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  • 1965 Project: Make a Comment

    1965 cover art

    For the month of November, I will be spending most of my time writing about 1965 (the year I was born). For that reason, I started the 1965 Project, which will consist of daily postings about overlooked gems from that year. To read these posts, start here.

    1965 Table of Contents

    1. It was a Very Good Year. (Introduction)
    2. Pawking Metaws (Bob Dylan)
    3. Kiddie Animation
    4. Unsettling Japanese Movies
    5. 1965 and American Politics
    6. Shindig! TV Show.

    If you’d like to make a comment about my 1965 posts, write it in the comment section below. If this is the first time you have made a comment, it won’t be approved immediately but will go into the moderation queue. Have no fear; I should approve it that same day.

    By the way, the bloggy part of this website is kind of a mess. This is temporary, and I’ll probably fix it in December.

  • Random Thoughts about Sitcoms

    (An ongoing list).

    You might already know that I’m a rabid fan of sitcoms. That is the reason I keep an ongoing list of favorite sitcoms. Here are some of my thoughts about the genre:

    It is always wonderful to have older characters be guest stars. Often these characters are played by immensely talented actors who at one time were famous. I just watched two episodes of the Middle which featured guest stars Norm MacDonald, Marsha Mason and Jerry Van Dyke. These actors had only small parts, but it was nice to see them again!

    Many good shows have one bona fide asshole character. Often their negative energy can bring out the best in other characters. (Besides it’s always a plot art to humanize the asshole).

    As good as three camera filmed-before-a-live-audience shows are, one camera shows have a lot of movement and energy and rapid scene changes which can make up for the silence. “Arrested Development had so many scene changes in a single episode that you were never bored.

    I’m surprised at how many shows have gotten away with doing the same plot over and over again. Keeping Up Appearances, Three’s Company, Allo Allo, Get Smart, etc.

    Most sitcoms fail because of bad ratings; it often has nothing to do with the scripts or talent.

    I think 80% of the recipe for a successful sitcom is not great writing, but finding the perfect actor for the part. I was thinking of the Middle; all the characters and especially the kids seem born to play their parts.

    Good to have a gimmick. It helps to have some narrative novelty even if it doesn’t always work. The Bernie Mac show had two brilliant things: 1)Bernie Mac breaking the fourth wall to rant about something and 2)onscreen text to comment on dialogue being spoken. Both provided endless amounts of hilarity.

    Raunch and potty humor is beginning to be a problem on sitcoms. There are fewer restrictions about subject matter on contemporary TV, but lowbrow humor rarely pays in the long run.

    One person online said that sitcoms by definition are not particularly memorable; it’s more the exception rather the rule. There is some truth in this. Plots tend to repeat themselves (even on the same sitcom), and jokes and character conflicts tend to recur throughout a show’s history. On the other hand, talented actors can inject something fresh into each iteration, and that is worth mentioning. Finally, the amnesiac quality of sitcoms may in fact be an advantage because it leads to rewatching. You may already know that George Constanza is going on a blind date set up by Elaine and Jerry, but it is still fun to watch the sequence again.

  • Social Media Linkdump Nov-Dec 2025

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    This contains my random/unclassifiable links found about politics, pop culture, etc. See also: my bio page and music reviews. By the way, blogging will be light in November because of my 1965 Project.

    Michael Mann on Bill Gates’ recent letter downplaying the catastrophic nature of climate change. Here’s a group-written peer-reviewed article about the current state of the climate.

    The Curious Case of Kacyee Nicole by Mimi Lamarre about a controversy about whether a young person with cancer is actually the person she says she was. The article talks about John Halcyon Styn , a nice and colorful man whom I talked to several times at South by Southwest.

    How rising ACA premiums will fuel panic and reduced spending.

    I have coined a phrase: Lawless lying racist tax cheat, creepy pervert, vindictive narcissist and blithering idiot.

    Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
    Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

  • Robert’s Roundup #56 (Nov-Dec)

    View Previous Roundup and Next Roundup (View All)

    MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. MASTODON: https://booktoot.club/@nagletx. Here’s a biographical profile of Texas author Robert Nagle.

    Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited,  and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here. Here is my article about methods and search queries I use to locate ebook deals.

    This post is usually a work-in-progress. At the start it will be blank, and I add to it over the weeks. By the way for the month of November, I’ll be focused mainly on the 1965 Project, a look back at cultural gems from that year.

    Indie Author Spotlight

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    Under the Radar

    To Name Those Lost Novel by Rohan Wilson.

    The One that Got Away Stories by Zoe Wicomb.

    Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained by August Kleinzahler. (poetry).

    Hope Verdad Presents: Short Stories with a Twist by Francesca Flood

    In a perfect world by Laura Kasischke. (W)

    Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans subvert an unfair economy by Lisa Dodson.

    All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D Simak. (1965).

    Land End’s: New and Selected poems by Gail Mazur.

    This is your life novel by John O’Farrell. (W, ) Also The Best a Man Can get. He’s a British humor writer and actor. See his satirical news website Newsbiscuit.

    Blink and it’s Gone

    Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. (1965). Won Pulitzer.

    Station Island by Seamus Heaney.

    Julia by Sandra Newman. That’s the retelling of the 1984 novel from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover Julia Worthing. A brilliant premise.

    Library Purchases/Printed Books

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    Creative Commons/Freebies

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    Literary Articles and Essays

    Jessica Pressman talks about electronic literature.

    Rant

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    Multimedia/Podcasts, Etc.

    Personville Press Deals

    I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. Prices normally appear highest on Amazon, Apple, Kobo and BN, somewhat lower on Google Play Books and lower on the two DRM-free stores which are Smashwords and Payhip. Personville Press is committed to selling DRM-free ebooks and audio files directly from the Personville Press payhip store or from Smashwords. The prices listed here are the non-discounted price on Amazon. Check the links to see if they are discounted at the moment (it happens often).

  • RJ’s Geeky Explorations #13

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    WordPress Stuff

    Here’s a bug report I filed about 2025 WP themes not being bold enough and the suggested way to edit CSS to fix that.

    Ultimate Guide to WordPress Image Sizes and Resolution in 2025.

    How to speed up your WordPress site with webp images.

    Controlling image size on WordPress.

  • Responding to Trump’s Idiocies

    Responding to Trump’s Idiocies

    Participating in a public protest is always a kind of self-congratulatory performance even if you are perfectly sincere.

    You have picked a time and a place to do it — to coincide with other like-minded individuals. The impact of such an action is unclear. The actions of one person or even a group of people rarely cause great changes. Most of the time, the protest is seen by a limited number of people, and chances are, many were sympathetic to your cause anyway.

    Events like this have an element of zany fun — people are dressed in silly outfits, sometimes dancing or chanting silly slogans (at this particular event, the leader of the cheers was a long-haired lady wearing star-studded bluejeans and a cowboy hat). Apparently people dressed in frog outfits were arrested in a recent protest, so now people dressed in dinosaur or frog costumes have started popping up at events. Most people brought signs (most were hand-made). Some had simple messages (“We don’t do Kings,” “Due Process for Everyone,” “RESIST!” “No Kings, No ICE!” ). Some had longer, deeper messages (“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”).

    I talked to lots of people at the protest of all ages and ethnicities. Surprisingly, at least half of the attendees seemed to be over 50 years old. I met several grandmothers; one of them said, “I am here protesting for my grandchildren; they shouldn’t have to grow up in a society like this.” I met librarians, high school teachers, veterans, unemployed people concerned about the future. Most of the attendees showed a visceral dislike of Trump (several signs even had profanities directed towards him). Several mentioned the outrages of ICE; some mentioned Trump’s reckless foreign policy actions; my own sign referred to “Trump’s Idiocies,” and indeed, one woman held up a sign saying, “NO SIGN IS BIG ENOUGH TO LIST ALL THE REASONS I’M HERE”).

    I have seen political protests in my days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Europe. To protest corrupt pyramid schemes sanctioned by the Albanian government, my university students went on strike, held protests and even held hunger strikes. I’ve seen demonstrators arrested, and I have seen demonstrators retaliate against police forces trying to “control” their actions. Back in the 1990s, I thought my students in Ukraine and Albania were not politically engaged enough (even though they always had opinions about their country’s politics). Then suddenly they became engaged. To my surprise, in the 2000s, the unendingly corrupt Ukraine government faced street protests that became bigger and harder to ignore.

