I gather current-year songs I love into playlists of about an hour long. Trying to shake off the past and keep my mind in the current as much as possible. Here's my 2026 playlists so far:

A good day to rewatch one the strangest videos to emerge from the mad MTV early days and see what details you missed last time. youtu.be/lcOxhH8N3Bo?...

I'm going to be at SDCC for the first time this year. Any real-world friends here going? DM me if you want to cross paths! Any great tabletop, or TTRPG, or artists you love that I should check out?

Consistently the most meaningful and grounding read on the internet, to me. Mandy's work reminds me of the best parts of the early promise of the internet made into a beating, living, and modern textual body. Here's to eighteen more years.

This is amazing. The kids are alright + also have access to 90s video segment technology

This has been the overwhelming opinion of everybody I've talked to, sports fans and haters alike. I think we all just wanted our city to feel fun, again. Seattle is a really fun city that feels like it's been struggling to wake up since lockdown.

I wrote about how I discovered that a new site for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig's long-running Tumblr project-turned-book, was a bootleg made by a marketing agency. They published the complete book verbatim, then added AI-generated art and new AI words, entirely without permission.

Hell yeah, why experience a meaningful daily ritual for a few fleeting years, when you can instead outsource it to something sterile that has never thought or felt or lived? Sometimes I get sad for people who don't realize that time is all any of us has. www.theverge.com/tech/947871/...

Introducing Melted: A Messy Ice Cream Game! No kickstarters this year! Preorder on my website now! Coming in July! Art by @wildkatstudio.bsky.social !

Breakout French-Canadian math rock duo Angine de Poitrine, British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, and garage rocker Ty Segall headline the lineup for the KEXP BBQ on Aug. 22 at Seattle Center. Tickets are on sale now. www.kexp.org/bbq/

Now that’s a welcome collab I don’t see coming.

What's the over/under on an AI model being named "Baudrillard" sometime within the next few years?

Nobody waxes nostalgic for leather fringe jackets, but they were super popular in the 80s. Because they're not in vogue now, you can use them as markers of cultural authenticity. What other things, from any era, are left alone by resurgent nostalgia and so remain authentic to their time?

KEXP is experiencing issues with its Seattle radio transmitter due to ice, on the final day of its spring pledge drive. Donate to the station (and receive various thank you gifts) at the link below:

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 💔