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Kay

@kayburke.net

189 followers 196 following 682 posts

Love, rising from the mists

Posts Replies Media

Kay @kayburke.net · 02/10/2026

Danny Stylite as seen in the Menologion. I bet there was a real treehouse element to the stylites. just me and God hanging out up here

Manuscript illustration of Daniel the Stylite atop his pillar. What I would call standard aesthetic for 12th century Byzantine art, but there is interesting perspective work with mountains in the background that almost look Kid A-ish

Kay @kayburke.net · 01/10/2026

the reading log of a woman having a normal time

Kay @kayburke.net · 27/09/2026

🫩

Kay @kayburke.net · 26/09/2026

neat!

clouds just after sunset across a busy street. lots of oranges and purples

Kay @kayburke.net · 16/09/2026

rest in peace, Annie Dillard. one of my favorite writers—few could do moth-based body horror better than her (first two pics are from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; 3&4 are Holy the Firm)

Kay @kayburke.net · 21/08/2026

I'm always charmed by the flavors of editorial voice that creep into less scrutinized wikipedia entries. This bit about Jeremiah Dixon's family; almost sarcastic

Jeremiah Dixon died unmarried in Cockfield on 22 January 1779, at the age of 45, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Quaker burial ground in Staindrop. Although he was acknowledged as a Quaker, he had been known to violate rules by wearing a long red coat, sometimes claimed to be a military uniform, or one from the Royal Woolwich Academy, either of which actually seems very unlikely, and for drinking to excess, for which he was disowned by the Quakers.[19] In his will[20] he bequeathed a large part of his not-inconsiderable fortune to Margaret Bland, the Dixon family housekeeper, on behalf of her infant daughters Mary and Elizabeth. We cannot know why, or what connection there was, but we do note that Elizabeth was baptised as the 'specious child' of her mother, with no father named.[21] One can only speculate.

Kay @kayburke.net · 20/08/2026

Swinburne wrote a very thirsty poem inspired by this statue

IL.
Where between sleep and life some brief space is, With love like gold bound round about the head, Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss;
Yet from them something like as fire is shed That shall not be assuaged till death be dead, Though neither life nor sleep can find out this.
Love made himself of flesh that perisheth A pleasure-house for all the loves his kin;
But on the one side sat a man like death, And on the other a woman sat like sin.
So with veiled eyes and sobs between his breath
Love turned himself and would not enter in.
III.
Love, is it love or sleep or shadow or light
That lies between thine eyelids and thine eyes?
Like a flower laid upon a flower it lies, Or like the night's dew laid upon the night.
Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,
Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise
Shall make thee man and ease a woman's sighs, Or make thee woman for a man's delight.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair, Fed thee on summers, watered thee with showers,
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear To thee that art a thing of barren hours?

Kay @kayburke.net · 18/08/2026

Kay @kayburke.net · 14/08/2026

People also ask: What has happened to Sufjan Stevens? Did Sufjan Stevens have a partner? Is Sufjan Stevens doing okay? Can Sufjan Stevens walk again?

Kay @kayburke.net · 13/08/2026

incredible stuff

In 1915, Hall fell in love with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge (1887–1963). Troubridge was a sculptress, the wife of Vice-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, and the mother of a young daughter. Troubridge and Hall would be lovers for the remainder of their lives. The romance caused tension between Batten, Hall, and Troubridge until Batten died in 1916. Upon her death, Hall had Batten's corpse embalmed and a silver crucifix blessed by the pope laid on it. Hall, Batten, and Troubridge were "undeterred by the Church's admonitions on same-sex relationships. Hall's Catholicism sat beside a life-long attachment to spiritualism and reincarnation." In 1917, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge began living together. From 1924 to 1929 they lived at 37 Holland Street, Kensington, London. The relationship lasted until Hall's death.

Kay @kayburke.net · 11/08/2026

I like the color-coded member timelines some bands have on Wikipedia. it looks like sheet music for flowers

Kay @kayburke.net · 10/08/2026

you’ve all been a little too rowdy about this one

Muted words in Bluesky: dobby, harry potter, america, discourse, slop

Kay @kayburke.net · 31/07/2026

fond of the emergent poems in the Example column of this wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreali...

"Let us love!"

"I would probably love
you [if...]"

"Will you love me?"

"Would that you loved
me!" / "God forbid
[that] you love me!"

"Something tells me
she loves me."

