Individuals are prey to institutions in modern mass societies... Individuals can struggle mightily against institutionalized conditions, but without changing the institutions themselves, those efforts will be largely for naught, since peopletire, lose focus, forget, and, eventually, give up their ghosts, while institutions share no such limitations.

I'd like to issue a call to realism for those of us in so-called developed industrial nations, who indulge in great horror at the gradual collapse of our own pathologically unsustainable mode of existence while ignoring the reality of the majority of this planet’s residents, who do not in fact share the same dread or anxiety about losing what most of them, frankly, never had to squander in the first place.

The very idea of inevitable death, carrying with it the manifest folly of human concerns, is at the core of ruin porn fetish. Memento mori: You and everyone you know will die and become wreckage plowed under and renewed, because that’s they way of all things. Fight it and be terrified; accept it and know peace. Live accordingly.

Rust may never sleep, but then, neither does moss.

Time travel is real, and does not require any speculative physics. It just requires a culture with clearly defined market segments.

Yes and yes to justice and lack of predation, but please -- please -- make room for the sacred whores and the sex fiends, for the enlightened perverts and all stripes and genders of carnal explorers, who make their way over that bridge, looking for love.... Take your safe spaces, but leave us our furtive rendezvous and right to the Excitingly Wrong! Leave us our shadows, for they do make us quiver so! Do leave us our wildernesses. Do just leave us now, won't you?

The darkest things of this world nestle inseparable from, and do not eclipse, its equally boundless graces and glories.