Month: May 2024

Weekly Round-up, May 25, 2024

John Winkelman

Flowering shrub outside my house.

[Above photo: The landscaping is filling in nicely.]

‘Twas another busy week with naught to show for it except continued employment. So I have that going for me.

Reading

Still plugging away at The Reactionary Mind, which is still very good if unpleasant reading. I also pulled Moonbath by Haitian author Yanick Lahens off the shelf for some fiction to read in my evenings before bed. It is excellent so far, if heartbreaking.

Writing

Not much to show, writing-wise. I feel the urge to write, and the ideas are all lined up and ready to go, but I have not yet bridged the gap between wanting to write and actually sitting down and writing. I chalk that one up to burnout.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Death, Possession
Setting: Bar
Genre: War

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, May 18, 2024

John Winkelman

Mother opossum with a baby

[Pictured: A mother opossum carrying a baby, photographed on Mother’s Day while walking to Kaffeine Place for breakfast.]

I am not quite as busy as I have ben in past weeks, but that just leaves space for stress to creep into my life. So it goes.

Reading

I finished Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and it was wonderful! I will definitely be looking into more of her work in the near future. I am still working my way through Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. It is slow going not because of the writing, which is excellent, but because the subject matter makes me feel…guillotiney. In my spare moments I read Joäo Gilberto Noll’s short novella Atlantic Hotel, which was decently good and weird.

Writing

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Evolution, Cryptids
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Solarpunk

Listening

Hot Chocolate, “Every 1’s a Winner”. I heard this song – possibly for the first time every – when Z and I walked into Bobcat Bonnie’s for dinner this past Wednesday. I didn’t recognize the song but I knew the voice, though it took some time to remember that it was the same voice from “You Sexy Thing,” which received much airplay after The Full Monty was released.

Interesting Links

  • “The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?” (Peter Watts and Dan Brooks, The MIT Press Reader) – Watts interviews Brooks about the inevitable, human-caused, ecological collapse, and what we may do to increase our chances of surviving, since mitigating is no longer on the table. This link comes via a post on Watts’ blog, where one of the commenters pointed out that the path up the technology mountain, post-collapse, will not look like the path we took to get where we are currently, because the availability and distribution of resources will be much different than it was last time. Food for thought.
  • “AI ‘art’ and uncanniness” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – A long article exploring the short- and long-term implications of banning the training of LLMs on copyrighted works. To sum up: There are nuances. It’s complicated. And the real bad actors are probably not the most obvious bad actors. Well worth the read.

Weekly Round-up, May 11, 2024

John Winkelman

Our raised-bed garden.

[The above photo is the raised-bed garden Zyra and I installed in early May. Soon it will overflow with healthful vegetables.]

Reading

The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Writing

Not much, unless Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets counts as writing.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Reincarnation, Politics
Setting: Library
Genre: Steampunk

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, May 4, 2024

John Winkelman

A Mallard duck on a log at the top of the Sixth Street Bridge dam.

[The above photo is of a pair of Mallard ducks resting on a tree trunk which is stuck at the edge of the Sixth Street Bridge dam just north of downtown Grand Rapids.]

This past Sunday, my good friend Christine Stephens-Krieger became the new Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids. Christine and I go way back. We worked together at Schuler Books and Music. We read poetry at several events. When I was part of Caffeinated Press we published Christine in our literary magazine The 3288 Review. I had the honor to be part of Christine’s project An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. And now I am part of the Grand River Poetry Collective, a local company which Christine created at the end of 2023.

For many years, Christine coordinated the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition.

All of which is to say, I look forward to what she has planned for the next three years.

Reading

Still working my way through All that is Evident is Suspect. I love this book so much! I also started The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, based on its mention in the Cory Doctorow link at the bottom of this post.

Writing

Not much to show this week, though I finally got into the groove of writing at least five story ideas for each of the weekly writing prompts. Those ideas are now scattered across two journals, and when I have the time I will transcribe them into a Google doc.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Dreams, Cryptids
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Lovecraftian

Listening

This is the kind of music that is getting me through long sessions of writing code for ServiceNow.

Interesting Links

IWSG, May 2024: Squirrel!

John Winkelman

Pepper, basking in a beam of April sunlight

April was insanely busy, even by the standards of my already-overfull life, so this post will be brief.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2024 is: How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?

Writing for me generally doesn’t start until after I have already dealt with most potential distractions.  Therefore my writing time is fairly distraction free, aside from interruptions from the orange maniacs (one of which is pictured above).

And as for the internet-as-distraction (social media, doomscrolling, etc.), well, that is kind of the background radiation of 21st century life, and if I am not immune to the lure of arguing with strangers on FB, or whatever, I have become fairly good at compartmentalizing.

But don’t let me keep you from your writing. How’s YOUR focus these days?

 

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