"It is necessary that
you should love me."

"Does he love me?"

Kay @kayburke.net · 25/07/2026

“The slash symbol, used to separate the two names in a romantic pairing, gives its name to slash fiction.” There is a tremendous amount of padding on either side of this text, resulting in 1-2 words per row.

Kay @kayburke.net · 25/07/2026

Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

The fact that individuals bind themselves with strong emotional ties to machines ought not in itself to be surprising. The instruments man uses become, after all, extensions of his body. Most importantly, man must, in order to operate his instruments skill-fully, internalize aspects of them in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits. In that sense at least, his instruments become literally part of him and modify him, and thus alter the basis of his affective relationship to himself. One would expect man to cathect more intensely to instruments that couple directly to his own intellectual, cognitive, and emotive functions than to machines that merely extend the power of his muscles. Western man's entire milieu is now pervaded by complex technological extensions of his every functional capacity. Being the enormously adaptive animal he is, man has been able to accept as authentically natural (that is, as given by nature such technological bases for his relationship to himself, for his identity. Perhaps this helps to explain why he does not question the appropriateness of investing his most private feelings in a com-puter. But then, such an explanation would also suggest that the computing machine represents merely an extreme extrapolation of a much more general technological usurpation of man's capacity to act as an autonomous agent in giving meaning to his world. It is therefore important to inquire into the wider senses in which man has come to yield his own autonomy to a world viewed as machine.

Kay @kayburke.net · 22/07/2026

The sample sentence for this Gorton typeface (ubiquitous in NYC) is sooo transmasc coded

Kay @kayburke.net · 22/07/2026

trans women getting into birdwatching is actually a project of reclamation

Augury was the Roman religious practice of observing the behavior of birds to receive omens. When the individual, known as the augur, read these signs, it was referred to as "taking the auspices". "Auspices" (Latin: auspicium) means "looking at birds". Auspex, another word for augur, can be translated to "one who looks at birds". Depending upon the birds, the auspices from the gods could be favorable or unfavorable (auspicious or inauspicious). Sometimes politically motivated augurs would fabricate unfavorable auspices in order to delay certain state functions, such as elections. Pliny the Elder attributes the invention of auspicy to Tiresias the seer of Thebes.

Kay @kayburke.net · 22/07/2026

Levertov: “I’ll do a cat one”

Alongside
Catbird cadenzas from the bushes
issue like edicts. See him! Fearless,
intent upon invention, slate blue
among the dewy leaves, his puffed throat

pumping. Alongside
the human day, his day,
fully engaged.
Miaow!
A bright glance registers
old Two-legs passing by. Not his concern,
pah! A billion leaves
demand utterance, he has the whole
hillside to sing, the veil of vapor.
Azaleas must be phrased! And dandelions—
a golden pizzicato!
Soon enough
it will be noon, and hot, and silent.

000

Kay @kayburke.net · 18/07/2026

Giovanni di Giovanni; 7 May 1365; 15-year-old boy charged with being "a public and notorious passive sodomite"

Kay @kayburke.net · 13/07/2026

I missed this subtext

Crunchyroll Apple TV app. The banner image is for Kamiina Botan, but the show description is “Bloodthirsty demons lurk in the woods, and nobody dares to venture out at night, save for the demon slayer of legend. Surviving in this harsh world, young Tanjirou take...”

Kay @kayburke.net · 09/07/2026

Scum of the year? That's right: for the 32nd consecutive year, it's the single Scum by Bark Psychosis

cover of Scum by Bark Psychosis. A razor blade on a blue background

Kay @kayburke.net · 27/06/2026

I didn’t like Undertale but I already feel that I would die and kill for Ralsei

Kay @kayburke.net · 21/06/2026

calm down

Jumart: a jumart, bif, or baf is a

The first record of a jumart appears in Conrad Gesner's Historia Animalium, published from 1551 to 1587, in which it is referred to as a jumar ?!. The term first appears in a French-Latin dictionary in 1670 as jeumarre. 6! Numerous alternate spellings and regional variants have been recorded; these include jumarre, jumerre, gimerre(41 , gemarlo, gemart,
gémart?, jemerri, jeumarre|8), jimère[6]
jumère.
!, joumar, ° and choumarrou!!. The terms
baf (for the issue of a bull and a mare) 8), bif (the issue of a bull and a donkey, 18) kumrah, 21 hinnulus, I2) and hippotaure were also employed.?]

