Month: July 2025

Weekly Round-up, July 26, 2025

John Winkelman

A crew digging in the street, replacing lead water lines with copper.

[A crew digging in the street, replacing lead water lines with copper.]

This was a rough week for famous people. In short order, we lost Ozzy Osbourne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Chuck Mangione, and Hulk Hogan. All of these men were fixtures in my life growing up in the 1980s. The first three were amazing human beings. Hogan? Not so much.

Reading

I am slowly working my way through Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine. It is an interesting exploration of cybernetics applied to business, and it is making me want to both study cybernetics and burn the entire EVERYTHING to the ground.

Writing

I haven’t managed much progress on anything. Too much work and life stress.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Genius Loci, Mutants
Setting: Labyrinth
Genre: Dystopian

Listening

Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford, “Close My Eyes Forever,” from the 1988 album Lita. Rest ye well, Mr. Osbourne.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, July 19, 2025

John Winkelman

Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar on a dill plant.

[ A Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar on a dill plant. ]

My first week back at work after a two-week break, and as usual, it was not so much a break as a deferred workload. Therefore this past week was exceptionally busy. Little time for creative pursuits.

I did find time on Friday to spend an hour or so with my friend Mark, beating on each other in the back yard. Mark teaches karate and kickboxing, and I teach kung fu and tai chi, so the techniques we come up with tend to be an interesting mix of a variety of sources. It was a good workout. And I feel it today in most of my joints.

Reading

I am currently about a quarter of the way through The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, which explores how supposedly-smart, competent people can end up making stupid and destructive decisions. To sum up: They don’t. Or rather, the larger capitalist system is set up so that event the well-meaning (lol) members of the Professional Managerial Class couldn’t make truly ethical decisions even if they wanted to. I am already angry, and expect I will only become more angry as I work my way through the book.

Baudrillard is breaking my brain. I am about 20 pages into Simulacra and Simulation and need to take frequent breaks so my head-meat doesn’t char and set off the smoke alarm.

Writing

I spent some time reviewing the manuscripts I printed out last week, and I think Neighbors can be cleaned up and turned into a real draft, but Cacophonous will need to be re-written from scratch, though the bones of the story are solid. Now I just need to free up the necessary time to do the work.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Colonization
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Solarpunk

Listening

“The Ludlows,” from the soundtrack to Legends of the Fall, composed by James Horner. Jim Harrison‘s Legends of the Fall is one of my very favorite books, and the movie does it justice, thanks in large part to Horner’s extraordinary score.

Interesting Links

  • ““The Corporate Takeover of Housing”” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – Smith discusses the embedded article by John P. Ruehl, which looks at the housing situation in the United States. Briefly put, there are lots of houses available, but few people can afford them. Corporate ownership is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. As usual for Naked Capitalism posts, there is a lot of excellent additional information and nuance to be found in the comments.
  • “Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – The conclusions Doctorow draws in this excellent article tie in to Curtis Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment,” which is the most cowardly, impotent, bootlicking school of thought to emerge in the entire internet age. I am in the process of writing up a take-down of the entirety of the Moldbug philosophy, which is probably vast overkill, since it really only needs a short paragraph to counter every variation of the dark enlightenment, from every one of its adherents.

Weekly Round-up, July 12, 2025

John Winkelman

A small snail on the boardwalk at Huff Park.

[A small snail on the boardwalk at Huff Park.]

I was on vacation for the past two weeks, and much to my surprise, the more vacation time I had, the more my energy level diminished. I suppose that is just another symptom of burnout and depression, or maybe it is simply because I am 56 and not getting any younger.

Reading

Currently working my way through Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation because I look so cool when reading it in a cafe. But before that I read Travis Baldree’s Bookshops and Bonedust, a prequel of sorts to his wonderful Legends and Lattes. Bookshops and Bonedust was decent, but not as good as Legends.

Writing

Back in 2018, for NaNoWriMo, I wrote a book called Neighbors: A Malediction, which was a lightly-fictionalized version of my encounters with an obnoxious neighbor over several years. I completed the first draft, as much as a first draft is ever completed during NaNoWriMo (really more of a zero-th draft). Since then the work has been sitting in my Google drive, gathering dust.

Earlier this week on a whim I collated all of the chapters into a single Word document, did a quick round of formatting, and had the draft printed and spiral-bound at Kinko’s. At a little over 54,000 words, and printed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, with 1.5 line spacing, it comes in at 120 pages.

Even if I don’t do anything with the manuscript, it sure feels good to see it in printed form.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Cyborgs, Precursors
Setting: Bar
Genre: Magic Realism

Listening

Midnight Star, “Freak-A-Zoid”, from their 1983 album No Parking on the Dance Floor. I was a freshman in high school when I first heard this song. I wish I appreciated it as much back then as I do now.

Interesting Links

  • “Cops’ favorite AI tool automatically deletes evidence of when AI was used” (Ashley Belanger, ArsTechinca) – As if cops needed any help avoiding accountability. They were doing just fine before they started using an AI tool deliberately designed to protect cops from the consequences of their actions.
  • “A New Far-Right American Party?” (John Feffer, Portside) – The Democratic Party is America’s right-wing party. The Republicans are the American Nazi Party. Musk’s “America Party” will also be a Nazi party, as Musk himself is a Nazi, as are all people who support him in any of his political ventures. The only moral way to interact with Nazis is with a guillotine.

Weekly Round-up, July 5, 2025

John Winkelman

Onion blossom

[An onion blossom, in our backyard garden.]

