Tag: reading

19 posts

Imagining Sam Pickwick as the Writer of Sketches By Boz

A small flight of fancy

Mar 27, 2026

Origin Story

Why are you doing this?

Mar 27, 2026

Douglas Adams on AI, Before There Was AI

A passage from one of the author’s comic novels of the 1980s clarifies a key user flaw of our AI present

Engaging with the text

Starting a new practice and next iteration of active reading; blazing a path from my digital garden to my physical tsundoku

Jan 24, 2026

Trying to like Reading again

I miss being a bookworm

Page-Turner Tunes: Boards of Canada’s “Music Has the Right to Children”

Page-Turner Tunes: Boards of Canada’s “Music Has the Right to Children”

The first entry in a series on my favorite albums for locking in while reading

At Present Pace ...

A year's-end reminder that the race is long but only against myself

When is a book TOO big?

In terms of sheer size, I’ve finally found my limit with one of my latest reads

Read What You Want

Engagement-based media has worried the concept of performative reading into a trend, and too many are falling for it

Up Next

One book closes, three more open

Enter House

In which I posit that Mark Z. Danielewski might be for the adventure gamers

My Current Read

A big, sprawling tip of the spear of what could have been an even bigger, even more sprawling thing

Take Three

Not the first iteration, probably not the last

Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25

Stuff I'm Reading I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn! Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch w


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lesser daemon
blog.bront.rodeo
May 5, 2025

Things I Am Consuming: 4.5.2025

It's the weekend, I've got no brilliant tech tutorials in my pocket and I have no particular desire to write about societal collapse for at least a little bit. So I'm just gonna write about some stuff I enjoyed this week. I've finally burned out on videogames for a bit after spending a few weeks housing my backlog of visual novels and I'm finally getting back on my book/show/movie shit. There appears to be a throughline of lore-heavy nerd escapism which frankly I deserve. “Children are dying."


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lesser daemon
blog.bront.rodeo
Apr 5, 2025

The Future Is Too Easy

It is rich cynics trying to make something lifeless grow in the way that living things do, and lock the dying present they rule in for the foreseeable future by effectively removing everyone from it but them. They are impatient not just because they are high-handed and avaricious, but because they know that the only future they can rule in the way they want is one that is passive, stupid, small and shrinking. David Roth, excellent as always, on CES in Defector. I do think it's easy to get myopi


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lesser daemon
blog.bront.rodeo
Jan 28, 2025

1/17 Link Roundup & Screenshot Dump

I've reached day 3 of my hundred days and I'm already out of ideas. A new record! However, I accounted for this inevitability in the goal I set for myself, which was just to "write something on my blog every day". I'd like to add some functionality to the blog to display shorter posts in the main feed - things like til or links with short notes attached - which will then basically allow me to do a hundred days of tweets but on my personal site if I so wish. In the meantime, though, I'm stuck wit


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lesser daemon
blog.bront.rodeo
Jan 17, 2025

Slackers vs. Strivers

How a pair of books with dramatically diverging philosophies came out in the same year—and fittingly, the more upright one became better known.

Books on Vinyl

Audiobooks are common these days, but advocates for those with vision disabilities saw their value early—as well as the value of the vinyl record.