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~you wake up one morning sick. you lie in bed dreading going in to work for a while, then realize that you don't, in fact, have to go to work. you could call in sick. in fact, you are going to call in sick. you lie in bed a while longer thinking about not going to work. then, having established that you don't have to go to work if you don't want to ( Read more... )

it's (okay, a little past) resolution time!

( last year )

how to live safely in a science fiction universe, charles yu. as i said elsewhere, the mark of a good time travel book is that immediately after finishing it, you want to start reading it again. this book's been pretty widely talked about, and with good reason.
austerity britain, david kynaston. britain after WWII was an incredibly bleak place; ( Read more... )

Church and 30th St. San Francisco MUNI Construction from Ken Murphy on Vimeo.

this week, i finally finished the end of the world and hardboiled wonderland. why did it take me a couple years? it's not that i didn't enjoy the book. i think my mistake is that i approached every session of reading as if it were studying -- i always had both the J-E and the kanji dictionary out, sometimes lugging the whole set out to a cafe. my ( Read more... )

i've been meaning to cook more, but the only dish i've made reliably so far is oatmeal:


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you teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought he was. i think one of the insidious lessons about tv is the meta-lesson that you're dumb. this is all you can do. this is easy, and you're the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. when in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ( Read more... )

all visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. but in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. if man will strike, strike through the mask! how can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? ( Read more... )

we went out for a cigarette. there was no smoking in the aranysárkány. vereš made some jokes at his own expense, but i was only half listening. it was noisy and lively outside, already evening, car headlights crisscrossed the city streets with their bright beams. women's fur coats left little clouds of perfume in their wake; i breathed these in ( Read more... )