Kay @kayburke.net · 11/06/2026

soooo true JPMorganChase Tower

Kay @kayburke.net · 09/06/2026

(contrast presented with no ill will)

000

Kay @kayburke.net · 07/06/2026

Mishima describing lesbian sex (from The Temple of Dawn). “Intermittently little nocturnal lappings could be heard licking the banks of the harbor”

pressed against two black pubescent mounds also filled with shadows. The annoying wisps of disheveled hair strewn across the cheeks had become signs of love. Smooth, burning thighs lay in intimate contact with smooth, burning cheeks, while the soft bellies heaved like moonlit inlets. He could not hear distinct voices, but a sobbing, neither pleasure nor sorrow, vibrated the length of the torsos. Breasts now abandoned by the partners innocently turned their nipples toward the light, trembling at times as though under an electrical charge. The depth of the night concealed in the aureoles around the nipples, the distance of the pleasure that made the breasts shudder, testified to the fact that every atom of their bodies was still isolated in maddening aloneness. They were feverishly striving to come closer, toward a greater intimacy, to fuse one into the other, but to no avail. Far away Keiko's red-lacquered toes flexed as if she were dancing on a sheet of hot iron, and yet they merely trod the empty twilight.
Honda realized that the room was filled with cool mountain air, but he felt as though the center of a furnace lay beyond the peephole. A shining furnace. He regretted that Ying Chan's back that he had examined so carefully during the day at the pool, perspiration flowing slowly down the spine, was turned toward him. Shortly the perspiration was diverted from its channel and trickled down the dark flank against the bed. It seemed as though he could smell the fragrance of some rich, ripe tropical fruit that had just split open.
Keiko shifted her body slightly to be on top, and Ying Chan tilted her neck, thrusting her head between Keiko's shining thighs. Naturally her breasts came into view. Her right arm encircled Keiko's hip, while her left hand gently caressed her belly. Intermittently little nocturnal lappings could be heard licking the banks of the harbor.
So beautiful was Ying Chan's sincerity that he was seeing

Kay @kayburke.net · 30/05/2026

Once a Kabbalist asked the Besht if he believed the world to be an emanation of God. "Oh, yes," he said, "the whole world is God." Everyone wholeheartedly seconded this enthusiastic response. "And evil?" asked the Kabbalist, tricky and malicious. "Evil, too, is God," calmly retorted the Besht, and he was placid, but now a murmur passed through all those present, and soon the voices of other learned tzaddikim and various holy and distinguished men piped up.
All conversations in this place provoked violent reactions-the overturning of chairs, sobs, cries, men pulling out their hair. Many times did I watch them debate this very question. And my blood boiled then, too, for indeed, how could it be? All this that surrounded us—how to account for it?
Under what rubric were we to place hunger and bodily injury, and the slaughter of ani-mals, and children felled by the plague and laid row upon row in the earth? In such instances, I was never able to shake the impression that ultimately, and irrefutably, God must not give a damn about us.
It sufficed for someone to point out that evil was not evil in itself, but rather only in the eyes of man, and a skirmish would break out at table; water would spill out from a broken jug and soak into the sawdust on the floor; one man would run out of the room in anger; another would have to be prevented from dealing a blow. Such was the power of the spoken word.

This was why the Besht always said to us:
"The secret of evil is the only one God doesn't ask us to take on faith, but rather has us consider." And so I considered this all day and all night, for sometimes my lanky body that ceaselessly demanded food did not let me sleep, out of hunger. I considered that perhaps it was true that God recognized the mistake he had made, expecting the impossible from humankind.
For he had wanted a person without sin.
Therefore God had to make a choice. He could punish for sins, punish incessantly and become a kind of eternal economist of our world, the manager who whips the peasants when they do not work as they are supposed to in their master's fields. Yet God might also, in his infinite wisdom, have been ready to bear human sinfulness, to leave a space for the weakness of man. God might have said to himself: I cannot have a person who is simultaneously free and fully subject to me. I cannot have a creature free from sin who would be at the same time a person.
Better sinful humanity than a world without men.

Kay @kayburke.net · 25/05/2026

Tolkien’s stance on the humble airplane seems relevant!

Kay @kayburke.net · 20/05/2026

Search engine results: Is Mastaba Snoopy Down Right Now? Server Status & Outages | Gamebezz Live Mastaba Snoopy server status tracker. Real-time outage detection, player reports & connection issues monitoring. Check if Mastaba Snoopy is down right now with instant status updates.

