Never read, but I'm interested. Thanks!

I can't seem to stop smoking completely. One in the morning, just after getting up, and one at night, immediately before bed. Sometimes two if I need to knock myself out/speed myself up. I've been trying take that final step for years now.

No coffee and very little sugar though. In case you were wondering. Which, I mean.... how could you not?

im completely off the sugars these days

the current epidemic of obesity & diabetes is due to it

Just finished this. Very enthralling read. Emotionally resonant. Heartbreaking. Also, a nice use of science fiction and fantasy elements in a story that doesn't really fit in either genre. Twisting SF so that it's just "fiction with awesome stuff" is something I value a lot, as a lifelong fan of SF who's sick of reading "SF books."

There are some awkward and intentional "millennialisms" in the prose — attempts to connect with 20/30-something audiences, but the bigger picture is definitely aimed at mature adults, so I can handle it. Good book.

written in 1928, covers from Civil War to 1915 or so, draft riots in Civil War are particularly interesting. Some great names..

Funny you should mention obesity. I was just going to say I've never really fully quit smoking, and people tell me I'll gain weight. I've seen it happen to other people. But I'm rail thin and I've never really had a chubby phase — not even in childhood or after high school — so I'm kind of curious about what fat me would be like.
🤔

I'd take the plunge just to find out if I wasn't terrified of being more on-edge and restless and foul-tempered than I already am.

i'm on a robert mitchell kick ever since i watched cloud atlas. 'the bone clocks' was great. now i'm in the middle of 'slade house', not as good but still fun.

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

I read half of Cloud Atlas and then I think I gave up or got distracted. I almost never leave a book half-finished. Maybe I should give it another go. Hmm.

maybe you should give up more books half-finished!

life is too short to be doing homework all the time :D

--

just read your beetus comments. just know that too much fat won't give you healthy mass. if you want mass you need weight exercise plus protein. this doesn't mean you'll necessarily get huge-- i used to know some wiry people who could outmuscle any steroid meat packets.

gotta run to work..

I'm actually super secure with being scrawny as fuck, but I feel like if I had to punch someone I would do almost no damage. Actually, that has totally happened. Anyway, yeah, hah. Wilford Brimley.

e = .5mv^2

so speed is more determinant than mass



anyway don't look forward to getting fat is what im trying to say. it's not a good thing-- it's actually worse for "skinny fat" thin people.

Yeah yeah I know. I don't actually want to get fat. All my friends got fat. I'd be ok with not looking like a high schooler at the 49 mark, but whatever.

I'm going to read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by Yuval Noah Harari next. Just ordered it on Amazon.

Think I'm gonna read some comics to dumb down while until it arrives. :D

Good man.

i read multiple reviews of that book and feel like "nothing to see here". in the sense that there are no new ideas advanced by it, but rather it's a compendium of common knowledge plus some errors (see the review on "the guardian" for a list of gaffes).

no new ideas except for maybe the bit about humans rallying around fictions. that's a great model to see things. human rights as religion, sure. but do i need to read 500 pages to grasp that? nope. it's immediately graspable, thanks-- next?

i sort of don't believe in books anymore. sad but true. all that fattening of pages for what could take 2.

so now yr a poet?

borges made the case for all that long ago

i won't repeat his argument, but it's all over his work

and sure, why not!

no poetry slams though please

e.g., im reading this book right now (well not this instant but this afternoon)



i started by having to skip 10% of it which is pure introduction and fluff

i have yet to get to the meat of the book-- how to build an earthen floor

by the time i'm done reading and taking notes it will probably be reduced to less than 10 pages

but publishers must justify the cost and need 200 pages for 3 ideas

the world needs more pamphlets

Hey you weirdo, my mother has that book! Yeah, she bought it (and, like, twenty others) with aspirations for some property she has in New Mexico that she no longer has time to visit because the world is a cold dark place and she had to go back to work a few years ago despite having worked for a quarter century as a college professor. :)

I hope she gets back there at some point. And I hope I can help. Fucking love it out there.

nice! but so many bullshit words in that book man.

im working on reducing all the gibberish and hippy talk into a simple flowchart

fuck! turns out i have to start from the end where subfloors are discussed

first subfloor, then floor

for the subfloor: drainage gravel, vapor barrier, insulation, compacted gravel,

for the floor: 1/2"-2"of a cob mixture

cure with linseed oil with a solvent in a 3:1 mix in a single pour

fuckers SHOULD START WITH THE CONCLUSIONS

then give you the filler

they should take a lesson from journalism

same with everything: gimme the executive summary and then the full report

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY!

HEY. i have an idea for you. why don't you sell the current house with its giant spaces and utility bills and buy the new mexico place from her? then you can fix it and she can visit you whenever

is it near any kind of city?

you can do a lot with satellite internet these days. they just launched a new one, faster-- i can't get a contract with it cuz my life in in suspense at the moment (jobs, etc)

Hah. Yeah, we've floated that idea. But it's nowhere near anything. Really. I've never been as isolated. It's AWESOME except when you need to go to, like, a store. And we lost our truck for hauling water. :( one of us should fly out there soon and take a look see though. It's been a year since anyone was there, and that makes me nervous.

