AnnieModify

Summer reading: Escapism served hot and fresh. Now I’m off to buy myself a hot and fresh personal pan pizza because baby, I earned it.  

Coup de Grace by Sofia Ajram

TW: Suicide, depression

Short, mind-bendy, horror-ish? But, I dunno, I wasn’t horrified. There were definite Ew gross horror nasty scenes and the whole setup is horror-y but it felt more like a sad psychological trip into desperation represented by the ew-gross things and the whole, um, plot. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood. I liked it? But also I’m not sure I liked it in the way it is supposed to be liked? If that makes sense. 

No Exit by Taylor Adams

TW: Child hurt/in danger

Easy read, thriller. A bit of a twist but it’s not really about the twist, it’s more about how in the heckin heck will they survive? Some pretty gruesome scenes. I can’t watch that kind of thing on tv but I can read it fine.  

The Dawning of Muirwood trilogy by Jeff Wheeler

The Druid, The Hunted, The Betrayed

Zoomed through the first, strolled through the second, and kind of plodded through the third. Your enjoyable basic fantasy with magic, threatening evil, a rising-from-poverty heroine and a nice cast of characters.

The Murderbot Diaries (3) by Martha Wells

All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol

Started watching the show and realized I’d never read the books? Could have sworn I did. Maybe I did and just completely forgot. That does happen. Anyway, I like these. Currently reading the 4th novella (Exit Strategy).

Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson

I read this one in March but forgot to include it, oops, so here it is. Anyway, I loved it. This was a random library pick and what an absolute delight. A quirky, thoughtful, funny but deep (also, short) scifi adventure. Read it. 

Anyway I loved it so much I immediately grabbed Robson’s other two novels: Drunk on All Your Strange New Words and Tomorrow Never Knows.

Enjoyed both, especially Drunk on All Your Strange New Words. I hope Robson will write more novels. 

Space Deputy and Space Rodeo by Jenny Schwartz

Absolute easy-read scifi escapism. Kept me entertained. Homey, hopeful, fun. 

Stars Die by Jenny Schwartz

Magic and family ties. A decent fantasy for escaping the current reality, but not enough to pull me back for the rest of the series.  

Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

I love Jemisin. This “novelette” (wth is a novelette) isn’t as gripping as her novels but still a great read. 

The Inheritors by William Golding

I don’t know. I liked a lot about this book but also it just made me depressed. I probably should have expected as much from the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies.

Nightchaser by Amanda Bouchet

Our community pool has a little book cart with discarded library books. I happened to grab this one and honestly did not expect to like it, because look at the cover: 

Anyway, I liked it! So that was a pleasant surprise. Tropes, yes. But like, they were done well enough I was entertained rather than annoyed. I liked the characters mostly. Plus I love a feisty little resistance standing their ground against galactic evil.

No one stood out any more than I did, and I realized that we’d all perfected the art of blending in and avoiding notice. Maybe Hourglass Mile had nothing to do with it, because the whole galaxy was a freaking jail. Not everyone needed bars to be locked up, and what I saw around me was evidence of entire populations falling into complacency for the sake of personal peace. 

I liked it enough to read another by Bouchet, A Promise of Fire. It’s a fantasy romance which my Kindle history tells me I already read several years ago but thanks to my ability to completely forget things I have read, I was able to read it again for the first time. Anyway, it was fine and I’ll keep Bouchet on tap for pure escapism reading which I find myself turning to a lot lately.

Heart of Mist by Helen Scheuerer

Another fantasy. I liked the world-building, I liked most of the characters, I got annoyed with our main girl, the bitterly self-pitying and alcoholic Bleak, who needs a solid kick in the arse. In fact, she gets several but they don’t seem to have much of an effect. I love a flawed (and female) main character but I do need them to show some personal growth over the course of, I don’t know, multiple life-changing events. Anyway, it ended on a cliffhanger and I’m down to give the next book a chance to see if Bleak gets her shit together or not. 

