Library

Recent readings & listenings

001

Breakneck

Dan Wang
Reading now
002

Imaginal Disk

Magdalena Bay
Album Synth-pop
an endlessly optimistic time loop with an earwormy intro/outro chorus and beautiful angelic reverby synths. its album art and recurring motif remind me a bit of this very good short story by qntm.
003

Unsong

Scott Alexander
Web serial
"The system of the world is gradually decaying and one day soon it will fall apart entirely." "I can help!" — a motto to live by! alternate spaceflight history! an allegory for a possible misaligned AGI timeline! tongue-in-cheek references to real companies and people that give you heartburn! this book's got it all for a very specific kind of person
004

The Last Flight

Public Service Broadcasting
Album Electronic
favorite songs off this album: I Was Always Dreaming, The Fun of It, Electra. re: the latter, there should be more songs that are just odes to machinery
005

The Wrong Stuff

John Strausbaugh
Space History
grand tales & horror stories about the soviet space program, all told from the perspective of a space cowboy (which I found both charming and also callous at best at times)
006

velocity : design : comfort

Sweet Trip
Album Glitch
glitchy electronic trance/shoegaze. music to ride public transit in a new city to
007

Scattered All Over the Earth

Yoko Tawada
Fiction
very neat bit of near-future speculative fiction that lets you muse about language synthesis and cultural melding in a measured way while also creating distinctive character studies that straddle the uncanny valley between being true-to-life and being archetypes
008

EUSEXUA Afterglow

FKA twigs
Album Art-pop
favorite songs off this one: Cheap Hotel, Sushi, Stereo Boy. the production on this album is fantastic, think it might include some of the best percussion on an electronic album I've ever heard
009

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson
Climate Sci-fi
a little blunt at times but an interesting look at the future of geopolitics in the wake of possible climate disaster. also cool to see geoengineering being taken as serious policy
010

I Love My Computer

Ninajirachi
Album Hyperpop
<3
011

Circular Motion

Alex Foster
Sci-fi
reads like heavy iron in your stomach. an oddly cathartic dystopian look at the end state of a world flattened geographically and culturally by misdirected enterprise
012

Y2Kbaby

Penelope Scott
Single Pop
cloying. awkward. gimmicky. STILL the anthem of a generation
013

Babel-17

Samuel R. Delany
Linguistics Sci-fi
oftentimes Hugo Award nominees from the 60s do not age well at all. this is not the case for Babel-17; it still has a lot to say about early body horror and its interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
014

The Technological Republic

Alex Karp
Tech Politics
ask me about this one
END OF LIST