"Hey Nostradamus" is the only one if his I've read - kleinbl00 is the one to ask, I think he's read most of them

Reading log for the last 2 weeks, because I was on vacation:

Stalled on reading Middlemarch - up to chapter 16, but haven't read any in the last week.

On vacation I read "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland. Really enjoyed that one.

Started reading "The Stranger in the Lifeboat" by Mitch Albom.

The gist of the book is "dopamine is a reward signal, and anything that gives you dopamine can be addicting."

The advice is basically "just don't do it for 4 weeks. That will prove you're better off without it. Then keep not doing it forever". With a side comment about medically supervised withdrawal for some substances.

I started reading it because I noticed I reach for sweets or scroll social media when I feel crappy about anything, and it feels kinda obsessive and dopamine seeking. I was hoping there would some commentary on how to be normal when so many things online and in society are highly tailored to suck you in and give you a dopamine hit of cat pictures or righteous anger, and get you coming back. But there's really none of that.

I skimmed through "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking" and it's a 40 year old book on cigarettes but it has more useful information about scrolling twitter when you can't sleep than "Dopamine Nation" does

Reading log last week:

Up to chapter 12 of Middlemarch.

Finished Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. There's not nothing in there, but the book is certainly not useful.

https://dirt.fyi/article/2024/03/its-obviously-the-phones

Reading log for last week:

Started Middlemarch

Started Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke - Not sure yet if this one is useful or yelling at clouds.

Read Ulalume by Edgar Allen Poe. I had seen the first stanza a few times but never the whole piece

    The skies they were ashen and sober;
        The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
        The leaves they were withering and sere;
    It was night in the lonesome October
        Of my most immemorial year;

I'm going to write down each week what I read/listen/watch. Mostly so I can look back look back and see what I was interested in thru time, but a little bit as motivation to keep notes, and a little because I miss this place.

1. Claiming past credit for reading Moby-Dick in January. Really enjoyed it this time. A decade ago I listened to it without paying close attention and thought it was meh, with some funny parts. This time I paid a lot better attention, and it came across as a madman telling a story of madness.

2. Read a few chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth last week - read aloud book w/ my wife. Aimed at middle school age but holds up well.

3. Saw a production of the Bonnie and Clyde musical last weekend. It did an excellent job portraying them as real people in a tragedy, who were also monsters. Idealism, passion, despair, fatalism, and refusal to give up.

I didn't know Bonnie wrote poetry, and some of it got published in newspapers. For a while they were popular but it wore off as it became clear they'd try shooting their way out of anything. The musical uses her original poetry. The last verses of her most famous poem:

    They don't think they're too smart or desperate
    they know that the law always wins.
    They've been shot at before;
    but they do not ignore,
    that death is the wages of sin.
    
    Some day they'll go down together
    they'll bury them side by side.
    To few it'll be grief,
    to the law a relief
    but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

4) A Wizard of Earthsea. Finished it this week. I had never read any of Le Guin before. It's refreshing to have a YA book that's not about a "chosen one". I guess A instead of The should have been a tip.

Also I haven't read Jung or about Jung but isn't the shadow plotline in the second half straight out of Jung?

Yeah that phrasing really sticks in the mind. I could have sworn I read that article a handful of years ago, but I guess it was last year.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes.

Fits into the whole accelerationism discourse going on

who got knocked up and who can't ever be

The thought I had was "who can't ever be knocked up because infertility"

I would have never posted this if I tried to edit it. Poetry is too foreign a medium and a couple bits are too raw.

Just posting this before I start thinking about it too much

    We few
        Stand in the shed playing dsm roulette, thats you
        but not me i'm just paranoid. Who can't watch horror they're too jumpy
        who likes to 'cause it's worth the laugh.
        Dad watches fireflies alone outside
    We happy few
        grow branches off the grapevine, greencard marriage, feral cousin
        who got knocked up and who can't ever be
        Mom traps an in-law in the kitchen
        New stories and new faces next time
    We band of brothers

Been a strange year but a good year.

