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Reposted by Jake Casella Brookins

Chris McLaren @chrismclaren.com · 13h

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

The Last Toast
I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.
- 1934

Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 16h

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.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 1d

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.

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Fantômas, Le contrebandier de DEI @theefantomas.bsky.social · 1d

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Ancillary Review of Books @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org · 2d

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!

A Meal of Thorns @mealofthorns.bsky.social · 2d

For Episode 34, @yarntheory.bsky.social joins to talk about structure, art & endings, relationships, and much more in Melissa Scott's 1993 cyberpunk space-Venice thriller BURNING BRIGHT:
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/06/a...

A Meal of Thorns 34 – BURNING BRIGHT with Ursula Whitcher

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!Guest: Ursula WhitcherTitle: Burning Bright by Melissa ScottHost: Jake Case…

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

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Wesley Osam @mwosam.bsky.social · 2d

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...

Action and Time | Recurring Bafflement

www.superdoomedplanet.com

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Richard @rwpickard.bsky.social · 2d

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.

Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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

Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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*.

The Girl with the Green Ribbon 💀💀 (Jenny Hamilton) @readingtheend.bsky.social · 2d

I'm seeing a lot of this in the romantasy space! there are books with minimal story apart from the romance, so you end up with an iterative structure where the leads go to a series of locations or make a series of small advances on their MacGuffin quest, as set dressing for their escalating intimacy

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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".

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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*.

The Girl with the Green Ribbon 💀💀 (Jenny Hamilton) @readingtheend.bsky.social · 2d

I'm seeing a lot of this in the romantasy space! there are books with minimal story apart from the romance, so you end up with an iterative structure where the leads go to a series of locations or make a series of small advances on their MacGuffin quest, as set dressing for their escalating intimacy

Mythcreants @mythcreants.bsky.social · 2d

A new thing we’re noticing is books where way less happens than you’d expect for their length because of worldbuilding info dumps or long scenes of explaining plans. You get through a 100,000 word novel and realize the whole story was spent picking up magic groceries.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

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

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

He's got an essay somewhere about getting lightly into watch collecting (obv plays into All Tomorrow's Parties) that really unlocked some of that for me. Pet theory of mine is that the Imagists are actually a better way to talk about him than the Beats.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

Cornell boxes & assemblage become the guiding metaphor imo, and while Neuromancer & Burning Chrome are fantastic, his sentences start feeling more uniquely Gibson-y moving forward

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah, 100%, the energy & rhythms really change right after NM. Even Count Zero is way less noir-coded, more contemplative

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 2d

Really glad Ursula brought my attention to this book: a particularly fine vintage of 90s SF, with some interesting character work and ideas about artistry. Recommended.

A Meal of Thorns @mealofthorns.bsky.social · 2d

For Episode 34, @yarntheory.bsky.social joins to talk about structure, art & endings, relationships, and much more in Melissa Scott's 1993 cyberpunk space-Venice thriller BURNING BRIGHT:
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/06/a...

A Meal of Thorns 34 – BURNING BRIGHT with Ursula Whitcher

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!Guest: Ursula WhitcherTitle: Burning Bright by Melissa ScottHost: Jake Case…

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org

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natasha @natasharedmane.bsky.social · 2d

You can always quote Disco Elysium on social media, it's always morally correct

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 3d

"You may argue anything at all by analogy, sir, and so consequently nothing."
(A.S. Byatt, Morpho Eugenia)

Jemmargh! Topaz (halloween edition) @jemma.bsky.social · 3d

I hate "well, what about if X was Y?" arguments, which is what this is, though slightly disguised.

Yes, my campaign to ruthlessly eliminate, for example, typos from my work, would be terrible if 'typos' were an indigenous people, and 'my work' was a landmass, but, hey, guess what?

The Louvre of Bluesky @thelouvreof.bsky.social · 4d

i think it’s actually completely okay to say an algorithm is not a real person

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 4d

getting married in October to ensure autumnal hiking anniversaries remains one of our best ideas

Jake & Alison Casella Brookins, in hiking gear with a small river in the background.

Tiptree, a small scruffy black and white dog, and Jo, a small brown dog witb a white chest and paw, on a rock outcropping overlooking a forest and lake.

The last glimmers of sunset over a lake, with a mountain and a forested island against the sky.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 4d

good excuse to return to Isolation Drills here

Buttadeus @thewanderingjew.bsky.social · 4d

In defense of Taylor Swift...what's the best 12th album anyone has ever made?

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Heckin Spoopy Mutilated Corpse @jrbolt.bsky.social · 5d

The New Weird thrives today in unlabeled and often unrecognized forms. Disco Elysium, Dorohedoro, The Locked Tomb, Dishonored, their well of fucked-up cities and punk necromancers was fed from a distant reservoir of Ford, Gentle, Swanwick, Leiber and Peake

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 6d

DNC throwing in for Bernie could well have blocked the catastrophe of Trump specifically, but without attending to the infrastructural rot I think we'd get something similar in a few cycles anyway.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 6d

Seconding Pip Adam's AUDITION. Also Seth Dickinson's criminally-under-lauded EXORDIA.

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Jake Casella Brookins @casella.bsky.social · 6d

Go hard on court reform & anti-corruption efforts. Make gutting the Patriot Act & related agencies/laws, including ICE & the Hague Invasion Act, a central pillar, along w/ beefing up the VRA. Elevate more gov programs to Social Security "political death to mess with" levels of visibility.

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After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, @megapolisomancy.bsky.social · 6d

My brave and controversial opinion is that slaughtering people is bad. We live in a death cult but we don’t have to feed into it.

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