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One of the author quotes on Folk's website (www.katefolk.com/home) blurbs these as "if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror" and yeah, pretty much. I'm too much of a ninny to watch Black Mirror, and if someone made this book of stories into a show I would be too much of a ninny to watch it, but I enjoyed each of these little tales of mostly single women, mostly in SF, dealing with some pretty strange things. Body horror, as promised.
In this expanded edition of her bestselling 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, renowned scientist and humanitarian …
Franklin's lectures are no less relevant in 2025 than they were when she added the final three chapters in 1999 to texts delivered as lectures in 1989 conceived as early as in the 1970s with respect to a a gem of fascinating sets of dialectics regarding what she calls the real world of technology. Holistic and prescriptive work, planners and planees, environment and nature, liberation and exploitation, time and space.
The Haunting of Hill House book follows four strangers, all of whom come to Hill …
as the women arrive at the house I put on Portishead's self titled, this one needs spooky music.
Runyon's gangsters have more in common with Benya Krik than Hammett's, who gets a cover blurb, to me, but those characters are only in the first few stories—the rest are about a jewish boy's (the authors?) childhood in Odessa. I enjoyed them, but I'm going to put off starting the second Babel collection I've got for now.
The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world — and what …
Covering 2010-2020ish, this caught me up on a lot of the struggle I had been oblivious to before 2016 and been distrusting of various sources since. Pretty remarkable work. Bevin succeeds, to me, at detailing the process and outcomes of what seem to have been predominantly anarchist movements he's sympathetic to.
What a strange little book. Kinda a rehash and very abridged version of Levy's Hackers that begins in WW1 and ends post-snowden. Especially strange to finish on hackers fighting back against the government and corporate attempts to run "the internet" as I was descending to land at DCA to attend the last ShmooCon in DC.
I'm still team Evgeny Morozov re: "what's the Internet?"
Starting the year with the slimmest book on the pile, and a memoir to boot, worked well the past two years. I forget why I wishlisted this one — I thought I'd read another Adolph Reed Jr. book but I see shelving this now that it was his son, Touré, whose "Toward Freedom" I'd enjoyed (and just added to Bookwyrm.)
Christmas gift
Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a …
Content warning pretty online
a few of my favorite very-online writers—but I'm think of Pargin and Jeb Lund (who for all I know don't know each other at all) specifically here and not like, uh, Lockwood—are pretty good about using their veterans-of-forum-wars (or at least that era of online) past to be pretty strong voices for not being assholes on the internet.
this is a lot of that
cw: mens rights nonsense
my point: so if you feel like you don't need some old guy rubbing your nose in a “deuteragonist" (I had to look up the word for that) “hey look at this kid who is a twitch streamer who is kinda black pilled, don't be lame like this”, because you yourself are also over that, maybe skip this one
Ultimately it's a fun read and a break from the John and Zoe books and pretty mad at the same stuff a lot of people are on mastodon are mad about re: the other social networks, so, I'm glad I read it.
Mickey hat einen einfachen Job. Er hilft einer Expeditionscrew, den Eisplaneten Niflheim zu kolonisieren, und …
picked up after a friend who had already enjoyed it linked x.com/mickey17movie/status/1836197947668860958 in discord, very fun, read it in a few days.
The book opens on Earth, eleven thousand years from now. The Anth met their end …
p good! kinda Y.A. and a little slow to start but w/e, fun ending
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who …
Another one that I waited out thinking "eh, probably great but maybe I'll pass" and then people I follow just kept citing it months and months later, so onto the pile it went. My first and not last Klein book, about significantly more than I expected.
The later, somewhat darker, more explicitly autobiographical half of Munro’s anthologies of short stories.
Munro's characters tend to (I know this reads like a horoscope) move on from situations for the next thing without a plan, or to be a little selfish before getting back to being serious, if they ever do. She's always putting characters on trains, or in cars, or on buses.
In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them …
Lots of people read this last year when Marshall published it and the title was so catchy, I thought about it after the last few accidents in SF, which made me think I should go back and actually read it.
80+ three page ideas, lots of overlap with the incident management side of my day job, casually written (if a little too pop, even, but I guess that's ok).
Every field is like this, it seems.
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with …
Re-using my comment on Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: “Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2017~ techie-San-Francisco and get 100% of the references and roll my eyes at a few of them.”
Started Sloan's newest, Moonbound, immediately afterward, and it’s very different so far.