Words to Live By

Usually the comment spam that comes in here is pretty boring. But this was too oddly lovely not to save:
VIBRATION AND SOUND ARE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PARAMETERS FOR MONITORING THE MACHINE HEALTH. REGULAR LOGGING OF THESE TWO PARAMETERS PROVIDES EARLY WARNING OF BREAKDOWN

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"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

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"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

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Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

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What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

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The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
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