velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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don’t call it a weeknotes
I had a couple of paragraphs to go here, but deleted them once I realised that this would actually be just as effective: I mean, it hasn’t been bad—just pretty intense? And I have not taken to Haddock-scale alcohol consumption, to be clear. (Though I did have a few jars of Eriksberg with my cat-sitter…
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11APR24 / accessions
Folks, I’m gonna be abandoning the pretentious thing I’ve been doing with these posts—you know, the whole “the department” and “the institution” routine—because it was never particularly funny, and it’s a strain on the basic purpose of these posts, which is to just be like “hey, look what I got myself to read!” Cue half…
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mister gotcha trend-lord douchebag
Trends Discourse is a genre unto itself, I have discovered lately, as I try to sustain some sort of engagement with what is arguably an adjacent profession to my own. But the self-satisfaction of its leading pundits, and the lack of reflexivity thereby implied, can make for some serious eyeroll material. Exhibit A is this…
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transition as seen from the other side: Jon Raymond’s Denial
A brief and unusual work of climate fiction, this. Raymond gets straight into an early-2050s US, and a world in which popular anger saw not only some sort of transition away from fossil fuels (in some nations), but also a run of very public prosecutions of bigwigs from Big Carbon: life sentences, the occasional hanging,…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”