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Nov 28th, 2023
RSS Never Even Left
This is an updated version of the RSS sheet for hand-crafting a website RSS feed. If you have no interest in doing that then just keep on movin'.
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Nov 25th, 2023
Pie
I want pie, ice cold outta the fridge onto a plate and down the cavernous maw that is my mouth and esophagus and stomach bile. Some of you are already thinking to yourselves, "sure pie is great, but cold? Cold pie?" and to that I will not say anything other than "yes" as I hit the send button on my
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Nov 24th, 2023
New Books: LAN PARTY & The Adventures of the Unemployed Man / Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Some more books from the mail and from the coffee
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Nov 21st, 2023
New Books: Eddie the Office Goblin / Chris Russ
Got this in the mail the other day. Super stoked to read it, because I relate to both goblins and office workers.
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Nov 18th, 2023
Treadmill - Hedonic
When I first started running: "If I can run 3 miles in less than 30 minutes I'd be so happy, so content. I could just do that a few times a week and I'd be set."
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Nov 16th, 2023
Book Haul: November 4th, 2023
About two weeks ago I was able to visit two used book sales on the same day. One was small and ugly, a few book carts filled in the center of a random basement room with folding tables creating a perimeter which had assorted genres no one is interested in; westerns, childrens holiday, graphic books
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Nov 11th, 2023
The Messengers
The first dead deer was pushed over onto the sidewalk, a short trail of blood marking the posthumous path it took from the road. I came across the carcass during one of my runs and I hopped over it out of reflex. It was only after I hit the ground on the other side of the body and made it a few step
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Nov 4th, 2023
You Know I Need Someone
So in case you’ve been living under The Rock™ for the past few days, The Beatles released a new song this week. Yes, those “The Beatles” and yes, it really is a new song.
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Oct 28th, 2023
Patching Things Up
I’ve started sewing a lot recently.
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Oct 21st, 2023
My New Ride
I bought an EV last week.
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Oct 14th, 2023
Two Memes From the Pit
The first few years I worked in an office, I was put into this sort of open pit of a cubicle with three other people. We were at the end of the cubicle alley and it was made from the leftovers of older cubes the company had lying around. They had too many people on the floor so they kinda just shove
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Oct 7th, 2023
I'm Fifteen Away
I'm running late for work but I'm feeling hungry so I mentally plan in another fifteen minutes to get some food on the way. I pull out my phone and open my smart outlet app, Smarter Life. I hit the button to open the garage door and turn on the garage lights. I go into my car and my phone pairs with
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Sep 30th, 2023
Fixing Myself by Changing Literally Nothing
Earlier this year I had a "knee problem" pop up. The term "knee problem" is code for "your knee has had 17 years of various ongoing problems and is fucked, dude." I went for a run one day and everything felt fine. A few hours after I was home and showered and eating toast or whatever, I realized my
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May 16th, 2023
Hobgobbling Around
it appeared just like all my favorite ghosts do; it was just there one day. i didn’t step awkwardly into a divot, or run too fast to cross a street before a car smeared me into raspberry-blood jelly, or push myself up one-too-many stairs in the pursuit of finding strength that my body doesn’t possess.
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May 4th, 2023
The Peter Principle / Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull
Having worked for roughly 10 years inside of a cubicle farm of pain, (and then a call-center purgatory)((and then finally an open floor-plan hellzone)) The Peter Principle had this sort of mythic quality to it, as if admitting to knowing the words of this hallowed spellbook was high treason and
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Aor 28th, 2023
Finch / Jeff VanderMeer
Finchy, Finchy, Finchy...where do we even begin?
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Apr 15th, 2023
RSS Is Back, and You Can Too!
After years of being ignored, I finally got around to updating my RSS feed for the site. You can now find the link to the feed in the navbar.
