May I have your attention?

10 sundry Sunday notes

Hi there and May the 4th be with you! Here are some things I found worth sharing with all of you today:

1. It’s May, and here’s a fun May-related fact. Watching cartoons as a kid, I’d be puzzled why Daffy Duck (or was it a different Looney Toon?) would shout Mayday! Mayday! after being shot down. Well, if you don’t know, it’s a butchered rendition of the French "m'aidez” (help me), which was made official in the 1920s as an international distress call. More on distress calls here.

2. It’s road trip season, and any good road trip needs a playlist. I started mine here and I made it collaborative, so please please please, add some cool stuff to it!

3. It’s also car game time. And no, I’m not talking about counting number plates. I’m talking about Yellow Car. The gist? You spot a yellow car — you punch another player. While the rules are a bit more elaborate than that, what really caught my interest is the history of the game:

The history of the yellow car game can be traced back to the early 1600's and to the carters who used to transport the harvested rape seed from the Cotswolds across country to the barges that would carry the rape across to Dublin. It used to take the carters anywhere from 3-5 days to get to Bristol and as the country roads of that time were barely tracks it was not unheard of for carts to overturn and even be raided by bandits and highwaymen. At this period in history fledgling industries in Dublin very much depended on the rape seed to see them through the winter and when the barges would arrive in Dublin full of the yellow crop, the dock workers would punch each other on the arm in appreciation for a successful crossing of the Irish Sea. This seemingly innocent punch on the arm passed on back to Bristol and dockers there would punch each other when the full carts arrived full of crop from the Cotswold fields.

Also, apparently, punching people after spotting a VW Beetle is not an official rule. But it’s a fun addition nevertheless.

4. It’s time to discover more independent authors! This weekend I was really digging

   Minna
   ’s debut novel Aubade. Minna herself calls it an homage to strong female characters like Ripley and Sarah Connor, and I found hints of early Le Guin, The Expanse series and old school space operas.

5. It’s the 5th book I’ve read penned by someone from the

   Soaring Twenties
   Social Club. Others include Minna’s short story collection No End Code,
   Trilety Wade
   ’s essay and short story collection I Won’t Keep You,
   Vanechka
   ’s disturbing novel Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel, and
   Brady Putzke
   ’s Stephen King-esque book Dream House. If your reading goal for 2025 includes “Read something written by a self-published author”, any of these would be a great bet.

6. It’s time to add another dimension to the “is listening to a book the same as reading it?” debate. “Mohamed Barud was losing hope in a Somali prison, when his neighbour devised a secret language and tapped out the Russian novel Anna Karenina through his cell wall.” That’s a blurb to a very real story that’s stranger than fiction.

7. It’s never too late to start learning a new language. While I’m still mustering the courage to learn a new language from scratch, I can’t help but procrastinate by following the journeys of other learners. Most YouTube polyglots (both of the grifting and the normal variety) are bad inspiration though — after you come to the realisation that folk have 40+ hours to dedicate to learning a week because it’s literally their job — it’s hard to draw parallels. But all the stories

   Tanya Mozias
   shares about her language escapades are pure gold — this one hits hard in particular.

8. It’s not a coincidence that all writing online is becoming uniform, and yes… AI is to blame.

9. It’s safe to say that the equivalent of the “Can it run DOOM?” meme in the literary world could be the “Is there a Little Prince translation?” challenge. The book has already been translated to at least 600 languages, including 3 dialects of Lithuanian.

10. It’s May the 4th today, of course. Nostalgia galore, even if for me, the first sci-fi flick I remember is this Soviet era movie about teens sent to a distant planet to do… Soviet teen stuff.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it! Recommend Fictitious to a friend or foe, buy me a coffee, and simply share something cool you’ve recently learned with me by answering this email. Any suggestions, ideas or thoughts are welcome!

Till next time,

Oleg