Now Reading

  On 12/9/2020 at 11:49 AM, dingformung said:

You don't really need to learn Middle English. It would surprise me if you don't already understand it (apart from the occasional weird word).

yeah it's pretty intuitive so far tbh, especially if i imagine how it would sound out loud. i should clarify: i'm actually trying to learn old english by gradually working my way back to it. i have an old english copy of beowulf & that shit looks like gobblygook. i feel like there must have been some pretty significant linguistic jumps in the, what, 300 or so years between these two texts.

  On 12/9/2020 at 11:49 AM, dingformung said:

You don't really need to learn Middle English. It would surprise me if you don't already understand it (apart from the occasional weird word).

You and I probably could, but if modern English is your first language it's harder to understand as Middle English is much more Germanic.

Old English is, of course, even more Germanic, but also Old, so modern German or Dutch won't help you there.

  On 12/9/2020 at 12:26 PM, dingformung said:

Yeah, the roman invasion already introduced a bunch of new words and changed the writing system from runes to latin based Old English letters. And the Norman conquest fucked it up totally.

Interesting. Do you have a source for this?

As far as I know Old English is the language of the Anglo Saxon invaders - who came in *after* the Romans had left.

I started reading Working Class History: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/working-class-history-everyday-acts-resistance-rebellion-book

It's basically a calendar-style book that has a couple entries for each day of the year, giving a brief description of an event (protests, massacres, birth dates of notable people) in the history of the working class. Pretty interesting so far, as much of that history isn't in text books or easily available to people that aren't scholars.

  On 12/9/2020 at 2:31 PM, rhmilo said:

Interesting. Do you have a source for this?

As far as I know Old English is the language of the Anglo Saxon invaders - who came in *after* the Romans had left.

Yeah, I totally mixed that up out of pure ignorance. What I thought was memory was a mere product of my imagination . Apparently Celtic runes were replaced by Latin letters through the Romans and the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain later continued using them but with a delay of a couple of hundred years, and mostly used Anglo-Frisian runes until then.

Just read PKD's VALIS in one sitting (okay, two - started on Monday and got about 50 pages in). What a great book. I feel kinda dizzy.

I read Joe Hill's NOS4R2. It's pretty terrible. Way too long, reads like YA fiction. Steals a LOT of stuff from his dad's books. Even makes an in-SK-Universe reference like his dad does, linking this story to one of his dad's books.

After that I read Adam Neville's The Ritual. A good read, I have ordered a few more of his books.

I dunno if anyone remember's Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half blog which then turned into a book? Well the follow up book which was promised 7 years ago just dropped. A lot of people thought she was dead or had turned into the webcomic world's Harper Lee/Salinger.

This one is called Solutions and Other Problems and it is very funny and very dark. The multiple chapter section on her BF's dog dying of liver disease has way more irl lol funny moments that something like that has any right in having.

Just now finished Anthony Bourdains kitchen confidential... ;(

  On 12/10/2020 at 10:06 AM, Hugh Mughnus said:

Just now finished Anthony Bourdains kitchen confidential... ;(

Good book, deserves a reread. Been at least 10yrs since I last did.

  On 12/10/2020 at 10:13 AM, hello spiral said:

Good book, deserves a reread. Been at least 10yrs since I last did.

Definitely - my version had some annotations etc, I think it was released in 2014 or so? Definitely shouldn’t be limited to those in the industry (as it was originally intended). Very sad about his situation and passing... 

halfway through kaufman's antkind, feels like the joke's ran its course. diminishing returns. might drop it

  On 12/10/2020 at 11:18 AM, KovalainenFanBoy said:

halfway through kaufman's antkind, feels like the joke's ran its course. diminishing returns. might drop it

Get on GR lad. The original and best.

  On 12/10/2020 at 9:36 AM, hello spiral said:

I dunno if anyone remember's Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half blog which then turned into a book? Well the follow up book which was promised 7 years ago just dropped. A lot of people thought she was dead or had turned into the webcomic world's Harper Lee/Salinger.

