Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra@wandering.shop

oh well at least it's not twitter threads amirite

I think I've successfully retrained myself away from doing too many political commentary threads on social media, but the (positive?) result is that I'm now doing more stuff like this: this week I made a whole poetry chapbook (which is, of course, full of political commentary) https://culmsheath.itch.io/ion-unnatural

the unending rumble of a cement mixer in my ear, as if it were a small but persistent animal wearing down its claws on the folds of the right side of my brain

I wrote a long, dense three-part essay about Sri Lanka, Sinhala Buddhist politics, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. It starts here: https://vajra.me/2019/12/31/abyss-brink-blood-and-dust-part-1-of-3/

I'm very happy with it: I was hoping that starting a Patreon would actually help me write more in-depth exploratory essays and it seems that this is working! How rare is it to plan something and then actually have it work?

Post-election, Sri Lankan journalists already being forced off Twitter by harassment.

it's a hard day for Reasons so I am day drinking while this good boy keeps me company

Old unfinished drafts of stories that I hadn't worked on for a while tend to grow stale in my mind—I always remember them as being far more rough and unpromising than they actually are. But working on them again—almost always—reveals that it is only the memory that is stale. When the dry crust comes off the surface, underneath is sap still as liquid and fresh as the first day. It's just that if you don't go back to it you'll never find out.

The state of the world and the lubricated ease of social media together conspire to turn us all into (if not journalists per se) opinion columnists and unpaid political analysts, and I'm not sure how useful that even is as a contribution to (which, even?) public sphere, but I do know that living in it too long makes my throat feel dry.

I'm trying to teach myself—again, as one seems to need to do—the joy of the written word, the sentence, the paragraph; to remind myself why I am a writer, and specifically a writer of fiction, and poetry.

I love Mandela Effects (basically weird mass false memories) and discovered only today that there is actually minor Mandela Effect about where Sri Lanka is—a surprising number of people seem to remember it being directly south of India, rather than off-center to the southeast https://mandelaeffect.com/sri-lanka-location/

I really like the option of a single-column interface in the newest masto version. Always had trouble navigating the multi-column interface—this is much simpler.

Blindspotting is such a good film.