Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
I was looking specifically for Philip K. Dick's "Cantata 140", also found Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" and look at that great wraparound cover! But also all of F&SF is in there, and it's pretty much all good, the best of the more literary end of SF, fantasy, weird tales. Unfortunately it hasn't all been neatly organized in a category on archive.org, but you can just page down in the pulp magazine rack.
Anyway, there's your reading stack for the next year sorted.
I dunno, breathy chicks singing how much they don't need me works.
Darling, you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me
—Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road", so romantic.
Largely inspired by McSweeney's Bruce Springsteen or Stephen King?, which I got all the classic SK, and many of the Boss's. #30 just made me laugh out loud.
Dedicated to that piece of shit, incompetent, convicted war criminal George W Bush, who sat blank-brained thru kids reading "The Pet Goat" while his good friends from Saudi Arabia flew planes into buildings.
Tons of audiobook readings of mid-20th-century short SF. Ran across #11 on archive.org, and "Accidental Death" by Peter Baily amused me. "Control Group" by Roger Dee is very talky but amusing, too.
Very much in need of downloading and playing back at higher speed, though, the readers are painfully, deliberately sssslllloooowwww, tolerable at 1.5x to 2x.
I play a lot of "old" music because it reminds me of the time.
'80s pop, because I really thought things could only get better, if we lived thru the Cold War (which I put at 5-10% odds depending on what shit Reagan had done that day).
'90s industrial, metal, and punk (old and post- whatever) because kicking out the bastards seemed possible, and we needed to be angry for it.
… And the only music I've liked of the last 20 years is repeats of those. That giant dump of vaporwave I got is great anodyne nothingness that sounds exactly like '80s pop played over muzak speakers at a mall (remember malls?! I lust for a food court lunch, full shopping bag, and checking out bored housewives & sorority chicks). I love it because it's soulless and derivative. There's a few old artists (as in, my age) still making stuff I like, Trent Reznor's Ghosts V & VI were bleak horrorshows which is just what I ordered, and occasional Corrosion of Conformity, Front Line Assembly, Gary Numan, etc. to keep me in the mood.
So anyway. Happy Tuesday. Most of us made it one more day, which is about the best we can ask for.
DO NOT TAUNT 2020. It can always get worse.