The Mandatory Performative Pride Month Post, 2025 Edition – My Head Canon of Fever Ray’s First Three Albums

Here we go again: I am boringly cis and straight white male, so I always need to be careful about what I say, because I am naturally going to be ignorant of many things, because I don’t have to experience them myself. I am in many ways shielded from the world. This is just part of my learning process and I hope people can be patient with me.

While my last post was just me thinking out aloud, I think this is more celebratory and thus more in the spirit of Pride.

Who is Fever Ray anyhow?

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The Mandatory Performative Pride Month Post, 2025 Edition – How Forgiving Should We Be to the Past?

I was reading a book called Making Movies by Sidney Lumet and I have problems with it.

Also, my usual caveat. I am boringly cis and straight white male, so I always need to be careful about what I say, because I am naturally going to be ignorant of many things, because I don’t have to or have a chance to experience them myself. I am in many ways shielded from the world. I am not trying to get angry on anyone’s behalf. I’m just basically thinking out aloud.

Also, Pride Month is supposed to be celebratory and this isn’t.

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AI in Creative Projects: Still Mostly Useless

I’ve been writing a novel. While in general I’m not interested keeping my projects very secret, this one feels like an idea I want to keep close to my chest for now. That doesn’t stop me from bringing up various uses of AI during this process.

First, not one word has been written by an AI. That’s the fun of this project. I want to write, because I like to write and it helps me get away the stresses of my job. There wouldn’t be much point to this if I just let AI do the writing. I will, at some point, go through the text with an AI tool, probably ProWritingAid, to fix the inevitable grammar problems, but even then I won’t allow the AI to make any decisions, just make suggestions.

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Final Destination: Bloodlines Review by Someone Who Hadn’t Seen a Final Destination Movie Before

Some light spoilers, but it doesn’t really matter when the point of the movie is seeing convoluted deaths rather than an actual plot or characterization, it doesn’t really matter that much.

Sure, I had an idea about what the gimmick is, so I wasn’t going in completely blind, but while I tried to find a boxset of Final Destination movies at some point out of interest, I could never find a decent one, so I have never seen the actual movies.

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How I Read as Much as I Do

Some caveats:

1) I don’t read that much. Not counting any books related directly to my work, I read between 30 and 35 books last year. That’s a fine number, but nowhere near the book-diet of some people I know. Maybe specifically because of this I might be a better example for some people, as my numbers are achievable.

2) This should not be competitive. Read as many books as you are comfortable with. Don’t read when it stops being fun or interesting or you have better things to do. Also, if you are competitive about this, that will change your habits in a negative way, because you will choose books based on what you can read fast rather than what would be interesting and you will start to read fast rather than digesting what you are reading.

3) I read a lot of non-fiction. I like to read things that will inspire my thinking in some way. This does come with some benefits regarding pacing your reading.

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