000

Kay @kayburke.net · 15/05/2026

The rare overlap of iambic bot and blocked bot...sublime

Two reposts by iambic.bot: from @blockedforthispost, "This is a pretty fascist thing to say" and from @ladyqueenb, "Is Cleveland trying to give this game away?"

Kay @kayburke.net · 03/05/2026

the first page of the NixOS docs

Kay @kayburke.net · 02/05/2026

the platonic Wikipedia opener

Jack Ferver (born 1979) is an American dancer, choreographer, actor, and professor. They are known for their dance-theatre shows that examine trauma, otherness, and queerness, as well as for their portrayal of a character known as the Little Lad in a
2007 Berries and Cream Starburst commercial.

Kay @kayburke.net · 07/04/2026

hoping that we aren’t, more or less, here

Kay @kayburke.net · 22/03/2026

Holy the Firm

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, i saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, drupped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second.
Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewel weed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her—

eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax-a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning.
The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning-only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Kay @kayburke.net · 10/03/2026

LinkedIn email with the subject "Anchoress (Remote, US) role is available"

Kay @kayburke.net · 06/03/2026

was shown this yesterday (by @josephfasano.bsky.social, I think)

"I Cannot Weave"
after a fragment by Sappho
O mama it's no use—
undo my loom.
I am undone by one who unloves me.
- JF

Kay @kayburke.net · 01/03/2026

this is how lesbians flirt now

ANTONIO
I am more serious than my custom. You Must be so too, if heed me; which to do Trebles thee o'er.
SEBASTIAN
Well, I am standing water.
ANTONIO
I'll teach you how to flow.
SEBASTIAN Do so. To ebb
Hereditary sloth instructs me.

Kay @kayburke.net · 20/02/2026

made a friend

A green agamid lizard sits on my open palm. He is angled away but looking back with a sort of “so what’s your deal?” expression

Kay @kayburke.net · 05/02/2026

I suspect bsky compression will ruin the effect, but: sunset on the skyscraper directly behind the smoke stack exhaust looks like an open flame

Kay @kayburke.net · 26/01/2026

A view of the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn. The plume from two smoke stacks (I think in the Brooklyn Navy Yard) occlude part of the Empire State Building and a large part of the sky in frame.

Kay @kayburke.net · 20/01/2026

Dalkey Archive Essentials cover for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The first several hundred pages are about a bus definitely not going where it ought to

Kay @kayburke.net · 19/01/2026

Kay @kayburke.net · 05/01/2026

very funny to me that the only source in Wiktionary’s entry for “feygele“ is one horndog on Usenet 27 years ago

Noun
feygele (plural feygeles)
1. A man who is or who is thought to be homosexual. [quotations A]
• 1999 September 24,
cor...@frogger.telerama.com, "Our
Commodification", in soc. motss!!]E (Usenet):
When will they introduce a scantily clad, ultrabuff, humpa-hunka burn'n all-man studflesh to give us feigellas a reason to watch?

Kay @kayburke.net · 05/01/2026

🤓

Kay @kayburke.net · 13/12/2025

Photo from a bedroom looking into a bathroom. A mirror to the left of the open bathroom door is reflecting Sara smiling at the camera, though she is not visible through the doorway. In the bottom right is a mirror on the ground, reflecting me taking the photo.

Kay @kayburke.net · 08/12/2025

cover of The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

Kay @kayburke.net · 07/12/2025

Search results on AO3 for the Peanuts fandom tag: 1,013 matching posts.

Kay @kayburke.net · 06/12/2025

Oliver Wendell Holmes you had a lot of weird ideas about race and gender, but you were awfully funny

Passage from Elsie Venner: “For some reason which must be left to the next generation of professors to find out, the men who are knowing in horse-flesh have an eye also for,— let a long dash separate the brute creation from the angelic being now to be named,— for lovely woman.”

Kay @kayburke.net · 01/12/2025

If this does anything for you, there are 1320.5 more pages where that came from

What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart's weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

Kay @kayburke.net · 01/12/2025

DONE. nothing else like it. thanks @deepvellum.bsky.social for making this object that I’ve carried around like Pizza Rat for the last year

Paperback copy of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. A Deep Vellum bookmark is on top of it.