Recently read: Nothing Happened (Williams, 2026)

Recently watched: Safety Last! (Newmeyer and Taylor, 1923), Workingman’s Death (Glawogger, 2005), Helvetica (Hustwit, 2007), Dr. No (Young, 1962), Magellan (Diaz, 2025).

Workingman’s Death was hard to watch in places. The tight spaces for the coal miners gave me shivers. The open-air slaughterhouse was … I can’t quite describe it. Disgusting? Repugnant? Horrific? How can that go on day after day after day?

Magellan was slow and beautiful and amazing and a stark (necessary!) contrast to the “hero worship” that I read in 1980s middle school and high school textbooks.

It seems that Notepad++ got hacked last year. Lovely.

This has been a tough winter to run outside. Cold + wind + slippery snow. Hard to stay motivated.

Recently watched: The Limey (Soderbergh, 1999), F for Fake (Welles, 1973), Safe (Haynes, 1995), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959).

Recently read: The Oxford University Press edition of The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron Worth, 2018). Currently reading Ubik (PK Dick, 1969).

Recently watched: A trio of films from Werner Herzog and one from Akira Kurosawa. Stroszek (1977), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009), Fata Morgana (1971), Sanjuro (1962).

Recently read: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (PK Dick, 1964). The Man in the High Castle (PK Dick, 1962). Working my way through the Oxford University Press edition of The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Arthur Machen, edited by Aaron Worth, 2018).

I finished The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (David Treuer, 2019) last night. It took a few weeks of on-and-off reading; it’s close to 450 pages (without the references) and small print. And dense.

I knew some of the pre-1890 history from reading other books, but the way it was presented in the first section of this book made me think about it in a completely different way. It had never dawned on me how different the pre-1890 experience was for different tribes. Different geographies, different cultures, different relations with their neighbors, different encounters with colonizers, different experiences with disease, different and shifting alignments during times of warfare. And so on. The first section of the book opened my eyes to how richly varied things were.

Subsequent sections dealt with 1890-present and most of that material was new for me. I came away from the book with (I think!) a much more realistic and nuanced understanding of Native America. Highly recommended.

Recently watched: A trio of films from John Carpenter on the Criterion Channel: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Vampires (1998), Ghosts of Mars (2001). Went to the movies on cheap night and saw One Battle After Another (2025).

Books: Recently finished A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, which I really enjoyed. There were a few twists that I did not see coming. Working my way through The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs.