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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05FEB24 / accessions
The department notes, without judgement, that the institution is reviving old habits with regard to acquiring texts more quickly than it reads them. Zindell’s The Remembrancer’s Tale: the Requiem for Homo Sapiens sequence had a profound and formative effect on the institution, despite its being discovered almost a decade after its initial publication. (Indeed, with…
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a pattern we are doomed to repeat
Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know? There…
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23JAN24 / accessions
Caro’s The Power Broker: a book notorious for being referred to far more often than read, and you’ll have an inkling as to why once you see a copy in the wild, given it’s about the same size and weight as a breezeblock. The institution was persuaded to take the plunge by a friend and…
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tools to cudgel or flatter
Bit of a callback here to last week’s post: Addressing the vacuity of the words fascism and democracy, [Orwell] wrote “the word fascism has no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Calling something a democracy is not very different except that “we are praising it.” Fascism is reduced to meaning not good…
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15JAN24 / accessions
The institution is on the rails today*, leaving the department to man the front desk, and having taken at least one of these new arrivals with them: * — The institution is, at time of this posting, en route by rail to a village just outside Wiemar, where they will be spending much of the…
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].”