Austin Grossman

beast mode

Imagine if drinking while writing were actually a smart thing to do.

Barista reading Less Than Zero is not taking questions

I watched Ride Lonesome tonight. I thought it was superb, apart from all the gratuitous Native American bits.

This article from 2014: US Border Agents Intentionally Stepped in Front of Moving Vehicles to Justify Shooting at Them.

And remember, Jonathan Ross was a firearms trainer, a veteran, and spent over a decade working for DHS.

What are you and Congress going to do about it?

One Way Passage (1932) with Kay Francis and William Powell

Goodbye 2025!

Happy New Year

A startling encounter at @portersqbooks.bsky.social in Cambridge, MA. I didn’t *quite* get that it’s on shelves in the U.S.

@samlakewrites.bsky.social Just started Control and I think the writing's top-notch, a refreshing angle on story moments that could have felt stock.

YouTube video by Josh Keck the Mountain Goats - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Thank you @emilystjams.bsky.social for reminding me of the existence of this @themountaingoats.bsky.social banger: youtu.be/z-lwTmJtEsg

It's annoying but true that the all-time best writing advice is "go for a walk."

YouTube video by GOWSeriesVideos Gears of War "Mad World" Official Trailer

Wait. Wait.

Top Gun: Maverick and F1 were directed by the same person who directed the Gears of War ad with the slowed-down version of "Mad World."

!!

youtu.be/_ojz7Jd_MKY?...

Revealed: how Toyota uses retro-style games and prizes to urge US workers to lobby politicians Games such as Dragon Quest used to mobilize workers to back corporate goals including relaxing environmental rules

Only a true hero can slay the Dragon of Light Duty Emissions Tailpipe Regulation.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Deep in my laptop's folder hierarchy, Chrome has generated english_wikipedia.txt, a file of exactly 30,000 words. Apparently in order of frequency (the first word is "the"). The first noun comes at word twenty: doc. Word fifty is year. Word 29,992 is hemsworth. Word 30,000 is evaporator.

Opinion | Trump’s Boat Strikes Corrode America’s Soul

“The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American”

I wrote about the Trump administration, the boat strikes, and St. Augustine.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

100%

From the City/Town Encounters Table, Dungeon Master's Guide 1st Edition. We learned a lot.
#tagyourself #ad&d #beastmode

reported to me

“I’m at the Harvard Yale game and and the Yale fans are interspersing, ‘Harvard sucks’ with ‘Larry Summers!’”

a pretty sick burn, we admit

I think Richard ends up as David Brooks

I was actually repurposing that as a reference to everyone of our generation reading The Secret History
but it was, perhaps, Too Soon

further proofs available for paid subscribers only!!!

Centrist pawns only look on, frozen with apathy and frustrated desire for the paradise of white people and crisp fall weather. In the end the worst consume themselves.

Dark academia’s rotten core.
It’s a straight line from here to the
Harry Potter books.

(a rant) the rich and pseudo-intellectual long only for madness, amid New England scenery. Dionysus/Trump grant their wishes. First on the chopping-block, the feckless center-right.

The Secret History: MAGA ur-text,
or merely a prescient allegory?

I can't have been more than ten when I opened a book of Sophocles in father's study and read this passage.
"Sir," I thought to myself, "I like the cut of your jib."

yes yes, “Eliot.” This is The Mill on the Floss, Book Seventh, end of chapter 2.

George Elliot’s prose has this bulldozer quality that drives forward slowly but with inexorable force and thoroughness

Do Identical Twins Write Identically? Evidence from Authorship Attribution This study investigates the writing styles of identical twins to determine if their shared genetics result in identical writing. We used computational authorship analysis techniques on writing samp...

In other scientific literature news, a quantitative linguist published a study comparing the literary output of identical twins. My brother Austin and I were part of the dataset www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YFIRR...