Effortless Malaise

@gograh.bsky.social

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culture junkie raconteur

the robot Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000. He sports a hoverskirt that supports a barrel-shaped torso with springy arms and white hands. His head is a transparent gumball machine globe without facial features like eyes, nose, and ears. He has a beak-shaped mouth that could double as the dispenser for the gumball machine globe just above it.
a wooden case from the first half of the 20th century with hammered metal sides advertising the Milwaukee beer Blatz, “The Beverage of Quality.” Likely held 24 12 oz bottles.
book jacket for Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove. There is a spaceship in the upper left corner diagonally facing the corner. A spill of rainbow-colored exhaust winds its way diagonally through the frame toward the lower right corner. The title of the book is splashed across the middle of the cover in 3D lettering that also incorporates rainbow colors. A wide-open mouth with vampire fangs completes the image, with the top and bottom rows of teeth “eating” the title.
the book jacket for Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei, featuring a calm sea and blue sky dividing the image in half. A sailboat sits in the middle, with a crescent moon above and to the left. Bright red, purple, and blue ribbons of color wave through thr upper left and lower right diagonals of the image.
criterion collection editions of Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Killing, Anatomy of a Murder, Repo Man, Blood Simple, The War of the Worlds, No Country for Old Men, and Sorcerer
image that shares information relaated to “You beat your record reading streak” showing 144 weeks in a row and 1,000 days in a row of reading.
the book jacket for Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson, featuring a red and black background with the title ina semi-gothic font. The illustration features a winding, two-lane road in the bottom third with a human skull that has vampiric, elongated incisors “eating” the road
a picture of a red restaurant table with a wooden plate with a stone molcajete stuffed to the brim with crab legs, mussels in the shell, fried tilapia, octopus, scallops, and clams in a spicy tomato broth. Butterflied shrimp hang from the rim of the molcajete and there is sliced crust bread on a plate just off to the side.
book jacket for All the Fiends of Hell by Adam L.G. Nevill, featuring a black background and an oblong, demonesque red head with an open mounth of white fangs and a featurless face except for a giant, gaping hope where the eyes and nose should be. Jagged spikes ring the sides of the head.
The book jacket for Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, featuring a background of residential houses in a neighborhood, with a power/telephone pole slightly askew to the right. Floating in midair to the left is a woman in a tattered dress. We see her from behind, her hair and dress disturbed by the wind. She is bound about the torso by wire and her left hand is at an angle, pushing against the wire. There are leaves blowing in the air around her and everything is cast in an eerie, greenish hue.
the book jacket for Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll featuring a bright yellow background with a rectangle in the upper third. Within the rectangle is a posterized closeup of a woman’s forehead, eyes, and nose in an electric pink color, with the exception of the whites of her eyes and bright yellow eye shadow.
book cover for The Potency of Ungovernable Impluses by Malka Older, featuring the light-blue silhouette of a retro-future cityscape in the lower background, below a purple, red, and pink depiction of the swirling clouds of Jupiter. In the foreground, the silhouette of a woman stand on the left, with her arm slightly raised toward the silhouette of a woman on the right, who appears to be walking away but is looking over her shoulder and her arm trails, reaching out slightly to the woman on the left.
book jacket for When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory, featuring an illustrated pink and orange sunset, with the sun setting into hills on the horizon in the bottom third. A black road winds its way from the bottom of the cover to the hills in the distance, where it terminates in the half-sphere of a black tunnel. On either side of the road there are sheep grazing on a pink plain, which are mirrored in the sky by white, fluffy clouds.
book cover for The Handle by Richard Stark, featuring a textured orange background with a silhouette of a revolver prominently across the upper middle. In the lower left corner, there is a black and white photo of a roulette wheel and in the lower right there is a silhouette of a small boat with an outboard motor. There is the silhouette of a man leaning over the motor and the silhouette of a man seated in the middle of the boat.
cover for Fantastic Four 112 by artist John Buscema, featuring a solid black background with the Hulk on the left with both arms raised with his hands in fists, facing off against the Thing on the right, who has his right fist cocked back behind his head and his left arm straight out pointing down. The hype text reads “Hulk vs. Thing—‘Nuff Said”
the book jacket for Oracle by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, featuring a black backgroumd with the sulhouette of a lanky teenage boy in a hoodie with the hood up amd obscuring his face. He appears to be standing hip-deep in the agitated waves of the sea, and he is lit from behind with a yellow glow.
