i’ve missed you have you missed me
Sorry for disappearing last week! Honestly, I’ve been kinda sick lately, in a way that made more meaningful endeavors like publishing this newsletter something that I wanted to postpone. I’m on the upswing now, and it’s thankfully nothing pandemic related. At least, not more than tangentially, as everything is these days 😅.
Anyway, I did a lot of reading while I was partly online, and I plan on taking a bit more time offline this weekend and do some more reading. The one activity that it seems that I can do in all but my most distracted states is pick up my ereader and knock back hundreds of pages at a time.
This week I was thinking we read some short fiction together. Or perhaps they’d be called “long reads” at this point. Two of these are oldies resurfaced, one is a newly published piece this week.
Let’s start with The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang. It does what his work does best: work as a parable for something that plagues our modern day. In this case, what happens when we record everything and use that to guide decisions that were previously left to community self organizing.
Up net is the much more dystopian Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue by Charlie Jane Anders. A world whose treatment of trans folks is only unreal in that the technology to shape it doesn’t yet exist. It’s mind-boggling how much we care to police others’ bodies, as if our own aren’t enough
Finally, a new piece of interactive poetry, Soft Corruptor by Everest Pipkin. The exact details are not the same, but the feeling evoked by playing and replaying the same game on an old Game Boy is something that I can relate to. I love the way that this piece is structured, making it almost like a game itself.
I am always looking for suggestions for things to read online, because that’s how I ground myself. Please, share with me something that you enjoyed this week to spread around some joy.
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Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t – Clive Thompson, Wired
*looks at the todo apps that I’ve been testing without actually filling out my todo lists* Nah, no idea what he’s talking about here.
Mark in the metaverse – Casey Newton, The Verge
This is a more open interview than I’d expected with Mark Zuckerberg. If you’re worried about Facebook taking over a nascent digital community don’t worry: it already sucks.
What if, instead of space travel and virtual worlds, our tech billionaires had been raised on exciting stories of a future with fast, efficient mass transit or a living wage for all workers?
david Karpf, Wired – Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology
“All the pain and the suffering, and the permanent scarring and nerve damage, was worth being free from student-loan debt.” Wow, ok. This is kind of incredible, and not in a good way.
Visitors to US Titanic museum injured by replica iceberg – Martin Belam, The Guardian
It just seems far too easy to make a joke about this. I’ll just say that I hope all of the injured are doing alright and weren’t causing problems in the first place.
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Legends Never Die: An Oral History of ‘The Green Knight’ | Narrated by Ralph Ineson | A24
I am more psyched up to see ‘The Green Knight’ than I have been for a movie in a while. But it’s also the first one in a while that is not releasing to streaming concurrent with the theater. To pirate or to wait…
That Captain America Show Was Weird
Oops! All Imperialism!
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Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever (Official Music Video)
My favorite song of of her new album, now that I’ve finally got to listen to it all
Future Islands – For Sure (Official Video)
I’ve listened to this album so many times and only just learned that there was a music video for this track. One of my top tracks of the album, with a car commercial in a dystopian landscape of a music video.
If you made it this far, why not share this newsletter with a friend? Or share with me some of the things that you found that you liked this week. Either way, I’m thrilled!
