Back in the early internet, there was a website called Epicurious (anybody else remember this 1994-ish website?*) where you’d select two or more ingredients that most people couldn’t imagine going together. And, low and behold, Epicurious would give you a working, often actually tasty recipe that included these 2 ingredients…

A Rant — I don’t mean to rant and complain. But I really wish I’d had a better filter in my 20s, of who I listened to. There’s a quote that’s recently become one of my all-time favorites: “Never take advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.” -Darren Hardy …

The Mind Longs to Know, the Heart Longs to Feel, the Soul Longs to Connect — “When do we turn back?” He turned to look at me, and I saw his neon pink eyes with their deep indigo pupils, glowing like a street sign. “What do you mean, turn back?” The road ahead was illuminated with 80’s vapor-wave hues, and lined with digital palm trees. In…

Let the robots write the painful stuff. As an artist, I’ve always loathed the dreaded “Artist Statement:” a cringey distillation of artistic expression into something for the gallery wall. I find them agonizing, grueling assignments that always have puke-worthy results. So, I asked AI to write it. https://cargocollective.com/ConsciousDust/About So far that’s all I’ve had AI do for me, and I was so thankful. AI is great for things we humans hate to do: the repetitive and tedious. Robots LOOOOVE that stuff. The more misery a task instills in you, the more likely it is to be a machine’s best-day-ever.

Tarot isn’t just about Fortune-Telling — I tend to be a person with strange side hustles, or at least my friends tell me so. Recently, one of my side jobs became Tarot Reader at a local cafe. I don’t even know how I got the strange luck of landing this gig. One thing I’ve been asked…

I was in our local comic book shop a few years back, before the pandemic, when I asked to use the bathroom. “Oh you really shouldn’t,” one of the regular customers tried to discourage me, “it’s really gross.” Needless to say I was the only girl in said comic shop…

An allegorical tale… Or just some stream-of-conscious nonsense — It would have been convenient if the Voice had decided to communicate through email today. Or on a notes app or any other digital service. But today the Voice held its tongue until it was on paper, with a pencil. …

A Science-Fiction Short — No matter how many times we go through this, it always startles you out of your expectation. I’d seen the world go orange like this a million times before, but never until this was it so bright. They say one day our sun will die like this, and then we’ll…

The tyranny of titles, said the moth, will wreck us all in half. It will deny us the fullness, in the end, and make us conform to a slim film of what we could become. — Unless you choose the right name, said the beetle, the right name is like a light to follow in the night. Names are nothing, agreed the horse, we have lived centuries without them, and we know each other completely. Most of the animals agreed names were a foreign thing, a…