Books and Reading
Cozy Mystery releases for March 2022 – I don’t actually read cozy mysteries, but I love the idea of cozy lit. Cozy everything really.
Steven Shaviro reviews Kathe Koja’s Dark Factory.
Speculative Fiction Links of the Week for April 15, 2022 – too many links to read in a week compiled by Speculative Fiction Showcase and Cora Buhlert.
Cartoons, Comics, and Humor
AI Weirdness – Easter eggs decorated by artificial intelligence.
Bizarro – Wayno’s weekly post of the week’s Bizarro cartoons.
Sarah Andersen – Sarah’s Scribbles is on Tumblr and so has a built-in RSS feed. https://sarahcandersen.com/rss
Questionable Content – Terrific series that comes through my RSS. https://www.questionablecontent.net/QCRSS.xml
Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.
This Modern World – “I’ll Do My Own Research.” (Every time I hear this phrase I think of danah boyd’s media literacy critique.)
Tom Gauld – Doesn’t seem to be a single home for Gauld. Appears in New Scientist and Guardian (and probably elsewhere).
Columns and Essays
More World, Less Bank: An Oral History of the A16 Demonstrations against Global Capitalism – a lengthy oral history of protests against IMF/World Bank in Washington DC in April 2000.
If we can farm metal from plants, what else can we learn from life on Earth? by James Bridle – We should be learning from the world around us, not destroying it.
“For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with researchers in northern Greece who are farming metal. In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as “hyperaccumulators”: plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. They do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop. As well as providing a source for rare metals – in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold – these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots. One day, they might supplant more destructive and polluting forms of mining.”
Horoscope
Movies
Ernest Hogan reviews Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway.
Music
Secondhand Songs – Search engine for cover songs.
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 big breaking news story.
Wikipedia Post of the Week
Defamiliarization – “the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.”
Coda
(100 Days of Blogging: Post 077 of 100)