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Apr 11th, 2023
Form Response for Recruiters
I've been getting a lot of emails from recruiters lately, offering me shitty jobs in small and mid-sized offices. I usually just delete them without even looking, but for whatever reason I started reading through some of them and noticed that virtually all of the job listings don't list the company
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Apr 4th, 2023
Shriek: An Afterword / Jeff VanderMeer
Janice Shriek, once a successful gallery owner in the city of Ambergris, is now a washed-up tour guide, struggling to make ends meet as her world around her is slowly, attritionally consumed. Janice decides to write an afterword to her brother Duncan's infamous The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early
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Mar 23rd, 2023
Ella Minnow Pea / Mark Dunn
The narrative takes place on the island of Nollop, named after Kevin Nollop, the creator of the infamous pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The citizens eschew modern technology and prefers to write letters to one another as the main form of communication. The book is epistolary
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Mar 4th, 2023
The World of Edward Gorey / Clifford Ross & Karen Wilkin
There isn't much to talk about here
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Feb 28th, 2023
The Orchard Keeper / Cormac McCarthy
I had trouble reading this one, tbh. It's a small, quiet story set after the first world war (i think?) in this little small ass town in the south. Marion Sylder is a bootlegger (transit) who kills a dude who he gave a ride to one night, for presumably being annoying af. Sylder dumps the body into a
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Feb 22nd, 2023
The Women Could Fly / Megan Giddings
Josephine "Jo" Thomas has spent the past 14 years in a state of mild disarray as she was forced to grow up motherless. Said mother disappeared without a trace one night, throwing Jo's life and her father's life into a shit heap that they made best-do with.
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Feb 19th, 2023
The Hero of This Book / Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken, or maybe just "the narrator" who is a fictional being, and also an author, goes to London after the death of her mother to grieve and reminisce and whatnot. The book is a series of vignettes recalling crazy times with her and her mother, and also her father, and other things
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Feb 18th, 2023
The Vegetarian / Han Kang (T: Deborah Smith)
Yeong-hye has a dream, and decides to stop eating meat. Her husband, who sees her as entirely ordinary in every way, cannot make sense of this. Her family likewise does not understand. At a family dinner everyone goes crazy, her father hits her across the face and then forcibly shoves a lump of meat
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Feb 16th, 2023
Ways of Being / James Bridle
A giant computer/mechanical wonder, with pipes and tubes powered with fluid currents could model the economy of the United Kingdom.
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Feb 10th, 2023
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe / Charles Yu
Charles Yu is a time machine repairman living in a science fictional reality. He's depressed, choosing to live inside his own time machine which is stalled out in the present-indefinite time setting, allowing himself to exist in a sort of non-time as compared to everyone else around him. This creates
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Feb 8th, 2023
Road to Nowhere / Paris Marx
Marx takes a good, long look at not only the history of automobiles and automobility, but focuses in on how big, sweeping changes instituted by governments and then by the private sector have shaped our society to a car-focused landscape, ultimately for the worse.
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Feb 6th, 2023
Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them / Antonio Padilla
This book felt dense as fuck, like a head-sized black hole, which coincidentally is the only head-sized object with enough data storage to fully comprehend Graham's Number, according to the book.
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Feb 2nd, 2023
The Doloriad / Missouri Williams
There has been some kind of apocalyptic climate event; the sky is white, the waters are poisoned, humanity seems to have been snuffed out. But the Matriarch survived. So did her brother. They are in the midst of repopulating the Earth. Their brood, now three generations, are animals.
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Jan 31st, 2023
Year of The Buffalo / Aaron Burch
This book is indie as hell, I saw this keep getting blurbed by a bunch of small/micro press twitter peeps I followed and just said fuck it and bought the book.
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Jan 27th, 2023
Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands / Kate Beaton
Kate Beaton is a comic artist who created a long running webseries called Hark! A Vagrant but I had never heard of her or her work previously. Ducks was all over the internet as not only one of the best graphic novels of 2022, but just one of the best books outright. That's an easy sell for me
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Jan 26th, 2023
The Mountain In The Sea / Ray Nayler
Nayler's debut novel comes out swinging with thoughts on consciousness, how will artificial intelligence be received in the future, why everyone fighting for something has some kind of reason to do so, the brutality of the capitalist world, and protecting what you can however you can.
