Performative Consumption
One of the reasons that I stopped doing the link posts is I really didn't want to make it a daily chore to scan through hours of news to write a sentence or two of snark. I still read about the same amount, but what I read isn't based on finding stories fit for riffing a couple of sentences.
The internet fuels . . .
Book Review - BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams
If there were a rock biography fit for the comic pages, it would be David Bowie. Mike Allred chooses his most visual and iconic era, Ziggy Stardust, to fill out the pages of the rise from London folkie to glam superstar. * BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams* is partially a biography, but mostly a loving tribute to Bowie’s sheer . . .
Book Review Roundup
I have not been good at keeping up with writing about books as I finish them here. To clear the slate at the beginning of the year, I'm going to do a short round-up.
Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is the master at sci-fi as a polemic. His stories are pointed but also dense with allegory . . .
My Favorite Albums of 2019
Last year I did a simple scrape of LastFM to build a mathematical list of my top albums. This year, I spent a fair amount of the summer making mixes for my bike rides, which skewed things a bit toward more aggressive or energetic stuff. So I spent the last month or so revisiting everything I picked up in 2019, and found I needed to expand the . . .
Searching The Stacks
Curating your own interests is essential. There are so many think pieces devoted to curating your media diet or trimming down on the time that you spend on social media. The concept reads to me that too many people are passively letting crap come to them. Of course, the algorithm is shit, the algorithm only exists to . . .
Moving Beyond Anger
The collective unconscious unleashed by giving most of the world a megaphone is an angry adolescent. We are seeped in the kind of angst usually reserved for punk kids smoking cigarettes waiting outside the all-ages venue. Our culture is so perpetually pissed off that furious displays of righteous anger don't feel . . .
Book Review: The Future Of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz's second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, finds her in good fighting form. If I wanted to give you a one-sentence synopsis of this book, it would be riot girls fight incels across time. If punk rock girls fighting neckbeards to guarantee universal suffrage and reproductive rights don't intrigue you, this book is . . .