The Half-Lived Life by John Lee

This book could have been a blog post. I use that phrase so much for nonfiction. I should switch to an acronym maybe. #TBCHBABP

Some good stuff. I took some notes. I found some helpful bits. Also, I scanned large chunks of text with illustrative anecdotes or just bland restatement of the thing that had already been said. This book also falls prey to the Just Do It! mode of instruction/advice, in which the writer tells you what to do and then, instead of telling you how to do it, just tells you what to do again, in slightly different words. 

However, this book’s greatest sin is quoting from Gary Chapman’s vomit-inducing Five Love Languages, non-ironically. 🤮 Gross. Fuck right off with that bullshit. 

Dealing with Uncertainty by Laurie Bowman

DNF. I liked the explanation of tools and models for decision-making. It’s very corporate-y, which is yuck and all the examples are like How Can Company Y Expand in Z Sector When Facing ABC Market Uncertainties? Who cares. Anyway I just skimmed the annoying bits till about page 100, when Bowman declares that companies are shifting toward conscious capitalism and sustainability and considering their “ethical impact” and then cites BlackRock as an example of this exemplary corporate behavior. Hahahahh WOW bye. I’m not even linking to this one. 

(Side note: I thought perhaps Bowman wrote this book in a simpler, more hopeful time which would kind of partially explain these amazingly dumb takes about corporate goodness. Um, no. Published in 2025.) 

Let there be lapses
Weeds in the garden, unswept porches,
A walk never taken,
A flower unnoticed,
Missed bill, missed text, missed appointment.

Let there be undone things
Half-written sentences never finished
A stack of books never read
Blank pages, unseen lines
Words never seen or heard or spoken.

Let there be glory in what-is-not —
All the unachieved
Unbelieved
Underserved
Overlooked.
Let us glory in these.

Let there be errors
Not just the tiny ones we can laugh away
But enormous, life-altering errors.
Huge risks taken which do not end well.
Huge efforts made which result in what we call failure.
(In fairness,
Any effort is success in certain realities.)
But let us — for a moment — judge by the world of machines,
Of binaries
Of industrialized morality
And call it failure.

Failure is the word we assign to all unexpected outcomes.

So, let there be failure.
Let failure warp our seeing and diminish our being,
Let it ride among us waving a torch,
Shame-blasting and guilt-smearing,
Blinding us with ridiculously disproportional fiery judgment,
Grinding nose to dirt
Binding self to work.

Let there be mistakes which make us weep
Keep us awake at night
Cause us to question our sanity, our decency,
Our right to be here,
Our ability to keep being here.

Let there be broken edges
Sawed-off pieces we cannot smooth down
Pointy bits irritating and upsetting
Dangling splinters and shards over chasms of regret.

Let there be surrender.
Let us call it what it is: giving up.
Surrender sounds too noble,
Enlightened, as if I didn’t have to but I chose to.
That’s not what this is.

Let there be quitting.
Let there be Done.
Not because we see what we have made, and it is good.
This is not putting a bow on a gift.
This is saying some things are too broken to be fixed.

Let there be giving up.

Lay down there, lay down, be still, give up.
Face in the mud, breathing in, wheezing in the stuff of life, the dirt,
The lowly dirt, the trudged-upon dirt, the worthless dirt
From which we came and to which we all return.
Let us lay there, breathing in this dirt,

This pure self
This known self
This elemental self.

Hell yes, failure. I embrace you.

Brother! Sister! Mother! Father!
Come quickly! Come and rejoice, for I have failed!
Come and celebrate!
Set out the feast!
Call the guests!
And enter into the joy of your child:

Humanity raw
Humanity broken
Humanity dirty
Humanity ill-fitted to survive
Humanity traumatized
Humanity doing such a fucked-up job of it
Humanity violent and stumbling
Humanity bruised and crusted at the edges
Humanity clawing its way from the dark tunnel of history
Humanity side-eyeing the stars while blood drips from our fingers
Humanity bargaining for the right to squirm
Humanity bringing a sword to a gunfight
Humanity bullshitting
Humanity asking clever little questions
Humanity dressed in robes, obsessed with ovaries
Humanity unhinged and in charge
Humanity waving exasperated hands in the air
Humanity dishing out pieces of pie
Humanity weeping at the sight of spring flowers
Humanity with big rough hands so careful so gentle holding a tiny new fragile thing
Humanity with smooth precise hands making deals, ending lives
Humanity dropping bombs
Humanity being a big dumb bully
Humanity the most awkward of the species
Humanity voted most likely to secede from the planet
Humanity pointing and saying look at this! wow!
Humanity wondering, always wondering
Humanity exhausted sitting in a patch of sunlight
Being dirt.

