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TWENTY OF MY FAVORITE ALBUMS

checkitout-checkitout's favorite albs (LP, CD, or otherwise) as updated on 5 June 2026

ROCK N SOUL, 1950s-60s

Endless Summer, The Beach Boys

The Beatles' Second Album, The Beatles

The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, The Bonzo Dog Band

Got My Own Bag of Tricks, Bo Diddley

Holy Modal Rounders 2, Holy Modal Rounders

Here's Little Richard, Little Richard

Sail On, Muddy Waters

ROCK N SOUL, 1970s-80s

Changesonebowie, David Bowie

The Clash [1979 US tracklist], The Clash

Fire and Water, Free

Europe '72, The Grateful Dead

One Size Fits All, Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention

ROCK N SOUL, 1990s AND BEYOND

The Cactus Al/bum, 3rd Bass

Buhloone Mindstate, De La Soul

Born to Die, Lana Del Rey

Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), The Wu-Tang Clan

JAZZ

Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography, Louis Armstrong

Out There, Eric Dolphy

Groovin' High, Dizzy Gillespie

"Bird" Symbols, Charlie Parker

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Pnin struck me with just how touching and HUMAN it felt compared to the other Nabokov novels I'd read. While Lolita, Pale Fire, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight are certainly admirable intellectual achievements, you can argue that they sacrifice honesty and emotion for detached cleverness. Meanwhile Pnin employs its florid language and beautiful tangents toward making us love this adorable, pitiful old Russian man and all his cute hijinks and his melodramatic backstory,

which makes it all the more effectively jarring when, in the most Nabokovian flourish, the narrator keeps shading like Oh by the way Pnin has ugly legs, and his classes are a joke, and if I had my way he'd still be stuck on the wrong train for all eternity.

[thelocalwafflehouse]

Bro what’s wrong? You barely touched your six egg and treat

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Been having a miserable, miserable time lately, so here's my attempt to take deep breaths and think about GOOD THINGS in my life

My dearest Kaz standing by me and believing in me at a time when I'm not believing in myself

Friends and colleagues who also believe in me, all those people who think I'm able to Do Anything when I feel like I can't do even a single thing

Mathew being a good loaf

Looking for new radio stations in a new town, just in time for the jazz station's Miles Davis Centennial marathon

Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman which, so far at least, is very much in the James Blaylock steampunk vein of high-energy historical hijinks (which is perhaps no surprising as I was turned on to the book by a Blaylock interview)

All the usuals: if nobody got me, I know the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Bonzos, Eric Dolphy, Bo Diddley, Drawfee, the Marx Brothers, Kay Francis, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Tati got me, dig?

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Song stuck in my head for the past month, the Dead has very much grown on me, this is a primo Dead age where the Pigpen era and the Godchaux era overlap.

[fitsofgloom]

A Macabre Scene Is All I Leave Behind: Le Macabre Coffee House located in London's West End. With its distinctive Grand Guignol motif including tables shaped like coffins, skull ashtrays, and wall murals depicting skeletons courting nude nymphs, it proved to be a favorite hangout for the offbeat set beginning with the '50s Beatnik craze and continuing into the underground scene of the '60s and '70s. Fittingly located just down the street from the home office of Hammer Films, the establishment was featured in a 1959 short devoted to bohemian life in Soho.

[caitthew]

i saw this cartoon of milk and all i could think was thats julia drawfee

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Sometimes I think of how certain highly revered cultural touchstones are actually quite silly and have always been silly:

+ that an important and iconic film franchise about Wars in the Stars features a loner named Solo and a pilot named Sky-Walker;

+ that a rock band named after beetles permanently changed pop music by cosplaying as an Edwardian marching band;

+ that even the very mention of "Don Quixote of La Mancha" was originally supposed to be as ridiculous as "Sir Lancelot of Cleveland" or "Don Quixote of Florida"

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"finished cappuccino"

may 2026

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DIARY: 6 MAY 2026

With some extra time before work this morning, I decided to drop in at Little Jupiter Cafe, a local place I only recently discovered a month ago. It isn't impressive lookswise (it has the sparse, minimal aesthetic of a milennial college graduate, still scared to damage the walls for fear of losing a deposit), but I keep coming back to its bar because it has the most delicious espresso I've ever tasted.

