Hello Thursday!

I don’t know if Wednesdays (when I get Thursday ready to go out) are actually busier for me than the other six days of the week, or if it just seems that way because I’m trying to get Thursday ready to go out, but Wednesdays recently have been horrible. Hopefully next week will be better. (This entire last week has been pretty hectic actually, so this Thursday is shorter than usual. But it’s still here, still coming between Wednesday and Friday, so that’s something.)

A thing to check out online

• Pablo Starr, Now’s the Time — Back in the early 90s, Pablo was the lead singer of a New Orleans funk band called “Clones at Play.” (Also worth listening to — you can find them here and here, among other places.) Since then, Pablo has gone on to do a lot of other things, but he’s also still doing music, as demonstrated by the album linked here. I’ve only listened to one song so far, but I liked that one, and based on my past experience with Pablo’s music, I’m willing to take the rest on faith. (Don’t disappoint me, Pablo!)

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

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

• Mislaid in Parts Half-Known (Seanan McGuire) 

I’ve continued reading

• ArtForum, December 2025 

• ArtForum, February 2026 

• Mislaid in Parts Half-Known (Seanan McGuire) 

• Ritual Income, Witch of the Demesne vol. 1 (B.L. Brown) 

and I’ve started reading

• Wanderhome RPG (Jay Dragon) — A friend of mine has started a game of this on Discord, so I need to familiarize myself with the rules.

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 22 (Yuto Tsukuda) 

• Art in America, Fall 2026 

• Midwest Design, Fall 2026 

• Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Ted Nelson) — Why, one may wonder, am I reading a computer book that’s almost as old as I am? (The first edition of this book was published in 1974.) Because as a historian, I eventually feel an irresistible compulsion to go back and read the primary sources, and this book has been mention in pretty much every computer history/culture book I’ve read, all the way back to Stephen Levy’s Hackers, which I am eternally grateful that someone at my small-town Mississippi library system bought when it came out in 1984, and I then checked out and read at least once a year for the next five years (as long as I lived in that town). Ted Nelson — who is still alive as I write this, though as he was born in 1937, this is subject to change at any minute — is one of the pioneers of computer culture, having coined the word “hypertext” and spent many years working on Project Xanadu, one of the precursors of the World Wide Web. (If you go read that article about Project Xanadu, particularly the section “Original 17 rules,” I think you’ll agree with me that a web constructed according to the original Project Xanadu ideas would have been superior to the one we ended up with.) At any rate, in 1974, Nelson saw the need for a book to try to get computer laypeople to both understand and be interested in computers. The subtitles of the two sections of this book (it’s printed back to back, like an old Ace Double) convey the ambition of what he’s trying to do here: The subtitle of Computer Lib is “You can and must understand computers NOW,” while the subtitle of Dream Machines is “New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — A Minority Report.” So far I’m only about six pages into Computer Lib, and the book seems to have aged remarkably well for a computer book. It’s still far too common that, as Nelson puts it “Anything with buttons or light can be palmed off on the layman as a computer.” (p.2) Add in now rather meaningly acronym “AI,” and this is compounded exponentially. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this. // Further opinion after reading more — yes, there is obviously a lot of this that is outdated (there’s information about where to go to get a terminal installed in your home for connection to a mainframe or minicomputer for timesharing, for example), but I still think there’s a lot of it that’s aged well.

• The Turbulent Appearance of Brise Collier (Natalie Kelda) — Another ARC (I love getting to meet authors on Threads and Bluesky!). This one is a sapphic paranormal romance set in the 19th-century Yorkshire coal mines. I’ve only read one chapter of it so far, and so far it seems to have set up the situation well. 

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