I don’t really hold onto any hope it’s coming out anymore… take this from someone who started the series as a preteen when A Feast for Crows came out. I’m now 30.
I bought a copy of Ben Hur in a second hand store for 3 dollars. The book was printed in 1887 and you can se it has been read by a lot of people and has been repaired at least once. I am hoping I can stick with it and finish it. Wish me luck.
Good luck! Please do pass long as soon as you finish it to people interested in reading it.
I have old books in my native language and some other languages inherited from my parents and grandparents and I have to find people to pass along as libraries will not take it because they don't have space or demand for it.
But when I find people who are interested in those topics, their eyes lit up when I pass along those books. I hope they cherish those books.
I love Ben Hur! The book is slightly longer than the movie, and has angles not in the movie at all. That's not to say either is lesser. I think both of them are quite representative of the story. If you want to discuss this, I'm on twitter with the same ID.
I thought you were going to tell us it has an erratum on page 116.
(A reference to the 1946 film version of "The Big Sleep", starring Bogie and Bacall. If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent movie. It even has a used bookstore.)
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. There's a series of games based on the books but I'm enjoying the storytelling in the book far more. Basic premise is after nuclear war survivors have built a new society inside of the tunnels and stations of the Moscow metro system. There's mutants and other threats, but I don't want to spoil too much.
That collection has a bunch of great stories. Some I particularly like:
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)
Yup. I've been looking for books that explain the underlying structures and dynamics of "wokeness" for a while. I feel "the Coddling" does a good job for some aspects of it. The best book I found so far in this regard is "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose. You read it and just think: "yeah, this is it". Unfortunately it's written like a PhD thesis, so not the lightest read.
> I've been looking for books that explain the underlying structures and dynamics of "wokeness" for a while.
Fear & fear of tolerance is a universal theme throughout history, there's not much to it. "Coddling" is a pejorative used by people afraid of tolerance.
Sure, but that's just Popper's old paradox of tolerance: tolerating hateful people makes a hateful society. Anyone who is fine tolerating hate isn't working towards a tolerant society, they're working towards a hateful society. You don't need to look any further than e.g. the contemporary indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians to see this. Or the deep fear and lack of empathy americans have towards the poor.
The problem is in how you judge hate, seems to me they don't judge it very well. And their reaction to what they consider hateful is also hateful which I don't agree with.
I remember listening to stories about a black preacher that converted a KKK leader and he did it through tolerance and compassion not by screaming hateful things back through a megaphone
> I remember listening to stories about a black preacher that converted a KKK leader and he did it through tolerance and compassion not by screaming hateful things back through a megaphone
The fact is, nothing in society was won by polite persuasion, but the compulsion to make people comfortable is the core of white supremacy. You might want to check your own judgement on hate if tolerating hateful people is your litmus test.
> but the compulsion to make people comfortable is the core of white supremacy.
Sorry, what? Then woke people are just white supremacists by your account. What's the point of the comical micro aggression complaints if it isn't to make woke people comfortable?
Sorry to break it out to you, both them and you are in the common pursuit of comfort and safety. One from the edgy teenager, I'm-totally-not-like-my-parents point of view, the other from I'm-totally-not-like-those minorities.
The fact is, you want to be treated in comfortable ways by them. Assuming you are a minority. If you are not, well, how's mom? And why was she so emotionally unavailable?
I'm a big Calvino fan and can thoroughly recommend Cosmicomics as a great collection of shorts. If you enjoy Calvino you may also enjoy Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.com/Design-Better-World-Meaningful-Sustai...
I'm currently reading Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tynan Sylvester.
A good friend of mine gifted me Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and I'm planning on getting into that one soon.
I have old books in my native language and some other languages inherited from my parents and grandparents and I have to find people to pass along as libraries will not take it because they don't have space or demand for it.
But when I find people who are interested in those topics, their eyes lit up when I pass along those books. I hope they cherish those books.
(A reference to the 1946 film version of "The Big Sleep", starring Bogie and Bacall. If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent movie. It even has a used bookstore.)
https://www.notbored.org/dialogue-in-hell.html
Ballard is science fiction in the sense he explores inner space instead of outer space.
Some are kind of eh, and ones that have really stuck out for me,
"Concentration City" - a giant infinitely expanding city ala Dark City or Blame!.
"Studio Five, The Stars" - poetry is written by machines and only eccentrics write their own. Think AI generation of art but in 1961.
"The Subliminal Man" - government uses subliminal messages to promote mindless consumerism - They Live but 1963.
"Billennium" - Earth is vastly overpopulated and any semblance of personal space or privacy is non-existent.
"The Garden of Time" - allegory of never ceasing approach of time no matter what you do to defend yourself from it.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_o...
* "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" — shades of Lem, Borges, and Harlan Ellison as a crew explores an apparently infinite construct.
* "A Question of Re-Entry" — post-colonialism á la Heart of Darkness by way of science fiction allegory; a beautiful companion to his apocalypse series (of which the best is The Crystal World; there's another story here, "The Illuminated Man", that Ballard used as the basis for that book).
* "The Drowned Giant" — an odd fable about giant found washed up on a beach and how a cottage industry of scavenging grows around it. (There's a decent animated version of this story in Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots.")
* "Dream Cargoes" — I guess I like Ballard the most when he's off in some tropical environment where nature is doing weird things, and this is one of them, and also because it's implied to be set on Vieques, an island that I love very much.
There are a few duds, but what's interesting is the wide span of Ballard's focus. He doesn't do one type of story, but many. (Unfortunately his later career could have done with more of this type of imaginative variance; he spent his last couple of decades writing at least three (four, if you count Running Wild) about rich gated communities hiding dark psychological secrets, and they were not very good.)
Recently finished the last Brandon Sanderson secret project.
- Aleister Crowley by Steven Ashe: A biography of the British occultist.
- Going Infinite by Michael Lewis: A (very well meaning) story of Sam Bankman-Fried
- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt: A book about "safety culture" on campus and it's implications at large.
Fear & fear of tolerance is a universal theme throughout history, there's not much to it. "Coddling" is a pejorative used by people afraid of tolerance.
I remember listening to stories about a black preacher that converted a KKK leader and he did it through tolerance and compassion not by screaming hateful things back through a megaphone
The fact is, nothing in society was won by polite persuasion, but the compulsion to make people comfortable is the core of white supremacy. You might want to check your own judgement on hate if tolerating hateful people is your litmus test.
Sorry, what? Then woke people are just white supremacists by your account. What's the point of the comical micro aggression complaints if it isn't to make woke people comfortable?
Sorry to break it out to you, both them and you are in the common pursuit of comfort and safety. One from the edgy teenager, I'm-totally-not-like-my-parents point of view, the other from I'm-totally-not-like-those minorities.
The fact is, you want to be treated in comfortable ways by them. Assuming you are a minority. If you are not, well, how's mom? And why was she so emotionally unavailable?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
So far: terrific. About a quarter the way in. Space opera with political intrigue.