Hello Thursday!

In an odd bit of synchronicity, I found this quote from novelist E.L. Doctorow just after I posted Thursday #12, where I talked about how I found a way to become a writer even though I didn’t have a sense of having stories inside me to that I needed to tell. Regarding writing, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

New things pop up on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes people adapt to them with no problem, other times it seems like the new thing breaks their brain, and you never can tell which new things will be which. Case in point: Road striping.

The local street department’s favorite thing to do recently has been to take streets that were 4-lane (2 lanes going one way, 2 lanes going the other), and restripe them as 3-line streets (1 lane going one way, 1 lane going the other, with a left turn lane between them, plus bike lanes on each side). It’s actually a pretty elegant system — it creates room for bike lanes without making the streets any wider, and car traffic moves at more or less the same speed because people who want to go straight just stay in the right lane and go straight, and people who want to turn left get into the middle lane to turn left. There’s no struggle to get from the right to the left lane into traffic when you want to turn left, no people trying to jump from the left to the right lane because they’ve discovered that the person in front of them wants to turn left and they might have to slow down, or maybe even — horrors! — stop. The new system is a vast improvement.

Well, it would be a vast improvement, if the roads weren’t clogged — literally clogged — with drivers who think the new setup is a county-wide game of “The Middle Lane Is Lava.” These lackwits stop in the right lane until they can take their left turn from the right lane. It’s just the most frustrating thing. And I just know that it’s just a matter of time before one of the lackwits behind me gets tired of waiting and decides to pass them in the turn lane, at which point the lackwit in front of me will decide to make their left turn into the lackwit coming up from behind me.

Sometimes I just really can’t deal with people.  

After finishing the most recent English volume of Flying Witch (see below), I was frustrated to learn that the next volume has already been published in Japanese but (based on past publication schedules) won’t be published in English for another eleven months. I knew that fan translations (known as “scanlations”) are a thing, so I decided to look and see how difficult it would be to find scanlations online of the next volume of Flying Witch. The answer, to quote Ryan George, was “Super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

So then I decided to see how much of a delay there was after the publication of the Japanese volume before English scanlations became available. The answer? Because the scanlations were based on the original magazine publications of the chapters, they were all available before the publication of the Japanese volume. In fact, checking the publication dates of the magazines and the posting dates of the scanlations showed that the scanlations were all posted the same day as the original magazine publications. In summary, there is no reason the American manga publishers couldn’t do same-day publication as their Japanese counterparts if they wanted to. They just don’t want to.

The whole thing reminded me of an incident that a friend of mine went through a few years ago. She’s a huge Doctor Who fan. No, a bigger fan that that. No, bigger. No, trust me, you only think you know someone who’s a bigger Doctor Who fan. Anyway there was some sort of Doctor Who special video event thing that happened in England, and she wanted to get a copy. If she lived in England, it would have been no problem. But because she lived in the US and there were export laws and whatnot, there were problems. She tried every legal way she could. She basically turned into the human embodiment of the “shut up and take my money” gif, to no avail.

She ended up pirating the video, not because she wanted to, but because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find anyone willing to exchange goods for currency with her so she could get the thing she wanted legally. Yeah, but tell me again about how capitalist markets are so efficient. 

Things to check out online

• A rare baby sighting could reveal where life begins for world's largest sharks — Lily is a big fan of whale sharks, so this article caught my eye. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about the oceans and the creatures in them.

• Lamy and Kuru Toga team up on a mechanical pencil — This is one of those “best of both worlds” things that I didn’t realize I needed until I discovered that I could have it. The Lamy Safari is my favorite fountain pen: They’re inexpensive, have ergonomically well-designed grips, come in a variety of colors, and also make matching rollerball pens, ballpoint pens, and mechanical pencils, so you can have your entire desk set coordinated. Plus, they’re made from the same kind of plastic as Lego, so they’re pretty much indestructible. Kuru Toga makes what I think is the coolest mechanical pencils out there. Their lead advancement mechanism rotates the lead as it advances it, so you don’t end up with a chisel-pointed lead and instead have a consistently pointy point to your lead. I was surprised and stoked to learn that Lamy and Kuru Toga have cooperated, despite the fact that Lamy is in Germany and Kuru Toga is in Japan, and they now produce a Lamy Safari mechanical pencil with the Kuru Toga mechanism inside it. I can’t wait to get my hands on one!

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• Cozy Companion, vol. 26

• Flying Witch, vol. 14 (Chihiro Ishizuka) — Another great volume; this manga keeps getting better and better. Unfortunately, now I have to wait until next year for the next volume! (Or else study my Japanese faster — volume 15 is already out in Japan, but Kodansha is apparently running 13 months behind on American publication.)

• Minnesota Monthly, July/August 2026

• Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, vol. 2 (Shui Usui) — Fortunately I’ve got two more volumes of this before I’m at the point of waiting for now volumes to be published.

I’ve continued reading

• Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again (Austin Kleon)

• The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead — The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter (Robert Hunter)

• ArtForum, November 2025  — In this week’s reading I noticed a couple of artists who are doing interesting work with oil painting. Specifically, Akiko Kuigawa, who makes oil paint look like pastels by repeatedly rubbing oil on a cotton cloth, and Yan Pei-Ming, who does monochromatic oil paintings in shades of grey that, when photographed, look like they were done with chalk on black paper. I think it’s really amazing that after centuries of working with oil paint, artists are still finding new ways to use the medium.

• Blue Rose: The AGE Role-Playing Game of Romantic Fantasy 

• Mislaid in Parts Half-Known (Seanan McGuire) 

• In the Embrace of Dragons (Lyonne Riley) — I’m approaching the end of this one. Riley continues to excel at writing sex scenes — each one is sufficiently different that I never get bored with them. (And maybe it’s just me, but keeping this sort of variety is something I really struggle with as a writer. Especially if you’re going to have the same characters having sex multiple times across a book.)

• A Red-Rose Chain (Seanan McGuire)

and I’ve started reading

• My Dress-up Darling, vol. 15

• ArtForum, November 2025 — I saw an ad in this issue for the exhibition “Basquiat: Headstrong” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and once again had to stop and remind myself “It’s not in Louisiana!” Someday that bit of knowledge will be instinctual for me — perhaps if I go there. But not today.

• The Cozy Cauldron Cab Company (Nathan C. Ashford) — I’m only a couple of chapters into this one, but so far it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

• Cozy Companion, vol. 27

• Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas (Becky Blades)

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 21 (Yuto Tsukuda)

• ArtForum, February 2026

If you missed any past Thursdays, you can access the archives here.

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason