I first read “House of Leaves” about a decade ago and loved it immediately. Specifically: Narrative at multiple levels. Found-document style Multimodal writing (letters, footnotes, mess) I also liked the core mystery: what was that house all about. My favorite parts were descriptions of measuring the house, exploring the stair case, etc. When Zampano is summarizing the parts of the Navidson record that focus on Navidson + family + friends trying to understand the house. ...

Normally, I’m a “systems over goals” kind of guy. Nevertheless, sometimes having a goal kicks ass. It cuts through everything with questions like: Will reading this get me closer? Will doing this get me closer? What’s one thing I can do to get closer? I’m not saying “goals over systems”. I’m still a systems guy. I’ll system my way all the way up and over the goal. Just sometimes, we need a sharp knife to cut away the cruft and a crisp goal can be that knife. ...

I was talking with LLMs about fiction that I might like to write. I think we may have settled on “metafiction”, defined via gemini: Metafiction is a form of fiction that self-consciously addresses the nature of fiction itself, often by blurring the lines between reality and fiction or by exposing the mechanisms of storytelling. My favorite stories are those where the plot is vague (so I can guess and think), the narrator/s are unreliable, there is a blurring of fiction/non-fiction, and often a mixture of formats/form factors (footnotes, letters, diaries, editor notes, etc.). ...

I am reading “Slouching Towards Utopia”. Good so far. It opens with a discussion on effort required for certain output, e.g. enough calories to live on, and how that looks at different points in time. The thesis of the book is probably something like: tech driving this dramatic drop in effort for calories, yet why don’t we experience paradise? But I might be getting that wrong. According to claude: …despite achieving material abundance for the first time in human history, DeLong contends that we have “slouched” rather than strode towards utopia. This is because our social, political, and economic institutions haven’t adequately evolved to distribute this unprecedented wealth or provide people with meaningful work and purpose in an age of plenty. The book suggests that while we solved the problem of production, we haven’t solved the problems of distribution and meaning. ...

This is another reminder to self: Book + Movie > Book | Movie I finished reading “Anything You Can Imagine” on the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Great book. Great movies, seen them many times. I’ve stared re-watching them now after having read a deep dive into how hard they were to make. The movies are so much better. Also, it’s probably been a decade since my last watch. ...

I finished “Hitler’s Monsters” yesterday. Meh. Anyway, the book uses a term I’d not heard: “border science”. I took it to mean pseudoscience, or occultism broadly conceived. Maybe. Wikipedia says Pseudoscience is stuff that is not science because it’s not testable, e.g. falsifiable. Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Fringe Science Wikipedia has something called “Fringe Science” which seems different again, e.g. fake science. ...

I was just re-reading “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” by H.P. Lovecraft. In his essay, he gives three structured frameworks: A 5-part procedure of writing weird stories. The 4 types of stories you can write. How to handle the 5 types of horror elements of a story. I thought it might be interesting to extract them and clean them up a little. I fed the essay into DeepSeek R1 and asked it to extract frameworks for modern writers, here’s what I got: ...

Okay, I’ve released and publicly announced Lovecraft Copywork. Here’s the tweet: Checkout my latest site: Write Like Lovecraft! Master the Art of Lovecraftian Style with Copywork.https://t.co/z3CxdtNaNw pic.twitter.com/elFfAf98dS — Jason Brownlee (@jason2brownlee) February 13, 2025 Below are some screenshots. Here’s the landing page that promote the benefits of copywork with lovecraft material specifically: Here’s the stories page: You can pick a story and see which stories you have already started and their progress. I generated iconic images for each story, gives a good horror feeling :) ...

I was reading a book about the Occult + Nazi’s the other day and there was a mention of technical analysis for astrology. As an aside, Germany went bananas for the occult in the early part of the century, then later the Nazi’s, because it was already in the air, e.g. Occultism in Nazism Anyway, my thought: Huh? Technical analysis for a field other than finance… that makes sense I guess. I filed it away to ponder…now. ...

My son made the comment about his school work that all kids make at some point: This is boring. Why do I have to do this? I’m never going to use it! I think it was with regard to some math homework. So, we had “the talk” about schoolwork. I stared off talking about the morning exercises he and his brother do with me: Star-jumps Push-ups Sit-ups Squats I said something like: ...