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Jan 24th, 2023
The Once and Future Sex / Eleanor Janega
The book showcases how women in the Medieval age were actually treated/how they lived their lives. The popular notion that women are now "in the workplace" more than they were ever before is wrong, a notion conceived from recency bias that the march of progress must mean today is the best time to
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Jan 20th, 2023
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow / Gabrielle Zevin
Sadie Green and Sam Masur are like 12 years old each when they meet in the hospital; Sam has been in a horrific accident which killed his mother and mangled the shit outta his foot, Sadie's sister has leukemia. Sadie goes to the play room to play some Nintendo, and her and Sam hit it off.
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Jan 18th, 2023
Guru Marathon / Sri Chinmoy
Something between a photography book and a collection of sermons, this book really underwhelmed me, especially at the $60 price tag. Sri Chinmoy, currently deceased, was a meditating, running-is-religious marathoning fool type, the guru as it were, and made himself known for being an old dude who
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Jan 17th, 2023
I Fear My Pain Interests You / Stephanie LaCava
Margot Highsmith is an aspiring actress (or just, actress?) and the daughter of two infamous musicians, her mother and father. Dad was a punk rocker, mom was in the band with dad before breaking off to do her own thing. Mom and Dad are split up. Josephine, Margot's grandma, is her agent. Margot is
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Jan 15th, 2023
Matrix / Lauren Groff
Marie is sent to live at an abbey full of nuns. Exiled without being exiled, she is a somewhat highborn woman (her mother was raped and had her) that is in love with the Queen, but is unrequited. It seems the Queen thinks of her mostly as something to play with during idle moments. Marie's mother
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Jan 10th, 2023
The Book Eaters / Sunyi Dean
This is a review of The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean.
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Jan 10th, 2023
Being Eaten By Myself
I've been thinking about productivity, leisure, life, meaning (or lackof), hobbies, fulfillment, purpose, and whatever other "big" words that hold some sort of intrinsic, if indefinable meaning in our lives on a day to day, or week to week, or month to month basis lately. I realized that very few of
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Jan 4th, 2023
Stella Maris / Cormac McCarthy
This is a review of Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy.
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Jan 3rd, 2023
A Wizard of Earthsea / Ursula K. Le Guin
This is a review of A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
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Dec 3rd, 2022
No Logo / Naomi Klein
This is a review of No Logo by Naomi Klein.
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Nov 16th, 2022
The Passenger / Cormac McCarthy
This is a review of The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy.
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Sep 16th, 2022
Unnecessarily Long Explanations for Why a Song Is in My Running Playlist: Bloc Party - Always New Depths
The year is 2005 and I'm watching cable TV in my room on any given weeknight while chatting with my friends on AIM. I'm not sure what I'm watching, probably SportsCenter or MTV's Real World/Road Rules Challenge or Office Space on TBS, or something. Times were different back then. A commercial pops
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Sep 9th, 2022
All About Me! / Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks, babbbaayyyyy.
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Aug 15th, 2022
Inventing the Future / Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
This book tackles the major problem that "the left" has faced for a long time, but most noticeably since the turn of the millennium, that is the tendency towards what the authors call "folk politicals." This is the small scale, "local", "organic" type of movement that rejects hegemonic structure as
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Apr 14th, 2022
The Ministry For The Future / Kim Stanley Robinson
While technically science fiction in the sense that "here's a story about sciency things that aren't happening in the world today," TMftF reads more as "this is not only possible, but realistic. Necessary. Mandatory." The science is based in current capabilities and expands outward from there, green
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Feb 9th, 2022
Norse Mythology / Neil Gaiman
Aside from a very cursory knowledge of Odin, Thor and Loki based entirely on the Marvel adaptations of the characters, I basically know nothing about Norse (or Greek/Roman) mythology. A lot of it is super weird, which I dig. Like Thor has two giant goats who pull his chariot, and if he's hungry and
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Feb 4th, 2022
McSweeney's Quarterly Concern No. 65: Plundered / Various Authors
McSweeney's 65: Plundered features works dealing with the lasting legacy of colonial violence in the Americas. McSweeney's is always kind of hit or miss, there's usually one sort of showstopper issue per year, which without question was issue 64, The Audio Issue, so this was more of a "regular" issue
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Jan 29th, 2022
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story / Nikole Hannah-Jones
I had never really understood or been exposed to the vast, total system of racism that has tried to keep black people in America down for the past 400 years. It was always sort of gone over in school as "yes this very bad thing that happened, but then MLK peacefully protested and it's all better now
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Jan 17th, 2022
Braiding Sweetgrass / Robin Wall Kimmerer
It's a series of essays about Indigenous culture both modern and historical, about living in reciprocity with the Earth, about what being a good mother means, about how to teach kids that the Earth can provide everything we need, about how to clean a pond.
