Stewing in power soup

what I've been up to lately

(Re)introduction

Last September, I set up this newsletter thinking I’d be writing a personal essay every few months. That was dumb. Not because writing personal essays is an unworthy or unachievable goal, but because it’s not a goal that I’ve ever actually had.

Suffice it to say, I’ve scaled back my ambitions. No personal essays. Instead, every month or two, I’ll post a rundown of everything I’ve been up to lately. Starting now.

What I’ve been up to lately

• I rebuilt my website. My old site was weird and offbeat—more of an art project than a business portal. Don’t get me wrong, my new website is also weird and offbeat, but it’s also more navigable to people primarily interested in my videos.

• I read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and I can’t seem to shut up about it.

• I’m reading Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s lovely. I made a short video about its excellent use of embodied observation as an alternative to microexpressions.

• I read the nichely viral There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. I made a short video about it, and I delved a bit deeper in this month’s Patreon video. I can’t say I recommend the novel, exactly, but I wholeheartedly recommend qntm’s short story “Lena.” You can read it for free on his website.

• The (fictional) SCP Foundation-inspired organization to which the (fictional) Antimemetics Division belongs got me thinking about the last season of Angel. Do y’all remember Angel? I don’t blame you if you don’t, it aired over 20 years ago, but it’s great. I talked about it in this month’s Patreon video.

  

  Angel, S05E14, “Smile Time”

• I’ve been slowly making my way through Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays. I made a short video about what the titular 1964 essay has to say about LLMs-as-literary-digests.

• According to Last.FM, I’ve streamed “Call It Easy” by Racing Mount Pleasant 123 times in the last 30 days. Pitchfork called the record “ambitious but underwhelming, filled with grand gestures that arrive at foregone conclusions.” I basically agree, but I love it anyway. What’s life about if not euphorically discovering for yourself the things that everybody else already seems to know?

• I finally finished Charlie Adhara’s Big Bad Wolf series, in which, over the course of five books, we follow Cooper and Park as they solve werewolf-related crimes and fall in love—not necessarily in that order. I had a lot of fun with these books, and I talked about them in… you guessed it (this month’s Patreon video).

  

• Stewing in a soup of ideas about power (the mysterious Organization to which the Antimemetics Division belongs; the evil law firm that serves as Angel’s chief antagonist; Charlie Adhara’s insular werewolf crime-solving agency, The Trust), I finally watched Conclave (2024). I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t such a powerful rejection of cynicism wrapped up in a locked room mystery.

• My local pinball bar bought Stern’s new Pokemon machine. It’s fun. I’m not very good at it yet—my highest score is in the 50 million range (amateur hour, trust me)—but I’m not worried. Pinball is like all institutions. It’s not tradition; it’s not the past. It’s what you do next.

• This post is a simulacrum! A facsimile! A sham! The canonical version lives on my website. You can subscribe via RSS and bypass Substack entirely at https://pagemelt.zone/rss.xml.