Recently I’ve met a couple men on what I’ve started thinking of as “the tech to therapy pipeline.” In this case that term specifically refers to quitting jobs in tech to pursue careers as therapists, but it could just as easily refer to me as a guy who stays in tech and (for reasons which may or may not be related to the job but are outside the scope of this post) also becomes a therapy client .
Four more Book Bingo books SPL Book Bingo 2025, Books 10–13 More Book Bingo quickies. Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau For the “Suggested by a library worker” square. Readable but didn’t grab me. Stories and stories and stories—in addition to the titular book that drives much of the novel’s main narrative, nearly every character with whom we spend any time gets a chance to tell a…
Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert SPL Book Bingo 2025, Book 8: Disability So I actually didn’t even know that I’d be able to put Get A Life, Chloe Brown in a book bingo square. I put a hold on it because it kept coming up in “I’m thinking about exploring the romance genre but don’t know where to start” lists and such, and then it became available smack in the middle of book bingo, and I…
Well, asked and answered: who’s afraid of gender? The answer may not surprise you: it’s all the worst people in the fucking world! To help us understand why, sort of, Judith Butler takes us on a journey that I found to be equal parts mind-expanding, boring, and perplexing, along the way using some variation of the word “phantasmatic” about two thousand times.
One Of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon SPL Book Bingo 2025, Book 9: Dystopia I’m doing this out of order and skipping books 7 and 8 for now, because I just finished this one and wanted to get my thoughts down while they’re swirling around. Note: This post will contain spoilers for One Of Our Kind. My knee-jerk reaction upon finishing this novel was to give it 5 stars and call it a day. For me it was…
3 More Book Bingo Books I am still plugging away at Book Bingo, possibly vaguely attempting to get a blackout (by filling all 24 squares) this year. That’s a lot of blog posts if they’re all as long as most of my past ones, so here’s a few quickies. Sylvie Cathrall, A Letter from the Lonesome Shore For the “Author from Another Continent” square. The boringest possible choice for “another…
a meander about writing and language Recently I wrote about how an essay I read, 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing, made me want to write more. The post didn’t have a really sharp thesis, and it didn’t have an intended audience. This flew in the face of I’d been led to believe is “good writing,” where it’s important to know your audience, and to write for that audience, and to have an objective,…
Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. SPL Book Bingo 2025, Book 3: BIPOC* Historical Fiction/Nonfiction Hey have you played Disco Elysium? It’s a video game with this character in it named Measurehead, who is a physically and verbally imposing man blocking your passage to a critical location. When you talk to him to try to get by, he greets you by saying “YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR DEGENERACY,”…
I’ve been trying more often to read novels with no knowledge about their plot. I don’t remember when I decided to start doing this, nor do I remember there being a single dramatic “this is the last straw” type event that pushed me into this slightly unconventional approach to fiction. But I’m enjoying it, because even the most anodyne back-cover or inside-flap synopses typically actually reveal…
Recently I had a pretty delightful conversation that started from the question “What’s your lesbian necromancer science-fantasy book?” This referred, of course, to Tamsyn Muir’s first novel Gideon the Ninth , which I had just finished describing to my interlocutors with hand-waving enthusiasm, but also metonymically to the general class of “things one can’t help but employ gesticulation when…
'The Mountain Goats Rhythm' is called a Tresillo Today I learned that the rhythm that I have just thought of as “the Mountain Goats rhythm,” the one that goes “ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE-two,” is actually called a “tresillo.” I was going to dash off a quick post about it, but a Web search for “mountain goats tresillo” didn’t turn up anything obvious so I ended up feeling like I needed to…
No creature loiters nonchalantly like a crow. Like: how’s it going bud? I’m only sitting here because it’s hella comfy of a spot. Chill, bro. And as I walk if he should happen to appear upon a wire, and then a fence, and then a branch… Coincidence. He’s headed this way too, perchance, for reasons of his own, inscrutable to me. How could I, with my blinkered human mind, presume to know the motives…
This weekend I spent a little time updating my Sit Spot page, a page about literally doing nothing over and over. I upgraded the back/next arrows from the clunky, juvenile ⬅️ and ➡️ to svelte, elegant isosceles triangles to provide a more restrained and cosmopolitan navigation experience. I added datestamps to the image captions, because what’s the point of keeping a record of the same nothing…
Since circumstances in my life require that I spend way more time than I want thinking about AI, I figure at least I can maybe get a blog post out of it.