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Jan 11th, 2022
Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life / Linda H. Davis
So, Addams had a suit of armor and antique crossbows in his house, created the original big titty goth gf in Morticia and then married two women who basically looked exactly like her, raced Italian sports cars, and was considered one of, if not the most important cartoonist at The New Yorker ever.
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Mar 9th, 2021
Henrik's Twelfth
Henrik's face was bloodied; his right eye swollen so badly that it was completely shut, his left eye just as swollen but somehow he could see out of it - or at least he was pretending he could. Henrik sat on the bench in the locker room, blood from his mouth, nose and eyes pooling below him onto the
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Feb 15th, 2021
21's in Outer Metro
"Hey Rook," Turn said to his new partner as he stood up at his desk. "We got a 21-21 down in the OM. You good for that?" Turn grabbed his jacket and walked towards the exit, not waiting for the answer.
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Sep 5th, 2020
16 Years and a Few Thousand Miles
It's something like 9:00 at night and I'm at my childhood home running around piles of leaves that are stacked throughout our front and side yards, the crisp November air making my breath fog out of my mouth like a spazzy, out of shape dragon. I'm chubby but athletic, having played sports and skateboarded
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Aug 7th, 2020
If You Aren't Spending the Next 96 Hours Watching 48 Hours of Golf, Are You Really Living?
Do I enjoy golf? No. Do I enjoy watching golf on TV? Hell yes.
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Feb 28th, 2020
If You Sit Too Close You'll Ruin Your Eyes
It's 2002 and I'm sitting in my bedroom in my childhood home, the glow of my computer, originally the family computer bought in 1999 and plastered with "Y2K Compliant!" stickers all over it but now reclaimed and repurposed into my own personal machine for watching & making shitty flash animations
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Feb 24th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 18
The eighteenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Feb 17th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 17
The seventeenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Feb 13th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 16
The sixteenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Feb 7th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 15
The fifteenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Jan 30th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 14
The fourteenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Jan 23rd, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 13
The thirteenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Jan 16th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 12
The twelfth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Jan 9th, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 11
The eleventh episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Jan 2nd, 2020
NHN Podcast: Episode 10
The tenth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Dec 26th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 9
The ninth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Dec 19th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 8
The eighth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Dec 12th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 7
The seventh episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Dec 5th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 6
The sixth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Nov 28th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 5
The fifth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Nov 21st, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 4
The fourth episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Nov 14th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 3
The third episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Nov 7th, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 2
The second episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Nov 5th, 2019
Bands Who Eponymously Consume
In 2002, Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World blew the fuck up. My family and I went to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio that summer as our family vacation. Cedar Point is or was the roller coaster capital of the world, or something like that, and at the time had like four of the five tallest roller coasters. I think the tallest at that moment was called Millenium Force and it properly rocked my little shit bag pre-high school face.
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Oct 31st, 2019
NHN Podcast: Episode 1
The first episode of the no happy nonsense podcast.
