Hi friends,

I wrote about how trying to get all of my book reviews and notes out of Goodreads turned into a weird programming side quest. "Yak shaving" is what programmers jokingly call these alluring and seemingly necessary activities you do on the way to doing the thing you actually want to do. Even if you're not a programmer, you've probably found yourself doing something like that.

Book scraper yak shave: I just wanted to export my book data from Goodreads

Goodreads has an export function, but, as I quickly discovered, it doesn't export all the data you might want, and some of it is formatted in annoying ways. No problem, I though, I'll open it in a spreadsheet (the export is a CSV) and clean it up. I'm trying to learn Python and cleaning up a bunch of data sounds exactly like an Automate the Boring Stuff with Python kind of problem. But I have so many books and the data was so messy. I might need to grab it myself to create a cleaner output.

Hi friends,

I wrote a blog post about my favorite holiday of the year, the in-between days from Christmas to New Year, the intercalary interstitial interregnum.

I love the quiet. The Christmas obligations have been dispensed with. Either I have fulfilled them or I have failed to fulfill them, but in any case they are moot now. New Year's Day will bring the fresh start feelings with perhaps a sense of obligation to make plans for self-improvement and maybe even act on them. But not yet. We are still in the lull. Days off for many people. I am one of those lucky ones, though even when I did work on these days it's been quiet.

Read more...

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy.

Good morning, Boston, and New England, generally

This is going to be one of those stream of consciousness posts. If you've come to enjoy my more philosophical or practical posts, I'm afraid I'm about to disappoint you. Actually, I think I'm not even supposed to apologize for what I'm about to write; that's definitely a rule. So I'm sorry for breaking that rule, as well. I guess every style of writing has its formal pro-forma introduction. In ye olden times it was a poem invoking the muse. In the blog post it's an apology. So there we are. The introduction is dispensed with and I can proceed to the main meander.

Hi friends,

I wrote a blog post about how I read books using text-to-speech.

Text-to-speech is not just screen readers: How and why I use synthetic voices to read me books

I could not get enough Severus Snape fanfiction. But I had a problem: I also wanted to knit. A lot. I could not get enough knitting and I could not get enough Severus Snape. When, a couple years earlier, I had experimented with speech to text (the experiment failed) I also discovered that my early model Mac laptop could to text-to-speech. It was pretty robotic and I didn't find much use for it. Until suddenly I very much did have a use for it.

Hi friends,

The days are short and the nights are long*. Even in California, December makes the earth's axial tilt felt, and I long for the brief hours of sun. Which is why I wrote about sun worship this week.

Worship the sun: It's traditional, it's natural, and it's reasonable

If you're going to worship something, the sun is a reasonable choice, and quite possibly the most reasonable choice. From the perspective of a person living on earth, the sun possesses all the important qualities of a god. Ancient people thought so, and some religions still hold the sun sacred. Modern scientific understanding of the sun only makes its god-like qualities more apparent.

Hi friends,

I wrote about some books I've been reading, and the books they led me to read as a result.

Some excerpts from The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner: The science fiction to German philosophy pipeline strikes again

I recently finished The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod, two science fiction novels that are full of direct references to all kinds of socialist, communist, and anarchist ideas. As in, not only are people living, for example, in some kind of anarchist society as in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed or Iain Banks' Culture novels, but they directly discuss specific schools of thought and thinkers. One of the thinkers directly alluded to was Max Stirner and his ideas of egoist anarchism.

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. It's all about the pies I have been making for the last month or so: cottage pie, steak and onion pie, chicken pie, and pumpkin pie.

Pie season: A progression of mostly meat pies

At some point in the summer, I wrote PIE SEASON on the wall calendar next to October 16th. In case you’re wondering where this season and its official start date come from, I made it up. It was too hot to make pies when I got a nice new baking dish and pie bird, so I declared pie season for when I estimated it would be cooler. And when I say pie season, I mostly mean savory pies.