I didn’t finish my Book Bingo posts — and maybe I will sometime but maybe I won’t — but participating in Book Bingo got me back in the habit of reading instead of aimlessly browsing the internet, at least some of the time. So I may continue writing about the occasional book.
Note: This is the ninth in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . It fills the Banned or challenged book square on the bingo card, according to a display at my local library; I assumed this was because of its sexual content, but it was actually banned in Czechoslovakia due to its criticism of the Communist government.
Note: This is the eighth in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . It fills the A SAL speaker (past or upcoming) square on the bingo card, according to a display case at my local library. SAL stands for Seattle Arts and Lectures and I unfortunately don’t pay too much attention to it. I’m posting this one before the seventh book I read because I own that…
Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . It fills the Latina/Latino/Latinx author square on the bingo card, and I suppose it could theoretically fit the LGBTQ+ love story one as well, in letter if perhaps not in spirit. I’m posting this one before the fifth book I read because I own that one, but In the Dream House has to go…
Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . It fills the LGBTQ+ love story square on the bingo card, but it could also fit the Debut author square since it’s writer Jarrett Melendez’s first graphic novel.
Note: This is the third in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . I read all 14 volumes of this serial comic on my back porch, one volume per day, to fill the Read outside square on the bingo card.
Note: This is the second in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . This book could fill any of the following squares on the bingo card: Debut author (if it counts for it to be the author’s debut novel ), Blue cover , or Sci-fi or fantasy by a BIPOC author (if magical realism counts)
Note: This is the first in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2022 Book Bingo . This book could fill any of the following squares on the bingo card: Debut author , Sci-fi or fantasy by a BIPOC author , Recommended by Library staff or Peak Pick , Been meaning to read , Non-binary/genderqueer author or character , or LGBTQ+ love story .
This is the first in what may be an erratic and inconsistent series By “may be” I mean it may or may not be a series at all. If it happens, it is certain to be erratic and inconsistent. of blog posts about making and drinking mocktails from Zero , a mocktail book from Alinea, the famous / notorious Chicago molecular gastronomy restaurant. It will be somewhat in the vein of my Foraged and Found…
Soldering I fear this decade’s project is repair. The circuit is sporadic, and the glow is dim, but for the eye-gleam of a crow or quiet prideful colors in your hair. But what are these against a hungry blaze that, out of sight, still smothers us in smoke? Our simple joys are made a bitter joke by grief and terror in these final days. Still, simple joy is all there ever was. And no encroaching…
Fall; Or, A Neal Stephenson Fan In Hell Warning: this post will contain lots of spoilers about Neal Stephenson’s novel Fall; Or, Dodge In Hell. I think it started around two thirds of the way through Fall, when Egdod suggested none too subtly to his children that they call themselves Adam and Eve. Egdod, the titular Dodge — having died and been brain-scanned and booted up as something like a God…
The Breath Mints. On July 25, 2021, I took a bus to visit my mom for the first time since the pandemic struck and everyone went into lockdown around March 2020. My favorite Blaseball team, the Breath Mints, had just had an incredibly successful in-game election. We’d picked up an amazing four blessings for our team, recruiting legendary pitcher Uncle Plasma to the rotation once again after he was…
Wingspan's Brilliant Learning Mechanism Recently I played Wingspan with my mom and brother. My brother and I had played it before, but it had been a while, and my mom had never played it. My mom is not a particularly experienced modern board game player — though I think she picks things up quicker than she gives herself credit for — and Wingspan is not a simple game. But she was able to learn it…
