Books, Books, Books!
I read a lot. I would wager that if I were to have some method to count every word I have heard spoken aloud and every word I have read that I would find that I have read far more than I have listened. (Surely that would would explain a lot about myself.)
Though recently I lament the fact that I have read mostly fanfiction for the past five years. Fanfiction is good fun of course, but I believe that everyone should pick up a good published book and read it from time to time. Since we're talking published works, let's not just stop with books either! I can also recommend checking out published journals, research papers, and news articles for good and varied reading.
(Maybe also a few textbooks...)
So without much further ado, here is a reading list of some of the things I have been reading recently:
- Journal Of Science
- You will see that I'm starting off with something that is clearly not a book in my book list. I like to obtain a copy of this journal and read at least the editorial and news section if I have the time. This journal has a lot of different kinds of research papers in it as well; it's good in terms of variety.
- The Fifth Kingdom - Bryce Kendrick
- If you have ever wanted to learn about mushrooms this is the book for you. A comphrehensive introduction to mycology. (In the same vein I can also recommend: Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora)
- Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
- A bit outdated by now, but still an awesome book. If (WHEN) you pick up this book for the first time, I recommend keeping a device nearby to lookup all of the missions he speaks of on the NASA website. (Or elsewhere if the site has been gutted by the time you get to reading this). Sagan often speaks of his predictions on how the missions to look far out into our solar system will go and my favorite thing about being able to read this book so far into the future was being able to see exactly how it went. Some things are able to end well Mr.Sagan.
- Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
- Reading this in our current political climate (the American one at least) will make you furious.
So many of the things he feared have come to pass with a startling intensity and clarity. The world is a dark and miserable place. Still, there are little islands of light. For example, he spoke of directly detecting gravitational waves. At the time he published this work we had yet to do it. In 2015 we did. - The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
- Le Guin is one of my favorite authors and 'The Dipossessed' is one of my favorite books from her. I highly recommend it. I recommend most of her books.
- Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
- A classic. Also one of Vonnegut's books in which his distinct style is more on the palatable side. Vonnegut is rather... gut... (I'll see myself out now) of course, but I recommend that you never under any circumstances read several books written by him within the same week. It's like drinking a bottle of plain vanilla extract.
- Feed - M T Anderson
- A book designed to make you feel ill- and it has a good reason to. Highly recommend.
All right that's some stuff I have read/been reading. I may make another post later when I need to procrastinate some more. In the meantime, any reading recommendations you have for me can be written as a comment on my neocities profile.
Some People...
I don't like putting nice stuff on my actual blog, so it goes here:
To my friend,
I really like hanging out with you!
I've been feeling really bad lately in both the mental and physical aspects, but I really enjoyed watching that anime with you. I'm glad we could watch it together. I had been putting off watching it with you for a while because I was worried it would somehow go badly, but I really enjoyed myself!
I know that I don't reach out as often as I should or seem uninterested in friendship, but I really appreciate that you keep messaging me regardless. I know my anxiety is often seen as standoffishness, but I'm glad that you're persistent and patient with me even if I don't ever say that. Sometimes I feel like everyone is either dislikes me or is afraid of me somehow, but I haven't gotten that impression from you yet.
To many more good conversations!
With love, your friend.
My Pepperrrrrrrsss
Buying seeds/grown plants for bell peppers is silly. The seeds you remove from the peppers at the grocer's always do splendidly
An Article About Poetry
First and foremost, the link for you to read is here.
I am writing this just after reading through this article and it was a very dense article, so naturally I am having issues organizing my thoughts. In short, this is about a group of people who are working on an English translation of an anthology of Russian anti-war poems. Given the persecution the Russian people are liable to recieve from their government for sharing antiwar sentiments, these poems are being translated to English in order to be preserved and further shared.
The article is focused on interviews with translators in the project about the nature of their work and the complexities of translating from Russian to English. They discuss various techniques used in the poetry to emphasize the senslessness and violence of the war in Ukraine as well as the ridiculousness of the Russian state's propaganda.
Here is a poem from the article written by Yulia Fridman and translated by Maria Bloshteyn:
When we had liberated Ukraine from the Nazis,
Poland from Martians, Finland from dog-headed men,
the Earth sprouted fragrant cocaine-smelling blossoms,
and our tankmen got high on their magical scent. Lithuania became a hotbed for galactic snails
from Epsilon of Andromeda, that cold crimson star;
they hid among salad greens and other plants,
we bombed it flat – no choice but go that far.
Read more about it here.
Starting to see a pattern here...
Alright, I guess these blog style posts are just going to be me doing shoutouts to randos (or people I know) saying nice things to them that I can never work up the courage to say to their face. Of course I say nice shit (as well as bad shit) about people behind their backs. /s :rolling_eyes_emoji:
Anyway, rando of the week is guy on youtube that disappeared for a while then came back and didn't get very many views on the vid.
I was VERY happy when I saw your upload!!!
I would check my subscriptions every once in a while, to see if I missed something, but you didn't upload. I vaguely remembered you saying something about how you had messed up/difficult stuff going on in your personal life (relatable) and was worried when I saw no posts on youtube or any other socials (among some socials completely disappearing). I was very happy to see that you were doing alright when you uploaded.
Anyway, Mr.Rando, I was very excited about that new video! All the best to you!
Guy in my Hard Drive
To the guy that used to post tons of portal and portal 2 speedruns:
You're really good at playing piano. Like, good enough that I downloaded one of your videos with you playing, saved it to my hard drive, and listen to it sometimes. Don't know if that's creepy to say, but I really liked your playing so I saved it.
Don't know if you disappeared or not, but if you did, that's a shame. Your playing was nice.
Music and stuff
Sometimes you think you aren't important to someone in the slightest, but sometimes people listen to the covers of songs you made and sent in the discord even after not speaking with you for weeks.
