So, 25 years after it launched, I finally read House of Leaves.

I’ve never seen the movie, The Neverending Story

Through no fault of my own, I’ve accidentally stumbled into a themed reading list. It wasn’t on purpose, but definitely my last three books have explored themes of memory, belief, and hazardous information.

So, the “Ancillary Justice” science fiction series has a futuristic evil empire where gender is meaningless and difficult to discern, and they wear formal uniforms with meaningful pins and always gloves

and somehow my mind IMMEDIATELY summoned this exact mental image for everyone in the empire, and it works So Well, so I guess if you’re ever reading the Hugo-award winning Imperial Radch series, I hope you also imagine these early-90s low-tier Sailor Moon baddies

In retrospect, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were the rarest thing of all: American media about how war is bad, actually

One of the things that I like to read is medium length, well-written, informative articles of the sort that used to live in magazines before the information crushed them all like Blockbuster video or travel agencies.

I have a book by Ruth Reichl where she talks about her time as an editor for an important food magazine for Conde Nast in New York in the 80s and she is treated like a legitimate no-foolin’ rock star, there are assistants, there are perks, it is wild. Magazines were crazy in the 40 years ago universe that no longer exists.

But then, for a long time in my personal heyday, there was blogs, medium form articles written by amateurs, a wild and explosive flourishing of community writing projects, many of them utterly unreadable or punishingly mundane, but this was also a good time, and I subscribed to many via the use of my “A Relatively Simple Syndication” (or “ARSS” for short, because it wasn’t very good) technology browser.

For a brief period, I subscribed to Increment magazine, an expensive but lovely periodical, made entirely free online, that was - I imagine - never once for a single second profitable. This fabulous loss-leader was underwritten by Stripe, a company that makes more money in a day than I will make in my entire lifetime, so they definitely have a little bit of dosh floating around for weird vanity projects.

At least several dozen times I joked that they should have called it Excrement magazine because of where I read most of the articles.

It turns out that one of my likes is just compelling non-fiction articles, and being as my last real subscription ended in 2021, I feel like I was one of the last holdouts on team print media.

but (he says, patting his extremely well-laden eReader) it’s not like I’m not also part of the problem

For a while, I leaned on Pocket’s featured articles in Firefox. They’re okay. At this point I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of them again and again, and honestly I’m not sure if Pocket is going to keep them going now that Pocket is folding (it turns out, keeping a blog/article reading tool alive in the current internet era isn’t terribly valuable, because the last human-written article was some time in 2023, apparently).

anyways, no point here, no call-to-action, just… thinkin’ about articles

Somebody has a white Tesla with vanity plates that read “ASMARA” and my first instinct was “sucks to your asmara, piggy”

This is also how I feel about D&D’s aasimar.

i’ve been walking-and-reading-at-the-same-time conversantly since I was 8 years old

now, let me tell you what I can’t do: I can’t bicycle and read at the same time

the one time I tried I sent myself flying over the hood of a car

now

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the car’s driver

you know,

for parking there

I went on a 90 minute walk today, up to a park near the top of the big hill I live on, and came home

Tiff: “So, did you like the park?”

Me: “Enh, by the time I got to the park I’d been walking for 45 minutes and it was starting to rain, so I just decided to head back home.”

Tiff: “So you didn’t get to read then?”

Me: “Oh, no, I was reading the whole way.”

Tiff: “How?”

Me: “I read and walk.”

Tiff: “You can’t.”

Me: “Sure I can.”

Tiff: “Those things are mutually exclusive.”

Me: “Wrong!”