I don’t know many Verlaine stories but this one on Pushing Ahead of the Dame about Bowie’s cover of “Kingdom Come” on Scary Monsters has stuck with me since it was posted (there’s a similar story about Jimmy Page in the early 80s spending most of an invite on wah pedal battery fussing and not really laying anything down): everybody has off days.
posts from 2023 / 01
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lol at this weird 😘 vehicle the everloving wife made with jr this morning

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I can fix “the mastodon community”
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gm2u 😘

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a Jacobin essay about how MILF Manor is really about abolition of the family
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fifth, sixth, and seventh books are none of them page turners, so they are all in an indeterminate race, although this silly nonsense is a likely winner: The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel)
by Macedonio Fernández ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6554891)


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lemon n’ lime dogs

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h/t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-IHvF5OCA of course
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plates, and jousts
can we couple them?
hell yeah we can
wanna know how? get this
proprietary to macmillan
only us
ready?
[lays off 10,000 people because a competitor just did]
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in addition to the music, david crosby was a poster’s poster, rip
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finally figured out no-handing on the cargo bike: simply allow the tires to run a little low, simple as.
I’d been maintaining it like my commuter bike at max recommended pressure (60PSI I think), but at 40, the ride is a lot smoother and no-handing is easy.
Yay!


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fourth book, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”, Haruki Murakami
I’ve had this on the shelf for a while (years, even) after catching up on Murakami and taking a good long break (furthermore, I think this was a gift, or used rack sale find, even) because it’s all very samesy. I picked this off the to-read pile because it looked the shortest.
I think crit of his lesser stuff like this is totally on the mark and fair but also “it me” so, I enjoyed it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41022133-colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage

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third book, “The Stories of your Life and others”, Ted Chiang.
Cheating because I read the first half last year. I got another copy after leaving my first copy on a plane ( https://mastodon.social/@gravely/109372422129728908).
I hope whoever found my first copy enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed my second copy.
“let’s take one idea seriously and see what happens”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Others

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ok, what the letters spells out is p easy to find on tvtropes[.]org which I’m told is a terrible website that’ll rot your brain and your ability to perceive art as anything but strings of gimmicks (they probably have a name for people like me who believe this), so I guess if you look for it the right way, like I did, the answer is in the google preview (remember when things were like that?) and you don’t have to click through.
but I’m also not gonna say what it is either, just read the book.
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second book down, the new Jason Pargin (f. k. a. David Wong), “If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe.” It was fun! I lol’d a few times, didn’t want to put it down, etc.
Jason put a tiny house of leaves gimmick in it (it’s full of metafiction shit tbh) but I only noticed it was happening for the last word so if you read it, let me know what it says (I’m going to go cheat and google it right now).

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first book of the year down, (I think via @leigh somewhere?): “Axiomatic,” a collection of Greg Egan’s short stories that appeared in various science fiction magazines (mostly Interzone and Asimov’s) between 1989 and 1992.
Great late 80s hard SF shorts
I don’t do star reviews, but, folks, they’re good stories
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156783.Axiomatic
aside: a characters is mentioned to have received their advanced degree in 2023, which I’m sure felt reasonably far out at the time.

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it’s bowie’s birthday ◻️

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lets all agree to call the FTC ruling invalidating non-competes a “Right to Work” rule
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26th near valencia
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does the fact that I got out a 6’ ladder and traversed the wall between our units to clear out the neighbor’s clogged patio drains ahead of tomorrow (they are out of town) absolve me of putting our christmas tree out on the sidewalk tonight (which to be clear I haven’t done yet) where it will surely float away in the storm tomorrow and disrupt commerce on Valencia St or nah?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF46NnUn5nw posting on the 'don theme song (“beep” is what QTs are gonna be called in the new beta)
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i have over six hundreds mutes in tweetbot, muting quote tweets here will be easy for me, now to go mute the word “quote” itself and get started on that