Who Wants A 2020 Retrospective? So last year when I wrote a retrospective of 2019, I acknowledged, presciently, that “Non-shitshows are clearly just not on the table anymore,” and 2020 certainly bore that out. But I also said “here’s to me writing a 2020 retrospective before March of 2021,” and now’s my chance to go 2 for 2. This ended up being very long and mostly about media I consumed. Just a…
A System Font Stack Allow me to indulge for a bit in some bloviating about the design of this blog, the thing that bloggers love most to do. I suppressed it when I carried out a pretty significant redesign a while ago, doing away with the “blueprint” gimmick that—while cute—confined the content to a tiny rectangle and locked me into a color scheme that I didn’t love and that played poorly with…
My (Current) Favorite Game, My Favorite Critic: A Case Study My latest thing is playing the shit out of Dead Cells, finally. Procedurally generated games are en vogue to the point where they’re practically a meme, which I guess makes me practically a meme for enjoying them so much, but what can I say? Roguelikes, or roguelites (though Dead Cells doesn’t feel particularly “lite”), or procedurally…
Foraged & Found CSA: Week 3 Week 2 of the Foraged and Found Edibles CSA has come and gone. Let’s review. I remembered to take a picture this time. Clockwise from the upper left: shiitake mushrooms, wild salad mix, spruce tips, truffle salt, dried lobster mushrooms, goose tongue. Shiitake mushrooms Good old shiitake mushrooms. Usually I get these dried and use them to umami up my vegetable stocks,…
Foraged & Found CSA: Week 2 It’s the weekend after week 2 of the Foraged and Found Edibles CSA, so time to review what I made with the week’s haul. Since this was the second week it wasn’t quite as thrilling as the first, and I hadn’t yet decided to blog the proceedings, so I forgot to take a picture of the whole spread. I’ll correct this oversight in future installments. Ramps Boy were these…
Foraged & Found CSA: Week 1 I signed up for a six-week CSACommunity Supported Agriculture, basically a delivery service for getting produce from a local farm. Typically a CSA will deliver to a local drop point for you to pick up, rather than straight to you. with Foraged and Found Edibles on something of a whim: it looked interesting and, based on a preview of the foods I’d be getting, like a fun…
2019 Retrospective After giving up on my pointless-feeling year-end music posts a few years ago, I wrote a more general retrospective last year and it turned out to be a worthwhile endeavor. So I’m gonna do it again. What’s the most interesting stuff that happened in my life in 2019? About Faces I gotta say the most significant event of my life in 2019, in terms of my personal sense of…
SPL Book Bingo Book 6: The Fire Next Time This is the sixth in my series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2019 Book Bingo, which ended on September 3rd; I did get a bingo, but neglected to submit the card before the deadline. Whoops! Anyway, for the “by an author of color” square, I read The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin. I was inspired to read this book by the track…
SPL Book Bingo Book 5: No One Will See Me Cry This is the fifth in my series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2019 Book Bingo. For the “by an author from Mexico or Canada” square, I read No One Will See Me Cry, by Cristina Rivera-Garza, translated to English by Andrew Hurley. Straight up: I had a tough time with this book, and I might have a tough time writing about it. But…
SPL Book Bingo 4: Sisters This is the fourth book in my series of posts about Seattle Public Library’s 2019 Book Bingo. For the “single-word title” square, I read Sisters, by Lily Tuck. This post will include significant spoilers. Sisters was the first of two books that I read strategically in order to get a bingo with minimum effort, by choosing it from a table in my local library that had a…
SPL Book Bingo 3: My Age of Anxiety This is the third book in my series of posts about Seattle Public Library’s 2019 Book Bingo. For the “book about disability” square, I read My Age of Anxiety, by Scott Stossel. Is anxiety a “disability?” It’s impossible to read this book and come away thinking the answer is categorically “no.” The anxiety Stossel describes is all-consuming, incapacitating,…
SPL Book Bingo 2: The Beatrix Gates This is the second in a series of posts about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s Book Bingo. For the “Challenges your world view” square, I read The Beatrix Gates, by Rachel Pollack. Content warning: The Beatrix Gates is very heavy on issues of transgender identity. That’s not the content warning, hold your horses. The content warning is that I’m a cis…
