(seen at the New York Solstice celebration. Explanation here)

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also:

1. Thanks to custom website and software design company Trike Apps for agreeing to host this blog. The occasional downtime when the hosting service gets annoyed at too high a traffic volume should be over for good now.

2. Comments of the month have to be the various stories of overachieving German soldiers in the last links post. Here’s Doug Muir on Beate Uhse and Chaosmage on Ernst Junger.

3. A while back I linked to Nick Land’s experimental horror shory story Phyl-Undhu on the grounds that someone whose blog I read wrote a thing. At the time I hadn’t actually read it. I was recently alerted by a friend that I should, and that it contains a character named “Alex Scott” who makes exactly my argument about the Great Filter, which is cited in the appendix. I still think Land is too quick to round my “Late filter doesn’t make sense, therefore early filter” to “Late filter doesn’t make sense, therefore I am putting my head in the sand and refusing to think about it”, but I am prepared to excuse this for a literary cameo.

Now more than ever, no race or gender in the open thread. There’s a race and gender open thread at Ozy’s.