Weekly Digest 040

Month of April + 5/1/2026 - 5/8/2026

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

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🙋‍♂️ Miss Me?

Daddy’s home. Here’s your milk and cigarettes, kiddos. I know you missed me and I’m glad to see you didn’t burn the place down while I was away.

Jesus tap-dancing Christ, did I have a hard time getting back into writing this update. This was initially meant for last week, but inertia is a helluva force. I have this sort of ‘active’ lethargy. The stuff I want to take care of slides down the list, so the stuff I “need” to take care of rises. Of course, “need” is relative and subjective. The past several generations didn’t “need” to do a lot of the bullshit we “need” to do today.

Anyways, what I’ve been up to…

We took a family trip to Florida to visit my folks. Kiddo got to visit his first zoo and get up close with a tiger. We also too him on a pirate cruise, complete with sword-fighting and 10am rum drinks for his parents. Air travel with a 3+ year old is its own special kind of hell, but it was definitely worth it.

Big Kitty

The day after we returned, a couple friends from Boston stopped by for pizza and drinks. They’d been spending the month in Stowe, wrapping up the ski season. And the next day, we loaded the humans and dogs into the Reads-Mobile for a trip to Cape Cod to visit my in-laws. This was for Kiddo’s school vacation week, which the Mrs. and I had to work through, so her folks helped watch Kiddo.

And the day after we got back from that trip, we had a different pair of friends visit from Massachusetts. My best friend, his wife and kiddo were vacationing nearby so we got to have them over to catch up and grab a bite to eat before collapsing after a few whirlwind weeks.

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During my hiatus, both the Celtics and the Bruins¹ managed to get themselves eliminated from the playoffs in ignominious fashion. This freed up a lot of my evenings after work, so I binged the Timothy Olyphant series, Justified, or as it should be called: Qualified Immunity (h/t to lchristopher). It was good-guy-with-a-gun junk food, but Olyphant is just so damn charming. It’s based on “Fire in the Hole” by Elmore Leonard; I really enjoyed it and loved noticing all the character actors pop up in it, including a villainous Margo Martindale. The series is also Walton Goggins’ coming-out party. He gets better and better each season. I’m probably going to rewatch Deadwood next to continue my Olyphant arc (fyi for Deadwood superfan, Tom Schecter).² I did also download Justified: City Primeval but much like the newest Matrix movie, I’m turned off by the first 15 minutes or so.

I’ve also spent a few hours a week plugging away at Crimson Desert, dumping just shy of 50 hours into the starting area of this game. I’ve been “altering my state of consciousness” and then just vibing my way around the world of Pywel. Cutting down trees, hunting animals, robbing houses… normal hero stuff. I already have two pet dogs and I’m about to adopt a third. My character fit, though, needs significant work. The combo of CD and Justified is making me realize I need to go back and finish Red Dead Redemption 2. A cowboy’s work is never done.

And I’ve been working through my transition plan at the bill-paying job, even though they’re well and truly fucked no matter what I do now. With all the pinballing between states and airports, ups and downs, I’ve been leaning heavy on my usual vice to pump the life-brakes at the end of each day. Usually not a recipe for productive output.

Long story short: I’m back, and worse than ever.

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📚Book Bits

• Statues to Silence by James Ryan

  • My assignment for the The Substack Review which I delayed for far too long.

• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

  • Not bad, but my least favorite Ellis to date. I prefer The Shards over LTZ, I’ll probably crack into Imperial Bedrooms at some point.

• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman (Finished)

• The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman (Finished)

• The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman

I’ve fallen into the abyss of Dungeon Crawler Carl, specifically the amazing narrated/acted audiobooks. A better, funnier Ready Player One meets Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on acid. There’s a high likelihood that I will finish this series before moving on to anything else.

Recent Book Haul:

• Bloodline by Lee Clay Johnson

  • First book released by County Highway’s Pan-America imprint. I feel like this will be a nice chaser to my recent Justified binge.

• Rough House by Alison Lyn Miller

  • Picked this off the free ARC rack at my local bookstore; it’s about pro-wrestling so right in my wheelhouse

• Blondie by Joyce Carol Oates

• Musashi: Book One by Eiji Yoshikawa (trans. Alexander Bennett)

  • Beau Watson wrote about the Book of the Five Rings recently and reminded be that I’ve wanted to read this since I finished Shogun a few years back³

If you notice the book haul start to peter off, it’s because I am trying unsuccessfully to read from my existing stacks. I have a sneaking suspicion my books are producing offspring without my knowledge, because the stacks never stop growing.

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💡Substack Spotlight:

So much! I am digging myself out of the massive deluge of Substack posts I saved from over the past month. It’s difficult to pin down a handful to highlight, but here goes:

• Sum Flux v6 Open Call - Stream of Consciousness

• Live Read of Cherry Kills by Sean Thomas McDonnell.

  • Featuring Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Hippie Drillsgt, Emily S Hurricane and Tom Schecter

• will christopher baer has been on a tear with his essays lately:

  oh, you pretty things

• Nightingale Press’s Ambassador Spotlights

  • Here’s the one for Lila and the rest are linked on NGP.

• Edward.Marlo.Ruiz’s Paragraph series - EMR is sharing short writings from various different authors and voices on Substack on different topics. Here’s a smattering:

  • Isolation by Saint-Lazare

  • Teeth by Hylia Corvidae

  • Steven Jesse Burnstein by Adriane Lord

  • Tics by MA Knight

• If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

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🖋️Writing

I missed three weeks of journaling which might be the longest break I’ve ever taken from writing, since 2010ish. I mentioned last time that I was interviewing for jobs and that was soaking up my mental bandwidth. That, at least, is in the rearview but with great power a new role comes new responsibility. We’ll have to see how that shakes out.

I will say that I did sit down with my scratch notebook and start to write out some ideas. I’m trying to habituate myself to more unstructured “playful” writing, and to start “writing through” my story challenges. Constantly battling that internal perfectionist.

There will be a number of reviews coming over the coming weeks as well, so eyes peeled for that.

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🌸Fleeting Thoughts

Spring has finally come to Vermont, and with it a nigh-endless supply of projects to do around the Reads Compound. Spring is a big audiobook season for me since I’m already wearing earplugs for the lawnmowers, leaf blowers, sanders, and chainsaws I’ll be using. I was recommended the Red Rising series as an audio series to dive into post-Carl. I’m always open to audiobook recs, if you’ve got any.

Random Thoughts that fit nowhere else is this update:

• I’m working on a purposeful de-optimization of my life.

• AI is an atomic bomb, built by socially damaged narcissists. None of them have read the Bhagavad Gita.

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🍻+🤙,

— V

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1. Congrats to Ed Park’s Buffalo Sabres, Canada’s new favorite team.

2. If you have not seen Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix, Olyphant is hilarious in it opposite Drew Barrymore who I generally find borderline annoying but is also great in SCD. Big recommend.

3. I’m obsessed with Samurais, Cowboys, and Knights… because I’m 6 years old.