Now Reading

Finishing up Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (while listening to PCA's new album Entangled Routes, no less). What a fantastic book. Might be one of the only pop science books I actually read twice. Definitely recommended for anybody that finds the weird world of fungus even remotely intriguing.  

About to wrap up ‘Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West’  by John Ralston Saul

I’m not the smartest fella out there, but it has been an enlightening read. 

Does anyone here have any experience with, or recommendations for, a non-kindle e-reader? My old Kindle is on the fritz, and I don't want to buy another amazon product.

halp?

  On 11/30/2021 at 10:16 PM, luke viia said:

Does anyone here have any experience with, or recommendations for, a non-kindle e-reader? My old Kindle is on the fritz, and I don't want to buy another amazon product.

halp?

I used to own Kobo reader Aura H2O for some years. I haven't tried any other e-reader brand so I don't have a referential experience. It had the E-Ink display which has some good things about it, but the screen responsiveness is really slow (you need to get used to it). I didn't like it being so slow because sometimes I need to go back a few pages quickly to check something related, and it tends to break the flow. But that only applies for viewing standard PDF files, usually of scanned material (so it had bitmaps in it), or just any PDF book, because the page size is set inside PDF and then e-reader treats it like an image. As opposed to any e-book file format, which basically works in a similar way than html+css, using markup, you can typeset the text with the reader software, so you can have any font size, style, etc. you prefer. But the thing is, majority of stuff I read were not e-books, but mostly PDF files. You can imagine that my experience was not optimal. Reading e-book file format books is great, and it was actually what the device was made to do.

Anyway, the screen eventually died in some unexplained circumstances and I haven't used it since, but I used it all the time.

As for the good sides, the thing is light and small and very rucksack portable. It's also waterproof (that is rain, not scuba diving). It had a backlight so you can read in darkness and very long battery life, I had to refill it only every 3 months or so, but only if I wasn't playing the addictive puzzle games because that drains power quicker. It had a very rudimentary internet browser (no JS support, only basic CSS) and monochrome bitmap support. I specially appreciated the portability: you go somewhere backpacking and you have one magic book which has thousands of books in it.

Overall, for portability and e-books (not PDFs) it's great for leisure.

raekwon the chef cooks up that biography s**t

I’m about a quarter of the way through Alan Moore’s Jerusalem after 2 years of staring at its cover on the shelf, and then moving it to the nightstand in an effort to commit myself to the task, and then staring at it for another 6 months without starting it. 

And it turns out it’s a fairly pleasant experience after all, so far, despite the wrist cracking weight of the thing. 
 

This was a bit of a trip. The sort of book that requires you to temporarily just fully accept premises that appear to be nonsense and hold your judgment, with a promise that you'll do better to scrutinize the framework only after it's fully assembled. Some parts are obtuse or at least, um, peculiarly argued, some parts are quite profound, but on the whole it's certainly interesting to ride along with one obviously intelligent man's solo intuitive approach to nondual anatman realization (though in many places he doesn't seem fully aware that this is what he is heading toward - it isn't clear that he had made any rounded attempt to study other historical approaches to this problem [of the self], though he does mention Buddhism once or twice, and it becomes clear through the book that he's got a good grasp of world history, so idk really, maybe this omission is just part of the presentation). There is a bit of Christianity here and there, but the book is hardly traditional at its core; there's very little in here that a classic theist would enjoy. It's abstract (lots of half-mystic hand drawn diagrams) and determined to systematically attempt to deal with the metaphysics of consciousness. It really only gets into exploring experiential meaning when it pops up as a side effect of the mechanics of his hierarchies. It is heavily abridged -- I don't know if the original double-bible-sized edition was ever published at all. Being so cropped, it kinda feels like he really did need longer to give concrete examples to convincingly illustrate his points. It got a little hairy for me in part IV, where scales of time finally come to play a prominent role (rather than the theory focusing almost exclusively on extension in space)... but the last two parts of the book were a good payoff. I liked it anyway. Certainly not for everybody. It's hard to follow in places, and will not resonate with either materialists or theists. 

Picked it up inspired by a YouTube video @Milwaukeeeee posted a few weeks ago. I've never read "The Headless Way" or any of Harding's other stuff, but skipped it as i already have a decent enough grip on pop-Buddhist "dharma bum" stuff... this book was really a different thing entirely. And it kinda made me want to re-read Lewis's Mere Christianity, which was not a book I was impressed with ten years ago, but probably deserves another look. 

anyway... I'm overdue for my quinquennial Hesse encounter, but might instead finally dive into something by the Big Brain himself ("Wisdom For Life" has been patiently waiting on the shelf). 