So.

Thanks to literally every Republican voter, and literally every elected Republican at every level of government, the United States of America is now a full-on fascist state, and if conservative Christians have their way – and it looks like they will – within a generation the USA will be a christofascist ethno-state, which has been the end-goal of all of American conservatism from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed.

To be clear: All legislation which enforces the consolidation of power or wealth (which is really the same thing) is inherently fascist. Per Wilhoit, any politics which relies on hierarchy is de facto conservative, and there has never been a version of conservative politics which does not rely on in-groups having the freedom to arbitrarily abuse out-groups.

This version of America is, and has always been, the Real America. The ascendancy of Donald Trump became inevitable the day the Supreme Court decided that money is equivalent to free speech. Trump ran on a platform of white supremacy and all of conservative America just gobbled that shit up. The GOP/MAGA/KKK/ICE/DOGE voting bloc (hereafter referred to as “Republican”) views immigrants as an expendable resource to be treated as little more than slaves, and they define “immigrant” as “anyone who isn’t white.” This is true of everyone who voted Republican at any level of government, in any location, in any election since 1980. Any Republican who claims otherwise is lying. Any Republican voter who claims to have been tricked or misled or lied to, is lying.

Now that the Project 2025 Big Beautiful Bill has been passed, some Republicans are expressing surprise and regret because they and their loved [sic] ones will be negatively affected. This is all performative bullshit. Just like the Musk/Trump feuds of recent weeks, Republican regret is rehearsed, scripted, and utterly false.

There is no path to redemption for Trump supporters. They must never be forgiven, and their actions must never be forgotten. They deliberately, and with malice, voted for the party that thinks the only protected group should be billionaires, and all other humans are meat for the machine. So let the MAGA crowd be ground up in that machine. Let them lose their families, their homes, and their livelihoods, since that’s what they voted for for everyone else.

Happy Independence Day.

Reading

I finished a re-read of The Maverick Poets, an anthology I return to every few years. I also finished Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Albina and the Dog Men, which was entertaining but light.

Writing

Haven’t had a lot of energy for writing this week. I knocked out a rough draft of a poem a few days back, but I doubt it will go anywhere.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Mutants, Cyborgs
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Technothriller

Listening

The Dead Kennedys, “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.”

Interesting Links

  • “Trump’s Neo-Stalinist Pentagon Photo Purge” (Arnold Isaacs, Naked Capitalism) – MAGA defines “DEI” as “Anyone who isn’t a straight white man.” The reason Trump supporters are against DEI is because, to a person, they are all too stupid, too untalented, and too weak to compete for success on anything remotely close to a level playing field.

IWSG, July 2025: A New Genre

John Winkelman

The G.R. LitFest was, by all accounts, a rousing success. The G.R. Poetry is LIT! event, in which I participated with the Grand River Poetry Collective, went spectacularly well, with dozens of readers, writers, and other participants in our many panels and open-mic events throughout the day on Friday, June 20.

I have not really participated in the local writing community for several years, thanks to COVID, work, and the ten thousand minutiae which eat away at free time like an infestation of ticks. But now the fire is lit again and I feel the deep-down-in-the-guts drive to write, to listen, to engage, and to be part of something beautiful! So I will be an active participant in the Poetry Collective and I am assembling the past thirty years of half-completed writing to see if there is anything salvageable in that big wonderful mess.

The Insecure Writers Support Group question for July 2025 is: Is there a genre you haven’t tried writing in yet that you really want to try? If so, do you plan on trying it?

I think historical fiction would be fun, mostly because of the significant amount of research involved. At the moment I think stories of the Scythians, Sarmatians, and the like, would be a great deal of fun to research and write.

Any of the lesser-known cultures of the 2500 – 1500 B.C. era would be interesting. And any knowledge I gain could easily be put to use in genre fiction (The Bulgar tribes but with DRAGONS!) There are also several subgenres which could be fun, depending on how fine one splits that hair – LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, or one of the myriad and occasionally ephemeral *punk variations.

All of which is to say, there is a lot to choose from.

How about you, reader? Are there new literary directions in which you would like to strike?

 

Insecure Writer's Support Group Badge
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

June 2025 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

June was a pretty good month for reading, considering the almost complete lack of free time, thanks to an intense work project and the arrival of summer with all of its related activities. I think the standout was Zig Zag Claybourne’s Breath, Warmth, and Dream, which was absolutely beautiful. I backed the Kickstarter campaign for book two of the trilogy, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

It was interesting to dive into Heavy Metal, which I first read in the early eighties, I think, when I was probably a little too young to be reading things which were DEFINITELY aimed at an older audience. The writing and artwork for this new generation of Heavy Metal compares quite favorably to the original run from more than forty years ago.

Acquisitions

Books and reading material acquired in June 2025

  1. Voices 2025 [2025.06.07] – Picked up at the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition winner’s celebration.
  2. Inque Magazine #3 [2025.06.24]

Reading List

Books I read in June 2025.

Books

  1. Heavy Metal #001 [2025.06.01]
  2. Metal Hurlant #1 [2025.06.02]
  3. Voices 2025 [2025.06.07]
  4. Zig Zag Claybourne, Breath, Warmth, and Dream [2025.06.18]
  5. Wolfgang Hilbig (Isabel Fargo Cole, translator) , Old Rendering Plant [2025.06.25]

Short Prose

  1. Kameron Hurley, “Not My City” (Patreon post)