Dirt with form, dirt with spirit.

Pale faces float through quiet rooms, ghostly fingers flutter in hallways. Pens move across expensive paper. Golden liquid sloshes in crystal while murmuring voices ooze and wind and hush and tell us there is nothing to worry about. 

But this is no time to be civilized. 

Let there be lapses:
Lapses of courtesy, lapses of decorum.
Failures of politeness.
Refusals to conform.
Let there be a wildness ringing in us for each other —
Hissing, bared teeth, spitting —
Reverberating, thrumming, cracking the marble palaces full of dead men’s bones.

When little trends roll around the blogging world that I’m not into, I ignore them.  People get to do things. I don’t need to be part of it. I can put my attention elsewhere. I don’t need to express my opinion of everything.

I am breaking that personal rule because this trend has spread from the blogging world to the world of face-to-face conversations. As I see it, I now have two options: 1) Projectile vomit on the next person who attempts this in conversation or 2) Blog about it. Maybe if I were a stronger, better person I could find some third or fourth option. Too bad. Here we are. 

So, um, listen: 

I care about you but I do not care about the hallucinating robot and I do not care what specific combination of words it glommed up from the dark reaches of Scrapelandia and cobbled together into seeming-sense and bracketed between the servile, saccharine phrasings of a pretend personality and spewed onto the screen at you. 

I like your personality. I like the stuff you make and do. I like how you see the world. I care about your thoughts and feelings. I want to see your imperfect output and your unfinished projects. I’m into your insights and your mundane observations. I care about your art and I enjoy your dumb jokes and I’m curious about your music taste and I want to hear your hot takes. 

But I do not care about the plagiarizing pretend bot or what it told you about your personality or ideas or business or art or future or whatever.

I don’t think AI is the devil. But I know that AI is not your friend. Or your coach. Or your therapist. Or your business partner. Or your dev team. Or your editor. It cannot know and it cannot think and it cannot feel and it cannot even summarize properly.

It is a tool, a piece of tech. It has its uses. 

But it’s not you, it’s not anything like you. It’s not interesting. It’s not alive.

I don’t care about its feedback or opinion or observations because it literally cannot produce any of those things. It is a glorified search engine cobbling together random bits of knowledge from what humans have actually produced, arranging it into a facsimile of conversation. That can be useful but it is not interesting. 

What are you having for dinner? How will you prepare it? How did it turn out? Did you like it? Will you have it again? How much garlic did you use? (Use more next time, trust me.) I care about that. Tell me. But I don’t care what your refrigerator thinks about your dinner selection. And I don’t care what a chatbot says about you. 

This is very simple but sometimes the simplest changes work really well. 

I have this 5th generation iPad (2017) sitting around, not in use. 

I love reading blogs and visiting personal sites and browsing the small web but I don’t like doing these things on my phone. I don’t even like using Mastodon on my phone. Mostly because I don’t like reading anything longer than a text message on my phone. (And gtfo with multi-paragraph texts. Stop it. Break that shit up.)

I also don’t like writing on my phone.  I get annoyed. I’m a slow thumb typist. I’m a fast touch typist. My own inefficiency when writing on my tiny iPhone 13 mini screen irritates the heck outta me. I like a bigger horizon. Give me some space. I want to spread out. I want split screen. I want room for long sentences to breathe. 

But I don’t like being on my computer all the time. More accurately, I’m on my computer all the time for work and it is sometimes hard for my brain to accept than I can use my computer for other things. 

So the languishing iPad is perfect. 

I didn’t do anything complicated but I like it and I’m using it.

1. I ordered a case with a bluetooth keyboard. I got a cheap one because I wasn’t sure if I’d actually use the keyboard but I have used it quite often. 