the book jacket for The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore, featuring a watercolor painting of a forest scene with a tree trunk rising diagonally up from the bottom left and a branch continuing up to the top. Dense foliage fades into the background. From the center top, a line of pink paint drips downward, culminating in a bulb of paint right in the center of the cover.
book jacket for Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi, featuring an illustration of a cliff face in the bottom third, with four silhouettes of men in trenchcoats and fedoras illuminated from behind by a yellow half-circle of light that has jagged beams of light emanating out from the core against a white background.
the book jacket for Terrible Worlds: Revolutions by Adrian Tchaikovsky, featuring a black background with what appears to be a bloated red sun occupying all but the lower third of the cover.
book jacket for Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky, featuring a dark blue background with a tiny silhouette of a human figure at the bottom and looming above it in the foreground is a conglomeration of computer parts and wires, culminating in a half-sphere of a screen with a smiling female face looking down on the human figure.
book jacket for Richard Stark’s The Seventh, featuring a yellow background with black amd white photos of a 1960s era football helmet on the right and an open suitcase full of American dollars on the left. in the foreground, there’s the silhouette of a revolver floating over the rest of the image.
a book jacket for Quantico by Greg Bear, featuring a Matrix-like shower of green alphanumerics on black in the background and a bright red, modified biohazard symbol in the foreground
the book jacket for The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton, featuring a line-art illustration of a rolling green and black sea in the background and a compass with a pentagram on the face on a chain with an anchor pendant at the other end
the book jacket for Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds, featuring a starfield background bisected by a crescent of blue-white light, which illuminates the silhouette of an elongated, angular, black starship with diamond-shaped solar sails at its stern.
book jacket for The Jugger by Richard Stark, featuring a mustard-yellow background with a silhouette of a revolver in the foreground. There is a black and white photo of a combination lock wheel in the lower left and the silhouette of two legs in pants and shoes from the knees down (suggesting a dead body) in the lower right of the cover.
book jacket for Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, featuring a starfield background with floating male body in the middle with a bright light behind him, rendering the figure mostly a silhouette. The light diffuses out from all around him, partially obscuring the starfield background
movie poster for 13 Assassins, directed by Takashi Miike, featuring a bedraggled and exhausted swordsman of the Edo period in Japan, under a cloud-haunted sky.
book jacket for Tomorrow’s Kin by Nacy Kress, featuring a New York skyline of the Freedom Tower (?) in the background of a breaking dawn. There’s an oval-shaped dome structure in the foreground with a lattice of beams visible through a transparent shell, hovering above the Hudson Bay. The Statue of Liberty is visible as well as some boats in the bay.
the iconic movie poster for Batman (1989) featuring Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton in text top billing and then the gold oval batsignal in the middle, with Batman in all caps underneath
the book jacket for London Match by Len Deighton, featuring a blue background with red diagonal stripes and a black and white photograph of Oxford Street in London in the 1960s, with an iconic block of curved buildings on eaither side of a wide street full of cabs, double-decker buses, and pedestrians
the cover to Eddie Campbell’s Bacchus, featuring the titular character with a grizzled face and a Greek fisherman’s cap with a resolute look on his face while he is being smothered by a naked redhead who is draped over his head
book jacket for Reentry by Peter Cawdron, featuring a downturned face in shadow at the top of the image, with the top of the head covered by an opaque green shell and a human brain visible underneath. In the bottom third of the image is a wide-angle scene of a jungle with a launch pad and a rocket visible in the middle of the jungle.
book jacket for Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky, featuring a dense, green jungle scene of overgrown vines and branches, with a network of roots and trunks on either side. Three pink and white birds fly across the lower third, and there are two human forms with glowing eyes crouching on the roots and trunks. In the middle background of the lower third, there is a pale illumination of the ruins of a human structure, jaggedly pushing from the jungle floor. In the foreground of the lower middle third, two snake-like forms wriggle in a slow-moving river.
book cover for The Score by Richard Stark features a light blue background with the silhouette of a line of seven men in various poses behind a black and white photo of a lrge commercial truck of 1950s/1960s vintage in the lower right corner and a large silhouette of a revolver in the foreground
book jacket for Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, featuring a starfield background with the backlit silhouette of a spaceship resembling an 18th-century sailing ahip, with solar sails eminating from rigginf attacthed to the oblong shape
akira movie poster with kaneda in the foreground with a large gun resting on his hip with a darkened cityscape in the background
a book jacket for Mexico Set by Len Deighton, featuring the color purple in the bottom third and a turquoise color in the top two-thirds. There are thick orange bands diagonally bisecting the right upper corner, extending roughly halfway into the cover. Superimposed over this is a black-and-white photo of a 1980s era Mercedes sedan with a hand holding a gun sticking out of the passenger window.