    Of course, Ukraine is in a volatile situation now (partially because of Trump’s unwillingness to uphold our NATO alliance or respond forcefully to outright aggressions). But the lesson of the Ukraine Maidan protests in the 2000s may be instructive and even hopeful. When talking to people at the protests, what I heard most from them was that Trump has gone too far, and that the tables are starting to turn. Maybe so, but the United States is a big messy place, elections are a long time from now, and the federal judicial system has been way too accommodating to Trump’s stalling tactics. In the meantime, Trump has continued defunding science, disarming regulatory agencies, demonizing political opponents, spreading misinformation and letting his underlings misuse the instruments of power.

    How do we respond? What can we do? I can’t say. But it was nice hearing the honking of car horns and the enthusiasm of car passengers for the signs and people they saw. It was also nice talking to people who felt just like me and felt just as exasperated and helpless. Sometimes you can watch the news reports and social media reports and convince yourself that politics is like a spectator event — like a boxing match or a circus. The bad news is that Trump and his gang are just going to get worse; they will continue to do more horrifying things, and it may take a long time for today’s leaders in the private sector and education to figure out how to overcome it. But it can be helpful to meet and talk with other people who feel the same way you do — and hear how they are coping.

    Robert Nagle at No Kings protest, October 2025
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  • Music Discoveries Oct 2025-Dec 2025

    See also: Previous and Next (View all)

    See also my rateyourmusic profile and the chart of my Music Album reviews.

    Preface. I am working on a big project that is semi-related to this column. When everything is ready, I’ll publicize it to death, but for now it will probably keep me from updating this page.

    Articles and Interviews

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    Emusic/Bandcamp Purchases

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    Youtubey/Podcasty Things

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    Freegal and Library CDs

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    Reviews:

  • Robert’s Roundup #55 (Sept-Oct 2025)

    View Previous Roundup and Next Roundup (View All)

    MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. MASTODON: https://booktoot.club/@nagletx. Here’s a biographical profile of Texas author Robert Nagle.

    Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited,  and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here. Here is my article about methods and search queries I use to locate ebook deals.

    I have been banned from Facebook, so I have limited ability to research authors, etc. Also, here is my journal of mini-reviews of music albums. I am happy with how it turned out, though I had to query AI for a few pointers.

    Also, I have updated my publishing tips for 2025.

    Indie Author Spotlight

    Mike Royko. It turns out that all his columns were digitized into a 2 million word ebook (Mike Royko: The Chicago Tribune Collection 1984-1997)! The price is a little high $11, but no matter how you look at it, you still are going to get your money’s worth. Royko has always been one of my favorite newspaper columnists, and I wrote a passionate defense of Royko here.

    (By the way, you can always look up the word count for a book by finding it on Kobo’s ebook page (which shows it).

    Under the Radar

    Queen’s Caprice (Stories) by Jean Echenoz (W)

    Reeducation of Cherry Truong: A Novel by Aimee Phan.

    A Taste of Terry Ravenscroft by Terry Ravenscroft. Sampler of his works. TR is a comedy writer in his late 80s. He used to write for British TV and for various comedians. I blogged about him in my first Robert’s Roundup column and even corresponded with him briefly and read his book reimagining Laurel and Hardy called Call Me a Taxi. Since that time, I have noticed that he has written a lot of comic novels — an average of one a year. That genre has recently interested me, so I am definitely going to revisit books by this author soon. Here’s a silly rap song TR did about going old called Grandpapparapper.

    Noontide Toll by Romesh Gunesekera.

    Beyond Sleep by Willem Frederik Hermans. Highly regarded Dutch novel.

    Pride of Eden: A Novel by Taylor Brown

    Waltz in Swing Time by Jill Caughtery.

    The Skin Above My Knee by Marcia Butler

    October: A Novel by Zoë Wicomb

    Shelter in Place: A Novel by Alexander Maksik

    All the Good Things by Clare Fisher

    Lacuna: A Novel by Fiona Snyckers. South African retelling of a story from a character in J.M. Coetzee‘s Disgrace.

    Jake & Mimi: A Novel by Frank Baldwin. “A relentlessly plotted and powerfully written thriller and a breathtaking exploration of the pleasures and limits of sex.”

    The Meaning of Consuelo: A Novel by Judith Ortiz Cofer.

    Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge.

    Angels Make Their Hope Here by Breena Clarke

    The Living Infinite: A Novel by Chantel Acevedo

    The World Is Waiting for You: Graduation Speeches to Live By from Activists, Writers, and Visionaries by Tara Grove, Isabel. Ostrer

    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine Angel. Author of Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again. This is more of a personal poetic investigation than anything

    Three to See the King by Magnus King.

    Upstate by James Wood. Novel by esteemed literary critic.

    Consequence: A Memoir by Eric Fair.

    Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer. Compilation of Singer essays on ethics sold in this low cost edition.

    Perverts by Adam Cosco.

    Hotels of North America by Rick Moody.

    Footprints: In search of fossil fuels by David Farrier. A meditation about how climate change has affected our arts and culture.

    The Jade Twilight by Chris Castleman.

    The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America by Barbara Clark Smith. Political history of colonial times by a Smithsonian historian (written in 2010). (Oops, the price went to 10$ while I was waiting. Have to wait until next time).

    Moira’s Crossing by Christina Shea.

    King’s Indian: Stories and Tales by John Gardner. “Midnight tales for the literary intellectual” as Kirkus put it. Mixed review in NYT; basically the stories are embedded in classic works which are told in a self-aware style. More Barth and Borgesian, I guess.

    County of Birches by Judith Kalman. (Bio, ). Kalman is a Hungarian-born Canadian author who wrote about the Jewish experience and the Holocaust. “The County of Birches is unique, devoid of the usual cliches of Holocaust or post-Holocaust literature, fresh, told with love, devotion and above all considerable literary expertise.” — Josef Skvorecky,

    The Will by Harvey Swados. Tale of three immigrant brothers who fight over their inheritance. National Book Award finalist. Author was a journalist who died at 52 (Obit)

    Lunatics a Novel by Bradley Denton. (W, ) 1996 Humorous fantasy novel about a widowed man who meets a moon goddess of desire (!?) His 2001 story collection One Day Closer to Death sells for 2.99, but is discounted often.

    Bad Connections: A Novel by Joyce Johnson.

    Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleagured Boyhood by George Singleton.

    A Plea for Eros: Essays by Siri Hustvedt. I pretty much buy anything from SH, but I already had a hardback copy; having a digital edition was very convenient.

    Cutty One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained by August Kleinzahler. Prose pieces by distinguished award-winning poet.

    Marriage Artist a Novel by Andrew Winer. (W)

    It’s All Right Now Novel by Charles Chadwick. Retired British fellow writes a roman-a-clef. (Got great writeups).

    Out of My Mind by John Brunner.

    Fever: HOw Rock n’ Roll Transformed Gender in America by Tim Riley.

    Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn. First in the Mindjack series.

    Gorgeous East Novel by Robert Girard.

    Game of X: A novel of Upmanship Espionage by Robert Sheckley. 1965 comic spy novel.

    Generations: A Science Fiction Mystery Thriller by Noam Josephides.

    Gatekeeper: Poems by Patrick Johnson. (Author’s Book Page) Here’s a review: “Gatekeeper is the first collection I have ever read that intimately explores the internet from an insider’s point-of-view. It makes one wonder what frontiers digital natives will break in regard to what is labeled as poetry. I’m not talking slick graphic design and multi-media downloads, but true and honest inner examinations that come bound on paper that you can hold in your hand and don’t have 30 000 songs, all your emails, contacts, and family albums—but something deeper, something underneath the user level.”

    Collected Novels Volume One: Desert of the Heart, The Young in One Another’s Arms, and This Is Not for You by Jane Rule. Early novels about lesbianism by a Canadian novelist.

    Starman After Midnight: A Novel-in-stories by Scott Semegran (Home, Book Page). This was a free Bookbub deal. Semegran is an Austin-based writer whom I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I hope to have time to read at least one novel of his in 2026. Can’t wait!

    Rest of Life: Three Novellas by Mary Gordon.

    An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius by Helen Smith.

    Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman.

    Beautiful by Massimo Cuomo.

    Only the Animals (Stories) by Ceridwen Dovey

    Collected Novels Volume One by Jane Rule. Noted gay Canadian novelist. Includes her first novel Desert of the Heart when gay activity was still outlawed.

    Here Come the Dogs Novel by Omar bin Musa. (W, Home) Musa is a multitalented Malaysian-Australian rapper, artist and storyteller.

    The Raising a Novel by Laura Kasischke. I’ve posted about her before. She’s a poet and novelist.

    Bright Air Black: A Novel by David Vann Bright. (bio, W) Here’s an extended video interview (YT)

    Deep Inside: Extreme Erotic Fantasies by Polly Frost. I’d reviewed Frost’s humor novel, With One Eye Open over a decade ago. She and I her husband wrote erotic stories which they had actors do staged readings for. So I’m sure this is fun as well.

    Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse by Les Murray (W) “Fredy Neptune is Murray’s best work yet, an almost completely successful round-the-world adventure novel in enticing, flexibly slangy (and very Australian-sounding) eight-line stanzas.” Ruth Padel writes, “”Fredy Neptune” is such a page turner, has such poetic authority and ambition, is so linguistically alive and rooted in such intimate humanity, that it should be on every reading list as this appalling century ends. It makes poetry, humor and intimacy out of the worst things, and finds riches, as Murray always does, in grittily difficult lives. This book is full of dignity, vigor, compassion and bite. It is what poetry ought to be, what the ”Iliad” was, or Euripides’ searingly antiwar play ”Trojan Women”: angry, visceral, necessary and — at the end of another millennium given over to war — a force for good.”

    A Dangerous Profession: A book about the writing life by Frederick Busch.

    Crawl Space Novel by Edie Meidav. Historical novel about an 84 year old standing trial in Paris for war crimes. Praised by Thomas Keneally.

    Blink and it’s Gone

    Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. With a $3 credit to my account, I decided to buy this gargantuan ebook to my collection. This book came on my radar on a listicle ranking Pynchon novels (this came out first), and looking at the glowing reviews.

    Grifters by Jim Thompson. Famous hard-boiled crime novel which was later adapted into a major film.

    Collected stories by William Trevor.

    Library Purchases/Printed books

    Sincerely, Andy Rooney by Andy Rooney. I have been a fan of Rooney’s droll columns. This is minor Rooney; it consists entirely of his personal replies to letters sent to him over the decades.

    Andersonville by MacKinley Kantor (W) Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about prisoners in a Confederate prison in Georgia. Two critics called it the greatest Civil War novel of all time. About two decades earlier, Kantor had written two other novels with a Civil War setting. Arouse and Beware (1936) is about how two Union soldiers escape a prison and form a love triangle with a woman who is also trying to return to the North. Long Remember (1934) is about a Westerner who returns home to Gettysburg only to have an affair with a woman whose husband is fighting in the war. Kantor is also known for a 1961 speculative essay, If the South Had Won the Civil War.

    Creative Commons/Freebies

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    Literary Articles and Essays

    (See Erika Krouse’s awesome ranking of 500 Literary Magazines for Short Fiction).

    Here’s an absolutely lovely annotated list of the 25 most important/meaningful magazine covers of the last century.

    Once again, I was caught offguard by the Nobel’s decision to award the literature prize to someone with an unpronounceable name. Here’s Krasznahorkai’s take on the Ukraine conflict:

    That the First World War is essentially repeating itself?! What do I think?!

    It fills me with horror. Hungary is a neighboring country of Ukraine, and the Orbán regime is taking an unprecedented stance—almost unparalleled in Hungarian history. This is partly because, until now, we were always the ones being attacked and losing, and partly because I could never have imagined that the Hungarian political leadership would talk about so-called neutrality in this matter!

    How can a country be neutral when the Russians invade a neighboring country? And haven’t they been killing Ukrainians for nearly three years? What do you mean “This is an internal Slavic affair”?!—as the Hungarian prime minister puts it?! How can it be an internal matter when people are being killed? And it is the leader of a country saying this—a country that has been constantly invaded throughout history. Among others, by the Russians. And these Russians are the same Russians.

    This Hungarian regime is a psychiatric case. There is the inhuman calculation behind it: Maybe they have already killed my daughter, but I would rather accept that so that they don’t harm my mother. But they will harm her. They will kill both. Is it so hard to understand?…

    A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is starting to get used to it. I cannot get used to it. I am incapable of accepting that people are killing people. Maybe I’m a psychiatric case. All of this is happening while, in the digital space, there is a vision of the future promising that the terrifyingly rapid advancement of technology will soon bring a beautiful new world. This is complete madness. While a fundamentally twentieth-century war is raging, someone is talking about how we’ll soon be going to Mars. I hope Putin and his sympathizers will be the first passengers….

    Rant

    I have been going to GoodReads more often. I have noticed that Amazon (which owns Goodreads) has been making it harder to exclude what ebooks you have been reading from your public profile. I am sick of it. Why should it be so hard to hide or exclude a sexy book you are reading from your public profile?

    Capsule Book Reviews

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    Multimedia/Podcasts, Etc.

    Perhaps I already read the speech itself, but this morning I listened to the wonderful Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Bob Dylan (YT). I was surprised at how thoughtful his thoughts about books and authors were. In addition to talking about poetry and musical influences, he gave very personal accounts of reading Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and Odyssey.

    Personville Press Deals

     I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. Prices normally appear highest on Amazon, Apple, Kobo and BN, somewhat lower on Google Play Books and lower on the two DRM-free stores which are Smashwords and Payhip. Personville Press is committed to selling DRM-free ebooks and audio files directly from the Personville Press payhip store or from Smashwords. The prices listed here are the non-discounted price on Amazon. Check the links to see if they are discounted at the moment (it happens often).

  • In Defense of Columnist Mike Royko

    Background: Electoral-vote made a very snide reference to Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko and implied that he was guilty of some serious wrong. I ended up sending a protest and receiving a one sentence answer to google his name and AIDS. I did do that, but barely found anything wrong (a complaint in the Advocate, but no smoking gun really). I don’t know what Mike Royko did during his writing or personal life, but he is one of America’s greatest columnists. Frankly, it is getting a little too easy to accuse writers and comedians of being assholes or bigots or sexist pigs. By definition, writers provide color and personality and humor. Mike Royko’s track record stands for itself and outweighs a few complaints about one or two columns. See: this Cspan Book-talk discussion about Royko and this survey about his life and works two years after his death. Holy cow! It turns out that all his columns were digitized into a 2 million word ebook (Mike Royko: The Chicago Tribune Collection 1984-1997)! The price is a little high $11, but no matter how you look at it, you still are going to get your money’s worth.

    I never lived in Chicago and, of course, never knew him personally. I only know Royko through his writings. After his death, I have read about half of Royko’s books with his columns, and for about 5 years in the early 1990s, I read his syndicated columns religiously. His columns were great fun and often perceptive. He used personas and characters to tell anecdotes (which was a pretty common technique at the time—see Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, Molly Ivins and, even more recently, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who still do this on occasion).

    My background is mainly in literature, and I confess it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read any of Royko’s columns. And I’m assuming that only his best writings were put into books. Over the years, a prolific columnist is going to say a lot of things that don’t date well or that stir up negative reactions at the time. But aside from a few off-color remarks, I saw absolutely nothing in Royko’s writings which would merit the charge of asshole, homophobe, whatever. He did use personas to voice some uncomfortable truths or attitudes. But any accomplished author knows how to use these personas ironically. The tone of his columns run the gamut, but I was struck overall by the humaneness of his approach to social problems and his sympathy for the little guy.

    Perhaps one can dig up a statement by one of Royko’s characters and find something that would probably seem repellent to the modern sensibility. But that happens often for lots of respected authors. Especially when you are trying to be humorous or satirical or caustic, you run the risk of alienating audiences. Whenever a character somehow doesn’t ring true to the contemporary reader, somehow the charge surfaces that the author was a bigot. More often, it’s just that the character didn’t work or that one particular reader didn’t enjoy or disagreed with that characterization. At the very minimum, these kinds of misses can serve as interesting time capsules for language and attitudes. But I’m always glad that a columnist took chances.

    I never lived in Chicago, so I’m open to the possibility that Royko was boorish in person or at local media appearances. But I don’t think it’s fair to compare Royko with today’s media blowhards. Perhaps he just played the part of public curmudgeon in typical H.L. Mencken style. But I regard many of his columns as literary gems. (And it’s scandalous that his books still haven’t been digitized). While looking up Royko’s Wikipedia page, I was horrified and saddened that Royko died at 64 years of age.

    Perhaps there is information about his biography that I am not aware of. But denigrating Royko for using personas to create dialogues is no better than accusing columnist Alistair Cooke of being MAGA simply because he and Donald Trump shared a love for golf.

  • Social Media Linkdump Sept-Oct 2025

    See also:  Previous and Next (View all)

    Three personal notes. First, the Facebook suspension continues. From what I read, it could take months to get restored. It doesn’t affect me, but I think a lot of people upload photos there and don’t store them elsewhere. So a ban could be devastating. Update: It got reinstated 4 weeks later.

    Second, I am happy to report putting together a table/spreadsheet of reviews I have written about music albums. I created a Google Form for inputting data, but the raw spreadsheet was so hard to read and search through that I rarely consulted it. I didn’t even realize that I had accidentally written 20+ reviews multiple times. I never had the time to look into how to create a read-only table that was user-friendly. I even included several tabs offering different ways to sort data.