Most days, coffee is a bitter medicine I swallow in order to power myself into facing the day. Sometimes I try to savor the coffee, but the average drive-thru or breakroom coffee isn't interesting enough for me to appreciate past "Mmm, hot drinks warm my veins", something I could just as well get from tea, or boiled water, or even a secondhand contact from a warm shower. But Little Jupiter is one of the rare places (at least so far in my relative coffee inexperience) where I actually like the taste of the coffee itself. The espresso is wonderfully nutty with no burn in the taste or the aftertaste, and any milk added is frothed to a delightfully smooth texture. My usual is a cortado (1:1 espresso shots and milk), but I've had just as good an experience with cappuccinos, lattes, and even an Americano, where the taste of the shot would still be completely transparent even with water poured over it (like someone only wearing a sheer nightie, naked body still fully visible).

It's a shame I'm moving away soon. In another life this would have become my regular spot, a place where I'd build rapport with the baristas the way they have with other customers, a place to bathe in the comfort of familiar faces and routines. But circumstances being what they are, with an impending out-of-state move on the horizon, I can only call it a spring fling at best, two months or so of casual occasional coffee bliss. The Northwest calls, with new coffee places to meet.

I completed reading a Jorge Luis Borges collection while I was at the cafe. 'A Personal Anthology' ends with multiple poems and stories that reflect one of my greatest writing hang-ups, that mere words utterly fail to capture the experience, that the words "cup of coffee" will never taste as good as simply drinking the cup of coffee.

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Immensely enjoying Jorge Luis Borges's Personal Anthology, his own selection of his own works, arranged not chronologically* but instead thematically by an unspoken system of "sympathies and differences". The result is that even in simply making a mixtape of his stories, poems, and essays, he couldn't resist crafting another Borgesian exploration of doubling, shadows, pattern, and recursion.

It also falls under one of my pet subjects in the world of arts: creatives who officially declare their own "favorites" or "best" or "canon", and how it can often from those the public may have chosen. (Personal Anthology does not include "Library of Babel" or "Lottery in Babylon", but it does have *the philosophical duology about how time doesn't exist.)

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I sometimes wonder if a big reason for my creative block is that I no longer force myself to explain neurodivergent things to neurotypicals.

So much of my writing life was about puzzling out my undiagnosed thoughts and behaviors and then trying to express those thoughts to normies. But now that I've built my life around (1) learning what my whole deal is and (2) choosing who I want to share my life with, suddenly there is less pressure on me to pinpoint exactly the right words to express a vague vibe that confuses me just as much as it confuses you. I now have prose words to reach the people I want to reach, and I no longer feel forced to reach out to people I don't need to reach out to. And so poetry (or at least the mode of poetry I had grown most used to) falls by the wayside because it's no longer a useful tool for reaching. I'm no longer a prisoner of my own mind, sending raving messages in bottles or howling incomprehensible howls at the moon. I'm home, and I'm just... talking.

[angeloncewas]

[peniswizard69]

My dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called "pasta names" 😳 you'll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

Me: yeah whatever. I don't feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude that better not be another salami

My buddy Gojo pacing: Jacob is lying to us

[mopsaiko]

just dug this out of my gallery what was i cooking

[crowfee]

me when two hosts are flamboyant, one of them likes anime too much, but nathan? nathan’s normal

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excerpt from "Notes After Blacking Out" by Gregory Corso

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ALBUM OF THE DAY

Substance, Joy Division

I've been meaning to get into Joy Division, and reading Greil Marcus's essay on "Transmission" fired my enthusiasm in exactly the right way. Been listening to the whole album on repeat all weekend.