I’m a bit late posting this week’s transmission, due to it having been week one of my dog’s recovery from TPLO surgery. She’s a “velcro dog” and couldn’t handle being separated from me for long, especially in her rough condition. And with her being confined to one room in the house for safety reasons, it was tough to spend a lot of time in the office. That said, I finally got a chance to work up a quick look at some things that came in or crossed my radar this week.

And this coming week, I might try something a bit different with what I post.

Books

Picked up some new and old this week.

The new…

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (2023) edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. →

The Alien Perspective: A New View of Humanity and the Cosmos (2024) by David Whitehouse →

The Singularity (originally published in 1960) by Dino Buzzati →

Run ’n’ Gun: A History of On-Foot Shooters (2024) from Bitmap Books →

The old…

GOD & GOLEM, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1966) by Norbert Wiener

Cults of Unreason (1973) by Christopher Riche Evans

The Minds of Robots (1963) by James T. Culbertson

Shuffle-Brain: The Quest for the Hologramic Mind (1981) by Paul Pietsch

Music

The Jenova 7 album “Lost Sci-Fi Movie Themes” showed up in the mail. “A love letter to the far out sounds of 60s, 70s and 80s sci-fi cinema; a ‘lost’ soundtrack featuring cosmic grooves, dusty breakbeats, fuzz guitars and outer space synthesizers.”

Also ordered the latest vinyl release from The Night Monitor — “Perception Report 3” — soundtracking unexplained phenomena. “Cover story: December 1987. The wild landscape of Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire (UK), where Philip Spencer (pseudonym) and his camera had a lonely morning encounter with a strange being… 'There was a small green creature about 10 feet away,' he says. 'As I brought out the camera it scuttled away and stopped about 40 feet from me.' Spencer photographed the creature. It made a dismissive movement with its right arm and he watched it disappear around a bluff. Shortly after, a silver disc-shaped object shot into the air and disappeared into the clouds.”

Design

Didn’t collect much in the way of design artifacts this week. Though I did acquire a nice modern plastics catalog for Bel-Art, which dates from 1967. The interior is unremarkable, standard stuff, but the cover is fantastic.