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Tag: Travis Baldree

July 2025 Books and Reading Notes

2025-08-012025-08-01 John Winkelman

I had some time off in July, so I put that time to good use getting caught up with my reading. Or rather, using reading as an escapist mechanism to avoid the fact that I still have at least a decade before I will be able to retire.

Acquisitions

Books acquired in the month of July 2025

  1. Banu Mushtaq (Deepa Bhasthi, translator), Heart Lamp: Selected Stories (And Other Stories) [2025.07.01]
  2. Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust [2025.07.09]
  3. Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris [2025.07.09]
  4. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States [2025.07.09]
  5. John Jennings, David Brame, Bill Campbell, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Damian Duffy, The Adventures of Lion Man (Rosarium Publishing) [2025.07.14]
  6. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards (Zone Books) [2025.07.21]
  7. Rosalind Belben, Dreaming of Dead People (And Other Stories) [2025.07.28]

Reading List

Books

Books I read in the month of July 2025.

  1. Steve Kowit (editor), The Maverick Poets: An Anthology (re-read) [2025.07.04] – Every few years I just need to re-read this book. This is one of those years.
  2. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alfred Mac Adam (translator), Albina and the Dog Men [2025.07.04] – Entertaining but mid-range novel.
  3. Frantz Fanon (Richard Philcox, translator), The Wretched of the Earth [2025.07.07]
  4. Christine Schutt, Pure Hollywood (And Other Stories) [2025.07.08]
  5. Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust [2025.07.10]
  6. Carl de Souza (Jeffrey Zuckerman, translator), Kaya Days [2025.07.13]
  7. John Jennings, David Brame, Bill Campbell, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Damian Duffy, The Adventures of Lion Man [2025.07.20]

Short Prose

  1. Christine Schutt, “Pure Hollywood”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.06]
  2. Christine Schutt, “The Hedges”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.07]
  3. Christine Schutt, “Species of a Special Concern”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.07]
  4. Christine Schutt, “A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  5. Christine Schutt, “The Duchess of Albany”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  6. Christine Schutt, “Family Man”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  7. Christine Schutt, “Where You Live? When You Need Me?”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  8. Christine Schutt, “Burst Pods, Gone-By, Tangled Aster”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  9. Christine Schutt, “The Dot Sisters”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  10. Christine Schutt, “Oh, the Obvious”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  11. Christine Schutt, “The Lady from Connecticut”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
Posted in Book ListTagged Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alfred Mac Adam, And Other Stories, Banu Mushtaq, Bill Campbell, Christine Schutt, Cormac McCarthy, Damian Duffy, David Brame, Deepa Bhasthi, Frantz Fanon, John Jennings, poetry, Quinn Slobodian, Richard Philcox, Rosalind Belben, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Steve Kowit, Travis Baldree, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu comment on July 2025 Books and Reading Notes

Weekly Round-up, March 16, 2024

2024-03-162024-03-21 John Winkelman

Looking East across the Grand River at the Sixth Street Bridge Dam, at sunrise.

[The photo this week was taken from the fish ladder on the west side of the Sixth Street Bridge dam, facing east into the sunrise.]

This past Sunday, feeling exhausted and also nostalgic, I dusted off an old Lenovo ThinkPad 11e, fixed some issues it had with continually dropping its internet connection, and turned it into my retro gaming machine. I have scores of games purchased over the years from GOG.com, so I installed a few of them – Hammerwatch, Ultima IV, and others.

One of my favorite games from back in the 1980s was Telengard, a sort of graphic roguelike which I played A LOT on my Commodore 64. There are a few ports and remakes available now, but while I found a few that could be played online, I didn’t find any which I could successfully install on the ThinkPad. No big deal; there are ways to get around this, including porting the Commodore BASIC source code to Javascript and having it run in the browser. It wouldn’t take long; anything that could run on a C64 is miniscule compared to even the most rudimentary of games available now.

But my research turned up one interesting bit of trivia: Back in 2005 someone released an updated version of Telengard, which I had downloaded and played once upon a time. That person was Travis Baldree, who wrote the absolutely wonderful book Legends and Lattes. Baldree is one of the developers of Torchlight, also one of my favorite games, and one which I played A LOT back around 2012 – 2015.

Reading

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I picked this up in June 2018 at City Lights Bookstore, when my partner and I spent several days in San Francisco at the end of a two-week vacation that started with stops in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Writing

Another week with little writing, though I do have a plan to start some deep worldbuilding for the rewrite of my 2022 NaNoWriMo project Cacophonous. Just too much noise in the world right now.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Reincarnation, Fae
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Literary Fiction

Listening

John Zorn, Baphomet.

I’ve been a fan of John Zorn since I first heard his album The Gift while sitting in Common Ground Coffee House in the early 2000s. “Baphomet” is a single track and also an album, prog rock by way of avant-garde jazz, and a fantastic listen. I think the theme music for writing Cacophonous, when I finally get around to it, will be Zorn’s oeuvre, mixed and randomized and on heavy rotation.

Interesting Links

  • “Are We Watching the Internet Die?” (Edward Zitron)
  • “School Hate Crimes Quadruple in GOP States Attacking LGBTQ+ Rights” (Julia Conley, Common Dreams)
  • “Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic)
  • “Jerome Powell just revealed a hidden reason why inflation is staying high: The economy is increasingly uninsurable” (Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Yahoo! Finance)
Posted in LifeTagged City Lights, game development, John Zorn, music, reading, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Telengard, Travis Baldree comment on Weekly Round-up, March 16, 2024

May 2023 Books and Reading Notes

2023-06-012025-04-15 John Winkelman

May was a slightly better month for reading than April, if only because there was more daylight to be had and I had the occasional opportunity to sit on the porch with a glass of wine.

Acquisitions

Books i purchased in May 2023

  1. Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes [2023.05.07]
  2. China Mieville, The City & The City [2023.05.07]
  3. Kaja and Phil Foglio, Girl Genius vol. 20: The Exorcism Engines (Studio Foglio) [2023.05.30]

Reading List

Books I read in May 2023

Books

  1. Alexander Darwin, The Combat Codes (ebook), self-published [2023.05.06]
  2. Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes [2023.05.07]
  3. Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich (editors), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Part 1 [2023.05.24]
  4. Sayaka Murata (Ginny Tapley Takemori, translator), Earthlings [2023.05.28]
  5. Angela Boord, Fortune’s Fool (ebook), self-published [2023.05.29]

Short Prose

  1. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Mind’s We: Morphogenesis and the Chaosmic Spasm, Social Recomposition, Technological Change and Neuroplasticity”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.08]
  2. Jason Smith, “Soul on Strike”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.08]
  3. Tiziana Terranova, “Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.13]
  4. Jodi Dean, “Collective Desire and the Pathology of the Individual”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.14]
  5. Arne de Boever, “‘All of us go a little crazy at times’: Capital and Fiction in a State of Generalized Psychosis”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.15]
  6. Jonathan Beller, “Pathologistics of Attention, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.19]
  7. Bruce Wexler, “Neuroplasticity, Culture and Society”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.22]
  8. Warren Neidich, “Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.24]
Posted in Book ListTagged Alexander Darwin, Angela Boord, China Miéville, Cognitive Capitalism, Sayaka Murata, Travis Baldree comment on May 2023 Books and Reading Notes

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