🎉 weekend edition vol.018
crab fest by lena ng and where in the world is jack? vol.02
this is...
/ˈfo͞ofəˌrô/
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a great deal of fuss or attention given to a minor matter
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The Media Guide - a weekly report out of all the new tv, albums, comics, and movies worth checking out
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Weekend Edition - a weekly zine featuring contributions of criticism, essays, webcomics, fiction, art, and more
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Review of Links - a twice weekly analysis and commentary of the news across tv, albums, comics, and movies for paid [+] subscribers
Published by The Independent Variable
Today:
🦀 Story Time: Crab Fest by Lena Ng
🌎 Where in the World is Jack? Vol.02
We've got merch! If you've wanted to support foofaraw, but aren't interested in our paid letter, this is a great way to do so.
There are three different shirts up on Cotton Bureau with the S3 edition available for a limited time. Plus two stickers on our KoFi shop, again with a limited S3 sticker.
But on to the important stuff.
We've got an absolutely wonderful flash fiction piece from Lena Ng. When I first read this, I immediately knew I wanted to publish it. In such a short amount of space Lena establishes a world just like ours with an odd surreal-ness. It's the exact style of story I'm hoping we can publish more of. Delightful.
Following Lena's story we have our second edition of Where in the World is Jack? where Jack dives into Opposite Land and plugs the wonderful new blogging service Scribbles from developer extraordinaire Vincent Ritter.
Crab Fest
By Lena Ng
There were banners everywhere. No one could not know it was Crab Night. I’m not too partial to crab myself, but my husband loves it so I looked forward to it on his behalf. A line of chefs greeted us in their starched white uniforms, with a nice detail of a small red crab embroidered on the right pocket of the shirt. They handed out mallets at the door, but if that didn’t suit you, they pointed to a table. I picked out a hammer. My husband picked out hedge clippers. He’s a weird guy.
The crab was chained to the center of the room. It looked down on me with its wet, beady eyes and swung its giant claw as far as the chain would let it.
“It’s so fresh,” whispered my husband, awed. He raised his hands to the heavens.
“How is it going to fit in the pot?”
He shrugged. The captain blew a whistle.
The crab cracked off the lower leg of the nearest man and gobbled it up. That’s only fair, I thought. We were going to eat one of its legs, why shouldn’t it eat one of ours?
The crab had a whispery voice. I couldn’t speak crab so I had no idea what it was saying. I saw a vision: all things turning into crab. Everything evolves into its shape. Was it a man before?
Or maybe it was a god? Instead of fleeing like the others, amidst the screaming, I clasped my hands and began to pray.
Lena Ng shambles around Toronto, Canada, and is a zombie member of the Horror Writers Association. She has curiosities published in weighty tomes including Amazing Stories and Flame Tree’s Asian Ghost Stories and Weird Horror Stories. "Under an Autumn Moon" is her short story collection.
Welcome to Opposite Land
I've been doing things that challenge many of my basic rules around blogging, note-taking, and general text editing. It's been weird and frustrating, but also fun. Here are a few of the rules I've been breaking:
Rule #1: Blogs are best served as static HTML, ideally generated via simple Markdown files, and hosted on a server that I control.
What I'm doing: I've started blogging with Scribbles. Scribbles is a simple blogging tool "for humans". It's a web app. It's hosted by someone else. It doesn't even use Markdown. Even so, I'm having a blast with it. So I wonder, do my "requirements" around blogging actually matter? I just purchased a lifetime subscription.
Rule #2: All notes should be written in Org-mode files. In cases where Org-mode doesn't make sense, Markdown may be used instead.
What I'm doing: I started using the howm Emacs package a couple weeks ago. Howm is a weird, relatively obscure package for taking notes. It uses plain .txt files by default, so that's what I've been using, like a Neanderthal. Oddly enough, this seems fine. Short, simple notes don't need complex formatting and will not be directly published in any other format. I'm putting the "plain" back in plain text.
Rule #3: All text editing must use Vim-like key bindings. This means using Vim in the terminal and Evil-mode in Emacs.
What I'm doing: I've removed all traces of Evil-mode from my Emacs configuration and have started using Emacs' "vanilla" keybindings. I'm adding convenience bindings for the most common tasks when the default bindings suck, but otherwise, it's C-x Whatever
to do Whatever. And I'm C-n'ing and C-p'ing like it's going out of style. I've also changed $EDITOR from vim to emacsclient.
Everything is so weird right now.
That's it! I hope you have a magnificent weekend.
Don't forget to check out The Sympathizer on HBO Sunday.
Oh! And both Maggie Rogers and girl in red dropped new albums today!
Next Week:
🛰️ The Outer #7
😿 Abstract Tears #4
Stay sane,
—humdrum