This is installment 1 of good consumer:: my apparent response to everyone having a Substack which is also a weekly roundup of what I am consuming online and not. (I am considering this sort of a vertical of my twitter feed.) Installments will always appear in the form of lists, and I'll upload a new one every Friday. Thanks for reading.

I am actively

• reading McKenzie Wark's forthcoming LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH from Verso. I will write about it soon.
• editing Jonathan Maskit's forthcoming BICYCLE from Bloomsbury.
• caught up on and reading BOY ISLAND, a sweet and beautiful comic about gender that's released in parts on Twitter by Leo Fox.
• suddenly really into book binding again, mostly on account of a very successful trip to the local art store. I stupidly took to heart the Google reviews which called the owner and shopkeep rude and overbearing, and avoided the store for so long on that baselessness that there was almost no way my visit could go badly. She was incredibly helpful and friendly. I walked away with lots of big sheets of paper.

I also

• kept up with the lost Titanic submarine against my will. My single favorite tweet about it is this one. Seeing as I've spent a lot of time thinking about boats and rich people, and their interactions--I watched season 8 of BELOW DECK on my recent vacation, began editing my ridiculous and stupid-to-me essay on the subject, and spent some time in Maine staring at various sailboats and yachts--I feel irked by the suddenness with which this is now a popular discussion topic. Of course, a submarine is different from a boat. The fact that it was filled with billionaires feels too absurd to be true. I digress.
• watched all of season one of HACKS in one day. It's a good show--particularly, in my opinion, Meg Stalter's ridiculous performance as terrible assistant Kayla, and Jean Smart's perfect/irreverent/mean-but-lovable uber-famous Deborah Vance.
• by way of research, read this interview with McKenzie Wark about another book of hers, PHILOSOPHY FOR SPIDERS about Kathy Acker. Research in multiple senses: I wanted to get a better sense of Wark for my writing on her next book, since I am only now becoming better acquainted; but also to begin to piece together Acker, who I'm reading and trying to understand. I like the class talk here, and precisely identify with and understand the petit-bourgeois/prosecco proletariat slant of Wark's identity. And I really appreciate the end of the interview, where the interviewer describes the book as "[expansive of] the notion of what an archive is because much of Kathy was archived in you, in your body, in your memories, and your feelings." Living, moving, changing archives!
• listened to Aphex Twin's SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS 85-92 a lot. It's good editing music (until I get to Ageispolis, which inevitably runs Die Antwoord's "Ugly Boy" through my head, and then through the queue).
• thusly listened to Aphex Twin's single "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f". If I can say anything about the single it's only derivative; I infrequently listen to "jungle mixes" on YouTube, usually attached to video game sound tracks/scores, which have similar sounds to this single. I have heard it is "the most Aphex Twin-sounding release in twenty years." But I don't actually know how to write about music. So, instead, I'll direct all to Arca's post thanking Richard for his genius, and which might hint at some type of collaboration on his newly-released album, the first in five years? This is baseless speculation on my part.
• dream of Pato Thai's yellow curry, the days of which I have left to procure it are fast dwindling. Fortunately it is not the best yellow curry I've had, just the one that I've had the most of. I could write a yellow curry essay, but since it would be annoying, I will hold off for now.
• discovered this Deep Sea website which lets you scroll the depths of the ocean and visit the various creatures which reside there. This is inevitably related to the submarine. As I've never been afraid of the ocean, really, I had a laugh at this person's expense (they who introduced me to the website in the first place). But from the anticipation post-tweet, or from the fact that the deep sea at some point is titled "THE TWILIGHT ZONE," I also had to stop scrolling.
• read this essay by Eleanor Stern in THE NEW INQUIRY about "folk etymologies," e.g. the fake histories behind certain turns of phrase used commonly in the English language. The essay ultimately urges a reader to think more deeply about two things: how an artificial story stands in for our knee-jerk paranoia about saying the wrong thing; and how exploring the true etymology of a phrase can lead us towards a clearer understanding of our own "hidden histories" which are not necessarily exclusively tied to the sinister, nasty, racist, and ultimately undesirable parts of our past. How, Stern poses, can the history of a phrase, of language, be embraced as exciting rather than indicting? I'm particularly drawn to the comparison Stern makes between this false historicizing (e.g. narrativizing) of our language and true crime as sites of truth written through fiction. "If you can’t fix the problem," she writes, "you can at least expose it. If that doesn’t work, then conjure a fiction or a half-truth or an exaggeration, a parable that gets your meaning across with brutal efficiency, whether that’s a true crime podcast or a false etymology."
• read another essay--I suppose I do this a lot--this time in LETRAS LIBRES, called "La muerte de la escritura". My Spanish is not remotely up to snuff--I had a translator opened in another tab for every third sentence--but my sense is that this isn't necessarily an interesting or unique take. It's too early to call anything related to AI and what it is (or isn't) killing; regardless, I like the closing sentiment which poses writing as a sickness, fundamentally untreatable (or tread-able) either by gadgetry or bad pay.