This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensurin...
Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations...
I’m a child of the wired generation, unlike some of the suits hereabouts who have their secretaries print everything out and dictate their replies for an audio-typist to send.)
Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)
Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.)
★★How boring, just another billionaire necromancer cruising the Caribbean in his thinly disguised guided missile destroyer, plotting total world domination.★★
The stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours of ape-men living down here; I don’t know how the rumours got started, but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you’re on yo...
Silly me, I wasn’t expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.
He looked like an escapee from a reeducation camp for fashion criminals.
Either they’re trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig’s Uncle Bertie’s left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers’ tears) or
Demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.
But on the ridgeline up by Magic Meadows there’s a place where the trees are all flattened outwards in a circle and there’s a scorched symbol in the dirt, kinda like a five-pointed star with an eye in...
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may...
Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You’re the expert in Visio, aren’t you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you...
To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the...
There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if
There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect,...
The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can't you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consum...
Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say this example is screaming megalomaniac! at me.
She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.