book jacket for Retrograde by Peter Cawdron, featuring an orange and brown Martian landscape in the lower third with a smooth plain at the bottom and a lone, spacesuited human facing the rising crest of a hill. The upper two-thirds of the cover features a female face behind the helmet of a spacesuit, with her eyes partially obscured by a darkened visor.
book jacket for the novella Rose/House by Arkady Martine featuring a starfield background with an overlay of an opaque triangular maze design with a sand dune in the lower foreground and a white, inverted triangle evoking a doorway at the horizon of the dune with the small silhouette of a human figure at the point of the triangle
book jacket for The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei, featuring a starfield background with a red plume of smoke or dust in the foregrounds, while curling tentacles lurk in the middle.
book jacket for Len Deighton’s novel Berlin Game, featuring a yellow and light-blue background with diagonal gray bars and a black and white photo of a compact two-door vehicle of European design with a man in a dark suit and sunglasses pointing a gun standing behind the front of the vehicle
book jacket for State Tectonics by Malka Older, featuring a black background with a purple desgn of interlocking chevrons, horizontal lines, and arrows. There are also yellow symbols that include a shovel, a lightning bolt, a running human figure, the letter x, a plus sign, and a clock face or timer.
the book jacket for The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar, featuring a black starfield background with a series of overlapping, glowing bue rings.
movie poster for The Gorge, featuring a dark-blue, purple-ish background with a lit tower in the background, barely illuminating a wide chasm with a swampy, long-nailed beast hand/claw reaching out over the edge in the foreground
book jacket for The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar, featuring an orange-ish red background with a roman numeral clock face at a skewed angle with the hands set at 7:15 while aman in dark pants and a white tshirt with a messenger bag slung across his chest runs across the clock face
a very self-assured siamese cat named Kevin sits on a table, staring down the camera with his beautiful blue eyes
book jacket for Richard Stark’s The Mourner, featuring a dusky green background with the silhouette of a revolver that’s common to this series with a foreground of bullets and a pensive alabaster statue that looks as if it is in mourning.
A vehicle console with a screen showing a date of 2025/02/10, a local time of 6:26am, and an outsode temperature of -21° F. The console is outlined in blue on a black background.
book jacket for Null States by Malka Older. On a black background, a stylized red series of icons, arrows, lines, chevrons, and circles evoke a sort of circuit board effect
book jacket for Hardfought by Greg Bear. In an outer space setting, a planet with continents and oceans sits in the background, while two large spaceships with towers and lights hover in the foreground.
album cover for Bad Religion’s 1988 album Suffer, featuring a suburban neaighborhood in the background with a defiant boy standing while engulfed in flames in the foreground. It’s punk as fuck, folks.
book jacket for Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A background with a gradient starting with orange at the top that becomes pink at the bottom, with an illustration of an alien “plant” in yellow with broad leaf-like fronds at the top with studded, spiked gourds underneath and a branching root structure underneath that
a promotional image for the Apple TV+ limited series Balck Bird, featuring two inmates in a prison cafeteria. An inmate in the background, with heavy muttonchop burnsides looks menacingly across the table at another inmate, who is staring forward.
comics cover of Sandman Mystery Theatre 1
book jacket for A Perfect Spy by John le Carré, fearturing a red background with a wavy bar of yellow in the middle, with wavy black text of the title and author
A stack of books with the spines facing the camera. DC Comics Starman Compendiums One and Two are on top, thick spines with illustrations of the eponymous hero in his goggles, carrying his staff. Also in the stack: Weegee: Murder is My Business and Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s. There’s also a dog-eared Signet paperback of Stephen King’s The Stand and, somewhat inexplicably, a wooden spoon.
splash page from Uncanny X-Men 168, where Kitty Pride, dressed in cold weather/ski gear, turns with finger pointed, exclaiming, “Professor Xavier is a jerk!”
Severance season 1 promo art with series star Adam Scott as Mark S with a bank of green and white tinged office overhead flourescents above and in the background while a latidudinally-bifurcated head reveals a smaller version of himself sitting upright at an office cubicle within
The book jacket for Ascension by Nicholas Binge, featuring a darkened, cloudy sky pierced by a narrow triangle of rock and ice, symbolizing the mountain at the heart of the novel’s mystery.
the book jacket for The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart featuring glitchy, wavy text of the title and author on a blue background with an also glitchy image of a circle with some lines with a triangle in the middle facing up that is repeated underneath with the triangle facing downward