Category: Life

Weekly Round-up, August 23, 2025

John Winkelman

A sign warning of the potential presence of snakes and alligators, at the edge of a sidewalk, at a facility in Orlando, Florida.

[A sign warning of the potential presence of snakes and alligators, at the edge of a sidewalk, at a facility in Orlando, Florida.]

I am back from a somewhat-sudden couple of weeks of travel. Z and I spent six days driving approximately 1,500 miles around Lake Michigan, visiting friends and family in Bloomington, IL, Madison, WI, Marquette, MI and Sault Ste Marie, MI, as well as stops at various places in between. We deemed this a necessary trip, as our family members are aging at the expected pace, which is to say, faster than we would like.

We returned home late Saturday afternoon, then I immediately began preparing for a work trip to Orlando. We left for the airport a little after 7:00 Sunday morning, and by late afternoon I was in Florida.

I spent three days doing work stuff, then hopped the plane for home. Z picked me up at the Grand Rapids airport around 11:45 Wednesday evening, and we arrived back home around 1:00 am Thursday.

And now I am tired, and very much looking forward to NOT traveling for a few months.

Reading

I finished The Unaccountability Machine while en route to Orlando, and made good headway in Simulacra and Simulation while at the work event. By the time I boarded the flight home my brain was complete mush, so I loaded up the wonderful We are Legion (We are Bob), the first book in the Bobiverse series by Dennis Taylor. It was just what my brain needed after such an exhausting summer.

Writing

Per events of the past couple of weeks, nothing here. Not even journaling.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Evolution, Colonization
Setting: Virtual Reality
Genre: Magic Realism

Listening

Starbuck, “Moonlight Feels Right“, released in December 1975. After picking me up at the airport, Z suggested we stop somewhere for food, as I had not eaten since breakfast. So we stopped at The Grand Coney for some comfort food. A song came on the radio which I vaguely recognized, though I couldn’t make out any of the lyrics. So I searched “70s song marimba solo”, and this was the first result. So if your day can be improved by a marimba solo, this is the song for you.

Interesting Links

  • “James Dobson, Burn in Hell” (Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns, and Money) – Conservative Christian child abuser extraordinare James Dobson was dragged squealing and bleating to his much-deserved reward. He was 89 years old, which means he lived about 88 years too long. He made a career of instructing conservative Christians on the best ways to beat their children to achieve the desired result of reducing them to the status of frightened animals instead of fully-realized human beings. Dobson was an active supporter of noted child rapist Donald Trump, which is really no surprise, as both men are held up as heroes by the white Evangelical church specifically because of these predilections. And if any conservative Christians read this entry and feel insulted, I would like to point out that it is not the job of real people to put any effort into differentiation between “good” conservative Christians and “bad” conservative Christians. If you don’t want to be lumped in with the bad ones, then you need to clean your house.

Weekly Round-up, August 9, 2025

John Winkelman

Looking west toward Division Avenue from the second floor of the YWCA West Michigan.

[Looking west toward Division Avenue from the second floor of the YWCA West Michigan.]

Reading

My evening comfort read is Jim Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked. The ten minutes between when I lay down in bed and when I fall asleep has been my only reading time this week.

Writing

Nothing new to report. Work ate my brain.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Cryptids, Mutants
Setting: Academia
Genre: Cyberpunk

Listening

PhD, “Little Suzi’s on the Up,” from their 1981 self-titled debut album. This was the fifth video played on MTV the day the station launched.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, August 2, 2025

John Winkelman

Zucchini blossom nestled in an overgrown zucchini plant.

[Zucchini blossoms in the plant which is slowly taking over our back yard.]

Less than halfway into summer, and summer seems to be almost over. The long heatwave finally broke and the outdoor temperature of the past few nights has been down in the fifties. I have slept better over the past three nights than at any point since early June.

Reading

I am about halfway through Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine. Still both enlightening and infuriating.

Writing

The only thing I wrote in the past week was Javascript.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Apocalypse, Genius Loci
Setting: Urban
Genre: Noir

Listening

Tom Lehrer, “So Long Mom (A Song for World War III).” Lehrer died this past Saturday, July 26, at the of age of 97.

Interesting Links

 

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.

Weekly Round-up, June 28, 2025

John Winkelman

A milkweed beetle on a milkweed plant

[A milkweed beetle on a milkweed plant]

This was another busy week, leading up to a couple of weeks off (more or less) from work. Whether or not I have any actual down-time during my break remains to be seen…

Reading

I randomly pulled Wolfgang Hilbig’s novella Old Rendering Plant off the shelf and read it in a couple of days. It wasn’t bad. Mostly atmosphere, and some very good writing which, purposefully or no, strongly echoes Lovecraft. So a good but light read.

Writing

Having been inspired by this past week’s Grand Rapids LitFest, and specifically by the all-day Grand River Poetry Collective event at the Wealthy Street Theater Annex, I have begun to assemble the many poems I have written over the past decade, to see if enough of them are competent (or even “good”) enough to turn into a manuscript. I expect this project will take at least the rest of this year, and likely a good chunk of the next.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Music, Economics
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Magic Realism

Listening

“Horses” by Rickie Lee Jones, from her 1989 album Flying Cowboys. Until recently the only RLJ song with which I was familiar was “Chuck E.’s in Love.” Someone made a post about Jones on Metafilter and that put me on something of a deep dive, as much as an hour on YouTube is a deep dive. I really like this song.

Interesting Links

 

Weekly Round-up, June 21, 2025

John Winkelman

Milkweed blossom

[Milkweed blossom, smelling like heaven.]

A super-short post this week, on account of I am insanely busy.

Reading

Late Thursday evening I finished Zig Zag Claybourne‘s excellent Breath, Warmth, and Dream. The story is engaging, the writing poetic, and the reading experience was a delight.

Writing

Nothing. Too busy.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Aliens, Super Powers
Setting: Ruins
Genre: Utopian

Weekly Round-up, June 14, 2025

John Winkelman

A House Finch nestling perched on the edge of its nest, amidst fern fronds.

[A house finch nestling perched on the edge of its nest, on the verge of becoming a fledgling.]

Several weeks ago, just after hanging fern baskets around my front porch, a pair of house finches built a nest in one of them. A week later there were five eggs. A couple of weeks after that there were four hatchlings. Up until a couple of weeks ago we had three nestlings, and finally, a single fledgling. I like to think the other two youngsters fledged earlier, as I didn’t find any little bird bodies in the area, nor evidence that they had run afoul of one of the many neighborhood cats. And there are currently several house finches around our small property, so at hopefully that number includes my temporary lodgers.

The fledgling in the above photo took off and joined its parents in exploring the neighborhood a few days ago. I have probably seen it at our bird feeder.

Nature finds a way.

Reading

Still reading Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Claybourne’s Breath, Warmth, Dream.

Writing

Too much chaos in the world right now to focus on creative pursuits.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Empire, Dragons
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Horror

Listening

Sly and the Family Stone, “Sing a Simple Song”.

Sly Stone died a few days ago. He had a hell of a life, but he and the Family Stone left behind a whole lotta good music.

And as I am writing this post, I see that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys just died. Damn.

Interesting Links