Mark Ayers

The advice is meant kindly.

Perpetual liminality builds real capacities—tolerance for ambiguity, the trick of holding two views at once, comfort inside a question that won’t resolve.

Liminality is life at the threshold—the airport terminal, the hotel lobby, the year between one name for yourself and the next.

Where am I At home in Greater Grand Rapids, Michigan What am I reading There is No Antimemetics Division by Qntm (2025) Derai by E.

The problem with my eyesight is this.

The impulse to speak and the need to think out loud produce the same sensation.

To call an era intellectually and morally bankrupt is to allege exhaustion at the root: the collapse not of institutions but of the capacity to build them.

Is it time to disolve these dis-United states?

Alfred North Whitehead’s count is exactly two.

The old world is dead, the new world is not yet born, and now is the time of monsters—the line is everywhere now, credited to Gramsci and passed along as the sharpest available diagnosis of the present.

To flatten the physical evidence of natural cycles is a quieter ambition than conquering nature, and a more thorough one.

Much of what reading does to a person happens not at the instant a sentence yields its meaning but across the hours a mind spends afterward on what the book raised—grappling with it, drawing connections, arriving at thoughts it would not otherwise have ha…

An AI coding agent collapses the distance between wanting a change and watching it happen.

COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·FARE This is where I think in public.

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Finished in 2026 A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (2014) The Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton (1999) Weaveworld by Clive Barker (1987) Ravenwood by Nathan Lowell (2011) Storythinking by Angus Fletcher (2023) Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletch…

Chance governs the scale of a life more than choice does.

Governments have always lied; the deeper danger was that power might damage the means by which a lie could be exposed, leaving citizens without enough common reality to argue about what should be done.

Twenty minutes outside town is where the regional food lives.

A question is an offer, which is why curiosity carries a loneliness that no appetite for facts would explain.

The backup club enjoys one profound advantage: it is not currently disappointing us.

The creator made a world simple enough to serve its purpose.

The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

SPECULATIVE MACHINES, “Bios O.S.”

Being trapped in an inherited world is alienating.

No contract you did not sign can bind you.

What I use day to day.

There is a familiar intuition that fairness comes at the expense of prosperity.

How long a vacation should last isn’t a matter of preference so much as arithmetic against transit.

Suppose the mind were the kind of thing that could leave the body—that it lived two lives on incompatible terms.

I came to three productivity systems in turn, each as it arrived: Franklin Covey, then Getting Things Done, then the Bullet Journal.

To picture wheels within wheels that drive the gears of the celestial spheres, each a Planck quantum distance from the next, grinding eternity into moments, is to weld together two cosmologies that stand some four centuries and a complete conceptual revol…

From the Archives of Canopus: Survey Document 31572-B Agent Johor, Colonial Service Third Assessment: Terminal Phase of Experiment It is with necessary detachment that I record these observations on the species of Sol-3 (local designation: Earth).

The utm query-string pattern originated with Urchin Software Corporation’s web analytics product.

A republic is the kind of thing that has to be kept.

Recognizing that selfhood and free will are illusions does not diminish agency.

When an industry says it only gives people what they want, ask who, in the whole chain of human persons, ever wrote the request.

We were not people who noticed the ground.

Language influences what we can think, not just how we express it.

Near-silence is the riskiest opening a sequence can choose, because it stakes the next 90 minutes on a promise of patience the listener has not yet agreed to keep.

They convene without a formal call.

The can promises a Mai Tai.

To grasp something and to carry it through are separate powers, and the distance between them is wider than we admit.

After Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

The most honest starting point is that animism isn’t a belief you install but a perceptual habit you cultivate.

A theory of linguistic change is compressed into a single claim: that language changes through its use by those who took no care to understand what the words they use meant to others who had previously used those words.

In 1972, I was ten years old—old enough to listen carefully to song lyrics and young enough to believe I understood them.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

What is this Antifa that some in power see as dangerous?

“Strong opinions, weakly held” captures the tension between acting decisively and adapting.