I joined a homebrew club and have leaned into the social side of that hobby. I've been playing ping pong again. I've made a much bigger effort to be social in general over the last year because I realized I was damn near reclusive during and after covid. Looking back I have always tended to be less social, but in 2021 i had some bad anxiety and froze up.

Been trying to get back into jogging after a long break to recover from a stress fracture caused by some uneven gait issues, extended by not wanting to do anything (see above). Also doing some beginner yoga. So I'm learning that I don't know how to breath from 2 directions. I'm not about to join a choir and find out from a third direction.

My capacity for doing things or "getting things done" seems to vary wildly, and I'm still learning to notice when and why. Compared to 6 months or a year or 2 years I'm a genius. Compared to pre-covid / pre-anxiety -- not sure. The "hindsight is 50:50" saying seems fitting.

"John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder."

Oh that's not too bad if you can get multiple firings in a session. I was assuming the whole kiln has to cycle up and down like with pottery

You made cloisonne sound approachable until I counted and it's got to be cooked 4 times.

Your mill project has been fun to follow. I knew a guy who made some upgrades to a CNC router he bought but nothing close to the precision and ambition of yours

There's always part of me that's surprised that enameling works at all given the difference in thermal expansion. Though the lower thermal expansion of glass would leave it in compression, so there's that.

I know with pottery finding a glaze chemistry that fits a clay and firing level is empirical or trial and error. Sounds like enameling is similar and the well known artists are guarding their knowledge.

Florida malaria outbreak still going, with local cases now at 7

Lots of cool stuff in that article

To go back to the slime mold, how does it decide?

We know it has memory. It can learn from experience. We know it does make all kinds of decisions if you give it various options of things it can do. The whole thing is a hydraulic computer. We injected little fluorescent beads into the thing. There are flows through the cytoplasm. And the cool thing is that if you have a fork like a “Y,” you see that it just shuts off one branch off, and the stream only goes the other way. It has selective control over each branch point—it’s a synapse, basically.

Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis.

When I say this thing “wants to do XYZ,” I’m not saying it can write poetry about its dreams. It doesn’t necessarily have that kind of second-order metacognition; it doesn’t know what it wants. But it still wants. [...]

I’m sure once we start looking, we’re going to find degrees of agency all over the place.

Oh man I was expecting something lighthearted from aiweirdness, but

What does this mean? Assuming they know of the existence of GPT detectors, a student who uses AI to write or reword their essay is LESS likely to be flagged as a cheater than a student who never used AI at all.

From the Airbnbs I've stayed at the last few years it seems the days of a nice Airbnb for cheaper than a hotel are long gone. Though also I've noticed more hotels being run down and dingey than I remember from years ago

When we still book Airbnbs it's when having a full kitchen outweighs the bizarre decorating choices and 'somebody's uncle stays here when it's not booked' vibes.

Weird phase. Feels like I've gotten more done and stalled out on more things in the last six months than in years.

Had both our old cars failing at the same time in April. Getting it done: got one repaired and bought a replacement for the other. Stalled: sale price of the car we don't need will be about double with ~2 weekends of work but I haven't touched it in a month.

Was offered an old fishtank and stand, cleaned it up, re-painted the stand, have some plants and little fish and it's been going steady for 2 months now. Stalled: haven't painted the cabinet door for the stand, it's just been sitting next to it the whole time.

Got ahead of the heat and planted a garden a couple weeks before the last frost day. Had to cover it with tarps one night for a frost, but it's been doing great. Been giving away tomatoes. It's kind of a chaos garden and I haven't weeded it as much as I should but I don't care. I'm not giving myself crap about that tonight.

Joined a homebrew club last fall. It's been great. Buncha beer nerds and brewing nerds stand around and talk.

Been trying to make some changes with mental health and anxiety. Have been journaling a bunch and that's actually been helping. Even got a recommendation for a counselor. Stalled: have not yet set up a first appointment though.

Going on vacation to the beach in a week.

That looks like a fantastic trip.

I did a pretty sweet 450° faceflop off that diving board because 12' is higher than I realized.

