Started a new job this week. It reminded me of this passage from William Gibson’s newest book, Agency. (Fortunately, my unease passed pretty quickly due to my colleagues’ warm welcome.)
Category: Groovy Things
This seems about right. From the old Irish Brehon Laws via Dorothy Dunnett’s excellent Queens’ Play.
Links, Links, Links (Nebulous Nightcrawler Edition)
- This Kicks Condor person/entity kindly mentioned my website here. There’s a lot of other cool websites there too!
- I really dug this song by Anangke “I Won’t Wait Forever”. Spooky and intense. (The other track there is worth a listen too.)
- My very very favorite Lord of the Rings covers. (My copies of these look about like this.) I never knew that the artist’s name was Barbara Remington and I also just learned that she passed away a few days ago. RIP.
- This Illimat game (inspired by the music of The Decemberists, one of my favorite bands) looks pretty neat!
- I can get behind a minimalist news site like this Legible News site that appears to generate news from Wikipedia current events.
- I’ve always enjoyed a good rant, like this rant from Sam Kriss about Star Wars and generations and Harry Potter and so many other things. (I assumed he was much older and almost laughed out loud when he revealed his age. I’m still much older and not nearly so grumpy and maybe I never will be?)
- I keep trying to remember to listen to this album Wings by the South Korean boy band BTS. It’s based on Hermann Hesse’s novel, Demian, which I find super intriguing! (Great book, btw.)
- When I was a kid, John Berkey’s art was my favorite science fictional art. Man, I dig those space ships!
- I feel like there’s a lot of valuable insight in this post/essay “The Internet of Beefs” by Venkatesh Rao. (Rao’s writing, generally, I find worth reading.)
- Dig this essay about libraries and forests by Rebecca Solnit.
Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis. What if a poet wrote a spy novel? This is about what you’d get, I think. Not sure why I’ve been reading so many spy and detective novels lately. Perhaps there’s some solace in these archetypal roles. An escape from the tyranny of the real. Perhaps they just suit my current melancholy frame of mind.
Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. One of the reasons I read books is to meet people who are very different from me. It helps me understand the ways I am a stranger. Strongly recommended.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow. I don’t remember, but I think I read this one because of the title. There seems to be a novelistic trend in parallel universes these days. Effective use of nested narratives. I dug it.
Gemina (Book 2 of the Illuminae Files) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. I love the wild use of typography and visual design in these books. Also, the science fiction story’s pretty great too.
I thought that Deadpool was the first Marvel character to break the fourth wall, but it turns out David Burn’s Sensational She-Hulk did it first.
Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. I’ve read other books about quantum mechanics. Nothing else has got me as close to feeling like I get it. A masterpiece of explanation.