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It’s payday, which means that I will be suffering all day long as I resist the urge to spend an unreasonable amount of money on new books.

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📚 It’s Halloween y’all. Here are some good short stories appropriate for the holiday that you can read right now:

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Very fascinated right now by the genre of writing called Kmart Realism. The fact that sprinkling real-world products into your story and name dropping actual consumer goods in a narrative can be so effective at creating mundane, disenchanted fiction is very telling.

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❤️ Texts like these:

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💬 From Orwell, in As I Please:

But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries… It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings… Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.

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🗞️ I just posted my first ever short story: A Grimm Night on Central Park South. In honor of Halloween, I center it around the spookiest thing imaginable: Big Tech. I would love if you checked out this little piece of dark fiction and gave feedback. Please read and tell me what you think! 🎃🐺🏙️👻

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Can’t believe I’ve never read Isaac Asimov’s self-proclaimed best story before tonight. My older brother put me on and it’s too good not to share. A short read: The Last Question.

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✏️ New Word Learned:

Hoi Polloi: the general populace ; MASSES

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📷 Light At The End Of The Tunnel — 35mm Portra 400 by me

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🎵 Been listening to:

Forever support LaKeith, a fellow 909er. And Leon Thomas really is about to go on a historic R&B streak, I think.

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Something strangely alluring about these HiChord Pocket Synth videos. Retro, nostalgic, stylish – while not technically ads, this may be some of the best marketing I’ve seen in a while. They really do make me feel like I could “just turn it on and make something.”

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🎥 Enjoyed my watch of Blue Moon with Ethan Hawke

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✏️ New Word Learned:

Zugzwang: a chess situation where a player must move, and any legal move worsens their position, giving them a disadvantage

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💬 A reminder from Friedrich Hölderlin:

But where the danger is, also grows the saving power

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🗓️ Commemorating the day that Frodo woke up in Rivendell:

Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed ‘Where am I, and what is the time?’ he said aloud to the ceiling. ‘In the House of Elrond, and it is ten o’clock in the morning.’ said Gandalf. ‘It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know.’

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📷 Didn’t post bc I didn’t think they were that good — but just hit over 1,000 downloads on Unsplash in three days, so has me rethinking. Taken on Portra 400, 35mm.

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Was recently put on to Simon Rich’s work (ex-SNL and ex-Pixar). Haven’t had this much fun reading a modern writer in a long time. If you’re unfamiliar, The New Yorker is a good place to start :

“We are both strangers to this world,” Death Skull intoned. “Maligned, misunderstood. We make our own paths, live by our own rules, refuse to compromise for anyone. Yes, in many ways, we are the same.” Ultra Man squinted at him. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “That’s a pretty big stretch. Like, I know we both wear capes, or whatever. But I stand for good, and you stand for evil. That’s about as different as it gets.” “Hmm,” Death Skull murmured. “Hmm.” “I told you it was pointless,” Death Skull said to his wife, Jackie. “It’s impossible to make friends after forty.”

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✍️ Streamers Are Clowns: bradley-andrews.com

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Mark Ruffalo does not get discussed enough in the “greatest actors” conversation.

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📷 photo of the artist taken on 35mm Kodak 400