This song is so damn good.

My favorite part of December is writing a poem every day, inspired by @kelliagodon.bsky.social and the Two Sylvias Press Poetry Advent Calendar. They're a stellar way to consider your world, and yourself at the end of your year. Only $25 and supports an exceptional PNW poetry press.

My friend Allison has cancer. I've been helping by giving updates for her on Caringbridge. I post them on Facebook, and they get less engagement than any other post. How much $ do you think Facebook makes each year from people desperate enough to advertise the updates to their medical crises?

No notes.

@johnaugust.bsky.social could this be a movie? I really, really hope it becomes one soon www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Seattle Times has called the mayor's race for Katie Wilson.

Very excited about this new digital comics shop @sweetshop.app. I love print comics, but I think there's also a need for a truly great digital comics app—and I'm not interested in tying myself to Amazon in order to build a digital comics library.

I missed that the South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo passed, at 85, last June. Listen to this song, which always soothes something unsettled deep inside me, recorded in exile in London in 1978. Unreal, non-egoist, beat-dragging, masterful drumming on this track. A musician's musician. RIP.

Design friends! @johnaugust.bsky.social is looking for a "UI-heavy product designer with exceptional visual taste" for a new product. Contract, for now, but his shop builds exceptionally well considered software. If I was looking I'd be all over this.

Oh, I love this GoFundMe aimed at helping @nisishawl.bsky.social fund the writing of a different kind of book: an "artifact of [an] imaginary philosophical movement". This is a book Nisi dreamed and has used in their fiction, so the idea of it jumping the veil into the realized world is thrilling.

Apple Music appears to be showing alt-image text for Pink Floyd albums instead of cover art.

My favorite part of this article is that there was a schism and original Castrator vocalist Mallika Sundaramurthy formed a new band called Emasculator. May this new sub-genera flourish as it splits and divides in infinitum, death metal cell division building a body of bloody brutal feminist metal.

My favorite part of the bible is the Parable of the First Person Shooter

I'm literally wearing a shirt with her name on it and an energy dome like one does on Monday so I'm down with all new spuds

We made you a rigorously cited timeline of major moves, cases, changes, and other wildass developments in the immigration system since January 20. This is one of the most complicated things I've ever worked on, but we think it needs to be done. The thread breaks down the kinds of things we found.

Red was one of a kind. She was a radical in the best sense, unwavering in her identity. Yes, a lovable grump who, when you got a smile out of her, you know you really earned it.

My pitch for all streaming services, but themed on Murderbot for Apple TV: A daily soap opera. Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Do it fast, do it cheap. One hour a day. Tin foil sets. Low, low budget. No VFX except premade/rudimentary. Cut a one-hour condensed version for the weekend.

Here’s an ad from the mid 90s when I worked at The Trading Musician (rip). It ran in @thestranger.com, which was famously known for @dansavage.bsky.social’s column and kink-forward personals.

1982. The future was anything we wanted it to be.

Finally!

Humbly, I submit that we update Betteridge's law of headlines. Instead of answering "no" to any headline that ends in a question mark, I think we can safely start responding with "what the actual fuck?"

Never not perfect when something less human(e) takes me

"Conspiricism is pre-modern thought applied to postmodern politics." Another ContraPoints banger. Get banged about conspiracies for 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Trompe toi’l’oeil

"Here’s an idea: perhaps no politician who actively holds a role in government should be publishing books. It’s that simple." Yes. If they can't wait, if they want to influence the conversation now, release for free online, or in a print edition produced by the GPO and sold at cost.

@johnaugust.bsky.social "Could this be a movie?" suggestion! www.outsideonline.com/culture/essa...

For a variety of personal reasons I still have a Facebook account. When I log in, it's a time capsule. The majority of my online friends haven't updated their profile picture in years, it's like we've never aged. Stuck in amber to avoid giving the machine more grist for the mill.

This is rad. Trust in our Sandy.

Comics are fun to read! Sometimes you learn something, too.

Morning mood

While the too-long one chilled for a month or so before editing I dashed off a too-short novella. The first needs cutting the second needs expanding. We start with cutting and second-drafting, tomorrow, a little bit each day until every edit is making it worse.

FKA Twigs crafts albums with as much precision, skill, verve, and talent as George Saunders does crafting novels.

"What are you fighting for?" RIP 💔

Receiving a book you backed on Kickstarter and looking for your name in the back is the new Steve Martin finding his white pages listing in The Jerk.

Love seeing that the Pacific Northwest's own @marthasilano.bsky.social wrote the Poetry Foundation's poem of the day, with a very local theme.

Tomorrow, Jan 24th: a special 24-hour livestream of the “groundbreaking” generative documentary film Eno (about Brian Eno). The film is different each time it’s shown; they’ll be presenting 6 different versions over the 24 hours. [ohyouprettythings.com]

Just finished O'Hagan's Caledonian Road, and I adored it. Witty, barbed, tense, with potent verisimilitude, a kind of modern Dickensian social [media] novel. It's a rich book to get lost in and feel like you gained something insightful about the world while lost.

Poetry Foundation not fucking around with today's poem of the day www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/...

The song that's speaking to me today.

Lynch taught us that art can be brutal about truth without being brutal to people, both creators and audience, and that’s a particularly poignant reminder at this moment.

It wasn't about weirdness for weirdness, for me, it was about the divinity-grade acceptance of + affection for the real contours of the world, human and otherwise, present in so much of Lynch's work: gruesome and cloying and piercingly beautiful and dumb, the whole mess, all that open-eyed curiosity

David Lynch taught me that you must be authentic in your art, no matter the stakes. Your voice is what matters. Your call is to create the thing only you can in this world. If you find your audience, create. If you don't, create. Keep creating. Keep moving. Nobody gets out alive, make now matter.

"...the tools we have used to make our living are no more in any meaningful or honest way." One hope I have is seeing people start to make new tools to counter the cynical ones. We're at a rare moment of opportunity, born of this frustration, the moment feels ripe to me.

“You see, taxes are an implicit acknowledgment that I exist within society and not above it. That my fate is tethered to the fate of humanity at large. That I am not the special little boy I’ve always believed myself to be.”

Did you know moles, when they eat an earthworm, hold it in their teeth and use their paws to squeeze out all the dirt the worm has inside before eating it? Kind of like Google used to do with bad information before they served it to you.

Here is a noted horrible man of history, Alexander Graham Bell, whose death helps us remember that all bad men die, kissing his wife Mabel Hubbard Gardiner Bell, as she cosplays as a pyramid.