    I have a backlog of technical tasks to work on. Frankly, if this Facebook ban lasts more than a month, I’m going to have to email Facebook friends to let them know what is going on. What a pain.

    Third, I have started a new series called “Political Pulse.” I really haven’t posted anything substantive about politics on my blog (aside from the usual linkdumps), but I feel that it’s useful to include unvarnished snapshots of my feelings towards current politics.

    I eventually cancelled my Washington Post subscription. Their reporting was really good, but in the last year or so the editorial pages is overrun with conservative viewpoints, and of course WP failed to endorse Kamala Harris. The main thing about the subscription I enjoyed was having access to their book review archive. I will miss that.

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    If you think science and public health are expensive, try ignorance and pandemics. (NYT commenter on an article about CDC and Kennedy).

    Updated research about how likely climate change will trigger a collapse of AMOC.

    (M)odels that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. … show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.

    The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models….

    The new results are “quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%”, said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. “Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%.

    “These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high. We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions.”

    I haven’t done it in a while, but maybe I will try to use an RSS reader again.

    Comment I posted in response to a review of Wizard of Oz remake in Los Vegas’s The Sphere:

    It’s important to remind everyone that the Wizard of Oz movie would have normally gone into the public domain in 2015 — were it not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended copyright ownership of all works in the USA by 20 years. A movie like Wizard of Oz properly should belong in the public domain already, and it should be easier for people to repurpose and recontextualize the work, as the Sphere people have done. That’s the entire point of the public domain — to provide artistic elements for people in the future to play with. Sure, when that happens, it’s a different work and should be treated as such. Frankly, I’m grateful that the corporation owning the movie copyright allowed this reworking to occur, but just imagine what other works might have been created if the copyright were allowed to expire in 2015 (as originally intended).

    …

    The most important thing to recognize about these folks who support authoritarianism is that they want authoritarianism over others but libertarianism for themselves. “We” should be able to tell “you” what to do but nobody can tell “us” what to do. (Random YouTube comment on an interview with political scientist Matthew MacWilliams). MacWilliams wrote a 2016 piece identifying authoritarianism as the prevalent trait among Trump supporters.

    On a YT clip about the 1990s show A Different World, one commenter wrote, “It was September 1992. It was a weekday night my freshman year at college and my roommate, a friend, and I were watching this show when I spoke up and said “We are a bunch of young college students living in a dorm watching a TV show about young college students living in a dorm.”

    Hank Hill does a Reddit AMA.

    Sourcewatch page about Turning Point USA, the organization that slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk ran. That group is amply funded by Koch, Donor Trust, etc. The wiki article about Charlie Kirk gives a rundown of his controversial positions. I’m sure that many will whitewash Kirk’s extreme positions, but he was involved in Professor Watchlist, climate change denialism, the Great Replacement theory, COVID misinformation and in initial organization of “stop the steal” Jan 6 protests. (He wasn’t involved on Jan 6, but had helped arrange buses to send students there; he even testified at the Jan 6 hearings about his role). Propublica and others have reported on wrongdoing at Turning Point, but this had little to do with Kirk — even though he drew a handsome salary from the organization.

    I have nothing against proselytizing, but it seems that organizations like Turning Point funnel lots of conservative money into funding a blowhard to go around campuses to spread the gospel of conservatism. There is no real equivalent funding source on the liberal side; not even George Soros of Bill Gates are funding proselytizing missions. If anything, the liberal side funds speakers who are actually qualified to talk about certain subjects.

    Also, it’s worth asking whether public debates result in meaningful discussion or are just ways to allow certain rhetorically-skilled people to knock down people who aren’t really that schooled in argumentation. One technique that Kirk uses is to note a contradiction in the other side and keep hammering it and then to go off on Gish gallops while the other side is too polite or diffident to stand up.

    I’ve been fascinated by this Cambridge debate between Charlie Kirk and Tilly Middlehurst (YT). Here’s a discussion between a Cambridge debate coach and Middlehurst about how she did it (YT). First, it’s a great discussion about how to handle blowhards.

    Here’s a 13 minute discussion by Roshan Salgado D’Arcy of the climate change misinformation that Charlie Kirk spread in public debates about climate change (YT). The speaker is a climate scientist, and he made this video 4 years ago. Says a commenter, ” one lesson … from watching those kinds of “debates” is to never try and counter argue someone at a podium when the audience is behind them. You can be overwhelmingly correct and you will still lose.”

    It’s probably no surprise to anyone that fossil fuel interests funded Mr. Kirk’s foundation. Emily Atkin wrote about that (btw, her climate change substack is a must).

    To address the YouTube comment cited above. I guess public debates are not a bad idea per se as long as you have two people who have knowledge or experience about the subject. In these walk-up-and-ask-question public debates, Kirk and his crew control the setting and what kind of people participate. It seems more like a venue for Kirk to land his talking points and Gotchas which seem to impress the easily impressed.

    Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote about the dangers of canonizing Charlie Kirk when his rhetoric was deeply antithetical to American values:

    It was unsettling to many to see politicians from across the political spectrum speak with reverence about a man who espoused the racist Great Replacement Theory, which argues that white Americans are being systematically replaced by multiculturalism and by brown and Black immigrants; who continuously claimed that “there’s a war on white people in this country; who said it was “a fact” that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people”; who gave a platform to people who believe in eugenics and race science; who contended that Black people commit more crime than white people and that the blame lies in a Black culture that accepts that Black men “impregnate women and they don’t stay around”; who referred to a transgender athlete as an “abomination” and called “the transgender thing” a “throbbing middle finger to God”; and who declared that Islam, the world’s second-largest religion, “is not compatible with Western civilization” and that it is a sword being used “to slit the throat of America.”

    I had an (unproductive) talk with a family member about the problems with extolling a figure like Charlie Kirk. Perhaps the thing that hit hardest was Kirk’s crazy remarks about Olympics athlete Simone Biles. In 2021 Kirk called her a “selfish sociopath” who brought “shame to the country” by withdrawing from an Olympic event. Then in June 2025 Kirk called Biles a “shock artist,” a “basket-case” and that she “will now be known as a mockery.” When discussing Biles’ acceptance of transgender people, Kirk asked, “is she a pervert or something?”

    Animated Political Humor. It’s crazy how much animated cartoons can get away with on Network TV. Here is a compilation of Family Guy clips. King of the Hill: Luanne is a Communist.

    The Hill gives the scoop about the Facebook Privacy Settlement. (I expect to receive mine in a few days).Update: I received $38.

    ROBERT REDFORD ON THE TWILIGHT ZONE. (It was great — no exhilarating! — to watch the 1962 episode, NOTHING IN THE DARK (Season 3, Ep. 16) where Robert Redford plays a wounded officer which an old woman treats suspiciously. Uncommonly good acting; Gladys Cooper was a stage and movie veteran whose first movie was in 1913 (and had been in Rebecca (1940) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s amazing that Robert Redford had continued making movies 111 years after Cooper’s first movie.

    To my delight, I realize that Cooper had been in two other Twilight Zone episodes, including the equally haunting Night Call (1964).

    Gisela Salim-Peyer on the similarities between US autocracy and Venezuelan autocracy:

    The word autocracy conjures images of police officers violently crushing protests and dissidents going to prison for their ideals. Those things do happen, but for many people, the experience is more passive: Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too…. There is a lag in time between the abstract threat of authoritarianism and its concrete realization, between hoping that your fears are mere paranoia and seeing them fulfilled. 

    From a long history about David Letterman’s Top 10 lists from his show, I found this gem with Casey Kasim announcing (YT).

    Recursive humor: The Falconer on SNL with Will Forte. (YT)

    I really have no idea how reliable this information is, but the number of notable people in Vienna between 1913 and 1914 is pretty astounding. Another source suggests that Kafka visited there also in September 1913 to attend an international congress for Rescue and Accident Prevention.

    FUEL COST FOR EV’S IS TWICE THE FUEL COST OF GASOLINE-POWERED CARS.

    Source: Some readers commented that EVs also have lower maintenance costs than gas-powered cars as well.

    Business Vids: Why America Got Rid of all its diving boards. (YT). This comes from the Business Explains the World series, a great series that does deep dives into engaging business topics. I’m also a big fan of the Paul Solmon economics reports over the decades on PBS.

    Every day or two DAILYKOS runs a long (English-language) update about the Ukraine war. (Archive) That and William Spaniel’s YouTube channel are the best way to stay informed about the fighting. Other reliable news sources: Kyiv Independent, Counteroffensive with Tim Mok Substack and Atlantic Council’s Ukraine Alert. On Bluesky, you can follow Julia Davis (who obsessively monitors Russian state TV) and Anne Appelbaum (who writes about autocracies and East Europe).

