cyrej

The Mysteries of Udolpho: 600 pages of just classic romanticism: themes of nature, pastoralism, christian spirituality, etc. Complete with purple prose, super-long sentences, poetry.

Somewhat educational to know the English version of romanticism is thematically just the same (as the German version) but it somehow comes across a bit insipid and fake. Beyond that there's no point reading 600 pages of this.

Time (Manifold): I'm pretty sure this is the worst thing I've ever read. Bad writing, lots of expositional monologuing, making me read about these CEO types (and their divorce issues and bunch of other gross stuff I don't care about) a lot. Really silly science, all explained in the same annoying pop-science way no matter who is explaining to whom. Extremely messed up (in universe and from the author) libertarian worldview: no sign of the environmental and humanitarian mess these people are directly causing and would realistically be living in, lots of enthusiasm for solving problems by just further mining everything, very negative and dismissive portrayal of the public and the government. Beyond that there's just a million implausible and silly things about this.

This Changes Everything: Read this instead for a realistic overview of the impending end of the world and how to fix it. It's less intimidating if one is less ignorant.

Computer:
fixed touchpad issues (static induced probably, it did not work and jumped around only when not charging) by changing background noise cancellation & senstivity parameters. The hardware wasn't hopelessly broken after all.

Just got an external hard drive, since I have only 16GB (it was meant s a chromebook with cloud storage).

I believe I have a working computer now without having to send the whole thing back or attack any more mouse, keyboard, screens.

Kindle:
I wanted to use the "vocabulary builder" - not to quiz myself (gross), I just want to see a list of things I've looked up in each book. But sometimes words (from well-known books) are not in the dictionary and it is impossible to add them to the list by hand. Minor but annoying. I'm having to keep "coquelicot", "rhodomontade", and "pattened" in my head.

The reading speed estimates are very wrong. Thinks I will read a 600 page book in about 20 minutes. Yesterday I had to read for 40 minutes to reduce the "time left in book" by 2 minutes. Even if I reset it it goes back to being very wrong after some time.

Phone: still broken (for the second time). Do not recommend XPeria Z1 at all, it splinters at the slightest provocation and once it does the whole touchscreen (and therefore everything) is unusable.

Self replicating machine: apparently possible but not yet done because there's too many parts. But 3D printers can apparently make complex and many-parted things out of a plan and a tub of plastic grains, can we do it now?

Was between 4 stars (good, but not mind-blowing) and 3 (meh); the "epilogue" disgusted and bored me so much that I settled at 3. That alone is 2 parts and several chapters, the first part is about everyone's life some years later - I am disgusted, I did not want to read about people's marriages and babies at length and pretend that's great, and does he really think someone is doing great morally for only hitting the serfs occasionally - and the second part is a long essay on why historians are all wrong and how they should instead approach things. This is ok, but it had already been said less directly throughout the book, the whole thing feels condescending and repetitive often. On the other hand I sometimes think he could have just written the essay and left off the rest of it.

Rostovs are all of them spoiled little brats.

I don't know what I expected, something like Moby Dick which just describes everything probably. It does very occasionally do a thing like put in a few paragraphs about how beekeeping works, but only to make a didactic metaphor out of it. I didn't properly consider that Tolstoy is some russian nobleman and can't tell about anything else or in a different tone.

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Quotes I feel are holding onto (because the only thing I enjoy is being super arrogant and putting down the "social sciences"):

"Among that number of innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human life there are those in which substance prevails and those in which form prevails"

"The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one asks" (it's mostly philosophy, in my opinion, where they continue to write long essays about questions which have long been answered or absurd and simple scenarios which no one wanted to know about, still come to no answers, and then feel smug about it)

The metaphor that history books and ideas (and in my opinion philosophy, literature, etc) are like paper or coin money in that they have mutually agreed upon value but not necessarily inherent value is also quite nice, if obvious.
The fact that academics write the history books and that's why books and academics and ideas are falsely portrayed as very influential was perhaps less obvious but probably true.

How come, with the huge volume of books published constantly, I can't for example find more prehistory fiction than Clan of the Cave Bear series and a few children's books? Do we really just have a huge amount of the same types of romance novels and crime and stuff and absolutely no demand for some other genres one would expect to be a thing? What is going on.

Prehistory and steampunk are definitely on the 2016 reading list (I don't know if that's an actual list yet).

We are all very insulting humanities students right now, especially literature, pretty much out of jealousy. The feeling is that their work is far easier and more fun and still they don't even do it competently. Points of evidence: they still go to bars and clubbing during exam time weeks. A girl is writing an essay about "the devil in literature" and has not heard of Faust or read Paradise Lost. Unquestionably I could do better than that (because wow), and it would be fun, and then I could finish War and Peace and all the other free-time activities I barely squeeze in that are their "work".

Personally I am also jealous of all the cigarettes and nice coffees they allow themselves, annoyed at the loudness, and judgemental of the accents which overwhelmingly indicate they are English and are paying a lot of tuition to be here.

So yeah. Back to math practice. Should have studied literature.

I looked at a buzzfeed article yesterday and that was a bad idea but it's really bothering me?

If you ever jokingly typed "unfollow me" or "you monster" or "you had no childhood" or "what sane person would..." because someone didn't watch the same cartoon as you or bit into a chocolate from the wrong angle or doesn't love the some brand, unfollow me (actually pls). But maybe explain to me how this 'pretend' outrage over the slightest difference could seem fun and constructive and not awful first.

(It's not a silly internet problem, I've had this happen to my face forever too and can we stop pretending what people say on the internet is different from their behavior irl)

Whatever hints were dropped towards unresolved murder mysteries, I didn't find them. Help?

( spoilers )

I am reading Inversions and it is not spectacular. I'm liking Culture novels less and less.

It's just like War and Peace and a lot of other things in that I have to read about some nobles hunting, going to war, diplomacying, being sexist, mistreating their serf and servants, etc. Generally being people with monarchies, patriarchy, European features and culture, a whole lot of extremely improbably things like horses and dogs (they have more suns and moons than us but that's about it)... Sure it's entirely possible that some other planet out there is medieval in all of exactly the same ways as Earth, but why do I have to read a whole book about this one out of all the planets in the universe.


If there turn out to be very good reasons for the suspicious similarities to Europe, 1700s, Earth I will still not like it, that's not the point. The point is that he chose to write about this instead of literally everything else in the universe, except now with some added assertions at being open-minded.

At least War and Peace is authentic and complex. I think we could really do better at criticizing things than by writing the exact same thing as always except exaggeratedly, "ironically" and smugly.

I'm more than annoyed. Why are maybe literally all the books there are the same boring stuff?

Course #1: everything done, 56/80 marks on known things. It is likely I'm getting more than 4/20 on last assigment but not likely in getting 14/20. So, upper second.

Course #2: study for exams today

Course #3: study for exams today

Project: Report and poster done and I'm pretty happy with this. Leave alone today, last corrections and turn in tomorrow.

Group project: I'm ahead of everyone, do more after exams