I'd love to though. I'm not sure it's practical just now. Trying to juggle two homes with a (basically) two-person family is tough, especially when one of you is 65. I'll keep it in the idea jar though.

ETA: Are idea jars a thing? I have no clue. But that's where I'm told I should put my swears, so I figure jars are fair game for non-tangibles.

yeah on GTD it's called "MAYBE/SOMEDAY". good system

so-- do you wanna sell it?

where it at?? how big the land?

ha ha ha ha

hmmmm

btw, read brad lancaster on water harvesting

And that's just negated everything you said before. Some things aren't as easy as a two page summary. That's like saying you get all the information you need about the news from Twitter.

There are books out there that will focus purely on the rise of capitalism, others focusing on the idea of animal rights and that's fine. But that's not what this book set about to do, as the title hints at. If anything, books like Sapiens help the reader push where to focus onto next.

Just cos one person knows all about the dawn of man and the change from foraging to agriculture doesn't mean the next is.

right. which is why i'd rather gather the information in discrete packets. in other words--essays.

what i'm aiming at is a discrepancy between the need for knowledge and the the need for publishers to do business. publishers need glossy attractive packets that look good in a coffee table, knowledge only requires... to fill the gaps in knowledge, plus the new ideas.

this is why i find myself reading wikipedia multiple times a day, whereas it takes a lot for me to commit to a book. got to the point where i've started giving wikipedia money-- they really do me a huge service which i can't ignore.

now, as for errors to be found on wikipedia-- there are errors to be found everywhere. read the guardian's review i mention and you'll see examples.

but yeah. i'm not saying i'm against reading or against ideas. it's just the 500-page volumes i find myself increasingly less willing to handle. i'd buy only "select chapters" if i could-- or pamphlets. many 18th/19th century pamphlets changed the world and didn't need to come in thick volumes (let's look in wikipedia for a list ha ha ha).

where did pamphlets go?

Eh, that's getting into specifics that violate my personal privacy rules about internet blah-blahing. Want info for real, pm me and give me some juicy dets I can use against you if you stalk me. :D

Internet. Also landfills or pricey recycled paper?

true dat. but my pms are full! full i tell you!

ok here is one: my porn name is narcissus black


no! the new york library apparently has an important collection of historical pamphlets

the landfill is where my book boxes are going. i have not opened them in years and not sure the prices are worth selling.

but yeah. we need a netflix/spotify of book chapters. why buy a whole album when you just want 2 songs? same with books: i'll take the important essays. please keep the fluff.

anyway still trying to distill a flowchart from that hippy book. hippys are confusing! the ramblings and lack of certitude! i need clear formulas.

working on it

That's why I love science writing and (good) journalism. To the point, no bullshit, no fluff, just mad dets and facts and formulas and structure. STRUCTURE!

I suck at feature-writing, because I simply lack the skills to get fluff into a readable format. I should get me some of them skills tho.

structure is mental gold

a memory palace instead of a pigsty

anyway i have cleared my shitbox. a full shitbox is unsightly and it smells!

SELL ME YR LAND :D :D :D

(nah, don't sell it yet. im just curious about it)

BTW-- i have a friend who is a caretaker in a millionaire summer cabin. lives there rent-free most of the year and keeps it pest-free, then scoots out when the owners come (all done with proper arrangements)

anyway-- off topic. so back to books/readings.

it's coffee time!!! FOOD OF THE GODS THIS IS NOT BUT IT HELPS

Picked up “Catch-22” last night on a whim. It’s been a while. I was laughing out loud by page 2. Might read while waiting for “Sapiens” to come.

Finished Tycho & Kepler, awesome book. https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/...o-shining.html

The Book of Dave, I probably won;t finish it, kinda sucky, IMO

I'm reading A Fire Upon the Deep. High concept science fiction about the far future when humans have colonized the Galaxy, and omniscient super-AIs protect and destroy entire civilizations. Pretty visionary entertaining stuff, I'd recommend it.

Sapiens was really good, I liked it so much I bought a hard copy. Seems like just about everybody is reading it lately.

That Kepler book sounds good

Vernor Vinge is worth reading! I 2nd that about Fire Upon the Deep.

I'm reading The Night Manager by John LeCarre...english intelligence taking out some bad guys...

A Fire Upon The Deep. hmmm.

Vernon Vinge!

Hey man, if you’re reading SF of that caliber and breadth, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be all done with Book of the New Sun, Long Sun AND Short Sun by now.

im nt reading fire upon deep. never heard of fire upon deep.

I am currently reading DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Starussman M.D.

I'm on a roll with great books atm. This is one where I think pretty much everyone on here would get something out of it. Here's the blurb to sum it up better than I can.

"he Weathermen. The Symbionese LiberationArmy. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army.The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
The FBI s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough s Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them nice middle-class kids, smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners radicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice often with disastrous consequences. "

Hes' just talking about the Weathermen atm. I knew of the SDS already but didn't know anything about that going on to be the Weathermen. It's insane how amateurish the whole thing was. Statements that don't mean anything and are barely backed up by anything either, and yet Nixon was terrified of them. He was certain they were going to be the start of a revolution starting with him being assassinated.

Comparing those guys to what he Black Panthers were doing for a time seems almost laughable. Bring on the rest of the book.

Oh. Then I missed a previous exchange or something. Either way, finish BOTNS.