Intro
I’ve spent this week reminding myself that what I have is pretty great. I’m focusing on what is instead of what isn’t. Additionally, a particularly exhausting work thing wrapped up on Monday, and I’m only working four full days, and two half days over the next 21 days. Right not, right here, the future looks pretty good.
Art & Illustration
- Eric Joyner has been combining robots and doughnuts for two decades now. I’m a sucker for his robot paintings. One of his most recent even includes another favorite — the creature from the black lagoon. He has lots of affordable prints available at imagekind.
Books & Reading
- Speculative Fiction Showcase Speculative Fiction Links for May 20, 2022
- Eric Idle blogs about books he’s read recently
Cartoons & Comics
- Bizarro by Wayno (and sometimes Dan Piraro)
- The Nib by various
- Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques
- Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
- This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
- You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld
Excerpt from Searching by Robert James Russell at The Rumpus:
Cartoon/Comics Blogging
- Comics Journal weekly round-up: Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ – This Week’s Links
- Mike Peterson blogs daily about daily comics at The Daily Cartoonist: CSotD: Friday Funnies, with a side of politics
- Women Write About Comics
Columns & Essays
- Ask culture vs. Guess culture. I’ve never heard this distinction before, but it’s clearly applicable to my own life. I’ve always chalked it up to southern “manners” vs. northeast forthrightness.
- John Scalzi reflects on one of his most well-known posts: “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On
Currently Reading
- Weather by Jenny Offill. Offill doesn’t name the source, but I recognized it immediately. (It’s Bruce Sterling.)
“I think of the time Sylvia interviewed that famous futurist. She asked him what was coming next, and he repeated his best-known prediction: Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m loving this book.
Health
- Get free at-home COVID-19 tests from covid.gov/tests.
Horoscope
- Free Will Astrology for May 19.
Louise Erdrich writes: Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.
And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
Music
News
I assume you already have your preferred news source(s). Here are news sources I use to supplement my news diet.
- Wonkette – I love the cursing and share their love of Molly Ivins.
- Popular Information – independent investigative journalism.
- WikiNews – Wikipedia has a news page. It can be kind of hit or miss, but I always use it when I’m following a breaking news story.
Politics
- Grim 2022 drought outlook for Western US offers warnings for the future as climate change brings a hotter, thirstier atmosphere
- Bad news for the 2022 hurricane season: The Loop Current, a fueler of monster storms, is looking a lot like it did in 2005, the year of Katrina
Spirituality
“Most of all, one needs to be mindful of appropriating and diluting traditional Asian practices. Moreover, as I found in my research, some digital religious practices resonate with the good life, and some are just a hedonic treadmill entangling users further in their desires.”
Wikipedia Post of the Week
- The Book of Nut (original title: The Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars) is a collection of ancient Egyptian astronomical texts, also covering various mythological subjects. These texts focus on the cycles of the stars of the decans, the movements of the moon, the sun, and the planets, on the sundials, and related matters.
Writing & Creativity
- I’ve been working my way through Tim Clare’s 100 Day Writing Challenge. I don’t do it every day, but I like the exercises. Clare’s sensibility about creativity and identity resonates with me.
Coda
And that’s all for this week. I think I’m starting get the hang of it. I have lots of categories, but if I don’t have something particularly interesting for that category that week, I skip it. Similiarly with the cartoons. If there isn’t a new cartoon over the past week, I’ll skip the entry.
I hope this week’s a good one, and right now I’m off to tend to the yard.