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Oct 2nd, 2019
Thoughts on Doing More or Less
I read a lot of think-piecey type of articles about climate change and what we can do about it. A lot of folks seem to be waiting for a technological breakthrough of some kind; namely the idea that we will engineer a carbon scrubber that works on a massive scale to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
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Sep 26th, 2019
Harriot
A very short story about a computer.
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Sep 26th, 2019
I Know a Good Spot
This past weekend a friend and I went to get coffee. It's a local place, independently owned, the front door is littered with stickers; skateboarding brands, musicians, anti-this and anti-that, etc. My kind of place, I guess. It's a lot like the coffee house from my hometown where I spent the
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Sep 5th, 2020
Toil Endlessly and Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor
I volunteered at a local(ish) farm yesterday. The farm is awesome; it uses permaculture practices, is small-scale, uses all manual tools, and everyone seemed to be generally positive and friendly. I honestly felt a little out of place, I'm kind of standoffish by default. Me volunteering was something
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Aug 27th, 2019
The Only Thing Left Is to Weigh Our Options
Apparently one of the most important things that happened in the past week was Disney's weird, echo chamber of a convention that they call D23. Owning Star Wars and Marvel (and like, an insane amount of other shit on planet Earth,) means you can just hold your own convention to announce new shit
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Aug 14th, 2019
Remembering That Time I Almost Passed Out From Dehydration
Last week I went for my middle of the week long run, this time the distance was 16 miles around a 5ish mile radius near my house. Despite the relative "localness" of the run, it's a pretty isolating type of activity. I wake up early and hit the streets in darkness to avoid some of the heat, and to
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May 28th, 2019
It's Called Taylor Ham, Dammit.
A few months after graduating from college I had been reduced to little more than a waking job application machine. Going through my email archives, I sent somewhere around 700 applications in 3 months during my busiest stretch. That's like eight applications a day, every day. I was writing cover
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May 21st, 2019
Self-Despair and Social Media
Watch any episode of Shark Tank within the last five years and roughly half of all the companies are like "Yeah we've done all our marketing via Social Media." This means that they basically do photoshoots every week with their product, whatever it fucking is I don't know, pajama pants let's say.
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May 15th, 2019
You Couldn't Even Watch All the Trailer Reaction Videos That Exist
Thanks to the rise of social media and the human desire to seem important, "content" on the web now exists as this insanely, impossibly large garbage dump that is hidden away in plain sight simply by the fact that we aren't looking for just any trash, we're looking for our friend's baby pictures, or
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May 7th, 2019
Everything Is Dumb and I Cried a Lot: Human Existence, Summarized
When I was like 12 or 13 I quit football seemingly out of nowhere. I was a "good" player, or as good as a little doofus kid can be at football at that age. I was a hard worker at practice and in games. I listened to my coaches. I hustled everywhere. I was the model peewee football player. After
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Apr 30th, 2019
You Won't Always Have a Calculator With You
I read something recently where this dude said he would be "very far from the internet" when he was on vacation. This immediately stuck out to me, namely, "how the fuck do you get far from the internet?"
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Apr 23rd, 2019
Yeah but I Pledged to Stop Running the Faucet When I Brush My Teeth, so I'm Doing My Part
I started to feel this heavy, looming dread about the environment yesterday. This is kind of common at this point for anyone who accepts that climate change is real, most especially for those of us who are environmentalists. Or at least those of us who pretend to be environmentalists on TV. I think
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Apr 16th, 2019
Perpetual Coffee Machines
My workplace is very modern; exposed ceilings, big open floor plans, agile workstations, digital conference room booking, heating and lighting of areas based on current occupancy, and a bunch of touchscreen coffee machines that at the drop of a hat can create any javaesque drink you would want:
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Apr 9th, 2019
How You Spend Your Free Time
Work sucks. I like to think that we all know that.
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Mar 26th, 2019
This Corporate Borezone That Dominates Everything
I recently spent some time off work in South Africa, and although by any context or measurement, a vacation in S. Africa is definitely outside the norm of my day to day life, I felt immediately taken by the country and it changed something in me. I now get to watch that new thing die as work and
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