    Louis CK on why people don’t appreciate technological progress (YT)

    Did you know the TV show Lost had a (legitimate) epilogue which never was aired? (YT) Blows my mind too (and actually it’s terrific in its own way). Also, the two Lost writers did a wonderful spoof of alternate endings on Jimmy Kimmel (YT). Really well done. I love the cast of that show.

    Here’s a great screenshot I made of books with humorous titles.

    Here’s a Bill Burr comedy routine about growing old, etc. (YT) Here’s a more recent clip on Jimmy Kimmel. (YT)

    Nobel winning author Wole Soyinka finds that his visa request was rejected– ostensibly for political reasons. He recently referred to Trump as the “white Idi Amin”. Fun fact: I met him very briefly in 1989.

    Here’s a nice photo essay by Jason Farago about how astronauts took pictures while on the moon. (Paywalled, gift link)

    My Current News Diet in a Nutshell

    Reality Chex is a news aggregator site run by one woman Marie Burns. I’ve been following her site for over a decade. She personally summarizes all the big stories from major news sources — as well as major substacks (Heather Cox Richardson, etc) and social media. Added bonus: gifted article URLs to the premium news sites!

    NEWS SITES I LIKE This is Not Cool is a climate change & energy blog run by videographer Peter Sinclair. A decade ago he made incredibly informative vids about climate change & climate change denials. This blog contains the latest news & video reporting about climate change, with lots of interviews.

    Guardian (voluntary $60) is a special category unto itself. It asks for a $60 donation, but doesn’t put anything behind a paywall. Reporting & commentary is generally first rate. (who knows?!)

    NEWS SITES I LIKE. The CNN Lite text-only is a great place to read full CNN stories without ads or multimedia. (PS, NPR also has a lite text-only site as well).

    NEWS SITES I LIKE. Electoral-vote has daily news and commentary by two California professors, with reader questions and commentary on the weekend. Initially it focused on election news, but now it covers all aspects of national politics and the Trump legacy. BTW, the site looks atrocious on mobile devices; there is another link specifically for mobile readers.

    NEWS SITES I LIKE David Corn is a journalist & author whose substack includes lots of interesting reports & commentary. I generally avoid following reporters on social media, but DC’s bluesky feed always has interesting stories & commentary. (He also has an Our Land newsletter which has a free trial. But even after it expires, it still sends regular commentary via email twice week.

    NEWS SITES I LIKE Deceleration is a blog/newsletter run by Marisol Cortez. She is a San Antonio journalist/intellectual/writer who focuses on environmental and social justice stories which affect Texas.

    NEWS SITES I LIKE (PT 11) Pro Publica, American Prospect, Washington Monthly, Bulwark and Robert Reich’s Substack all have wonderful analysis and opinion pieces. Sometimes the ground they cover overlaps quite a bit,

    NEWS SITES I LIKE Atlantic Council provides commentary about foreign policy issues (including outstanding analysis about Ukraine). It’s a newsletter, and you can choose the countries or topics which interest you. Voila! You will receive articles via email.

    NEWS SITES I LIKE Sri Preston Kulkarni is a foreign policy expert who ran for Congress (and lost) in my congressional district. In his Seeking a Better Future Substack he writes eloquently about the latest political events. FUN FACT: Sri is the son of Venkatesh Kulkarni who was a distinguished Indian-American novelist who taught at Rice University in Houston.

    NEWS SITES I LIKE . Clive Thompson is a tech reporter & geek who digs up the most amazing things. He drops a lot of cool things on his Mastodon account and every few weeks or so he publishes a summary of his favorite links on his Linkfest — which is really fun to read!

    NEWS SITE I LIKE . I used to like BoingBoing for my unusual/geek news until it went behind a paywall. Still haven’t found an adequate replacement even though Cory Doctorow’s feeds are everywhere. Metafilter is a geek link-sharing site which was really cool 20 years ago, but it’s still semi-cool. PS, there is a $5 fee to become a member, but you can just lurk — as I have done for a long time. For other link sharing/commentary, check out HackerNews , and Slashdot) and certain subreddits.

    Paywalled journalism. Slate.com (120$), Vox.com ($40), Atlantic Monthly $80), New Republic ($20) are all excellent, but pricey. I mean, how many premium news & commentary services do you really need (i.e., can you afford?). NYT is still essential reading, but who the hell knows what the annual cost is– there are so many opportunities to get discounts — especially when you call their customer service line to cancel.

    Other people on Substack, etc. Worth mentioning that almost all of them have active bluesky feeds.

  • Political Pulse #1 (2024, Late August)

    See also: Previous and Next (View all Political Pulses)

    It occurs to me that my intermittent blogging and social media postings might give the impression that I am detached from the political realities of the moment. Far from it. FB mostly shows liberal messages, and Mastodon features insights and outrage. I haven’t felt any special need to express my political leanings on these platforms except on rare occasions. But I have strong opinions and emotions about the current chaos. Here I mention a few random thoughts to give an idea about what I’m thinking about.

    I am outraged about the Texas government’s decision to allow 10 Commandments to be posted in every classroom. I am also outraged by the capitulations of various entities in society to Trump, especially our universities. I never would have guessed that they would give in so easily.

    I am resigned to the fact that Trump’s coalition can pass whatever the hell it wants (at least until the midterms). On the other hand, I am shocked by how often Trump lawlessly steamrolls through existing statutes and just run out the clock on court orders — and gets away with it.

    I am sick of GOP’s new budget cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid by applying means test and work requirements. The mere act of creating more hoops to leap through makes it harder for people to use the plans as intended. “Work requirements” is the phrase conservatives use to describe these hoops, but it’s not the work requirements themselves but the bureaucratic obstacles created by these hoops. For Obamacare, the ability to document income is particularly hard for self-employed and unemployed. Personally I depend on Obamacare and worry sick about the new rules (even though this setback was easily foreseeable).

    Trump’s tariff game is transparently destructive and stupid, and yet Trump loves it because it flatters his ego and reinforces his notion of his power and importance. I am particularly struck by how major businesses have fallen in line to flatter Trump.

    I am depressed at Trump’s decision to separate from Europe and NATO. The Ukraine conflict is a sticky and intractable conflict, and I probably agree that Europe need to take a lead towards a solution, but Trump seems to do everything to foil Europe’s efforts. I’m glad that Trump is finally turning Ukraine into a front burner issue, but meeting Putin seemed ridiculous.

    I was never particularly pro-USA, but until maybe 10 years ago, US did lead the world in education, technology, business and (in some ways) culture. This country’s decision to demonize outsiders and immigrants is shocking because it undermines what made this country so remarkable. I see international students fleeing Trump’s intolerant philistinism in droves; that only accelerates the decline of USA across the board. I am basically stuck inside this country for the foreseeable future, but believe me, I am asking myself how I could escape the state that is a cesspool of conservatism.

    Many political problems are so solvable, but where does the momentum to change things come from? We could legislate gerrymandering out of existence; we could make Puerto Rico and D.C. a state; we could implement the National Popular Vote by interstate compact. I wish every day after each Trump press conference, the Dems or progressives could organize some daily TRUTH CONFERENCE to counter GOP’s repulsive lies.

    Many people seem to have blind faith that our political system will bounce back and recover from Trump’s insane demagoguery. I am not so sure. The second election of Trump showed that USA’s appetite for authoritarianism is increasing. So far the authority of the courts have been respected, but the decisions of the Supreme Court and Appeals Courts were already so reactionary that they already seemed in cahoots with Trump’s oligarchic vision.

    I am depressed by the influence of TikTok and short vids. They are so useful for dictators and bad actors. They are so personality-driven and frankly driven by the sex appeal of youth. I’ve seen how teenagers and many adults are transfixed by all this malarkey and indifferent to nuanced reporting and editorializing just because it doesn’t include singing and dancing and sloganeering.

    Trump’s corruption is so crude and obvious that what’s the point of having ethics anymore? He has manipulated the system to maximize profits for his companies and stock accounts and cryptos. He has thrown off any judicial oversight, fired inspector generals and turned the legislature into spineless Yes-men. Trump is basically a memestock selling worthless tokens and making a killing in the process. It doesn’t matter that it’s doomed to lose value; as long as he’s not the last one to be holding the bag, everything is fine. With the tariffs, a single announcement can manipulate the stock exchange, making it easier for his close pals to make a killing with advanced knowledge of what’s ahead.

