Posts in the category “media”

nikhedonia, noun: The pleasure and satisfaction derived from the anticipation of success. A harmless indulgence, and a prudent one, too, since success comes only to some but nikhedonia is freely available to all.

“Off to golf so early, darling? Hadn’t you better have your little nikhedonia session first? You know how badly you play when your gummata are troubling you.”

from The Superior Person’s Book of Words, by Peter Bowler

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry;
The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy;
The books that people talk about we never can recall;
And the books that people give us, oh, they’re the worst of all.
Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862 – March 26, 1942)

DirecTVEvery month I get a worthless email from DirecTV touted as my “snapshot”. It’s just a marketing email with links to pay my bill!

It would be really awesome, though, if they actually sent me a summary of my viewing habits for the month instead. “You watched twelve hours of American Ninja Warrior,” for example. Or, “Your living room DVR played 37 hours of the smooth jazz music station this month.”

1984

1984

The future is always closer than you think.

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif — books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined — to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can’t imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is.
Louise Erdrich

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.