That's good, it's bad luck to be superstitious. I learned that In middle school,,🤪🥴

Jonathan Haidt is the one who wrote The Righteous Mind which has been discussed here. That book has an interesting viewpoint that I find useful to remember in some Thanksgiving conversations, but Haidt doesn't do much useful with it in the book.

In his about page:

But the transformation of society in the 2010s was not caused by anxious college students. They were simply the “canaries in the coal mine” — the first generation to have moved their social lives onto social media platforms. As soon as they did so, around 2012, an epidemic of mental illness began.

There's a number of places that statement could lead, but he skips over the "transformation of society" part as far as I can tell. His policy proposals are to change the "Must be 13+ to register" checkbox to 16 and he wants Congress to make Facebook give him access to data for research.

I think he's found a real issue. I don't think he has a useful idea of what to do about it though.

Also from his about page:

We showed how this anxious new generation arrived on campus and demanded new norms, procedures, and bureaucratic responses that are incompatible with the older truth-seeking culture of universities.

University are so much rosier when we forget about the arms race of tuition and student loans and credentialism.

That sounds painful. I've mostly had to deal with vocabulary-only versions of these from an engineering manager who never had enough buy in from other departments to make major changes.

The OKR vs KPI showdown

In a series of mandatory high burn rate meetings two leansixsigma blackbelts, keepers of secret knowledge from Japan and ancient wisdom from Illinois, fight to the bitter end* attacking and blocking with statistics beyond any comprehension which haven't been applied correctly since that one guy left.

* in the end we're saddled with both

Where are you that only the last four books of the Vorkosigan saga are available?

I could get them all on paper from the library, I just couldn't get the others as audio for no money or effort on Overdrive. Yeah they're kinda cozy, but it must put you off more than me. I read a couple Peter Wimsey books and didn't regret it.

To be clear I made it through the 5 Corwin books, haven't read the other 5.

I have read Earth Abides!

Read a lot more this year than the last several years combined.

Nonfiction In chronological order:

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn - unrelenting, I had to break it up with multiple fiction books between the sections.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt - I read this following kb's recommendation, it has given me some food for thought at the last few family gatherings.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow - also read because of kb's recommendation. This one had a lot of history I had never heard before, and new context for a lot that I had heard. Highly recommend.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - interesting, but less impactful than the Dawn of Everything.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman - argues against common ideas that human nature is bad. I didn't get much out of it.

Fiction in no order, I jumped between series as audiobooks were available from the library:

Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand - better than I remembered

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot - so much slower than I remembered

The last four books of the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (the only ones available as audio) - the background setting of the Galaxy was a little confusing since I jumped in at the end, but the stories are self contained. If I remember correctly these were recommended to me years ago as an example of how women write scifi with less wooden characters and more emotion than men, though the comparison was mostly to golden age of scifi authors. I liked the books. Definitely not 'hard' scifi, but I'll argue they're definitely scifi and not 'fantasy with spaceships and lasers.'

A couple of the Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers - cute, kinda twee

Firsrt quarter of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - was reading this and liked it, but had to return it and then had no desire to check it out again once I picked up something less self referential.

Ra by qntm - fun idea, but chaotically written.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - fun

Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny - Sometimes I search an author on hubski, trying to get an idea of whether I'll like a book. I was searching Neil Gaimon and found this recommendation for several Roger Zelazny stories. I had heard of Zelazny but never read anything of his. It made a bigger impression than anything else I read this year. Thanks kleinbl00 for leaving that recommendation for someone else eight and a half years ago.

The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (Corwin books) - enjoyed these.

The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski - enjoyed all of these, though I thought the short stories were more engaging and the novels leaned more on political intrigue.

God first, America second.

So we're back to 'murica first!'?

he needs to either represent his electorate or his X in some legislation, who is he going to choose?

filter for X in ['religion', 'shareholders', 'finances', 'influence', 'celebrity', 'special interest group' ...]

Once we filter out the flawed candidates we will be left with the one pure, unblemished, sacrificial lamb to send to Washington to save democracy...

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I'd argue insider trading and the churn between business/lobbying/legislating are conflicts of interest to fight.

Separation of church and state is more about the Pope owning half of Italy and Kings deciding to be their own Pope and less about people voting for a pastor.