Jake Casella Brookins

Philosophy folks on here, anyone able to point me towards anything good on "species" and the vagueness/sorites problems? I'm trying to think through something on things that exist (meaningfully) conceptually but not (meaningfully) materially, such as species, and having a hard time.

In our latest critical book-club, we talk about Melissa Scott's BURNING BRIGHT (@torbooks.bsky.social), a queer cyberpunk/space opera about political machinations and online role-playing games, with author Ursula Whitcher!

This kind of pacing has bothered me for ages; I just checked and it looks like I first complained about it on my blog nearly a decade ago: www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/2016/04...

People need to read more novellas, and they should start with the ones by @rebeccacampbell.bsky.social and @fishgottaswim.bsky.social, and honestly time is only the tiniest of the reasons why.

Also probably worth calling out—because I make film & TV the unqualified villains perhaps more than I should—that what I'm griping about bears most resemblance to reality TV, with its mix of visible external editing and essentially diegetically constrained individual scenes

Compare this with a more oral/aural/literary mode of story-telling, where it's actually *less* common to slow down and do a beat-by-beat script-style screen description (which can be startling, used sparingly), where fiddling with the chronology and pace is natural: seconds to years in a paragraph.

Lots of writers have no problem at all telling braided, non-sequential stories; but in-chapter the pace, the frame-rate, the speed at which time passes, is unchanging, and tied to visuals/externals or scripty narration. So huge numbers of leaden pages pass because, well, "the camera's rolling".

I've been seeing a lot of this even in books that seem like they should be more driven, pulpier, more plot & action-focused. What frustrates me about it—to be clear, I adore a contemplative lost-in-the-landscape literary meander—is when it seems to stem from a televisual concept of *time*.

(Ugh I presented a talk on this in 2019 I think I always planned to get published, file under "pre-Covid ideas")

He's got an essay somewhere about getting lightly into watch collecting (obv plays into All Tomorrow's Parties) that really unlocked some of that for me. Pet theory of mine is that the Imagists are actually a better way to talk about him than the Beats.

Cornell boxes & assemblage become the guiding metaphor imo, and while Neuromancer & Burning Chrome are fantastic, his sentences start feeling more uniquely Gibson-y moving forward

Yeah, 100%, the energy & rhythms really change right after NM. Even Count Zero is way less noir-coded, more contemplative

Really glad Ursula brought my attention to this book: a particularly fine vintage of 90s SF, with some interesting character work and ideas about artistry. Recommended.

"You may argue anything at all by analogy, sir, and so consequently nothing."
(A.S. Byatt, Morpho Eugenia)

Jake & Alison Casella Brookins, in hiking gear with a small river in the background.

Tiptree, a small scruffy black and white dog, and Jo, a small brown dog witb a white chest and paw, on a rock outcropping overlooking a forest and lake.

The last glimmers of sunset over a lake, with a mountain and a forested island against the sky.

getting married in October to ensure autumnal hiking anniversaries remains one of our best ideas

good excuse to return to Isolation Drills here

The New Weird thrives today in unlabeled and often unrecognized forms. Disco Elysium, Dorohedoro, The Locked Tomb, Dishonored, their well of fucked-up cities and punk necromancers was fed from a distant reservoir of Ford, Gentle, Swanwick, Leiber and Peake

DNC throwing in for Bernie could well have blocked the catastrophe of Trump specifically, but without attending to the infrastructural rot I think we'd get something similar in a few cycles anyway.

Seconding Pip Adam's AUDITION. Also Seth Dickinson's criminally-under-lauded EXORDIA.

Go hard on court reform & anti-corruption efforts. Make gutting the Patriot Act & related agencies/laws, including ICE & the Hague Invasion Act, a central pillar, along w/ beefing up the VRA. Elevate more gov programs to Social Security "political death to mess with" levels of visibility.

My brave and controversial opinion is that slaughtering people is bad. We live in a death cult but we don’t have to feed into it.

Geordi LaForge meme. No: Biblically accurate pufferfish. Yes: pufferfishly accurate angel.

the government should not be able to smash into your home and drag you into the street for no reason. it's kind of a core civil right, perhaps THE core civil right.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau said, "so I'd recommend being the velocity of men, or the energy of men, or maybe not men? Anyway not the despair thing, yick!" Then he took an ungodly large swallow of some kind of patent medicine and kept walking.

Post a you from a different era

I got Covid for the first time and it feels like I finally discovered the band that everyone else was into five years ago. A band that sucks and when you go their concert beats the shit out of you

Another packed house for poetry at Caffe Aroma

Bumping for people looking for Halloween reads: don't forget to read weird collections by Black authors