I feel like I've heard good things about Houellebecq's, but can't vouch for it

Utterly failing to write or edit or even read anything new (first cold in several years has positively laid me out), needed a re-read, picked up Virtual Light for the first time in a bit. Utterly wild that this came out the year *after* Snow Crash

and shout out to those still clawing

They're talking about killing leftist activists. They're talking about murdering people organizing in defense of immigrant communities, doing mutual aid work, and protesting their violence. They are talking about murdering people like me and my friends. We must do more than acknowledge it's fascism.

The reading experience of both The Art of War and The Prince is greatly enhanced if you add "Oh, honey," to the beginning of each section.

(Less good for Clausewitz.)

If the Altman be Bob,
Great work, good job
If the Altman be Sam,
Good grief, goddamn

periodic reminder that if you write stuff that's published on the web for a publication you yourself do not own, PDF that shit as soon as it goes live

kingdom threatened by barbarian roller grill sorcerors

Pale Fire!

this sent me scrambling in a panic as I realized I'd missed your Bombadil takes

not even noon here and I've had enough tea and cold medicine to see into the 8th dimension

Have you tried the Russians? With the right translator Anna Akhmatova is party unto herself.

absent-mindedly trying to remember what movie a quote in my head was from and finally realized it's from my own mental adaptation of Wave Without A Shore.

Philosophy folks on here, anyone able to point me towards anything good on "species" and the vagueness/sorites problems? I'm trying to think through something on things that exist (meaningfully) conceptually but not (meaningfully) materially, such as species, and having a hard time.

In our latest critical book-club, we talk about Melissa Scott's BURNING BRIGHT (@torbooks.bsky.social), a queer cyberpunk/space opera about political machinations and online role-playing games, with author Ursula Whitcher!

This kind of pacing has bothered me for ages; I just checked and it looks like I first complained about it on my blog nearly a decade ago: www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/2016/04...

People need to read more novellas, and they should start with the ones by @rebeccacampbell.bsky.social and @fishgottaswim.bsky.social, and honestly time is only the tiniest of the reasons why.

Also probably worth calling out—because I make film & TV the unqualified villains perhaps more than I should—that what I'm griping about bears most resemblance to reality TV, with its mix of visible external editing and essentially diegetically constrained individual scenes

Compare this with a more oral/aural/literary mode of story-telling, where it's actually *less* common to slow down and do a beat-by-beat script-style screen description (which can be startling, used sparingly), where fiddling with the chronology and pace is natural: seconds to years in a paragraph.

Lots of writers have no problem at all telling braided, non-sequential stories; but in-chapter the pace, the frame-rate, the speed at which time passes, is unchanging, and tied to visuals/externals or scripty narration. So huge numbers of leaden pages pass because, well, "the camera's rolling".

I've been seeing a lot of this even in books that seem like they should be more driven, pulpier, more plot & action-focused. What frustrates me about it—to be clear, I adore a contemplative lost-in-the-landscape literary meander—is when it seems to stem from a televisual concept of *time*.

(Ugh I presented a talk on this in 2019 I think I always planned to get published, file under "pre-Covid ideas")