Last of the year! Wild. Kind of. Also not. That I’m only at #28 but have been (allegedly) writing these posts since 2017 is a little sad. But this is also not my job, I make no money from this, and my readership is mostly my mother (I think; I’m not sure if my analytics work anymore?).

In any case. I put an exercise book in the projects section. Like it says somewhere on that page, I had other plans for those, but yesterday as I was cleaning up my writing repo ahead of tagging 2020 and blowing away the projects that “no longer serve me” (i.e., things I’ve more or less given up on), I realized that the majority of these exercises were “done,” or at least semi-formatted, so I figured I’d throw them up here into the void in case anyone else finds them helpful or useful. While I do think The 3 A.M. Epiphany book is probably worth its money (at least for a certain kind of time in a life), I also think that good shit should can can be found for free. So this is my (extraordinarily minor) contribution.

In other news, I’ve got my year-end reading list more or less in the works, so I’ll put that up on Thursday or Friday, probably. For a preview of the recent stuff, here’s a reminder that the Reading page exists, and is as of this morning mostly up to date.

Notably, I recently enjoyed Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation, but as we’ve yet to discuss that in Foucault Club (the reading group; yes, we’ve moved away from French philosophy for the moment), I’ll hold off, as I think one of the three readers of this blog is also in that reading group. Suffice to say I enjoyed it and enjoyed the Schnuck’s fried chicken callout in the acknowledgements (a St. Louis thing).

I’d had some links to the LitHub Biggest Literary Stories but then I changed my mind. So really, the only recommended reading (which is really viewing) ahead of the booklist (maybe I’ll “star” or bold my favorites in the list? Maybe not.) is this:

Video: How a Bicycle Is Made

on the Rene Herse “Journal”

This is really delightful and cool. And the write up on the page is good (calling out the gendered-work stuff, etc.), and bikes are good.