2. The main apps: Orion, Tot, Ivory, Lire, Reader, and Raindrop. 

3. The home screen is just those apps (plus Kindle) and a shortcut to my secretly published blogroll because I like RSS but I also like traipsing through the actual blogs. So much personality. 

4. I have Orion as the only browser and set up Kagi with the blocklist and a couple of lenses from Flamed Fury. 

5. I switched to Lire as my RSS reader and organized my feeds in folders so that’s made my brain happy. 

I’m popping the iPad open in the morning and reading blogs. Sometimes I want to make a note so I’ll open Tot in split screen and that works beautifully.  

Anyway, nothing complicated here and I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking a bit. Let me know if you have suggestions for cool things I haven’t thought about.  :)

Long live the small web. 

A week notes addendum with an actual update, maybe. 

For Small Web July, my little stack of goals:

• More blogging

• More reading blogs and responding

• Finish (or work on) a few small web projects

• Stay on track with exercise

More blogging: ✅

• Not as much as I’d have liked but I got a few posts in over the last 9 days. Also cleaned up some languishing drafts. 

More reading blogs and responding: ✅-ish

• Definitely more reading blogs, and this has been lovely. Over the last few months I let my online browsing/reading time get sucked into news and sadness and outrage. It’s good to recalibrate. I haven’t done much responding yet. 

Finish (or work on) a few small web projects: ✅

• Set up an old iPad as a blog/RSS reader + small web browser ✅

• Get my little notes/micro/commonplace garden set up - in progress

• Finish some of those half-done slash pages - next?

Stay on track with physical goals: ✅ / ❌

• First week of July was great: got in my cardio/steps almost every day + weights @ the gym 4 times. Felt good. 

• This week has been not so great. I feel very fatigued and like I can’t get enough sleep. Maybe I did a bit too much, maybe I’m fighting something off, maybe it’s just some health issues flaring up. I don’t know. I do know that pushing through exhaustion leads to more exhaustion. So I’ve been resting as much as possible and trying not to feel too discouraged about not meeting my goals this week. So: ❌. But also ✅ because actually listening to my body and taking care of myself in the way I need right now is good and something I want to keep doing. 

My therapist said humor is a healthy coping mechanism as long as I can also honestly acknowledge my real feelings. 

This is a tribute to Gasoline Balenciaga aka Mr Business the cat, who has left this mortal plane for the catnip fields of forever. 

My real feelings are sad and also okay. Gasoline was a good cat and my snuggle bud. He slept on my bed almost every night. He only really liked me but would tolerate pets from other people until he would not and then he would glare with the indignation of a thousand burning suns. He was young, only 4 years old. I have no idea why he died. I was out with my best friend eating chips and drinking beer when Rob called me. Here is how the conversation went: 

Me: “Hey, what’s up?”

Rob: “Do you have a Gasoline-sized box?”

Me: “What?”

Rob: “Do you have a Gasoline-sized box anywhere?”

Me: “What?

Rob: slowly, enunciating “Do you have a box big enough for Gasoli— Oh never mind I see one.”

Me: slowly “Why do you need a Gasoline-sized box?”

Rob: “Oh. Um. Well. He’s dead.”

Apparently Rob walked over to pet Gasoline who was sleeping on the couch. This was where, and how, Gas spent most of his time. But Gas was not napping, or, I guess, he was: The nap that never ends. The eternal catnap. The endless blissful snooze. 

Gasoline always wanted to be eating or sleeping. Mostly sleeping. He also always wanted me to be sleeping. After 5pm he would sit in my bedroom doorway and when I walked by he would meow and try to lead me into my room and jump on the bed and look at me like: IT IS BEDTIME NOW. GO TO BED. I explained to him carefully that although I do like to go to bed early, 5:37pm is a little too early even for me. This did not seem to sink in, as he repeated this routine almost daily. He would eventually give up and try to herd me to the couch instead and this was much more effective, as a tactic. 

He had absolute disdain for any surface that took my attention away from his gloriousness, as you can see:

He was obsessed with the printer.

He pretended to be annoyed by but secretly enjoyed cuddles with his little sister, Hazelnut Gooby.

He had a squeaky purr and I will miss him.