Eerie and Beautiful Pictures of Architecture, Ruins, Buildings around Detroit

I was just wandering around the Internet looking for random things involving pre-Depression and post-Depression fiction, news, events, and buildings when I stumbled across DetroitYES -- a website that pretty much caters to a strange community of urban photography, lost architecture, and the ruins of Detroit.

Staring beyond the accumulating defacements, this massive head equals in size and feel the Olmec stone heads I have seen in Jalapa, Veracruz.

Some things that really caught my attention were the "urban cave drawings" expo, which is really about graffiti, tagging, and some particularly spectacular images drawn onto the underside of an abandoned railway switch station. Other buildings that caught my attention were the Butzel Library, razed to the ground in 1998; St. Stanislaus Cathedral, an incinerator; and Ferry Street, also here, a series of 19th century mansions, abandoned to weather, time, and foliage, but still stunningly beautiful.

The area that I've been spending most of my time in is The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.Some of the images are just stunning, and all of them come along with histories and small anecdotes about the picture taking.

Technorati Tags: Detroit, Architecture, Ruins

The Byzantium Outcast

A month or so ago I started a project called Vex's Arsenal, by Kyt Dotson. The idea was to write stories about the various magical instruments that Vex owns (for the most part which are weapons) and how she came to receive them. A great deal of the magical weapons she owns are to serve one purpose: to assist her in killing her primary adversary—the voices that harass her. The series tends to outline that while she has slowly amassed a certain number of interesting items, she has never succeeded in this mission.

The Byzantium Outcast is one such item, an artifact of a bygone eon. A demon/god-entity forged into a bronze/copper statue and lost to time. The story about this demon is being posted slowly (one segment a week) on Vex's Myspace blog. Those so interested can go read it there, but eventually I will make a PDF of it for release—and anyone who is so inclined should add as friend.

The image was commissioned from a lovely artist from Deviant Art named Nicole Cardiff. A larger version is available, click on the thumbnail with this article to view it.

There is also a news item posted on the Mill Avenue Vexations webpage about this development.

Edit: Since the Myspace blog links all seem to be broken you may need to access it via Vex's Myspace indirectly.

Technorati Tags: Kyt Dotson, Nicole Cardiff, Vexations, Mill Avenue, Vex Harrow