    Trump has so many flawed officials working for him. He is undeniably racist (see this and this), and I think a lot of his constituency belongs to the class of white aggrieved racist. Everything has to be the fault of the Asians, or the colored people or whoever is the scapegoat of the moment. If anything, it demonstrates how many American corporations stay silent when demagogues flail about.

    It’s becoming apparent that the Trump Administration is not only corrupt, it interferes with the free market more than any socialist would do. Requiring that corporations and universities remove diversity policies is just as intrusive as requiring that they don’t have racist policies or behavior. Trump Administration requires that companies pay lip service to Donald Trump himself or they will be castigated by Trump personally. Trump has made companies more vulnerable to political influence — to arbitrary tariffs, to DOJ investigations, to blackballing them for federal contracts or to Twitter-hate. For companies to be allowed to succeed in business, Trump expects trinkets and statements praising him and nominating him for prizes. Now Trump Administration is buying ownership stakes in companies and pressuring the Federal Reserve to loosen credit and release politicized economic data. My question: what kind of business CEO would support this kind of nonsense?

    I haven’t mentioned my core issue, which is fighting climate change. Once again, this issue gets lost in the weeds even though the need is more pressing. Climate events are happening with more frequency, and heat records continue to be set every year. Trump’s policies about renewables are not just kneejerk-ideological, they are out of date even in conservative circles by at least 50 years. Nobody is talking about coal anymore; electric car companies like BYD are quickly driving oil and gas out of business. Solar power is now the cheapest source of power generation and will continue to be. The truth is that nobody is listening to Trump anymore except his devotees. Trump is now the biggest advertisement for China’s eco-friendly authoritarianism. Trump is not just evil; his attitudes and actions now make him the enemy of the entire planet. He embodies the pampered aristocrats which demand that devotees eat shit and die. The sad thing about Trump’s backward thinking is that he undermines the main competitive advantage American business used to have. We will miss the opportunity to lead in renewable energy; instead Trump’s stupid policies will leave Americans further behind while the rest of the world benefits.

  • Facebook Obliterates People — and There’s Nothing you can do about it

    Facebook Obliterates People — and There’s Nothing you can do about it

    See also: Facebookdisabledme Subreddit. According to this post, it can take 3-6 weeks to get reactivated. Sometimes longer. I’ve seen estimates of about 1.5 million FB accounts being suspended per month. Here’s an online petition protesting Meta’s actions.

    Update: The account was restored 25 days later.

    Up to now I have been politely indifferent to Facebook — everything it is, and all the problems associated with it. I signed up in 2007, but I didn’t start posting there until summer 2008. For about a decade, I posted things there 5 or 6 times a week, and I managed 2 groups and 5 special interest pages. From about 2018 onward, I posted less frequently — maybe 3 or 4 times a week. More than a decade ago, Facebook changed its algorithm so that people who liked Pages would never see its content unless page owners paid to “boost” these pages. That caused many artists and content creators to move away from Facebook or depend less on it to reach fans. Some have moved onto another Meta property (Instagram), while others have increased their presence on LinkedIn or TikTok. Geekier types like myself have moved to Mastodon and Bluesky and maybe other sites. (For a while I was an active participant on several StackExchange and Reddit discussion boards, but now I mainly just lurk there).

    This year I probably checked Facebook once or twice a day and post there once or twice a week. Earlier this week, I tried using Facebook’s tool to export my data out of FB (which I used to do every year or so). Immediately when I pressed the Submit button to initiate this process, Facebook surprised me by suspending my account and removing all my FB content from the site. At this point, I paid very careful attention to what was going on. Was I on the correct facebook.com domain? I have always been extremely scrupulous about using Facebook and maintaining browser security. I keep my passwords safe in a password locker and use relatively complex passwords.

    Facebook asked me to “appeal” the decision by uploading a recent photo of myself. So I did:

    After I uploaded this photo, I received this message:

    Five days later, I am still waiting and had time to reflect on what Facebook has been doing to me and the world. I don’t like it at all.

    I’m guessing that eventually the suspension will be lifted and Facebook will provide no explanation. Why should it?

    Why have I continued to use Facebook?

    First, because that’s where many older and less tech-savvy users are.

    Second, some of my friends overseas are there, and it’s often easier to reach them through Facebook than elsewhere. I wish more people had personal websites where they can be reached. I wish it were easier to locate the emails of people I haven’t seen in a long time, and I wish places like linkedin made it easier to contact people who were not already connections.

    Third, some content creators (and especially musicians) post updates on Facebook and nowhere else. Some social groups post events and activities on Facebook — and nowhere else.

    Fourth, (I admit it), it is occasionally fun to lurk and read content by people I hardly know.

    Fifth, family and friends have posted photos on Facebook — and nowhere else.

    Sixth, I follow very closely wall posts by about 20 people on Facebook. Many of these people are or were bloggers (and post their content elsewhere), but one or two friends post content on Facebook — and nowhere else.

    Seventh, as I mentioned before, I maintain some 2 or 3 low traffic pages for authors. I don’t use them often, but once in a blue moon, I need to post something on it.

    Eighth, occasionally old friends use Facebook to contact me out of the blue, and that is often wonderful.

    Nine, I do enjoy some of Facebook’s photo management, tagging, etc. It’s pretty easy to post a few nice personal photos and get likes and comments from people.

    Tenth, for a while I used Facebook as a way to feel the political pulse of friends and family. Over the last few years, this is no longer true, often because Facebook serves so much slop that it’s hard to tell what people really believe these days.

    Eleventh, as a publisher and author, I often promote some of my ebooks and creative projects (as well as creative things by actual friends). Frankly, this has been the easiest way to inform many people — even though FB buries a lot of content, and I doubt that friends see many of those links.

    Twelfth, it’s a good way to learn when friends or families have died or have had serious illness.

    Why I am motivated not to use Facebook

    First, I have long been aware of how Facebook violates privacy and resells user data to the highest bidder.

    Second, I am aware of how Facebook ads are becoming more unavoidable.

    Third, in the last two years or so, my Facebook feed has been flooded with posts by unknown people and organizations. I remain suspicious of anything which Facebook has decided to feed me. Often it’s celebrity news or whatever I happen to be doing research on. Facebook often just creeps me out. Sure, I may like Seinfeld and Star Trek, but that doesn’t mean I love constantly receiving “news” from all sorts of random “people” on these topics. 95% of my motivation for going on Facebook is to learn what my friends are getting excited about, not to read the things that Facebook has decided I should be interested in.

    Fourth, in the last five years I have been seeing overall decline in engagement from my Facebook friends. Facebook has not only been clogging the feed with garbage, but clogging it so much that actual friends who might be interested in my posts rarely have the opportunity to view them.

    Facebook and Enshittification

    Cory Doctorow wrote eloquently about how social media services can become shittier over time as the cost of switching to another application increase:

    For social media, the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends, and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there’s the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place….

    …

    This enshittification was made possible by high switch­ing costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neuter­ing it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

    When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that as bad as they’ve made things for you, you’d have to endure worse if you left.

    This enshittification process is pretty widespread and inescapable. Despite this, it still was worthwhile for me to repost my content onto Facebook. Until now.

    Where to Find Online Content by Robert Nagle (Hint: Not Facebook!)

    In a way, Facebook is nothing more than a blogging platform for dummies. If you subtract the privacy issues and advertising and generated content, it’s actually an easy and user-friendly way to blog.

    But I post my stuff at several places. Here they are, ranked from most important to least important.

    1. My idiotprogrammer blog. Almost all my content originates in megaposts on my blog. It consists of 20% personal stuff, 20% political stuff, 20% promoting my stuff and 40% cultural blogging (music, books, movies, etc). I even add to things I posted over a decade ago (such as this, this, this and this). My blog contains lots of things I never bothered to post on social media. I have been blogging there for 24+ years! BTW, the most recent posts are usually a mess.
    2. Mastodon. Now my favorite site, although almost none of my meatspace friends are on it. About 70% of my posts is culture blogging, 10% is self-promotional, 10% is political, 10% is personal. About 95% of my posts were originally posted on my blog.
    3. Blue Sky. This has more users (and more phantom users), but essentially I just repost the same things that I post on Mastodon. I like Blue Sky less because it has a smaller maximum character count than Mastodon.
    4. Robert’s Roundup newsletter (sent by email). About four times a year I send out a newsletter with highlights from my blog and publishing information.
    5. Facebook. I mostly repost the same things I post on Mastodon, except that I occasionally post personal photos and slightly more political posts.
    6. Video platforms. I have started posting book-related things on YouTube. At some point I may have a modest presence on video platforms once the Tik Tok situation is clarified.
    7. Instagram. Despite the popularity, I post rarely on Instagram because it is overrun by ads and spam, it is not easy to browse through and it is cluttered with short meaningless vids. Plus, most of its functionality requires that you use the phone app. I am reluctant to use any of the Meta phone apps for various reasons. No, thank you, I’ll use only my browser.