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post about the James Turrel skyspace in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Seeing the obvious in the Turrell skyspace: The Three Gems by James Turrell in November

"We're here at the perfect time," said M- and we looked up at the sky for a bit. Then she said "Do you know what this piece is about?" I felt like someone had asked me what coffee is about. Isn't it obvious? "Um, it's about the sky," I said. We sat there quietly for a while and then she said "Do you want to know what it's really about?" And I said yes, and she explained.

Hi friends,

I heard that some of you like lists of books, so I made a list of books. Not to give away too many spoilers for my blog post, but one of the books I should be reading is Gender Trouble and in the post, you can read my excuses about why I'm not.

Books I should be reading but am not, along with my selected excuses

A book is not a pizza. It will not go off if you take a long time to read it all, and nothing is wasted if you read only a portion. Also, unlike pizza, you can get books out of the library or buy them in electronic form, so none to very little waste is produced as a result of you not finishing the book. There are plenty of books I start, decide I'm not into them, and don't finish. I don't consider it virtuous to finish books nor sinful to abandon them. Non-fiction and poetry books are often perfectly enjoyable or useful if you read only a portion.

However, there are some books that I think I should read, not out of some kind of moral obligation to the book itself, but for other reasons that are important to my life projects. Nonetheless, I am not reading them.

Hi friends,

This week's post has been a long time coming. I mean, I've been thinking about it for a couple of years, and then held off posting until the moment felt right. I explore how an internet challenge for male abstinence fits into a long tradition of cultivating vital energy and magical power. It gets weird.

Content warning: The linked post contains frank discussion of human sexuality and may be an info hazard. There are no graphic images.

Sex magic for the masses: In which we start at No Nut November and arrive at orgone

Hi friends,

The last weekend before NaNoWriMo feels like a good time to share my theory about sword and sorcery and what makes those stories tick. I present to you

Sword and sorcery and the mid-career hero

For a long time, I've been thinking about why I love some kinds of fantasy, even though it's not that good by my usual standards, while at the same time I can't get into other kinds of pretty OK fantasy that everyone else likes. Like, why do I love the Witcher short stories and TV show, but find Wheel of Time just OK as a show and impenetrable as a novel series? (And why are the Witcher novels so meh?) Why did I inhale every Andre Norton novel that came my way but could barely get through The Lord of the Rings? Why is Luke Skywalker so boring and Conan the Barbarian so awesome? Also, why does Columbo feel like it belongs in this list even though it's not fantasy?

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. Another one about current events! This one is about the weird syllabus tacked on to the latest California Ideology manifesto.

pmarca's reading list: All I've got is a hammer engraved with There Is Nothing Outside of the Text

Earlier this week, internet rich guy pmarca posted a manifesto on his pal Musk's web forum, which he then reposted on his personal web log. It was OK. However, what struck me as interesting was the list of names at the end. Unfortunately for me, I've got a bit of a Columbo-like tenacity about just checking up on a few background details so uh, I looked up every one of those names, and I made a table. So you don't have to. You're welcome and/or I'm sorry. Read more...

Hi friends,

There's a new thing on my blog that you might enjoy. I posted this persuasive essay on Tumblr last year, but hardly anyone saw it and 'tis the season for bat discussion, being both Halloween month and a Friday the 13th, so I'm taking it out of the spooky decorations closet, cleaning up the bat poops stains (typos) and putting it up for you to enjoy (possibly, enjoy again).

Is Batman a furry? A completely logical examination of the facts

Consider that he:

• Wears an anthropomorphic animal costume for personal reasons
• Feels a strong emotional connection to the animal, including using that animal’s iconography as a kind of identifying marker
• Wearing the suit allows him to express a true aspect of his personality that is otherwise hidden, which matches my understanding of fursonas Read more...

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. Because you're cool and signed up for my newsletter, you get to learn about it first.

