Book updates (RATM #8)#
June 14, 2023
Actually a partial update. Time for some other mental hygiene and time to go through the last books and things read.
I have a dataview in Obsidian with books reads, in progress, and similar staff. It is both great and something that deserves further attention.
I have two books that entered the queue and stood there for a couple of days, benefiting most of the attention. Every day science and awareness got a level up from Se pianto un albero posso mangiare una bistecca, a book that offers a “what science says” about many environmental media symbols.
That’s one of the “things are a tiny little bit more complex than the way it is put by someone willing to cause some gut reaction (with the hope of moving people towards their goal)”.
On a completely different level, there is I Tre. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic e il futuro del tennis. Mum bought that at the same event we bought Oceano di suono.
She read that first and said a lot of super good things. She said she was as impressed by that as by Roger Federer è esistito davvero. She was right.
I got a pleasant read and a conceptual framework from what looks like “a book about sport”. It is that sort of feeling of “getting to read more than just the object that is the subject of the book” that is probably one of the markers of a great piece of writing. When DFW writes about tennis or mentions tennis in Infinite Jest, there’s more at stake than tennis. Even if defying this “what” can sometimes be hard and, if pushing too hard, it simply vanishes, and what you write to get at this “what” become was more boring than the books for your exam in which all the 1000+ pages you had to read were manuals from the professor holding the class.
“I Tre” will give you some of these vibes. And, at least in my case, introduced me to something new. I knew about the psychology of competitive sports. I guess that started with network analysis stuff and Gladwell and something else on peak performance. Here you can get something more. For example references to books about the physics of tennis (for Rafa’s topspin) but also in-depth analysis on football/soccer and even more stuff.
I’ve finished Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. What a book. I’ve read The Cathedral & the Bazaar and needed this one.
The book helped me to better understand what’s around and beyond a lot of technologies we use daily without thinking too much as well as work.
This definitely needs more attention to be properly written about. And hopefully it will help to have a better Obsidian flow concerning book info retention.
I started Prince of Persia Diaries, aka The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner who created the game quite a lot of time ago.
This is impressive for a variety of reasons. Like Mechner having learned to program we have no idea where and doing his university in filmmaking. (Wikipedia says his mother is a programmer).
So, yep, again an example of someone doing something cool in software coming from outside.
Other note-worthy things are the memories I have of the game. As he describes the level making and the choices… I am with him for the first 6 or 7 levels.
Besides that… I have no idea of the other games he refers to. Not even Karateka. Sometimes it is good to be reminded of how it was to live in the pre-smartphone era. And also that I’ve been there before, a few times (i.d. years). #neverrefrainfromablink182quote
The staggering thing to learn was that, as he writes the game as a solo effort, he is not sure whether to go filmmaking or game-making. In part because the market is dying. The book teaches the value of great ports for a game and brings you back to the pre-pc days of Amiga, apple II, pc (meaning MS-Dos, and windows 3.1 I guess), Atari, and mac being there.
I’ve also finished Pollan’s Come cambiare la tua mente.
A history book and a personal journal on plants and chemicals that can alter your mind. It starts mapping out the evolution of substances from Hoffman synthesizing the LSD to Timothy Leary leading to the ban and switch in the public discourse about psychoactive substances.
Then we follow how the renaissance of experiments and interest in psychoactive substances. In between we get Pollon’s own personal experiences with psychoactives.
Basically a 3 in 1 book. History, journal, and overview of trends and new perspectives. Also, the glossary is nice.
Ok, partial update – there’s more than reported bookwise – done. Let’s try to have this randomness happen more often!