jo

@jlb

he/they

seattle jew; queer & transmasc; sff books, indie games & ttrpgs, art, interesting writing

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jo @jlb7/10/2024, 8:32 PM

dante, personally @dante

@Bigg7/9/2024, 6:12 AM

What are some of your comfort longreads. Is that a thing

One of mine is this 2013 Deadspin piece by Jeb Lund about horse racing's image problem. I can pull it up any time I've reached the end of my social feeds and have a great time. Lund's always been a terrific writer - him and Dan O'Sullivan are also responsible for writing Andrew Brietbart: Big Deal, Big Coronary, Big Corpse, which is another of my favorite comfort longreads and (in my opinion) is responsible for forever changing the tenor of how huge pieces of shit like Brietbart get talked about after death. But the horse racing piece has always especially stuck with me.

Anyone else have things like that? Articles and essays you carry around with you like a photo in a locket? If so you have to tell me what they are

#The Cohost Global Feed

eggbug enthusiast @aidan7/10/2024, 8:26 PM

please add more of your favorite longreads in the comments, i love essays

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in reply to @Bigg's post:

rachel @wholemilk7/9/2024, 7:06 AM

Either the awl or the hairpin's defense of Meat Loaf as a lesbian icon, which I can't find at all and it's heartbreaking,c just some shit from Slate in 2022 (this was like, no later than 2017)

dan @docmatador7/10/2024, 9:20 PM

https://the-toast.net/2014/11/20/lets-make-meat-loaf-lesbian-icon/
Could it have been the Toast not the Awl? Author for the Slate article mentions writing this for the Toast in 2014

rachel @wholemilk7/10/2024, 9:22 PM

Oh my goodness YES the toast of course!!!! Thank you!!

dan @docmatador7/10/2024, 9:38 PM

ahhh no prob! happy to help

Johnnemann @johnnemann7/9/2024, 7:49 AM

This is very Basic but David Foster Wallace's essay collections. Also I was recently reminded of this piece: https://www.guernicamag.com/helen-rosner-on-chicken-tenders/

eggbug enthusiast @aidan7/10/2024, 8:17 PM

If I was writing a syllabus on longreads i would assign DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Caity Weaver's Gravy Boat: My Week on the High Seas With Paula Deen and Friends because they are basically in direct conversation with one another

Johnnemann @johnnemann7/10/2024, 8:24 PM

Did you see the recent (inferior imo but entertaining) one in the Atlantic by Gary Shteyngart? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/royal-caribbean-cruise-ship-icon-of-seas/677838/

eggbug enthusiast @aidan7/10/2024, 8:30 PM

no omg but ive had a deep lovehate of cruise reviews ever since reading ASFTINDA in high school so im very excited to read this

Cam Swamphen @Swamphen7/9/2024, 10:49 AM

My go to's are Jon Bois on the end of RadioShack:
https://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories

And this old blog post on Dark Saviour:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-extraordinary-sega-game-that-played-the-player.110811/

Iro @Iro7/9/2024, 2:26 PM

should you see blood on the last day of travel

@DeathBecomesDavid7/9/2024, 2:37 PM

The Wretched of Middle-Earth by Charles Mills

eggbug enthusiast @aidan7/10/2024, 8:25 PM

I think i reread the entirety of Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak's The Best Restaurant In New York series at least once a year (this is the last entry, i think, but it has a list of all previous entries at the bottom. gawker getting murdered makes these hard to access quickly)

You honestly cant go wrong with caity weaver's entire archive especially the endless appetizers piece

Nire Bryce @NireBryce7/10/2024, 8:52 PM

The Buccatini Saga: https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/12/2020-bucatini-shortage-investigation.html

Nire Bryce @NireBryce7/10/2024, 9:08 PM

green bay packers on the Catan sheep strategy.

article in the clickthrough but this reddit comment is incredible (and apocryphal, probably. poster is giving software engineering advice in post history)

https://np.reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/2sjogc/how_the_green_bay_packers_became_obsessed_with/cnq9tss

charlie stross on Why we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners, which has a lot of concorde history to austrailia I didn't know.

and, ofc, the Classic of English Literature, I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi by Franck Ribery

That Ravioli Railgun Post https://web.archive.org/web/20060917182607/http://www.mit.edu/people/daveg/Humor/ravioli_as_gas

The Case of the 500 Mile Email Limit: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Math, Girls and Socialism, about how east germany closed the learning gap in mathematics between boys and girls https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/11532/math-girls-and-socialism

Kyle @kyle907/10/2024, 8:59 PM

Ada Palmer's still very much relevant essay "On Progress and Historical Change": https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/

China Mieville's skewering of that particular brand of libertarian that keeps reinventing the "let's all live on a big boat in international waters where there will be no taxes or government regulations" idea: https://inthesetimes.com/article/floating-utopias

Belarius @belarius7/11/2024, 7:03 AM

As noted in my reply, "The Secret Mainstream" (Tom Bissell, 2006).

@zaratustra7/15/2024, 9:53 AM

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/fd-how-the-u-s-and-its-allies-got-stuck-with-the-worlds-worst-new-warplane-5c95d45f86a5

in reply to @aidan's post:

dan @docmatador7/10/2024, 9:17 PM

https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio-mishima-novelist-seppuku/
When I think of a longread, I think of Grantland. This essay on sumo was so important to me when I was younger, though it's been probably 10 years since I've read it so I'm not 100% sure it holds up.

@NRS7/10/2024, 9:51 PM

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/07/how-a-sneaky-furniture-expert-tricked-versailles
Guy who literally wrote the book on antiques is caught forging the antiques that people brought to him to appraise.

V(ee?)@atonal4407/10/2024, 11:20 PM

Atchafalaya, by John McPhee. I love everything he writes but for some reason I come back to this essay over and over again. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

V(ee?)@atonal4407/10/2024, 11:55 PM

Some years ago, the Corps made a film that showed the navigation lock and a complex of associated structures built in an effort to prevent the capture of the Mississippi. The narrator said, “This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first among trading nations. . . .We are fighting Mother Nature. . . .It’s a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.”

Moo 🌸@Moo7/11/2024, 12:47 AM

Not exactly the same genre, but 17776 and the vexillology TED talk

leivathan @leivathan7/11/2024, 5:39 PM

It's not exactly an essay, but every so often I go back to infilament's Complete Killer Instinct guide. It's maybe the best tutorial a fighting game has ever had, and a great intro to both the genre and to KI:
https://ki.infil.net/index.html

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