Tag: philadelphia

ON STRIKE

Francis BassLeave a comment

MYSELF AND SEVERAL THOUSAND OF MY FELLOW AFSCME DC 33 MEMBERS ARE ON STRIKE!

AFSCME DC 33 REPRESENTS OVER 9,000 MUNICIPAL WORKERS IN PHILADELPHIA, FROM ASPHALT RAKERS TO SANITATION WORKERS TO LIBRARY ASSISTANTS LIKE ME.

IF YOU LIVE IN PHILLY GET OUT TO A PICKET LINE. 1515 ARCH THE MSB AND CITY HALL COULD ALL USE BODIES. 1515 ARCH IS 24/7, DROP BY ANY TIME. UNITY CAUCUS ON INSTAGRAM IS A GOOD SOURCE OF INFO AND REQUESTS FOR SUPPORT. WE DON’T NEED WATER BOTTLES!!! COLD TREATS WILL GENERALLY BE APPRECIATED ANYWHERE. OTHERWISE, ASK WHAT’S NEEDED THEN BRING IT. PHILADELPHIA WORKS BECAUSE WE DO!

IF YOU DO NOT LIVE IN PHILLY, YOU CAN FILL OUT THIS MUTUAL AID FORM SET UP BY A FELLOW DC 33 WORKER AND SEE WHAT WAYS YOU CAN HELP.

YOU CAN ALSO VENMO ME @Francis-Bass. I APPRECIATE IT.

ONE MORE TIME PHILADELPHIA WORKS BECAUSE WE DO!!!! SOLIDARITY FOREVER!!!!!!

Public Domain Day 2025: Philly Photos!

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Happy (one day late) Public Domain Day!!!! Yesterday, on January 1, 2025, works from 1929 entered the public domain, including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and The Skeleton Dance! You can read more about the Public Domain and what’s entering it this year on the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s 2025 page.

As always, I’m celebrating by releasing one of my works to the Public Domain. Actually, a collection of works—this year I’m ceding a bunch of photos of Philadelphia I’ve taken over the past five years. I am going to try to upload them to Internet Archive and Flickr sometime soon, but I want to take the time to add useful metadata to them. So for now you can just look at them on this site, or download them in one big zip file. I have more ambitious plans for next year. For 2025, this is what I’ve got.

I also normally try to write a post about the public domain or something … yeah I got nothing this year. You can see all my previous posts about the public domain, and all the works I’ve ceded to it, here. Maybe read my 2021 post, “A Plea for Authors to Consider the Commons”, if you haven’t already. It’s relevant again because this year, four major publishers—Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley—won their suit against the Internet Archive, forcing the Internet Archive to end its practice of Controlled Digital Lending. Fortunately, the judge signed an order stating that the court’s decision only covers books which the publishers have made available as ebooks. So the Internet Archive can still practice Controlled Digital Lending of books which are otherwise not digitally available—and that’s a lot of books! It’s not such a bad outcome as it could’ve been. But fuck these publishers and fuck the AAP and fuck US copyright law and fuck Sonny Bono, forever.

Year in Review and Year to Come

Now, some quick non-public-domain-related notes.

It’s been a long year. I’ve been busy. Mostly writing this stupid novel. Novels suck. What an awful form to exalt. What did Borges say? “What laborious and impoverishing madness, composing vast books; developing an idea for five hundred pages whose perfect oral exposition fits in a few minutes.” [“Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos.”] So I’ve gotten a lot done, but not much that’s in a ready, shareable state. Here are three cool things I put into the world in 2024:

And here are three cool things I hope to put out in 2025:

  • A halloween sadboy novella
  • Another short story zine, or two
  • A new short story in the April issue of Apex Magazine!

I’m very excited about that last one. The story, “I Remember a One-Sided Die,” will be my longest story to ever appear in a magazine—just over 7,000 words. So, look forward to that. Also, very soon I’ll release a big long post containing 40+ mini-reviews of movies I watched in 2024. And I’ll have another new year comic.

Okay happy new year happy public domain day here we go again another lap around the sun see you again soon!

Spooktober 2024

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A larger than life size skeleton posed with arms raised in front of an obelisk grave in the Woodlands cemetery in Philadelphia

Every year around October I like to read horror books and you can see all my previous posts about that here and this is this year’s post.

This year I had a couple false starts with some really insipid contemporary horror novels, so I wasted time on those and didn’t finish them, and only ended up reading one prose horror novel—a novella, actually, Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape. I also read the graphic novel A Guest in the House by E.M. Carroll, and I watched a bunch of movies, and I went to some graveyards, so I’m just gonna throw all that into this post too. Enjoy! 🎃

What I’ve Been Reading

Low Kill Shelter by Charity Porpentine Heartscape – A virus has spread across the world which turns its victims rabid, and causes canine-like changes in their jaws. But it hasn’t spread so thoroughly that society has collapsed—in fact, the world is still running along as normal. You still have to work. And everyone has given up on discovering a cure, even the companies supposedly funded to do that. The officially sanctioned cure now is just to execute the infected person.

The novella follows a man who is keeping his infected friend chained up in a closet in his apartment, studying him and trying to find a cure on his own.

This is quintessential Porpentine—a dead-eyed vision of the world which brings the grotesque and the banal smashing together, transgressive in a way that doesn’t feel like just a stunt, transgression as a by-product of probing deep into pain, discomfort, and rabid desires. The book excels in attitude, style, and narrative voice, but the plotting felt a little stilted. At a certain point it just starts going from one archetypal monster movie scene to another, and loses the extreme tension, the claustrophobia, the push-and-pull dynamic of the beginning. Overall I enjoyed it, but it lost its edge about halfway through.

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