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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repeating falsehoods like incantations
From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud: An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt
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the negative positive
Well, then—that’s the agenda for the next week determined, I guess. Had a lousy night last night, all roiling guts and mild fever, and got out of bed this morning feeling like I’d been gargling glass (and sounding like the whitest of all Barry White impersonators). Those two lines have just confirmed my suspicions as
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throw glance / throw salt
It’s the time of year when we reflect—whether publicly or privately, or both—on the year gone by. There are so many angles one could take, even in a “normal” year, but this has not been a normal year, either personally or more broadly. I am however going to avoid publicly reflecting on the elephant (or
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Books read 2021
This is the first year I’ve actually kept a proper tally of the books I’ve read; as such, I’m not sure how representative (or not) it is of my usual reading habits. (In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not that representative, given I started keeping track when my mishap at the end of January ensured
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17DEC21 / accessions
Bumper batch from PM Press. Somewhat less of a bargain after the import tax, mind you… and for reasons unexplained the package was to be collected from a location half an hour by bike from my actual address, way out on the edge of the city. But hey, I needed the exercise.
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].”