This one is called Solutions and Other Problems and it is very funny and very dark. The multiple chapter section on her BF's dog dying of liver disease has way more irl lol funny moments that something like that has any right in having.

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Yeah, I member Hyperbole and a Half and loved it, will have to check out the new one, but not without some trepidation, as I'm hardly the same person now who loved that book seven years ago and frankly did kind of forget about her in the meantime. But I know that at the time I found it funny as hell.

  On 12/10/2020 at 11:18 AM, KovalainenFanBoy said:

halfway through kaufman's antkind, feels like the joke's ran its course. diminishing returns. might drop it

I liked the first half better, and the whole thing could have used some trimming down, but I guess it wouldn't really be Kaufman without the megalomaniacal (and in parts self-indulging) monumentality. I found it best to only read a couple of pages per day, and every time I go back to it, there are always some details I don't remember; it's almost like the darn thing keeps changing on me, like when you're familiarising yourself with a new Autechre record. The sheer amount of stuff in there is insane and can be sort of overwhelming. So in a way it's the gift that keeps on giving for me, but I fully understand people dropping it after a couple hundred pages. It's certainly not for everyone.

"Les fous du son" great book about the use of electricity for sonic purpose and the inventors from Edison to nowadays.

Antkind has now devolved into the most sophomoric, unfunny Trump parody one could imagine

The Death & Life of Great American Cities - torn between "Jane Jacobs has some real interesting ideas regarding dynamic structure which could be applied to many different areas of life" and "Jane Jacobs admires the hustle & bustle of urban landscapes in a way that feels dated but I can't quite put my finger on it"

Capital as Power - good shit, very dense. Makes me want to read Veblen next in my economic research

Creative Evolution (in french, just started)

Che Guevara's Guerilla Warfare (this shit is tight) ((on a purely academic level of course))

Sanity, Madness & The Family by R D Laing (they should put a trigger warning on this shit yo)

top books of 2020, in no particular order:

deleuze & guattari - anti-oedipus

oswald spengler - decline of the west (probably the only thing from my "absorb the alt right's reading list so i can better critique them" project that was actually interesting)

karl marx - capital 1/2/3 (a real slog to get through but i'm glad i did)

che guevara - guerilla warfare (do i get the t-shirt now?)

90s nick land/ccru/accelerationist shit (nothing in particular, just the overall vibe)

the world as will & representation (strong disagree with his conclusions but it's beautifully written)

jacques ellul - propaganda (scary shit)

hp lovecraft (again more just the overall vibe)

i read close to 100 books this year though so i'm probably fogetting a lot of really big ones

  On 9/28/2020 at 6:20 PM, Extralife said:

XX by Rian Hughes

 

Fantasic postmodern sci-fi. Loved it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51075314-xx

Finished The Three-Body problem series days ago (amazing reading !), and just grabbed a digital copy of XX.

  On 2/7/2021 at 3:08 PM, Nil said:

Finished The Three-Body problem series days ago (amazing reading !), and just grabbed a digital copy of XX.

I had so much fun reading this. Highly recommended.

recently:

an audiobook of thorstein veblen's theory of the leisure class

kenneth waltz's theory of international politics

jacques ellul's the technological society

rereading a thousand plateaus (opening to completely random pages each time, as suggested)

randomly flipping thru marx's grundrisse, various works of aristotle, lacan, heidegger in similar fashion

also a bunch of pdfs on evolutionary biology, systems theory, the history of the mp3 file format

  On 2/7/2021 at 3:17 PM, Extralife said:

I had so much fun reading this. Highly recommended.

Me three. Just finished it as well.

Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke - it’s great

i'd like to read the three body problem at some point. in general i want to expose myself to more chinese media to get a better sense of the country. it feels weird that they make up like 1/5th of the global population & yet the only exposure i get to the culture is through propaganda (both kinds).

also it'd be nice to read some fiction. not counting the hp lovecraft story collection, i think the last fiction book i read was neuromancer back in 2019