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Jack Preston King

@jackprestonking.bsky.social

1.8K followers 3.7K following 2.3K posts

Author of In Defense of Magical Thinking: Essays in Defiance of Conformity to Reason and other books for rebels against the spiritual, creative, and cultural status quo. Writes unruly poems, short stories, and novels, too. jackprestonking.com

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · Apr 13

For anyone interested, my author website currently has over 200 essays, short stories, flash fiction, poems, a novel, bunches of book reviews and more, all free to read. No subscription needed! Just a good old fashioned author website full of cool things. Come see what I'm about! jackprestonking.com

Jack Preston King

Jack Preston King - author, poet, philosopher

jackprestonking.com

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 6h

Once you declare “I am a physical body and something more,” you’ve taken a spiritual stand.

#spirituality

Are You Spiritual?

If you answered “NO,” think again

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 7h

Perhaps not directly a #Halloween poem, but definitely Halloween- adjacent...

Here's "Let's All Be Witches and Re-Enchant the World":

Let’s All Be Witches and Re-enchant the World

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting
for our senses to grow sharper.” — W.B. Yeats

I’m tired of this scolding
from the haters of magic
who press their dull knives
to the heart of our longing,
who see in Wild Nature
but a mass to be measured,
and in the Soul of All Living,
but an insult to reason

I’m tired of pretending
their methods impress me,
that their double-blind studies
reveal more than blindness
to all they refuse
in advance to conceive
for fear of conflicting
the faith they believe

I’m tired of hearing
that we’re only our bodies
from men with no love
for the magic of bodies,
who find in our dreams
but the chatter of neurons,
in our deepest desires,
mere chemical churn

It’s time to remember
the Tuatha de Danann,
to sleep on the hilfort,
and learn the Sidhe magic,
till the wind has awakened,
and leaves whirl round,
till “Away, come away”
rises out of the ground

So, get ready to fly
past the glowering doubters
on your unlikely broom
to the place of our meeting,
our sharing the mushroom,
our dancing and dreaming,
our splitting the veil
that separates worlds

Come join me in singing
to the Earth and the Moon,
in welcoming spirits,
in shaking the barley.
Let’s join the wild hunter,
our banners unfurled —
Let’s all be witches
and re-enchant the world.

-- Jack Preston King

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Reposted by Jack Preston King

🕯️ Crowley Rae Jepsen 🕯️ @mags.colvett.online · 7h

I can’t get over this. This is what I’m supposed to hear when my time machine crew returns to the present after collecting butterfly specimens in 1812 and realizes we’ve disturbed something

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 7h

I reviewed the #audiobook of the original 1955 novel of Invasion of the Body Snatchers on my blog a while back. The audiobook is narrated by Kristoffer Tabori, who is the son of Don Siegel. jackprestonking.com/f/the-invasi...

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

I first read Jack Finney’s 1955 classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a teenager in the late Seventies, after seeing (and loving) the Donald Sutherland/Jeff Goldblum movie remake in the theate...

jackprestonking.com

Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 7h

Amateurs...

Reposted by Jack Preston King

hailey @hailey.at · 16h

some of you only started using the internet in the late 2010s or later, and it shows

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 8h

Don't forget Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) and Werewolves Within (2021).

Reposted by Jack Preston King

Victoria Strauss @victoriastrauss.com · 15h

To be clear: like the real KDP (which has also been impersonated by scammers), the real IngramSpark does NOT charge any fees to create an account & upload a book, and does NOT sell paid adjunct services like editing and book cover design

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 12h

My #BookReview of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, by Peter Bebergal

#ClassicRock #occult #music #Booksky

Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in an Illinois small town in clear signal distance of St. Louis’s legendary powerhouse KSHE 95 – Real Rock Radio. Many of the bands profiled in Peter Bebergal’s Season…

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 18h

If paying for use of copyrighted material makes #AI economically unfeasible, well, too bad. Products that cost too much to produce so they can't turn any profit are deservedly doomed in a Capitalist economy.

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

to ASCAP and BMI, and those entities pay artists. I know this doesn't address those artists who object to their work being used at all by #AI, but its better than the system the AI industry wants, which is take what they want and to hell with copyrights.

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

I think a fair answer to "I just don’t know how you go around asking everyone first" may be OK don't ask first but DO pay later. Radio has been doing this forever. Stations don't ask permission to play songs. But they DO pay a royalty every time a song is played. Stations make royalty payments

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

Great point.

Reposted by Jack Preston King

LJ Pemberton @ljabouttown.bsky.social · 19h

okay i’m not saying i’ve learned everything at my middle age but i do think that maybe the key to happiness is having food, water, shelter, some degree of financial stability, good friends, and the wherewithal to slow down and feel time

extreme busyness is a plague

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

I think the key to understanding the relentless drive by OpenAI et al to force #AI on us is realizing it was never intended as an ordinary Capitalist consumer good. That's the disguise, but the real purpose is becoming visible in paces like San Fransico (this is a real billboard in SF):

Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

This one is even better:

Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 19h

This is where the real money lies for #AI.

Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 20h

It’s #SpookySeason! Read "Night Fall, Moon Rise," a brand new 2,000 word story set on #Halloween night!

#HappyHalloween #shortstory #HalloweenStory #HalloweenFiction #magicalrealism #weirdstories #weirdfiction

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Night Fall, Moon Rise

A Halloween Vignette

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Reposted by Jack Preston King

Moose Allain @mooseallain.bsky.social · 21h

The sort of cartoon you'd expect to see from me

www.worldofmoose.com/products/con...

Cartoon showing a man reading from a dictionary to another. He says "So, it turns out confirmation bias means exactly what I expected it to mean|"

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JP Maney @j-p-m.bsky.social · 24d

At their roots, most religions sound alright.
But what happens when they mature?

Are you using or being used by religion? Here’s how to tell.

Can we use religion’s institutions to practice what most religions preach, rather than to institutionalize followers?

jpmaney.com

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 1d

Night Fall, Moon Rise

A Halloween Vignette

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Reposted by Jack Preston King

Sophiacycles @sophiacycles.bsky.social · 1d

I don’t use soul in a religious sense but rather the way psychologists Carl Jung and James Hillman and the Romantic poets like Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake use it: to speak of the experience of depth in our lives.~Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

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Ryan T. Pozzi @ryantpozzi.bsky.social · 1d

On This Day in History: October 7, 1955
Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Kenneth Rexroth emceed while Jack Kerouac worked the crowd with a wine jug and shouts of encouragement. The reading helped ignite the Beat scene.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in 1959 – Photo by John Cohen

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avidreader9.bsky.social @avidreader9.bsky.social · 1d

When an electrician dad misunderstood his daughters request to be a transformer

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 1d

Current mood

A cartoon depicts a man and a woman walking side by side on a street. The woman wears a stylish dress and holds a purse, while the man is in a suit. The caption reads, "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”

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