One of the hilarious consequences of the almost total abandonment of the CD format, smashed between the analog resurgence of vinyl and digital moving to streaming, is that CD’s you actually can actually find (neighborhood record stores usually have shelves of the bastards) and want to buy now cost about what you’d pay for them… Read More This Week in the CD Changer: Aesthetic Extreme Makeover Home Edition
There’s a level of show-biz bullshit that’s so profoundly dense it begs to be lit on fire. When you’re talking about Bridgerton, which turns Regency Romance into Current-Year preach-lit, the temptation is the more profound. And now they’re trying to sell getting the actress naked as some kind of transgressive act, because she’s overweight. This… Read More Naked Girls Get Extra Naked – A Fisking of Bridgerton Noise
The true beast of the Pandemic has returned, and now it will devour it’s own genre. Behold, as the most popular documentary of this century destroys Fair Use: The rule of Fair Use requires that the use of a content be “transformative”, i.e., you’re using it to do something with it other than what the… Read More Tiger King Destroys Everything
Variety has an actually non-excruciating article, about the results of the WGA Strike: The Writers Guild of America called a strike one year ago today, declaring that the streaming boom had created an existential crisis for writers. The WGA got most of what it wanted from the strike, though it took almost five months for the studios and streamers to come… Read More The End of Infinite TV
Because it’s that magical time of year, when a young man’s fancy turns to varietal short fiction. Here’s what’s comin’ at ya: You get a .pdf and .epub of the issue with your subscription to the Shallow & Pedantic Patreon. It’s available in the same formats on Gumroad. And of course, Amazon, which also has… Read More Unnamed Journal 38 – Mechanical Nirvana
I was a Strokes fan back in the day. I discovered them in a music store in a mall in 2001, when I bought their first album Is This It on CD. I loved it instantaneously as a sugar-rush amalgam of every under-celebrated New Wave band: Television, the Modern Lovers, a dollop of Doug Yule-era… Read More In Praise of Comedown Machine
It’s the first edition, but whatever. Because I am old, because I came up in a time when CD’s were the newest, hippest form of musical consumption, I have hundreds of them. True, the format has become the cultural equivalent of the 8-track, having neither the aesthetic cachet of vinyl nor the supreme convenience of… Read More This Week in the CD Changer: Interesting Failures Edition
I find again on Monster Hunter Nation content worth discussing: I was on another author’s page in a post where they were announcing the release of a new book, and some dude rolled in to whine about how he shouldn’t be writing this new book, but should instead be writing more books in the other… Read More You Don’t Own The Author – The Wages of Fandom
I often feel as though keywords were inscrutable gobbleydegook, this makes them seem saner, than anything else I’ve read. The big idea is that a keyword can be, and probably should be, a cluster of words. Thanks to Cedar Sanderson from Mad Genius Club for breaking this down. I used it to pre-create a blurb… Read More Link: A useful Primer on Amazon publishing: Blurbs and Keywords
I put Anthropica on my Amazon List a bit ago, due to my previous interest in the Dead Rabbits/Animal Riot podcast and publishing house. I received it for Christmas this past year. David Hollander is a skilled writer, and he has a literary style which paradoxically produces long, Faulknerian sentences, yet the chapters seem short.… Read More I am Not Enjoying Anthropica
Content Blues 