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22 hours ago, Cryptowen said:

just cracked open some pareto, gettin real computerbrain vibes from him so far

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i mean just look at those machineman eyes of his

Vilfredo_Pareto_1870s2.jpg

 

Pareto is a super interesting dude who would definitely be on /b/ a lot these days.

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16 hours ago, drillkicker said:

Not /biz/?

No, he's a Classical Liberal Capitalist with a strong anti-Marxist bent, not an idiot.

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Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey

 

Crossover, Donny Cates

 

also- Practical Pottery, Horace Jenkins, but just in little pieces as I’m teaching my son some clay techniques and whatnot.

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Rereading The Crucible, and I’m struck by the similarities of people seeing what they wanted to see, even if it was conspiracies based completely in fantasy, just like QAnon and the election lie in the US.

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i hate it when i walk into a bookstore & the entire philosophy section is nothing but noam chomsky books. sociology? all chomsky as well. politics? linguistics? oh u better fuckin bet it's our boy chom. and then i go complain to the bookjockey working the cash & he just says "goh ho ho, g'd reddy ol chum, you've bin noamed" & starts dancing around with his stupid fuckin little red pointed hat. god i hate buying books from the shriner bookstore

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still reading pareto, leroi-gourhan, some stuff about bone evolution. i think i might be starting in on schumpeter soon

 

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On 3/21/2021 at 6:06 PM, Rubin Farr said:

Rereading The Crucible

                                           funny enough i just found old pics today online of me and arthur miller when he was being honored at the william inge festival

                                                     in independence, kansas in 1995. I gave him my arm to help him up the stage steps in the bright lights.

                                                                                           Very nice person and he signed a copy of the crucible for me.

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^that's one of those books i've always wanted to read based on the title alone, not even having much familiarity with the work of DFW himself. i might read it for just that reason eventually, but i'm still feeling burned from I am a Strange Loop (that was a few years ago. dunno if I'd assess it as harshly today, i was just going through an intensely anti-computational mind phase at the time)

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4 hours ago, eassae said:

 

I couldn't finish I am a Strange Loop. I had just finished Gödel, Escher, Bach when I started it, and it just seemed like a shadow of this former work. Maybe I didn't get far enough into it—I read about half.

It’s ... soppy.

GEB was fun. This, not so much. Still, nothing wrong with the basic premise, it’s just that I’d have preferred it if he had used less sentimental autobiography to support it.

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I'm confused, what does that Lipsky/DFW book have to do with Hofstadter? 

Strange Loop was fun, IMO, but yes, it's autobiographical and sentimental. I walked into it kinda knowing that was the point. GEB is way more of a wild ride from an enthusiastic young man, and I do prefer it between the two, but I can't fault Hofstadter for trying to work through his wife's death via his theories on consciousness. idk. 

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Gotta agree with the GEB vs. Strange Loop sentiments above. But in retrospect GEB is a bit dumb also. A good introduction to some of the concepts though.

Books read this year so far:

  • Scott Frost - The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes (Finnish translation, got it for a euro)
  • Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
  • Ben Fogle, Michael Palin, Jonathan Scott, Hilary Bradt, Simon King, Simon Calder - Irresponsible Traveller: Tales of scrapes and narrow escapes
  • Kobo Abe - The Face of Another
  • Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
  • Lindsay Ellis - Axiom’s End
  • Elif Shafak - Three Daughters of Eve

 

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Weaveworld (Barker obvs)

The last book I read of his was a few years ago was The Great and Secret Show which blew my mind. And here we are off and running from the first chapter, I just love his style of writing. I should definitely read his books far more often than I do.

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37 minutes ago, beerwolf said:

Weaveworld (Barker obvs)

I've been a huge fan of Barker's since I first read the Books of Blood, to me they're the shining example of his amazing visceral writing skill; Volume One (In the Hills, the Cities is my biggest favourite) is just amazing, but the whole series is indispensable. I had to glance at his bibliography to verify, but I have almost everything he's ever written, including graphic novel adaptations (Tapping the Vein being the best, but some one-offs like The Yattering and Jack are fantastic) and comics (all Hellraiser series). There seems to be a new novel (Deep Hill) and short story collection (Fear Eternal) in the works, looking forward to them. Barker's filmography is also dotted with some great ones, Hellraiser and Hellbound especially - there's a new version of The Hellbound Heart coming up which could be interesting.

Any Lovecraft fans around? I obtained the annotated collections of his stories to get more depth, but our year-old is standing fast between me and the wherewithal to read them...

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16 minutes ago, dcom said:

Any Lovecraft fans around? I obtained the annotated collections of his stories to get more depth, but our year-old is standing fast between me and the wherewithal to read them...

Not a fan, but I’ve recently started reading some of his work (the Dunwich Horror, Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth). The writing is terrible: archaic, with pathetic attempts at rendering dialects and overly reliant on the thesaurus entry for the word “horrible”. The plots, such as they are, are paper thin and utterly predictable. And his powers of description are all but nonexistent.

But it works. All three stories I read were entertaining and maintained their interest to the very end and The Shadow over Innsmouth especially was a truly gripping bit of horror writing.

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50 minutes ago, rhmilo said:

But it works. All three stories I read were entertaining and maintained their interest to the very end and The Shadow over Innsmouth especially was a truly gripping bit of horror writing.

Lovecraft's language takes a lot of getting used to, but when it starts to work for you it really works. I've been reading his works since early teens, so I don't pay that much attention to it anymore.

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  • 3 weeks later...

It took about a month, but I finally managed to polish off Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".

Yes, it really is that good. The plot keeps racing along, the backdrop is interesting enough (history of India between roughly 1900 and 1980) and even though the cast of characters is spectacularly large there's enough gentle little reminders strewn about to continuously refresh your memory as to who is who.

The language has a whiff of Joyce about it, but not so much that it becomes annoying and mostly enough to make it enjoyable. It has more than a whiff of India to it in the characters' speech patterns and this adds to the fun tremendously. You will also most likely have to look up some words in a dictionary, both because Rushdie is more intimately familiar with his thesaurus than you are and because you, like me, might not know some Indian words. This, too, however, adds to the pleasure of reading this book.

Highly, highly recommended.

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main ones i'm reading rn are joseph schumpeter's capitalism, socialism, and democracy and lewis mumford's technics & civilization

schumpeter gets pretty dry when he gets into technical detail but he does a great job of acting like a wet blanket to pretty much every kind of ideological utopianism. when he gets to the section on democracy, after the first chapter i was like "holy fuck schumpeter put the baseball bat away, he's already dead". and schumpeter (wiping sweat from his brow) replied, "sorry friend, but the people want hamburger helper for dinner"

not super far into the mumford text but it's good so far. feels like it's in the same general realm as ellul, spengler, gebser, maybe a bit of heidegger. nothing radically shocking yet but he does a very good job of consolidating abstract concepts (the kind outlined by the ppl i just mentioned) into a more straightforward 20th century american materialist point of view. his treatment of soldiers feels kinda one-dimensional but other than that no complaints

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