Book Wyrm

11/30/2025

"He was a machine, like all Tralfamadorians.
He was held together by cotter pins, hose clamps, nuts, bolts, and magnets. Salo's tangerine-colored skin, which was so expressive when he was emotionally disturbed, could be put on or taken off like an Earthling wind-breaker. A magnetic zipper held it shut.
The Tralfamadorians, according to Salo, manufactured each other. No one was sure how the first machine had come into being.
The legend was this:

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.
These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.
And rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough.
So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.
And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.
The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.
And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore."

Using the viewer on the dash panel of his space ship, Old Salo now watched the approach to Titan of the space ship carrying Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, and their son Chrono. Their ship was set to land automatically on the shore of the Winston Sea..."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

09/21/2025

"Making music is a pleasant and satisfying activity. For the music maker, sharing the experience with a friend or group of people creates a delight that rivals most other forms of communication. For the solitary performer, music is a satisfying way to express inner feelings and emotions. Music is both stimulating and cathartic. Its message transcends the barriers of language and culture to be shared by all people. No one really knows why music affects us the way it does, but the magic and empowerment that result from musical experience are universally undeniable. This book acknowledges the influences and charm of music and provides a way to increase your music-making pleasure through building the instruments that you play..." -Great Folk Instruments to Make & Play by Dennis Waring

I found this one at the college library and I'm so excited to make a variety of instruments!

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07/22/2025

Dr Angela Puca talks about Giordano Bruno!

In this video, I explore the magical dimension of Bruno’s thought—an aspect often overlooked or dismissed in favour of his more fashionable reputation as a f...

07/22/2025

"We worked in any place that was given by the customer - an empty cow shed, under an overhang, inside a barn, outside in the field or yard, or in a corner of the house. This was the workshop, about which the shokunin would and could never complain. We worked at a single job from as short a time as one week to as long as two or three months, working from dawn to dark. Rain or snow, summer or winter, we sharpened our tools. In the winter, when I bent my fingers to sharpen the tools with the icy cold water, I could not straighten them immediately afterward..."
-Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use by Toshio Odate

This book was recommended to me by my Cabinetry instructor last semester and it's really good! And I'm making a Japanese style toolbox similar to one in this book this semester!

07/20/2025

I’m compounding several different topics into one video and probably should have done separate videos for each topic, but for me, they’re all related to each...

07/20/2025

"She deliberately turned her attention to the new things he had given her to think about. Her age, for instance. He was right. She was about three hundred years old--something none of her people would have believed. And he had said something else--something that brought alive one of her oldest memories. There had been whispers when she was a girl that her father could not beget children, that she was the daughter not only of another man, but of a visiting stranger. She had asked her mother about this, and for the first and only time in her life, her mother had struck her. From then on, she had accepted the story as true. But she had never been able to learn anything about the stranger. She would not have cared--her mother's husband claimed her as his daughter and he was a good man--but she had always wondered whether the stranger's people were more like her.
"Are they all dead?" she asked Doro. "These... kinsmen of mine?"
"Yes."
"Then they were not like me."
"They might have been after many more generations. You are not only their child. Your Onitsha kinsmen must have been unusual in their own right."
Anyanwu nodded slowly. She could think of several unusual things about her mother. The woman had stature and influence in spite of the gossip about her. Her husband was a member of a highly respected clan, well known for its magical abilities, but in his household, it was Anyanwu's mother who made magic. She had highly accurate prophetic dreams. She made medicine to cure disease and to protect the people from evil. At market, no woman was a better trader. She seemed to know just how to bargain-as though she could read the thoughts in the other women's minds. She became very wealthy.
It was said that Anyanwu's clan, the clan of her mother's husband, had members who could change their shapes, take animal forms at will, but Anyanwu had seen no such strangeness in them. It was her mother in whom she found strangeness, closeness, empathy that went beyond..."
-Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed
We found this one at the library recently, so good!

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07/20/2025

Let’s time travel and step into the mystical lineage of the Neolithic Wu 巫 shamans that laid the foundation for Taoist mysticism. This video lecture explores...

07/18/2025

In this live interview, I am joined by Dr Christina Oakley Harrington—medieval historian, long-standing practitioner of witchcraft, and founder of the renown...

07/11/2025

The Carrot Highway! (1996)

Originally disturbed by whisper production company

03/02/2025

"When he was young, John had paid no attention in Sunday school, and always forgot the golden text, which earned him the wrath of his father. Around the time of his fourteenth birthday, with all the pressures of church and home uniting to drive him to the altar, he strove to appear more serious and therefore less conspicuous. But he was distracted by his new teacher, Elisha, who was the pastor's nephew and who had but lately arrived from Georgia. He was not much older than John, only seventeen, and he was already saved and was a preacher. John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha's voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy. But he did not follow the lesson, and when, sometimes, Elisha paused to ask John a question, John was ashamed and confused, feeling the palms of his hands become wet and his heart pound like a hammer. Elisha would smile and reprimand him gently, and the lesson would go on..."

-James Baldwin, Go Tell it On the Mountain

We found this one at the library recently and it is such a good read!

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03/02/2025

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The matyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, evert human group is a society of island universes.
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad?..."

-Aldous Huxley

One of my favorite books since I was like 16, The Doors of Perception. I found this one at my family's used bookstore back when

03/02/2025

"Beloved: Great truth that transcends Nature does not pass from one being to another by way of human speech. Truth chooses Silence to convey her meaning to loving souls.
"I know that the silence of the night is the worthiest messenger between our two hearts, for she bears Love's message and recites the psalms of our hearts. Just as God has made our souls prisoners of our bodies, so Love has made me a prisoner of words and speech.
"They say, O Beloved, that Love is a devouring flame in the heart of man. I knew at our first meeting that I had known you for ages, and I knew at the time of parting that nothing was strong enough to keep us apart.
"My first glimpse of you was not in truth the first. The hour in which our hearts met confirmed in me the belief in Eternity and in the immortality of the Soul.
At such a moment Nature lifts the veil from him who believes himself oppressed, and reveals her everlasting justice."
-Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil has been one of my favorite writers since I was young!