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They wonder why I'm not enthused to drop /
The more visible you get, the more your spiritual is tried
— _, Kendrick Lamar

manually blogging things is, admittedly, not a thing that i necessarily want to do. technology, in the sense that i'm using to make this post, is not really my thing. i don't find it very interesting to build websites; i don't find it very interesting to do much of the formatting minutiae that services would otherwise provide me myself; and there's a lot more friction to all of this that i generally dislike. but i'm also not very interested in continually bouncing around services—and i sure as fuck do not want to microblog. i preach to a choir, but: we made an unbelievable mistake when Twitter became load-bearing infrastructure for the blogging space and no, Bluesky is not going to be better about this. 300 characters is barely sufficient to tell you my favorite enchilada ingredients, much less tell you about the complexities of the world you live in.

so, here we are. let's see how many times i can find the strength and time to do this per month.

what i'm reading (42/40)

before Cohost kicked it, my plan was to give you a lengthy treatise on the history of climate change; luckily, that's something well-suited to a medium like this and the plan has not changed (although i could not begin to give you an estimate on when the post will be out). a lot of my reading this month—provided i can get to it through the instability of everyone moving everywhere—will be to that end. actually, a lot of the notes for the essay already exist and i could probably write it with what i have now—but i like to be thorough. accordingly: i'm early into Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard. this book makes me wish i could personally throw Charles Koch (and actually the Koch family generally, but definitely Charles if i had to pick one) in a hydraulic press.

i'm not even to the parts that would have information for the post. i'm like one chapter in. but why is this guy not in front of an international tribunal? the children of the people reading this are probably going to wonder why we collectively—to use a Situationist turn of phrase—didn't hang him with the guts of his own bureaucrats. just a deeply, sincerely evil person on every level—can't wait to see what other horrible things he's been up to since... 1973, the year i am chronologically on in this book.

converted essay of the day

if you're hankering for some truly unrefined content, i have converted my essay "unfinished political musings on the state of West Virginia" to my site. this was a Cohost draft that i eventually published at some point, and it seems i did it so late in the post's existence that Google has outright failed to index it. or maybe the service is just that fucking bad now, even when you use the prefix "site:" and exact quotes, i dunno.

i think eventually i'll rewrite this guy more formally; the political history of West Virginia is genuinely fascinating and i will maintain it (among other things) is a good reason to consider it culturally distinct from the capital-S South. i also have a book in my long list of to-reads about the history of the Socialist Party in the state, which might make for a good post eventually.

other stuff of interest

i think Cohost Union News will launch on Sunday or Monday, as of now; i'm collecting links already for the first write-up and finishing up the blog-roll for the sidebar. i'm also advising a few things behind the scenes elsewhere in the greater Cohostsphere, and we'll see what comes of those.