Author: PGR
-
it’s not the invisible hand that puts packages on our porches
As someone who tries on the regular to drop critiques of the passive voice and its role in the obfuscation of the infrastructural, it’s very nice to see someone making the same point from a much larger soapbox than my own: Through passive voice and other forms of labor-erasing language, delivery notifications ask us to…
-
03JUN23 / accessions
Not done one of these in a while; acquired a few new titles in the interim, but workload throughout the institution has necessitated the, ah, temporary shelving of outreach activities in the accessions division*. Rather than go back and catch up, we’re just picking up from the present moment. So: I’ve never actually read The…
-
the extreme wrong we congratulate ourselves for not being
Digital polarization is not simply the process whereby views tend toward extremes, but that which sorts us against our better judgment to commit to a stance of binary opposition. In other words, the process by which politics is hollowed out into opinionating and by which it converges with consumption and entertainment. “Hitler” is the extreme…
-
every teenage car in this town was turned to the same station
I have been thinking a lot about worldbuilding over the last year or so, in a deliberately more expansive sense than the one common to sf discourse, though taking that sense (naturally enough) as my starting point. This is because it’s obvious to me that something that we might as well call worldbuilding is at…
-
s’not unusual
** Attention conservation notice: man complaining about being ill ** Day six of an absolute stinker of a head-cold; at the end of each day, it’s felt like a turning point has been reached, only for the actual turning point to occur in the middle of the night, and to be a turning not exactly…