    Life after Facebook

    I didn’t expect to be forced out of Facebook and my content obliterated. Also, I never expected to be unable to view Facebook’s content. It really makes me mad.

    Perhaps Facebook will eventually restore my account and my access, but from my point of view, the damage has already been done.

    Like I said, I haven’t used Facebook much in the last 3 or 4 years. But I have used it often to look up people, communicate with people whose emails I didn’t have.

    But now I assume that Facebook can randomly destroy your account and its content — and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    From now on, why should I trust Facebook about anything?

    Post-Script: Facebook’s Lie about Downloading your Personal Data

    Facebook suspended my account immediately after using its export tool to export personal data onto my local device. My best guess is that this action triggered some bug — even though I have used the same export tool about once a year without incident.

    When Facebook announced about 10 years ago that it had created a tool to export personal data onto your computer, I was relieved and ecstatic. I could back up my data and keep a local copy for reference. The zip file was about 300-600MB, and I made this backup about once a year. I

    After my appeal was filed, I noticed that the dropdown box on the right side of my suspended account still had a button for suspended users to download your information. But the only info it let you download was your basic demographic data — not your posts or photos or list of friends or comments. That was worse than useless.

  • More publishing tips

    In 2020, I started a web page of self-publishing tips. I’ve been adding to it over time, but it’s become very unwieldy, and so I am making a new overflow page. The original tips page contained a lot of detail, but this second post offers general thoughts about promotion strategies.

    Compared to others, I am not a particularly fast or prolific writer and I don’t write books for a series. With regard to social media, I post occasionally–but not often–and I certainly do not spend time making multimedia content unless I have carefully planned it in advance. I know some people publish commercially once every year and are regularly posting things on social media (and gaining followers, etc). There is value in doing that, but it’s not for everybody — especially for slowpokes like myself.

    The key challenge in self-publishing is deciding what to spend money on and what to forgo or do yourself. You will certainly make mistakes on these decisions. No-budget methods can work occasionally, but they can also be major time sucks with little payoff.

    Make your ebook so that readers will be comfortable spending $2.99 or more on it. A low price point may make a book seem more competitive against the majors, but the jump from 70% to 35% earnings on Amazon makes it difficult and maybe even impossible to break even on what you spend for marketing.

    The first year of your book’s publication doesn’t matter. Unless you already have a track record and an army of followers or subscribers, chances are that you are going to lose money on it. (I’m almost inclined to say the same for the second year as well).

    In-person events are fun — and great way to spend your time occasionally, but they almost never bring in enough sales to make them worthwhile.

    If you publish often, I would go for cheap pre-made covers (and save money). But for occasional one-off books, I would spend a lot of time and money making sure that the cover properly conveys the book’s vibe.

    I hope this doesn’t comes off sounding too cynical, but writing and publishing books are practically exercises in futility and masochism. The writing process may be rewarding on a psychic level, but the production and promotion can be soul-crushing and wallet-crushing for an indie author. In a way you are investing in an idea or fantasy which is totally anti-commercial.

    Reviews are helpful to a point. But having only 2-5 of them is not terrible — as long as they are semi-literate and perceptive. Book description is just as important, if not more. It’s much more important to devise ways to get the ebook in front of people.

    If you write in a genre that is not particularly popular or accessible, it can be perfectly acceptable to pay for a trustworthy person or organization to write a review of it.

    Many authors think that dropping your book into an ARC pool will result in more reviews, especially if the site running these ARCs have some mechanisms to penalize freeloaders who don’t post reviews promptly. The problem is that those who are prodded to write reviews often write superficial and worthless reviews and may not even be well-versed in the genre. I’d much rather have a single thoughtful review than ten reviews which are 1-2 sentences long by people who are just phoning it in to improve their score for the ARC pool.

    Institutions will simply not purchase ebooks if it hasn’t been reviewed in Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly or Kirkus (or NYTBR). Exceptions are possible if the publisher has previously established itself as a reliable provider of quality books or if the book has won a prize. But to even to be considered for institutional sales, you’re going to have to spend $1500 or more per ebook.

    I am generally bullish about videos for marketing. Video interviews especially. Videos are forever! I like short talking head videos, not some pretty graphics and animation. Right now, the bookstores don’t let you link to videos, but I think that will change soon.

    Exposure is much more important for sales than reviews. That is by far the biggest challenge.

    Exposure can be bought, but it often is expensive and can often cost more than the increased sales it earns. Occasionally it is okay to throw money away for extra exposure, but in general you should stick to marketing techniques that pay for themselves and last for a longer period than the short term.

    The reason why so many people are writing series are that 1)marketing efforts will accumulate with time, and 2)you can discount the first volume to cheap or free in order to hook readers into buying later volumes. This doesn’t always work out because 1)some stories don’t benefit from sequels and 2)a number of people will never read the first volume or even if they do, won’t be inclined to read volume 2.

    A cheap way to get exposure is to have a byline and author bio for an article, but frankly very few websites or Substacks attract enough eyeballs to make it worth it.

    Writing reviews is a thankless job, but don’t dismiss the value of doing it as a way to gain extra exposure. This is true especially if 1)your review is one of the only reviews on a book or 2) the website running it gets a lot of eyeballs.

    Chasing down reviews or “shares” from individuals is a major time suck. I just spent a day and a half making a list of individuals who are 1)reviewers and 2)run book blogs. I had planned to send them press releases and offers to forward review copies to them. After a day and a half of note-taking, I concluded that 1)most of them wrote superficial reviews on genres I didn’t care about and 2)almost none of them could bring enough eyeballs to make it worth it and 3)it was hard to imagine any of them “liking” this ebook — and it wasn’t my lack of self-confidence fueling this perception; it was a fact. Another idea — to target established critics or bloggers who weren’t reviewers per se — seemed equally futile. But at least I could conceive of these people actually liking my book. Ultimately I decided to compile a much shorter list of 15-20 names of bookish people or artistic people I knew and send them the announcement. That hardly will produce an onslaught of attention and sales.

    I say this as a longtime blogger and enthusiast, but writing things on your blog rarely increases your exposure. Google used to feature blogposts prominently in search results, but that ended in the late 2010s. Now AI just paraphases a lot of things without really bringing a lot of eyeballs.

    Even though author websites don’t matter all that much for book sales, there is value is keeping the same domain — and not letting it expire. It is really reassuring (and a sign of quality and commitment) when a domain is still around 10 years later. A writer doesn’t need to blog often on their own website, but it should be at least once or twice a year — to convince readers that yes, you are still there and alive.

    It is believed that many who market books are scammers. More often, they are simply people acting in good faith who overvalue the value of these services. You should still be skeptical of what they promise.

    Literary contests are expensive gambles. With some exceptions, it is very rare for a major literary prize to award a prize to an indie author.

    Success getting a teaching gig in creative writing depends on 1)getting a Phd, 2)getting signed to a major press or university press and/or 3)regularly publishing in small literary journals. Winning a grant with a significant cash award can also make the difference (if you are courageous/foolish enough to spend the time filling out all those application forms).

    Online forums are extremely restrictive about what kind of self-promotion you can do. If you try, be prepared for rejection and rudeness from the Barney Fifes running each forum or subreddit.

    Be mindful of your authorial persona and biography. Some details might alienate certain readers, but more than likely will become part of the overall book brand.

    I know this sounds crass, but many first-time authors signed by the Big 5 are signed not so much for book quality but the presentability and youth of the author. Big 5 pay a lot of attention to how this person might come across on podcasts and video interviews and personal appearances. That has always mattered, but now more so than ever. You may not be as exuberant or as hot as the new literary flavor being touted on the talk shows, but don’t be afraid of improving what image of you gets projected to the public.

    ****

    Pinning your hopes on Amazon’s algorithm somehow discovering your book and increasing its visibility to readers is unrealistic. Gaming the Amazon algorithms is indeed a thing, but ultimately the problem of exposure has nothing to do with Amazon. It has to do with promotional efforts on the part of you and your publisher to reach consumers. That part often requires a lot of time and money– and frankly many such efforts don’t work as intended for a particular book.

    I used to think that getting good reviews is the key to increasing visibility. It is not. If I had a great book page on Amazon (with a stellar cover, great book description and 100 5 star ratings/reviews on Amazon) that would still not solve the problem of increasing exposure (even though it would probably help later).