Shaky Saturn, you're my guy: Seeing and knowing what you're seeing

It's too hot to think and all the smart things I was going to say leaked out of my brain at about 5 p.m. After staring at the internet for an hour instead of writing, I stepped onto my deck to try to cool off and saw a kind of yellowish-orange blob in the Eastish. I'm due for a new pair of glasses and nighttime really brings out my astigmatism for some reason, but my color vision is rather good just the same. Maybe it's Mars, I thought, and brought out my sky app to identify it.

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. It's about how I got tricked into filling my house with succulents by Big Succulent. There are a lot of photos.

I did not choose the succulent life; the succulent life chose me

The first succulents I remember distinctly were a pair of cacti that my grandmother had in a sunny little back room that I had to pass through on the way to the outhouse. The cacti were rather small, and they lived in different places depending on the season. I mostly don't care for cacti, because I think they are out to get you Read more...

Hi friends,

You may ask, how can this be, two posts in one week? Well, it's a special occasion, the Autumnal Equinox, and I thoutght it would be nice to celebrate by sharing a poem with you all.

El Camino Del Mar at Dusk

Happy Autumnal Equinox to all in the Northern Hemisphere! There is a certain peculiar feeling I get at the autumnal turn. It's a gestalt, a felt sense, some kind of suchness or maybe haecceity of this change, like I can feel the shift of the entire world though the complete combination of all the little shifts all together. Actually, to call it a feeling would imply it's an emotion only and that's entirely too single-dimensional a sense of the thing. It is both stronger and more subtle than that. Because of this ineffable but recurrent sense of this moment, I have written multiple poems trying to eff it, as it were. The poem I'm sharing today is part of that spontaneously-arising series. Read more...

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post about, yes, for a change, a real trending topic. Everybody is thinking about the Roman Empire this week because of a TikTok meme about asking dudes how often they think about the Roman Empire. But most of the things they are thinking about are the same old boring stuff, in my opinion.

Thinking about thinking about the Roman Empire: Eating dormice with garum from the trashcan of memology

I think a lot about Pompeii, because I was obsessed with volcanos as a kid, in exactly the same way as some kids get obsessed with dinosaurs. Also because I saw Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2021 and it was so astounding, I made an important change in my life. That exhibition had a lot of day-to-day stuff from people's lives. Previously, I found a lot of stuff about Rome pretty tedious because it tended to focus on marble busts of boring looking dudes with names that all ended in "us" and their military exploits. You may take it as read I am making the jerking off motion in the direction of a phalanx. I mean OK, a phalanx is cool once. A jar full of holes that people bred dormice in on the other hand? That's cool at least a dozen times. Read more...

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. It’s a poem about choosing to do something dangerous on purpose. I also talk a little bit about the “four seasons” bias in nature poetry.

The Gate of Pinecones: First published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue

Thanks for reading and see you on the internet!

Hi friends,

I wrote a new blog post that you might enjoy. Normally I post on Fridays or very late on Thursday, but I'm sending this one sooner because it's about a play that you can see this weekend if you're in San Francisco.

Hair metal fantasy Cymbeline in McLaren Park: A review of San Francisco Shakespeare Festival's 2023 Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline

The poster for Cymbeline in the park looked like a hair metal fantasy movie from the 80s. I’d seen it every time I went to get burritos at my local taqueria, and I thought, whatever this is, it’s gonna be weird. On that promise, it delivered. Read more...

Hi there,

I wrote a thing. Like, just a few minutes ago. I thought I'd tell you about it here first.

The inner life manifest as supernatural in The Shining: Are the ghosts real? Yes. No. Maybe.

I rewatched Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) this week as homework. I've been writing so much about metaphorical haunted houses and I thought the metaphor was getting a little thin. I wanted to ground it in a real haunted house. Or at least a real fictional haunted house story. I thought the movie was even better than I remembered it, more beautiful, much scarier, and much richer in meaning. However, it's not so much of a clear-cut haunted house story. My spouse, who watched it for the first time with me, found the ambiguity annoying. Are we supposed to think the ghosts are literally real? Are the characters hallucinating them? Are they a metaphor? What really happened? Read more...