Read: The Call of the Wild by Jack London 📚 Fight Club but with dogs in the late 19th century Yukon. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
Tentboy revealed. The next episode in my twisted, funny retro murder mystery based loosely on my childhoodl
Reader, he waved a sock. Or given the time of year, maybe it was a Christmas stocking
open.substack.com/pub/fuppe… #booksky #thriller #mysterybooksky
Sometimes the right thing to do is admit that the 40 years of anti-U2 prejudice you began as a snotty sixth former was in error, and they are in fact a fucking good band. #musicsky
I’m posting my dark funny mystery serial on Substack, and nobody gives a fuck. Partly this is annoying because it’s really good, even if it has no dragons or spaceships. But increasingly, it’s great. I’ll just do what the fuck I like because there are absolutely no consequences.
Read: In Ascension by Martin MacInnes 📚 Top drawer grown up SF with much geekiness, philosophical ponderings, and characters who exist in a world rather than being case studies or Star Wars/Tolkien knock offs. If you liked Contact, The Martian, Arrival, it’s the same kind of deal. #booksky #books
More news on tentboy in the next episode of my twisted, funny retro murder mystery based loosely on my childhood, told through the medium of the village newsletter. #readingcommunity #books #crime #BookSky open.substack.com/pub/fuppe…
I’d love to #buycanadian, but walmart.ca ’s incompetence and insanity make it impossible to use them, at least. Amazon.ca isn’t as bad as the virtue signallers would claim (it’s a huge route for a lot of small businesses get visibility for example) and there’s always canadiantires.ca
Another story finds a publisher - a ghost story with an eccentric old musician, North Norfolk, and old recording tech. I mean vastly hugely mindboggling old. You might thing it’s a long way back to a DX7, but that’s just peanuts to this tech. More as I get it. #writingcommunity #horror #horrorsky
There are two ways of not writing for your audience’s approval. Either assume they’ll love whatever you write, or assume they don’t exist and nobody cares. I choose the latter.
My a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery told (eventually) in the medium of 1980s village newsletters has a contents page… #readingcommunity #books #crime
Next episode - actually a little blogette - of my a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery told (eventually) in the medium of 1980s village newsletters is out. #WritingCommunity #BookSky fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/apparen…
I know Paul McCartney is a perfectionist, but surely making a choir of children practise all year long to sing their song is overkill. Once a week for maybe a month surely would be enough. They’re only kids, after all.
Is there a way of muting all of America on BlueSky? I’m a more hardcore Marxist than a lot of Bluesky lefties in many ways, but the level of masturbatory smug performative outrage, plus the ongoing malignant arsery of the government the US voted in is really getting unbearable.
Read: The Missing Millionaire by Katie Daubs 📚A digestable way to learn about early 20th century Toronto rather than turning up any new info on the disappearance of theatre impresario Ambrose Small in 1919. Entertaining enough though. #BookSky
In a closed diner on the main street, an old man with a white beard and a red Christmas hat is sitting at a table doing the accounts. I guess even Father Christmas needs to put aside time for business admin.
Read: The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards 📚 Who’d have thought a family saga in in post WW2 New Brunswick logging industry would be this enthralling? The characters are recognisable people, even if the backdrop is unknown. #booksky
Sometimes the music might be great but it’s not helped by the blurb on the website…
EG this from a Bandcamp recommendation: “a tender suite of German trio jazz tinged with Mongolian long song”.
More as I get it.
#MusicSky #wankymusicblurbs
Read: Desert Star (A Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch Novel) by Michael Connelly 📚 Bosch and Ballard content. Solid procedural plus some Ageing Bosch character development. Reliably delivers what you want and then some, and this is why the big name writers get to be the big names. #booksky
Latest edition of the Fuppery Newsletter is live - a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery told (eventually) in the medium of 1980s village newsletters. open.substack.com/pub/fuppe… #readingcommunity #books #crime
Read: The Widowmaker by Hannah Morrissey 📚Love the seedy, grimey Black Harbor world and this has the usual tapestry of decay, lies and small town secrets. Not quite up there with Hello Transcriber, and there’s gratuitous Oirishness at the end. But better than most. #booksky
Environment Canada has Very Precise knowledge of snow
Latest in the (fictonal) weird shit my mother wrote about her village - This is prep for the actual serial next week. Kind of tipping the jigsaw pieces out and wondering where they all go) #booksky #writing #iamwriting Greg the geezer
Episode 2 of the Fuppery Newsletter is now live - a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery told (eventually) in the medium of 1980s village newsletters. Get started while there’s hardly any catching up needed. fupperynewsletter.substack.com/p/fuppery…
Traitors - 'Deal Or No Deal' for the 21st century
I just watched the BBC Celebrity one, and it was laced with celebs getting emotional and saying how cruel and emotional it was (they were paid UKP40k each btw), but you know - it’s just a game. A wildly camp game. With a huge production crew around them. And lest we forget, nobody gets killed. They get given a piece of paper, saying ‘your work here is done’ and they go home to their families. Nobody is being kind, nobody has anything to feel guilty about. These are people who perform on TV for a living performing on TV to be paid. With (mostly) their mates.
And it’s not about the psychology. Anyone with ten minutes attention to the study of human interactions knows we’re terrible at spotting liars. There no interactions we don’t see. Nobody has enough information to make any judgements about anything.
It’s all entirely arbitrary. The hysteria reminds me of the ancient Noel Edmonds ‘game’ show, Deal Or No Deal, with its bullshit about odds. There were no odds. Every single round was a straight 50/50 guess.
I understand that isolating a bunch of people in a house can result in those people getting some kind of group hysteria but let’s not overstate it: the Stanford Prison Experiment was largely fake, let’s remember. But FFS, this was a silly, camp game show. Calling it cruel, stewing in manufactured ‘guilt’, or pretending it offers some kind of psychological insight is just TV’s usual self aggrandisement.
Read: Putin’s People by Catherine Belton 📚TLDR: Putin helped the KGB steal all Russia’s money, oligarchs stole it from the KGB and set up Putin as leader, Putin stole the money from the oligarchs. Putin wins. Authoritative, heavily researched and so so so so detailed. #booksky #bookstodon