Bora Chung - "Cursed Bunny"

Interested short stories from Korean writer. Leaves a lot open / to the imagination.

Favourite was probable "the cold finger", of a woman in a car crash, led astray by a ghost.

The Cursed Judge

Found on Nebula, interesting-enough discussion of video games, like Jacob Geller, Errant Signal, Daryll Talks Videogames, ...

Helen Oyeyemi - "White is for Witching"

Intriguing book. Of the twins Eliot and Miranda (Miri).

Of their parents, and grand parents, and even great grandparents. Of witching. Of the house with its own mind. Of being unable to escape the witches, or the soucouyant, or the goodlady.

Most of it, interesting and well written, changing POVs you take a moment to realise.

Then suddenly, it becomes this amazing suspense/horror story, where Ore and Miri are lovers, but both pulled aside by their backgrounds, in that house where the mannequin moves when nobody sees it.

Only the repaired dolls were on view
    (Father let's go to the doll hospital and get you repaired)
    she didn't know where the thought had come from, she probably had to be careful because she had been mad.
    Miranda dropped her hand and came out of the fitting room, passing the woman who had been talking to her father as the woman returned to her cubicle. One of them smiled with all her teeth and the other looked blank.

'They killed him,' she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.

I walked out of the bathroom door and, I don't know how, found myself still in the bathroom. The room hadn't grown any longer, the door was still in front of me, I didn't feel any change in the ground beneath my feet. But when i tried to pass through the door again i was in the bathroom again, and my neck cricked, as if I'd turned my head too fast. I tried one more time, and came through into the passageway, which was meant to be arranged into an L, with the staircase completing the rectangle. I was on the longest part of the L - the bathroom was meant to be in between Eliot's room and their dad's room. But the doors had changed positions. All four doors on that floor were now ranged along one wall, and the rest of the 'L' was blank. None of the doors would open. The stairs were still there, and I inched down them carefully, one by one, afraid that they would change too, unsure where they would take me. The staircase ended in the kitchen, every surface heavy in the moonlight.
    There was a long shadow behind me. It wasn't my shadow. From the corner of my eye I saw it grow like a syrup stain, called from nowhere. I went to the counter, spilled salt all over it and ran the flat of a knife through the salt, on both sides. I turned before I could lose my nerve; or more, the knife turned and took me with it. Kill the soucouyant.
    'Ore,' Miranda said. I had her by the throat. It was the principle of knife and fork. You had to hold something down before you could stab it.
    She was holding a pair of dressmaker's scissors to my chest, opened into a stark 'v'.

Jeanette Winterson - "The Daylight Gate"

read it again (first time 2014: https://weesbij.blogspot.com/2014/08/jeanette-winterson-daylight-gate.html)

John Dee and Edward Kelly had intercourse with her in turn. When it was done John Dee went back to his books, for he was never comfortable with much that was not a book. Edward Kelley fell asleep. They had forgotten me and I had not minded.

    John Dee nodded. 'Do you believe in the life to come?'
    'I don't think I do.'
    'Yet you have seen many strange things with me, have you not? Apparitions, spectres, unaccountable sights not of human form?'
    'I think these things are the magick of our own minds, not visitations from elsewhere.'
    'Then our minds must be multitudes indeed.'
    'I think we are worlds compressed into human form.'

The Limiñanas - "Faded"

Live in Rough Trade records. Wonderful.

I forgot I discovered them (did I actually?) Probably through Pandora stations.

Ava Reid - "The Wolf and the Woodsman"

Ok young adult fantasy.

Not very logical, character building wise; angry at her captors, then understanding the next paragraph. Then angry again the next page. 

Internet fandom writing, though not terrible.

David Foster Wallace - "Infinite Jest"

Not sure I'm getting through it.  Long "listing" descriptions.

Funny at times, but ... 

Beau Travail

Curious half-dance French Legionnaire film (1999)

Kajillionaire

Found via "best heist films"... one of the most tender and beautiful films I have seen in a long time.

"Old Dolio" and her parents try to scam, badly equiped for the world... She manages to transform in the most wonderful way possible.

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi - "The Centre"

Alright book about a secret Centre where you can learn a language fluently in ten days. At 80%, it's a bit predictable and I can't say I'm super taken with the characters, but some of the stuff (the protagonist being called out as being presumptuous and claiming minority while she's from a rich family) is OK.

At first, it sounded like Anna had half a dozen daughters, so varied were the names she used for them. Like Natalya was also frequently called Natasha, as well as Natashinka when she was being praised and Natashka when criticized. Eventually, I figured out that Anna had three daughters. One had three children of her own and Anna was saving money to help her move to England. Another was a shop owner in St Petersburg and the third, a nurse, had moved to the States.

And maybe I was meant to stay in Pakistan, not be transplanted into this harsh and windy place. We're meant to die where we are born, surely? When I first flew to England, my skin became scaly and dry, my tummy uncomfortable and my bladder confused. It took forever for my body to adjust. Someone told me then – I can't remember who, probably Naima – that although our bodies travel by plane, the soul still makes its way on foot.
    "Your soul," she said – I'd been in England for maybe six months at the time – "your soul still has months, if not years, of travel ahead. It's probably only reached Afghanistan or Iran by now."

In the West, they. keep it all at a distance. The old, the poor, the dead – outsourced, deported and dismissed, hospitalized and imprisoned, or else bombed via remote control. But here, it's all mixed together in such a way that the rich, in panic, put on their blinkers.

Widows

Steve McQueen, four widows of robbers in a political game in Chicago decide to execute the heist themselves.

Was ok.  Took a bit of time before it took off.

Marianne Faithfull - "I get along without you very well"

so beautiful, and I don't think I ever heard this before

Marianne Faithfull - "Going Home"

I know the lyrics, but I don't know them. I recognise them, from where?

was this the song I knew? Or another version?

Zeigarnik effect

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks (this effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect[19]).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluma_Zeigarnik#Zeigarnik_effect  

Found via a Daryl Talks Games episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIDc_g7hydY 

Under the Silver Lake

Mulholland-Drive ish film with a young Andrew Garfield (?) about a guy falling in love with a mysterious girl in Hollywood.

Strange parties, people going underground for the rest of their life.

from IMDB

While not initially a box-office success with audiences,[28] Under the Silver Lake has garnered a cult following who are convinced that there are hidden meta-clues, codes and ciphers sprinkled throughout the film waiting to be discovered. These include references to the mystery surrounding the identity of the dog killer, various different cyphers or codes, geocoding systems, and even analysis of fireworks in the film, connecting the sound pattern they emit to Morse code. In certain scenes in the film there is graffiti that can be seen in the toilets and on a wall and which are coded with the Copiale cipher.

Quotation

 

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

    Cormac McCarthy - "The Road"

Hugh Howey - "Wool", "Shift", "Dust" trilogy

First book of the "Wool" trilogy, on which silo was based.

Easy read, quite enjoyable. Good escape.

Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains–
    The lift, arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two of them. They boarded and Thurman fumbled for his badge. "Fear," he said, "Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn't show them what was out there, they would go look for themselves. That's what we've always done as a race."

Philosphy Tube

somewhat interesting, philosophy stuff, about beauty in ugly times

Lost Highway

still amazing

more amazing than I remember

but where is the bowling ball scene..???

Artifice Girl

Interesting low-budget/indie film of a tormented child-abuse-survivor who creates an AI to lure pedophile predators out.

Not ground breaking but a good story about the increasingly vague boundaries between AI and humanity