    Amazon provides a lot of (paid) methods for increasing exposure, but I think it is dangerous to rely too much on Amazon’s methods because they literally hold all the cards. (They are practically a monopoly, etc.)

    I realize that I have not provided much useful information here. Here’s one tip learned the hard way. Keeping the price very low is not a very effective marketing method for raising visibility. Maybe 5-10 years ago competing on price was a viable strategy, but nowadays, there’s so many low-cost titles even from the majors that it won’t lead to sales except in certain limited circumstances.

  • Music Discoveries Aug 2025-Sept 2025

    See also: Previous and Next (View all)

    Articles and Interviews

    Here is a spreadsheet showing my reviews of music albums over the years. So far I have 470 albums reviewed, and I’ve frantically trying to post about older albums that have meant a lot to me. I feel this is less musical criticism than an attempt to succinctly describe what’s unique and interesting about albums — so I won’t forget them. (In the last 2 weeks I have posted about 20 new reviews, and feel I will easily reach 500 by the end of the year — and will still not have scratched the surface.

    COMIC-CEREBRAL AUDIO PLAY ON SPOTIFY (64 minutes) (Link) A decade ago I produced a great audio play by Ohio author Jack Matthews. So cerebral that your mind will explode midway through. Premium Spotify users can listen for free — FYI I did the intro and the narration. The actors were great too.

    Here’s a great better late than ever obituary by Giovanni Russonello of jazz singer-trumpeter Valaida Snow (whose compilation I reviewed today).

    Emusic Purchases

    1. List begins here

    Bandcamp Purchases

    1. Begin

    Youtubey/Podcasty Things

    Here’s a rare live recording of the lesbian pop group Fem 2 Fem singing “Switch (You Bitch)” (YT) Fem 2 Fem has two albums at Archive.org here and here.

    I assume that many have already seen this amazing music vid with Saoirse Ronan, but it’s absolutely great (with the Talking Heads note that “We LOVE what this video is NOT—it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.” (YT)

    Here’s an early live performance by Spice Girls performing Wannabee at Hotel Babylon in 1996 (YT). Holy cow, here’s a 17 minute interview they did in 1996 after a Japanese tour. (YT) They were eating dinner and talking and laughing about girly stuff. I’ve always thought their first album Spice was incredible.

    PRE-TEENS COVER BREAKFAST IN AMERICA. (YT) I am speechless by how gentle and jolly this cover version is. The Graystones are a talented California group of young musicians entering the 7th grade. They also do a version of the Logical Song. (YT)

    Here’s some early videos by the Sugarcubes (which Bjork was in before going solo) in 1988. Motorcrash and Deus.

    Here’s a live Gorillaz performance at the 2006 Grammy’s.

    Freegal and Library CDs

    From Library’s ILL, I obtained La Tigre’s 1999 self-titled masterpiece. Wow, it really bowled me over, especially the song Hot Topic (YT). I learned through the album’s wiki page that Hot Topic was a list song (or laundry song). Wiki has a great page about that.

    I have been enjoying Eubie Blake, especially his album The 86 Years of Eubie Blake (which is a must listen — here it is on Youtube). The irony is that after his death it was later learned that he was born in 1887 (not 1883), so he was actually only 82. He said he composed Charleston Rag in 1899, but didn’t commit it to paper until 15 years later. His song, “I’m Just Wild About Harry” became the theme song for Harry Truman’s election campaign. His singing pal, Noble Sissle actually sang several of the songs on the 86 Years album. Blake and Sissle wrote the jazz musical Shuffle Along which premiered on Broadway in 1921 and was the first African-American produced show on Broadway (and it starred Josephine Baker — holy cow!).

    Jody Miller.

    Reviews (Rateyourmusic/Personal Reviews, etc)

    See also my rateyourmusic profile and my review spreadsheet.in Google Docs.

  • Thoughts on the Semi-colon

    (A college friend asked for my thoughts on the semi-colon, and I was happy to throw out some)

    I made screenshots of Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage about semicolons. 

    Conventions for punctuations change with each generation. When editing that Clay Reynolds interview, I noticed that he punctuated things very strangely. In fact, he had taught English grammar and punctuation at the college level for over a decade and read all sorts of grammar books while pursuing his Phd. He used lots of commas and runon sentences throughout the interview. True, he died before he could go over everything again (and so a certain number of these anomalies were simply errors), but I was aware that he viewed punctuation and sentence length much differently than I did. Although he used  semi-colons, he didn’t use many of them, preferring instead to make lots of commas (which I try to avoid doing). 

    He also used Oxford commas (i.e., putting a final comma in a list of items), so that meant more commas in his text. I tend not to use the Oxford comma; that’s just the way I had learned it in high school and saw no reason to change it even though I recognized that sometimes it made sentences seem ambiguous (and I had to be careful about that). So I was more prone to use semicolons.

    (Lately I’ve been using the Oxford comma more often and have noticed that it allows for more variety in sentence structure, which may or may not be a good thing).

    I love semi-colons, but I don’t use them that much. I also use parenthetical statements more than the average writer would.  I also use m/n dashes for certain long sentences.

    I went over some recent writing of mine (both fiction and nonfiction) and found fewer semicolons than I would have thought.  Often I use  parentheses and m/n dashes  instead to  relieve the strain of overly long sentences.

    EXAMPLE: I like semi-colons; on the few occasions when it’s necessary to use them, I sometimes resort to parentheses (but only if the thought  inside the parentheses is simple).

    (NOTE: I really like starting out a sentence with a short statement such as “I like semi-colons;” and then continuing the thought. Also, at the end, I could have also used an m dash instead of the parenthesis).

    With the example, I could have easily put a period there instead of a semi-colon, but I thought it deserved to be one continuous thought. Formal writing tends to avoid sentence fragments, but sometimes a fragment can convey meaning effectively.

    When reading aloud, it should be easy to know when to breathe. A semi-colon makes it easier  to know when to breathe. Good sentences should be light and fluffy and occasionally strange. Although it’s true that semi-colons can result in longer sentences, the semi-colon can relieve the overall burden of breathing/reading  without making the flow of sentences seem too staccato.  

    Horray for semi-colons! I see no reason to avoid them unless they start making your sentences overly long. Also, I would try to avoid using semicolons more than once in a single paragraph if you can help it.

    Some authors of the past have used  multiple  semi-colons  and parenthetical statements in a single sentence to convey long-winded things (I’m looking at you, Faulkner and Proust!) These techniques can work up to a point. I loved reading Proust with all his twists and turns and cascade of mental associations, but found Faulkner’s prose in Absalom, Absalom to be absolutely insufferable. In contemporary times, I don’t think you could get away with that anymore (you don’t want people switching to social media in the middle of an interminable sentence!)

    As I mentioned, my arsenal currently  includes a mixture of semi-colons, parentheses, and  m dashes when trying to convey a longer thought. But that introduces all sorts of punctuation complexities. Semi-colons generally belong outside the quotation marks even if it looks strange. Occasionally, just to avoid having to deal with a tangle of punctuation rules, I will  iron the whole thing out into multiple sentences  even if it ends up making me sound like a dufus.

  • Mobile Phone Stats

    Here are some screengrabs from globalstats about web traffic. This data aggregates data from the previous year (as of June 2025). It’s hard to say how representative this data is of general traffic. and frankly I’m not sure how they define screen resolution. I find it hard to believe that the 2nd/3rd/4th leading screen resolutions are all below 400×800 for United States visitors and pretty much 1st through 6th place for global traffic. I would have liked to see data about mobile phone ownership in the US and specifically screen resolutions of specific phones.

    The most shocking thing is the low statistics about tablet users across the world. I suspect that avid readers like myself use a tablet more frequently than the average person. Of my Internet usage, it’s 50% on desktop, 45% on tablet and 5% on mobile phone. Of course, I’m talking mainly about reading and surfing, but on my tablet, I have always done gigantic editing jobs on my tablet. Ebook and PDF apps allow you to highlight and note certain sections of text which I can use for editing on my desktop. With the Kindle app, you can even email what you’ve highlighted and annotated from the actual text. I simply upload epubs I want to edit to Kindle Personal Docs, input the changes on my desktop and (the most important step!) confirm that the changes have successfully been made by comparing the revised text against the annotations I made on my tablet.

    Summarized from AI: Below is a snapshot of approximate global mobile-browser usage broken down by device category and browser. Estimates assume ~5.56 billion monthly Internet users (all devices) and apply June 2025 Statcounter mobile browser shares. These figures help prioritize testing on:

    • Samsung Internet, Opera Mini, UC Browser and stock Android browser for fringe coverage
    • Chrome on Android devices (covers ~70 % of mobile traffic)
    • Safari on iPhone (covers ~21 % of mobile traffic)