  On 1/1/2022 at 11:44 PM, luke viia said:

This was a bit of a trip. The sort of book that requires you to temporarily just fully accept premises that appear to be nonsense and hold your judgment, with a promise that you'll do better to scrutinize the framework only after it's fully assembled. Some parts are obtuse or at least, um, peculiarly argued, some parts are quite profound, but on the whole it's certainly interesting to ride along with one obviously intelligent man's solo intuitive approach to nondual anatman realization (though in many places he doesn't seem fully aware that this is what he is heading toward - it isn't clear that he had made any rounded attempt to study other historical approaches to this problem [of the self], though he does mention Buddhism once or twice, and it becomes clear through the book that he's got a good grasp of world history, so idk really, maybe this omission is just part of the presentation). There is a bit of Christianity here and there, but the book is hardly traditional at its core; there's very little in here that a classic theist would enjoy. It's abstract (lots of half-mystic hand drawn diagrams) and determined to systematically attempt to deal with the metaphysics of consciousness. It really only gets into exploring experiential meaning when it pops up as a side effect of the mechanics of his hierarchies. It is heavily abridged -- I don't know if the original double-bible-sized edition was ever published at all. Being so cropped, it kinda feels like he really did need longer to give concrete examples to convincingly illustrate his points. It got a little hairy for me in part IV, where scales of time finally come to play a prominent role (rather than the theory focusing almost exclusively on extension in space)... but the last two parts of the book were a good payoff. I liked it anyway. Certainly not for everybody. It's hard to follow in places, and will not resonate with either materialists or theists. 

Picked it up inspired by a YouTube video @Milwaukeeeee posted a few weeks ago. I've never read "The Headless Way" or any of Harding's other stuff, but skipped it as i already have a decent enough grip on pop-Buddhist "dharma bum" stuff... this book was really a different thing entirely. And it kinda made me want to re-read Lewis's Mere Christianity, which was not a book I was impressed with ten years ago, but probably deserves another look. 

 

anyway... I'm overdue for my quinquennial Hesse encounter, but might instead finally dive into something by the Big Brain himself ("Wisdom For Life" has been patiently waiting on the shelf). 

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I first saw the picture of pointing to oneself (image below) a long time ago and I did not remember where. Years later after seeing some videos a month ago about Douglas Harding I remembered the picture. I've nerver read anything from him, or the Headless Way I suppose it probably takes a similar direction to Advaita Vedanta to some extent, but for me the advaita stuff... I can't really take the whole package of it mostly because it dennies a lot the value of personal voluntary will, freedom, responsability and action.... also what is the point of realization other than that same general speculation of the supposed timeless unity with the divine they and many similar traditions do?. Although all the D. Harding stuff may be good for focus, meditation a calm balanced mind and many other things I do not know about

I'm glad a random vid motivated you to read a whole esoteric speculative book. The last big one I read was "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" and  also"Meetings with remarkable men" by Gurdjieff (The Ouspensky's "In search of the Miraculous" is also quite good about the "4th Way") Despite the fact the bald armenian dude may be considered another guru or cult leader, he was a great writer no doubt about it, and certainly those books are some of the most rare and best I've read.

Now I'm reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra which for the moment points to a self created mysticism out of suffering and other times critizising and naming the flaws of the whole spectrum of different types of people you can encounter lol, but it's being great and also fun to read

Started reading American Psycho. I have picked up a book in a while, I should continue my read through of the dune series again as well.

  On 1/6/2022 at 6:03 PM, thumbass said:

Started reading American Psycho.

Bret Easton Ellis is a great writer, but American Psycho can be a bit infuriating because of the style. Although I like all he's written. Glamorama's my favourite. American Psycho is his third, Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction came before it, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms after. White is his latest and only non-fiction, and he got cancelled because of it,  but I'd recommend reading it anyway. He's one of my favourites alongside Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh and Douglas Coupland.

  On 1/6/2022 at 6:21 PM, dcom said:

Bret Easton Ellis is a great writer, but American Psycho can be a bit infuriating because of the style. Although I like all he's written. Glamorama's my favourite. American Psycho is his third, Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction came before it, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms after. White is his latest and only non-fiction, and he got cancelled because of it,  but I'd recommend reading it anyway. He's one of my favourites alongside Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh and Douglas Coupland.

Thabks for the recommendations! So far I don't have problems with the way he writes. Will check the rest of his works out after finishing it.

https://starman414.wixsite.com/kriyananda?fbclid=IwAR0bSom7nFh4IuJR7YP8F66ZtwVh6RSZSAqYN1FqAb554d_-EK_SGfA3ea0

Joseph Henrich - The Weirdest People in the World

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashvamedha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mythological_objects_(Hindu_mythology)

Judas Unchained by Peter F Hamilton

reading Logan’s Run for the first time since school, still a classic 

I'm reading Cixin Liu's (or Liu Cixin's) short story collection the Wandering Earth and so far it's been "idea scifi" at its best and worst. Tons of cool ideas but cardboard characters and very little story. And he clearly has his own tropes that get repeated. Still it's pretty addictive because you want to get to the big reveal or whatever at the end of the story.

Anyone can recommend any scifi horror? I feel like I need some of that.

I really, really, really recommend you this book if you're into J Dilla.

https://www.amazon.com/Dilla-Time-Afterlife-Producer-Reinvented/dp/0374139946

re-reading Proust as a new years resolution

Reading this yo

https://www.josephazize.com/2020/01/13/george-adie-there-should-be-more-work-11-july-1989-final/?fbclid=IwAR2X7CX_N0XYz1qExRQr5Pvj8ippL4agu9cSSCOvXUFzT9Av4H1webtX6ws

https://www.gurdjieff.org/pentland3.htm

  On 2/17/2022 at 6:08 PM, taffer said:

re-reading Proust as a new years resolution

 

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I listened through the whole In Search of Lost Time series as a sort of audiobook broadcasted by a Finnish national radio and with 5 minutes each weekday it took fucking YEARS.