Everything is going to be OKayfabe.

Vol. 6, No. 9

Happy G1 Climax season to all who celebrate. Japanese wrestling remains excellent, even if their premier annual tournament sounds more like where DFW did his finest work than a place where sweaty naked dudes roll around together. Or something. It’s the first year in a long time that nobody is working in a Bullet Club t-shirt, and the field seems a little bit thin, but it’s one of those things I have a lot of fun with every year, even if it is a ridiculous amount of wrestling to watch (17 shows over 31 days for the block matches, plus the semi finals and final after that).

I haven’t locked in my rooting interest this year, but my love for Zack Sabre Jr. remains pure and true. Sports note: Sure, the World Cup has been a lot of fun (when it’s not awful and gross), but wrestling would never allow the top four to be the final four — everything is always better with underdogs.

Housekeeping.

The mess of code displaying in the RSS feed is hopefully fixed with this post. Or not. The fuck do I know.

Television Set, from The Plain of Smokes / Ken Price / 1981

Confusions.

📚 I tried to understand ‘BookTok’ during Canada Reads, but was never able to quite crack it: ❝Personal testimony is paramount on BookTok; a book is deemed successful if it “breaks” or “destroys” a reader. The most common book-review content on the app understands books as pleasure-spiking torment factories, arenas for an almost masochistic level of personal involvement. This means users film themselves literally crying and holding a tear-stained page up to the camera, captioning the post with a quip like “brb gonna cry more” or “I just feel too much 😭.” The excess of emotion often scans as winkingly facetious, a dramatization to demonstrate just how deeply a person loves books. […] Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok.❞ / 🎻 Alex Ross is retiring / ⚱️ Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman died. / 🖊️ My new favourite blog is unstory. (Warning: it might be poetry.) / 🗞️ The future Google Reader almost gave us. ❝When Google Reader went away, the only thing that truly vanished was the curation layer, Reader’s accidental social network, and that we’d have to rebuild, one link blog and newsletter at a time, on our own.❞

Extensions.

🗺️ Pastmaps, historical maps overlaid on the modern world. / Jerry’s Map. / Gerrymandle, a game of gerrymandering. / 👾 The exhaustive and scientific ranking of every NES game (that gets everything wrong). / Pac-Hunt, Pac-Man but you’re the ghost. / 🥁 Sgt. Pepper’s death list. / 📀 The (virtual) Criterion Closet. / 🪶 Feather, a single-file wiki. / 👨‍🎨 Current Rothko. / InkField. / ✌️

Explorations.

🍿 A Man Called Otto. / 🍿 Coraline. / 📚 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, read to the kids. / 🍿 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, watched with the kids and still disappointing. / 📚 Nine Stories by JD Salinger.