7858

@7858.eth

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The Courage to Be Disliked Dialogue lays out the fundamentals of Adlerian psychology as the most effective self help strategy. The title is so good, the book has tons of sales, the reviews were glowing, and the connection to Japanese culture was so tantalizing. But the book turned out to be just one of the many dime-a-dozen self help books that grab onto some specific mode of psychology and tell you to stop worrying because now you have their special insight. If you’re a troubled teenager, go for it. Or for any of its near clones. Otherwise, skip it.

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Darkness at Noon Former Soviet Party superstar languishes in prison while awaiting execution by the Soviets. Not recommended. These people are just the worst. The book is largely an assertion along the lines of “us old Bolsheviks were making good progress toward trying real communism and then these Stalinist thugs came and ruined it.” Which is, of course, stupid on its face. Soviet thinking had all the worst vices of religious thinking and none of its virtues. It’s so exhausting to listen to the performative rhetoric competition. “How far can I distort my worldview? Did you distort your worldview enough to escape the KGB death squads?” There’s pretty much nothing else to this book. Warning: I’m going to block anyone who shows up in the replies defending any flavor of Marxism, Bolshevism, Stalinism, etc.

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“Warpcast is being rebranded to Farcaster.” Cute little kid goes through awkward adolescence and emerges attractive on the other side.

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Simon Sarris just tweeted about his first motorcycle and it reminded me of mine. It was a black Kawasaki 450 LTD with a homemade sissy bar welded onto the back. I left it on its side for a winter outside an apartment that I didn’t even live in. In the spring I stood it up, Fred Flintstoned down the driveway, popped the clutch, and it fired right up. Those old UJMs were unmatched. It looked enough like the Purple Rain motorcycle that one of my coworkers would sing “Why do we screeeam at each otherrrrr?” every time I got onto or off of it. After a few months of that, he got fatally stabbed in the neck by his common law wife in the course of a disagreement about some crack. There’s exactly one lie in this cast, $10 USDC to whoever guesses it correctly.

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Illuminati be like

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The Pearl Steinbeck tells the story of a poor father who finds a valuable natural resource and loses a great deal as a result. This book reminded me of why, after reading The Grapes of Wrath, I wrote Steinbeck off as a hack for a decade. The prose is more florid in this book, with flashes of brilliance, but an intolerable baseline cringe factor. The overt political message is so exhausting that I couldn’t even empathize with the human experience related in it. Exquisite books by Steinbeck: East of Eden Of Mice and Men Great book by Steinbeck: Cannery Row Bad books by Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath The Pearl I haven’t read any of his others and I had such a bad experience with The Pearl that I’ll probably take another decade off.

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Holy shit, congrats @phil

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Are there any enterprise grade tools for AI PR reviews? I’m looking for at least senior level performance and I feel like the models are close but I can’t cope with a super clunky UX

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The trouble is they never listen

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The Caine Mutiny Civilian becomes a captain of a minesweeper over the course of WWII. “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.” The pain of coming to grips with this reality lies at the core of this book. The passably smart, reasonably independently thinking protagonist struggles with the dilemma, sometimes discarding his own rational reactions to formalistic bureaucratic nonsense and sometimes recoiling so strongly that he can’t help but reject the system level demands imposed by the distant geniuses. The court martial concerning the mutiny mentioned in the title is usually referred to as the dramatic climax, but the post mortem delivered by the conflicted defense attorney afterwards was, for me, by far the best scene. Other than one slow section near the middle, the whole book is outstanding. It feels grown up and sophisticated without being daunting or fatiguing. Highly recommended. Lots of fun and full of insights applicable to any bureaucracy.

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I love this industry “This paper introduces Multiverse Finance, which splits the financial system into parallel universes so you can short the market today, but only if your candidate is going to lose the next election.”

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It breaks my heart that so many young women have decided to dress so poorly. The choice seems to be between the frumpy dystopian flesh tone Kardashian sweatsuit path and the deliberately dowdy 90s dad Brooklyn ironic antifashion path. A whole generation of raw goddess energy completely squandered. Tragic

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The Canterville Ghost Pragmatic American family moves into an old European house and haunts the ghost living there. It’s almost a perfect bookend to The Turn of the Screw: - Funny instead of scary - Ghost is the victim instead of the family - Written by a European about Americans instead of vice versa - Ghost is a flamboyant gothic blood and chains type instead of the naturalistic type - Wraps up neatly with a bow instead of leaving the reader uncertain Oscar Wilde is reliably funny, and this book delivers on that Front. It presents a stereotype of Americans that’s mostly outdated, but even still it holds up. And as a parody of ghost stories, it’s as relevant as ever. It’s fun and quick. Put it on your list for next October.

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The Turn of the Screw Governess either sees ghosts or loses her mind. The ambiguity about whether the narrator is actually seeing ghosts or is merely hallucinating them gives this book a more effectively horrifying character than most gothic horror. She’s intensely protective of her charges, but the whole time you’re wondering whether some well intentioned act is going to result in tragedy. Recommended if you’re into ghost stories or horror.

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I wouldn’t tell anyone I won the lottery but there would be signs

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Pains me to say this about a journalist, but @kaufman is a top tier follow. Consistently interesting, often hilarious, and a totally natural fit for our scene I’m either gonna have to adjust my position on journalists or “no true Scotsman” him into some other category in my mind

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Of Mice and Men Two migrant workers have a bad time settling into a new gig. Steinbeck is a strange animal. His prose is great—sharp, direct, and natural. The stories are good. Nothing mind blowing, but always solid. The characters are especially memorable, but even adjusting for that, his books hit way harder than you’d expect. There’s some secret alchemy to them that just reaches into you and torques your insides. It feels more like a gigantic short story than a novel. It’s all one big push to a single big idea. And holy shit, when you get there it’s so intense. This was my first pass through it. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but the ninth grade English teachers were right about this one. I finished it around a week ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it. Pound for pound it’s one of the best books of all time. Strongest recommendation, a universal must read book.

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Abraham Lincoln Carl Sandburg poetically tells the story of the United States’ sixteenth president. It’s a great and good book about a great and good man, but it’s almost kitschy in its self conscious effort to mythologize. Sandburg clearly wanted for it to pass as a proper biography, but it seemed to me that his real goal was to write an American Aeneid. One of his unspoken theses is that Lincoln, much more than the founding generation, represented the genesis of the true American spirit at its finest. The Prairie Years section, especially, is distractingly poetic in its language. And then after hundreds of pages of getting used to the flowery prose, the book transforms into a direct journalistic account of Lincoln’s role in the war. But these are just quibbles. It’s an incredible story of a peerless man at a pivotal time. The book delivers, even if it’s quirky and unabashedly partisan. Recommended for fans of history and biography.

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