Archive.is link..

Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.

As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

Some that I have enjoyed:

• A Spy Among Friends
• Slow Horses
• The Ipcress File (both the recent TV show and the 1965 film are great)
• Traitors (2019)
• The Night Manager
• London Spy
• The Game (2014)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (both the TV show from 1979 and the 2011 film are great)
• Smiley’s People

A) I have never touched tumblr.

B) I first heard it around 30 years back, so a little before tumblr.

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

You can’t get a lot cooler than that.

I have three "!subscribe pending"s in my list after a session of joining a few days back. For me, they are showing up in my sidebar and I can post to them as usual, it seems. It is just that they don’t change from ‘pending’.

There is https://beehaw.org/c/creative which seems to be fairly active and certainly includes some knitters.

!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz looks interesting.

!ukcasual@lemmy.world might become a pleasant UK based one

I would advise not reading them all together. They were published separately and are best read that way IMHO - just dipped into between other reads. James had particular settings and themes that his did extremely well and returned to often. I love love his tales, but I must admit that reading them them all consecutively does them no favours.

I’m very much a fan of Dunsany - though I’m in my '50s so certainly don’t count as a younger reader. I clearly recall reading The Hoard of the Gibbelins as a teen (probably in de Camp’s The Spell of Seven) and being smitten from then on.

Moving further afield than fantasy, I don’t know if anyone reads M. R. James these days. His ghost stories are still adapted for seasonal TV shorts by the BBC as well as cropping up on Radio 4, but whether he is actually read…?

Another that is underappreciated is George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, which to my mind is easily on a par with Three Men in a Boat, but gets nothing like as much appreciation. But, then how many people read Three Men… nowadays?

Museums - particularly local/folk museums.

As a kid my dad would drag me around them. I was born fairly late in his life, so he would be reminiscing about various things on display but I had no context for them and so no real interest. Maybe I would find a couple of the large items something to play with or on etc.

Later they started to be come more interesting, once I developed an interest in history and then they started to have a value as a resource on low/intermediate tech solutions to actual things I was doing. And then I started to notice items in the displays that my grandparents and then parents actually owned and used…

These days I am starting to find things on display that I used myself at the start of my working life.

I am rather surprised and disappointed with Waldinger’s conflation of introversion and ‘being shy’ here. It does not inspire me to seek out his book.

My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake - which I am (or have been) reading week by week along with the TrueLit sub on reddit. It would be a profoundly different experience to read it without the analysis and discussion going on there, so that is something…

Otherwise, I am reading The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, which is engaging and entertaining, as was her The Hollow Places which I read immediately before. I am also dipping into a collection of the Para Handy tales by Neil Munro, which are a cosy - if stereotypical and patronising - glimpse into another time and pace of life.

I have just returned from a couple of weeks away during which I finished an anthology of Clarke Ashton Smith short fantasy tales (all about the atmosphere: story and worldbuilding are very much secondary and character scarcely features); Haldor Laxness’s The Atom Station (a sparse look at the clash of modern - written in 1948 - and traditional Icelandic values); and Blackwood’s The Willows (an extrapolation of the original idea of “panic” - as several of this other tales are).