I'm excited to get into this ARC of @isaacbutler.bsky.social's THE PERFECT MOMENT, if I can keep it away from someone else in this house who is aleady eyeing it. bookshop.org/a/8189/97816...
Preordered this months ago when the paperback was announced then forgot so I got a very happy surprise in the mailbox this morning
awards from indie bookstores are great but if you have to shell out (thousands!) to participate in Indie Next to qualify, how indie is this really
Magnificent
Screenshot of the Voices in the Crowd section of the Onion, showing headshots of six people, their fake names and jobs, and their responses to the question "Two jurors in the Michael Jackson molestation trial said they regret acquitting Jackson, and both now have pending book deals. What do you think?"
Headshot of a young white man above the caption "Neil Serven Director of Defining," next to the quoted text, "This is what happens when a sleazy loonball is tried by a jury of his peers."
Long ago, when I worked at Merriam-Webster, The Onion took my name and those of five of my editorial colleagues (presumably from the front of the dictionary) and used them for the phony people in the Voices in the Crowd section. Even better, they gave me my boss's job.
Why not double the guaranteed profits?
I'm always glad when spring comes and I can read outside again, but even moreso now that my eyes are older and direct sunlight means I can leave my cheaters behind for a while.
TEXT: Utsunomiya is known for its gyoza. I did not know that. I had not read up on Japanese culture. I had intended to join the Peace Corps and teach in Africa. Those plans abruptly changed when my best friend had a psychotic break and I got pulled out of my Peace Corps interview.
Very much enjoying Trish Ready's NOBUKO, picked up thanks to a review by @mattdbriggs.bsky.social. This paragraph full of surprises, for instance:
#InternationalBagpipeDay, you say? May I recommend Julia Wolfe’s LAD? Which sounds like giant monoliths in space slowly moving into a jig
Putting this out there for the #STS and #astronomy folks:
If anyone knows great readings on space telescope and Mars rover images, how they're constructed and how we make meaning of them, I would love to add those to my research! (I already have Seeing Like a Rover and Picturing the Cosmos)
Both of the options here are human writers. The first option is unprocessed human writing and the second option is human writing run through a language model to reproduce the same outputs with different words
If it couldn't have existed without training data, it isn't creating anything at all.
You too!
54 degrees and at last my reading chair isn’t buried in snow
This sounds good — I'll need to find a copy. I very much enjoyed The Big Clock too, but Clark Gifford's Body is the one that really blew me away.
Still lots of copies on sale at @rosemetalpress.bsky.social AWP table, which I'm gonna say is ... 648?
And you did right after saying this!
Well deserved. It’s a great book.
Back at ya
I am here too.
(I was on a delayed and crowded train this morning and had plenty of time for observation)
Delightful that an object as consistent as the subway strap inspires so many different approaches:
two fingers in, two fingers out
three fingers in, pinky out
three fingers in, index out
four fingers stacked
vertical fist
one finger hook
wrist drape
but never, in my experience, the thumb alone
"In a small town, each of us is a biography, a row of photos, a continuous thread, our identity affixed to a story, to a history. Three, four, five moments in a person's life that, in some way, make up enough of a sketch to identify us."
~ Federico Falco, THE PLAINS, tr Jennifer Croft
Uh oh, that car is going to slip and crash
I was just talking about and recommending Refuse To Be Done with one of my thesis students this afternoon. Looking forward to seeing you in Baltimore!
one of the neat things about submitting to the fancier lit mags is that by the time they send you a rejection all the cells in your body have been replaced with newer cells, they're not rejecting you but as past version of yourself, how quaint
This snow knows what it did
Time is a flat circle.
deep in the bunker yelling at minions to bang out the konami code faster while dozens of screens show it all going horribly wrong
The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive
