PicoBlog

Now it is almost Pride, which we celebrate on the anniversary of the 1969 LGBTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York. And to mark the occasion, I’ll be revisiting the universally beloved classic 2015 film that everyone agrees is perfect in every way, Stonewall, directed by undisputed genius cinematic auteur Roland Emmirch. HAHAHAHAHA! Just kidding! God, can you imagine??? No no no, it’s the other Stonewall. This one, directed by the late British filmmaker Nigel Finch, was released in 1995 and is based on historian and activist Martin Duberman’s book, also called Stonewall.

I was seven in 1961 when Roger Maris pursued the major league home run record and was hounded by sportswriters for the crime of challenging Babe Ruth. His teammate, Micky Mantle, who had already won a triple crown and was also chasing Ruth, was the fan favorite. Although Maris had won the MVP award in 1960 with 39 home runs, he was considered a Yankee usurper, an import from Kansas City.

When David Berman died in 2019, there was much public mourning from the social media accounts of some of the moodiest, dreamiest writers and musicians I admire, but I had no idea who David Berman was. Yes, I had heard of The Silver Jews, but never once had I listened to them. I felt left out—kind of like I felt left out after John Prine died, but I was slightly familiar with some of his more popular songs.

As I say in my TED Talk about Vilem Flusser, the most pressing cultural question is: “why are things so weird?” Or as Anna Shechtman describes it: “that feeling—floating somewhere between mania and motion sickness—that everything has changed.” It seems like everyone really fucking wants the answer to be “The Algorithm.” The New Yorker internet and culture columnist Kyle Chayka gives them that answer in his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

In 1983, a 52-year-old senior executive at Texas Instruments was passed over for the company's top job. He would go on to found and build the most strategically important company in the world. Who's up for a story? Morris Chang was born into a middle-class family on July 10, 1931 in Ningbo, Chekiang, China. The early years of his life were set against a backdrop of hardship. Wars and widespread poverty had overwhelmed the country, exposing him to this suffering at a young age.

As I rounded the curve of scrub-speckled highway in Bienville Parish, not far from the Arkansas state line, I nearly blew past the concrete marker I came to see. I pulled the rented land barge onto the gravel patch on the roadside, and we stretched our legs before we approached the bullet-pocked monolith. Wilted flowers have been left at its feet. Stones placed on its head. Chips gouged away as souvenirs.

The Southern Oracle would like to warn you, this post is about The NeverEnding Story, both the 1984 movie and the 1979 book. Spoilers abound if you are not familiar with either, but especially if you’ve seen the movie but never read the book. If you are confident, you may pass. It was the summer of 1984. I was 9-years-old, sitting in a dark movie theater in Traverse City, Michigan with my dad and a bag of Twizzlers, and before me on the screen was a story that would begin to speak to me.

Inventory update: the 50 Years of Text Games book remains officially sold out, but as all orders have now shipped, I’m expecting to have a small stock of copies available out of the inventory I was holding back for lost shipments and other emergency contingencies. Expect a fire sale of these last few copies in a few weeks, which I’ll announce here! In the meantime, here’s a fun new article on an obscure piece of interactive fiction history: the lost art (or, perhaps, well-buried curse) of the type-in game.

The AP (Alex Pareene) Newsletter is a newsletter by me (Alex Pareene). You can read my announcement post for my thoughts on the newsletter form itself, especially the political newsletter, which this one (mostly) is. It should also give you a better sense of what this newsletter is, and will be, than any description I could write here (which would just sound something like “The AP [Alex Pareene] Newsletter is a newsletter about media and politics and power and sometimes transit and a bit of labor and whatever else I feel like writing about”).