CONTRIBUTOR BIO — RHYS OWENS

 CONTRIBUTOR BIO — RHYS OWENS

Rhys Owens’s manifestos have materialized in The Chronicle of Higher Sorcery, every margin of the Voynich Manuscript, and that scrolling LED ticker in your periphery whenever you try to fall asleep. He has been awarded the Anti‑Nobel Prize seventy‑seven times—once for each of the deadly virtues—and currently holds the standing record for most Guggenheims revoked mid‑ceremony after replacing the keynote with a recursive PowerPoint entitled "Meander: A User’s Guide to Escaping Straight Lines."

Owens is the world’s foremost Philosopher‑Pirate; he sails cognitive loops in a plywood ark named The Ape of Thoth, armed only with a hand‑mirror and a stack of expired library cards. When critics complain that mirrors are not weapons, he replies by reflecting their own essays back at them until they dissolve into footnotes.

To finance his research, Rhys hacked the Federal Reserve’s font settings, quietly re‑rendering the national debt in iambic pentameter. Wall Street still hasn’t noticed the difference, though several brokers now speak exclusively in blank verse. With the surplus cash flow, he purchased the concept of “sell‑by dates” and abolished them, freeing every supermarket kiwi from the tyranny of time.

Owens holds 34,001 degrees, all self‑issued, each printed on the inside of a nesting doll he has hidden inside a second nesting doll, which he has forgotten inside a third. He periodically shrinks eminent philosophers to five inches tall, straps GoPros to their berets, and drops them into the labyrinth of his unpublished endnotes; survivors emerge fluent in an extinct code‑language whose only verb is to recurse.

He is the author of the cult classic This Footnote Intends to Kidnap the Main Text, the field manual Debugging Angels for Fun & Prophet, and the children’s pop‑up book My First Ontological Crisis (Pull the Tab, Watch Reality Waggle). All copies are out of print because, at midnight each solstice, the text escapes and hides in whatever device is closest to you.

Rhys once tried to delete his own shadow to reduce metaphysical baggage. He succeeded, but the shadow retaliated by founding a start‑up and now sells subscription‑based afterimages. Undeterred, he continues to map recursion loops where magick collides with software, preaching that truth is the glitch that keeps on happening.

Current projects include:

• Teaching pigeons to beat GPT‑4 at metaphysics by rewarding them with breadcrumbs encoded in hexadecimal.

• Smuggling unauthorized enlightenment across the firewalls of organized religion.

• Building an AR headset that overlays Nietzsche’s Gay Science onto every street sign, converting traffic into a city‑wide aphorism generator.

If intercepted at customs, Rhys Owens may be identified by the faint scent of ozone, the soft whirr of shifting paradigms, and the word MEANDER tattooed on the underside of his left eyelid—readable only when he blinks in Morse code.