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My favorite parable isn’t Christian actually, it’s Buddhist or, anyway, Buddish. It could be from any faith with a monastic tradition but as I remember, it was told in Buddhist terms. I believe m...

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Sir Gladhand had surely seen the world and, as he watched, the world had just as surely passed him by. He was a hero a dozen times over for whatever that mattered but lately it didn’t feel as tho...

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“It’s a fool-proof plan,” she told her, “it’s a fool-proof plan and you know it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” Her sister looked at her askance, a brief silence punctuated by rifle exchan...

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In a flash, you can bridge the impossibly-vast chasm between the lonely islands of two human minds, forging a connection there like a welder with a burst from their hot torch. BRZZPT. The connect...

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what an honor is to not die young and pretty, what a privilege it is to instead just wind down, simply wear out. How often it is a person doesn’t get to experience ...

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“What happened to my powers?” The intrusive thought sped through her mind from time to time. She had no idea where it could’ve come from, but each and every time, she pushed it down and away beca...

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The good news is that your last nervous breakdown could be your very last nervous breakdown. The bad news is that there’s a couple of different ways that scenario could actually unfold, good or i...

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We want to go to the stars. The movies make it look easy, the television makes it look easy, little blinking lights, press a few then liftoff, there you are. The fantasy is understandable but I w...

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“Is this place hallowed,” asked the cleric, canvassing what remained after the awful battle, “or is it merely hollowed-out?” “I don’t follow,” replied the bard, his only friend who had survived t...

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He nicknamed her “Autumn” and she thought it was adorable, she thought it was a reference to the dark brown of her eyes, the rust-red of her hair, her freckles like speckles on a half changed map...

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A labelscar is a word within a word. Or maybe it’s more of a word without a word. A labelscar is what gets left behind when a word has stood for so long that the world has changed around it but i...

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The communists shot Laika into space, just because they could, just to prove a point. This wasn’t for the science, of course, it was a dominance play, to show off to the world. They knew that she...

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“The hardest thing in your life is rarely something you do once or a handful of times,” she said, “no matter how difficult. Childbirth, killing in war, those take seconds or hours.” She allowed h...

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While you were sleeping, the spirit entered your room and sprinkled magic inspiration all over the keys, but the thing that did so was no muse, it was instead The Devil himself. Or herself, somet...

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We always talk about how long we get to live but we so rarely talk about how long we’re going to be dead, a number so close to infinity that it’s functionally indistinguishable from the infinite ...

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There aren’t enough books where the mystery writer tries their hand at detective work and turns out to be terrible at it. There would be more of them, I reckon, but few crime novelists would care...

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If we are lucky, very lucky, this life will have been as if it were a trip to some grand amusement park when we were children, so well-themed and so immersive we could have all sworn that it was ...

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“I am what I am and that’s all what I am,” the old sailor muttered, half to himself, half to no one, “and I guess what I am is tired. Just tired.” He still clenched that corn cob pipe between his...

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One of the most common ice-breakers is that eons-old question “if you could go back in time to anywhere in history, where would you go?” and while in theory it can be telling, in practice, the an...

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When I was a little boy living in a little place, the television served as my only connection to the larger world I longed for and my ability to distinguish between reality and fiction was tenuou...

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SiestaWare, a name both silly and obscure in reference, which cosmically aligns, goofy and oft forgotten such as it is as well. SiestaWare was named after FiestaWare, a line of vibrantly-hued art...

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“You could wish for infinite wishes, child, of course you could,” according to the owl that lived there for as long as anyone could ever remember, “but that wish would just turn you into another ...

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It’s a tragedy you could set your wrist-watch to, if people still wore watches: with the release of each new Jurassic Park film, there is the inevitable wave of families across the country adopti...

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The Thin Mint Blizzard isn’t “exclusively” at Dairy Queen, no matter what the ads on teevee say. Anyone can put ice cream in a blender with mint-chocolate cookies. Branding means nothing. A brand...

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In the oeuvre of “Dungeons and Dragons”, there are six statistics you build your little imaginary dark-elf murder-hoboing Cthulhu-indentured warlock around: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Cha...

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