Bracing for the storm to come in a few weeks at my main job. We just had a manager quit (for good reasons: stress and mental illness related) which leaves the other three of us to do more until a replacement is found. It's a non-profit, so I've pretty much capped in terms of pay scale and responsibilities, but at…

Morning work jams:

When I re-read Red Dragon last summer, it held up better than I had expected. Still pulpy as hell, but enjoyable and atmospheric.

I'm still reading Claudio Lomnitz's The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón - the chapters I'm on now are the deep background of the Magón brothers, before their turn to anarchism. They were widely famous because of their journal Regeneración which was one of the first Mexico City papers to openly challege Porifio…

The developers also hired the great Wayne Barlowe to do concept art, on the strength of his Barlowe's Inferno work. And then didn't even use any of it (aside from his Charon design). As a Barlowe fan, that was especially disappointing - playing through a level based on some of this art ( https://waynebarlowe.wordpr……

Magic Eye - "Japan"
Madalyn Merkey -"Untitled [Goddess of the Horizon A-side]"
Chelsea Wolfe - "Crazy Love"
LA Vampires / Zola Jesus - "Searching"
Muslimgauze - "The Asphalt Jungle"
Gil Scott-Heron - "Vild (Deaf, Dumb and Blind)"
Mauno - "Reeling"
Matchess - "Mind of Self-Estrangement"
Zola Jesus - "Taiga"
Freak Heat Waves -…

This is such a good list!

Just finished reading Richard Harris' Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900-1960 which…um, is far more interesting than it sounds? Harris wrote the book for a more general audience, in order to counter the popular image of suburbs as inherently wealthy and conversative, so it was a quick read and…

I've always wanted to read that Gould book - time permitting. It would be nice to move up from Bully for Brontosaurus and the like. The internet really does make reading more technical scientific literature. Zhuravlev and Riding's Ecology of the Cambrian Radiation (speaking of invertebrate paleontology) would have…

Go Buffy Sainte-Marie & Screaming Females (and Thee Oh Sees, but I've only ever listened to their newest.)

I just discovered him a few months ago. In specific The Underworld Service is really, really good!

I like this idea very much.

I get them on a semi-annual basis and they almost always take the form of being watched by something or somebody, and being intensely aware of not being able to move but desperately wanting to. The most harrowing occurred when I fell asleep on my parent's couch, in our basement, and during the sleep paralysis I…

Capek is amazing. I got to read "The Absolute at Large" last year and it's worth checking out. Agreed on "Prix": I was really disappointed with how shoe-horned in his character was in "Fiasco."

Does going through thousands of pages of administrative records, letters, reports and newspaper articles from Canadian prisons in the 1930s count? Because that's about all I'll be reading in June.

I had a similar experience with Harry Potter. I was fifteen when they became big deal in North America, and by that point I'd already read a whole bunch of not great fantasy (Brooks, Eddings, Jordan), the really good (Le Guin, Pratchett, R. R. Martin) or the essential (Tolkien). A few years later (around 2006 or…

Of course it has been, and can be, disputed. The entire Revisionist school of historiography about the atomic bombings disputed it for decades, and most recently Tsuyoshi
Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy argued that the Soviet entry into the Pacific War was just as crucial to forcing Japanese surrender (indeed Hasegawa…

Seeing them live in Montreal was the highlight of my 2014…really cast a long shadow over the year, as they played in early January.

I recall reading (something academic but the names of the author and paper elude me both) about the legitimation of Ottoman imperial power, and Mehmed and the Sultans after him until Mehmed IV, considered their claim to the Balkans (Rumelia, after all) as resting (in part) on the possession of Constantinople and 'the…

And of course the word spread, becoming faranj or ifranj in Arabic, and farangi in Persian - also the term for Europeans in northern India during the Mughal period. In Ethiopia, ferenji apparently has the same meaning, as does farang in Thai. And then Gene Roddenbery used the name in Star Trek. So there's that.