SPL Book Bingo Book 1: Hybrid Child This is the first in what will, I hope, be a series of at least 4 entries in this blog about books I read for Seattle Public Library’s Book Bingo. Hybrid Child is by Mariko Ōhara and was originally written in Japanese; I read what I believe is the only English version, translated by Jodie Beck. I picked it up from the library before I noticed Book Bingo was…
A Whale's Lantern Collaboration Process I recently participated in a collaboration set up on Mastodon by a mysterious entity known only as “A Whale’s Lantern” or “The Whale” for short, who paired me with a total stranger so that I could work with them to write and record a song fitting a Whale-selected theme. This was the fourth such collaboration, but my first. My partner was a drummer and…
2018 Retrospective I used to do year-end best music posts, but it started to feel a bit silly when most or all of my list every year was just stuff that could be found on any of the countless other lists put out earlier by people who had actual deadlines to hit. But I did find myself wanting to look back at 2018 when the year turned, so I widened my scope a little bit. Here are some of the most…
Spacemacs to Doom Migration I’ve been trying out Doom Emacs recently, because I guess I can’t go more than like 2 years without wanting to throw my current text editing situation out the window and replace it with a new one. That current text editing situation is Spacemacs. It’s starting to feel kind of clunky, with too many moving parts to configure straightforwardly, slow to start up and slow to…
Bayesian In-toot-ition Someone in the Fediverse tootedThe Fediverse is, loosely speaking, a constellation of open source social media replacements, of which Mastodon, on which I have an account, is one. Yes, the analogue of “tweeting” is called “tooting” there. a probability problem: A, B and C toot the truth with a probability of 1/3 and lie with a probability of 2/3. A makes a toot and B toots…
A Different Kind of Freedom February My employer Bonanza has an interesting employee benefit called “Freedom February,” where during that month every employee gets a week’s worth of free days off and some cash to offset the cost of using those days to take a tropical vacation should they desire to do so. Generally, several months in advance, employees decide on a few specific destinations and…
Songwriting 'Process' I’ve written, recorded and released into the wild about a dozen completely original songs, but I still don’t really have a process for writing them, or at least not a conscious one. This post is an attempt to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t. I’m not, by basically any conventional measure, a “successful” songwriter, nor do I pretend it’s anything other than a…
Wheel Turn 2 or, the Mountain Goats' 'Heel Turn 2' Is Going To Get Me Killed, Or Save My Life Get stomped like a snake Lie down in the dirt I have, mercifully, been doored only once in the approximately twelve years I’ve been cycling as my primary mode of transportation. If you are unaware, being “doored,” as a cyclist, means having a car door opened directly into your path of travel too suddenly…
A Crow Looked At Me Every once in a while a music album comes along that just consumes me for a little while. I want to read everything anyone’s written about it to find out if it affected other people in the same way it did me and mine for insights and ways to put words to how it made me feel what I did. Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me is the latest such album. It’s about the recent death of…
Bish Bosch My Favorite Albums of 2012 list omitted what was probably one of my most anticipated albums of the year. In fact, it didn’t make that list. The reason is not that it disappointed me—though in a way it did—but because even if it hadn’t it definitely would not be an album I’d want to return to often. The album is Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch. Scott Walker is a fascinating man, and his recent…
MPD + Quicksilver on OS X I don’t know about you, but I let iTunes manage my music on Mac OS X and have done so for years, since when it was only kind of bloated and annoying instead of incredibly bloated and annoying like it is now. So even though iTunes itself is kind of awful at this point, all my music is organized the way iTunes likes to organize it, and most options for buying music have…