Obligatory 100th Post Celebration!

For someone who's been starting and abandoning blogs for over 20 years, 100 posts is really quite something (I'm not counting Tumblr, since you can get 100 posts easily there). It took about 3 years to get here but I managed to pull it off finally. To celebrate, I'm highlighting my favorite posts and will pin this sucker to the top of the blog so that everyone can check these out. - A.B. 4/23/2025:

Photo from Pineapple Supply Co. (Unsplash)

Hello, This is New Blog. Nice to Meet You. (June 27, 2022)

The very first post. I honestly thought this whole blog wasn't going to last this long...

Discomonia (It's in My Legs!) (December 12, 2022)

A repost of a piece I first wrote for Medium back in 2019 about a genre of music that is near and dear to my heart, despite its lack of cool.

Summer of Constant Rain (May 21, 2023)

A repost of a creepy short-short story I also first wrote back in 2019.

The Complete "Army Man", and other zines found on Internet Archive [Something Interesting #1] (June 8, 2023)

The very first of the Something Interesting posts that seem to be my bread-and-butter.

The Semi-Forgotten Poet from Head Tide, Maine [Something Interesting #3] (June 9, 2023)

When I read "Richard Cory" for the first time, I remember laughing out loud once I got to the end. Robinson is known for being pessimistic himself and most of his work carries around a dark humor that's kind of jarring to read from the late 1800s. I usually associate that time period with really flowery, overly verbose, and melodramatic language. Robinson feels like the other American Realists that we're pushing back against that shit, similar to Frank Norris or Stephen Crane. He was still able to work within rhyming structures and formal meters but it never feels stilted or forced. He remained blunt but somehow eloquent too.

An Alternative Reading Recommendation for Those Tired of Searching [Something Interesting #5] (June 23, 2023)

A collection of links to various publishers and Best-Of lists for books, which is also my most-viewed post so far (at 30 views)

Playing the Pilcrows [Something Interesting #7] (June 25, 2023)

If you’ve never (or rarely) come across them before, the pilcrow (¶) or “paragraph mark” is traditionally used while editing a document to indicate where a break in paragraphs should exist. You usually first encounter them during middle school/high school English but don’t really get to know them well until you take a journalism course at some point, where they used to be commonly used when proof-reading copy. To be even nerdier – and to quote Wikipedia – the pilcrow was used by medieval writers “to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of visually discrete paragraphs was commonplace” or to mark a new sentence altogether.

Backgammon: A Miscellany

The new highest viewed post (at 11 views) and my favorite of the miscellanies I've posted so far.

Add Some Crunch to That Pop: Important Power Pop Albums [Something Interesting #30] (July 21, 2024)

One of my favorite genres of music is both pretty ubiquitous and mostly unremarked about other than every once in a while by other music geeks: power pop. That's also for good reason, since admittedly it's just Dork Rock for most people. The usual description gives away the game early on - "it's as if the Beatles or the Beach Boys didn't stop making their early stuff but also got heavier somehow." At its most reduced elements, it's just lonely boys singing about girls and cars over power chords for 3-4 minutes at a chunk.

April 10, 2025 (April 10, 2025)

The very first of my recent shifts to journaling here, which appears to be a major drive to keep posting regularly instead of once every 4-5 months.

Sounds of Living, In Spite of a Junta: M.P.B. from the 1970s [Something Interesting #46] (April 22, 2025)

My most recent Something Interesting, this one actually took me the longest time to develop and write. I feel more inspired now to focus on taking my time for quality posts and think this might be the finest of my writing here so far.

A key way to find out about these events and periods is by checking out the pop culture that sprung from them. A good point is that 1970s Brazil had a wealth of music that still excites today. The genre most of it falls under - Música popular brasileira or M.P.B. - is technically a catch-all for all Brazilian pop music. There was a lot of innovation and stylistic changes occurring during that time, though, due to continuing in a line from the bossa nova and Tropicália threads laid during the 1960s.