Read what interests you.

That's how I feel about Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

...enough Reddit for today ! :')

I read this. Her parents were truly rebels. She went through a lot. Crazy that some people live like that. I guess it ultimately worked out for the author and her siblings.

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The Netflix sticker on my Heartstopper book turned out to be a permanent part of the cover design. I thought the stickers were bad 😡

Many thanks!

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It's not because they're not afraid of being seen as gay though, it's because being gay is so taboo there that most people wouldn't assume that a guy is openly expressing being gay.

I listened to it and loved most of it, could tell where some of it was just filler, but nothing was so bad that I wanted to stop. Was it amazing, no not really, worth the time whilst driving down the road, better than a lot of things I've tried listening to.

>Your entire argument hinges upon the need to force same-sex attracted people back into the closet, that's insane and you're insane for arguing that we should do that

They're not arguing that. They're saying that the increasing visibility of and conceptualization of homosexuality meant that men felt the need to signal that they were not homosexual. That isn't saying that we should go back, it's just saying what likely happened. Even today you can see greater male physical affection in places where homosexuality is extremely taboo like in Saudi Arabia, where it's not rare for male friends to hold hands.

The solution to this is not that gay people should go back in the closet, it's that there should be a reduction in the stigma associated with being gay (though even without a stigma, most people don't want to be perceived as a sexuality they're not, so this might not work). Identifying why things likely shook out in a certain way is not an attack on the gay community.

It's not homophobic, it's presenting a reasonable theory of why things shook out the way that they did. It's not saying "and that's why gay people should go back in the closet." It's just saying that as the concept of homosexuality developed in public consciousness as possible thing that a person might be, that men made a point of signalling that they're not part of that group. There's no value judgment there.

>Basically, he's writing how books are the only worthwhile form of the humanities

This is very much not what he writes. His argument is about how Kanye, SBF, and McElwee's complete dismissal of the value of books is connected to a larger cultural trend of anti-intellectualism. He thinks that this anti-intellectualism is linked to other trends (egoism, effective altruism) that are potentially harmful.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,

Thy micturations are to me,

As plurdled gabbleblotchits, in midsummer morning

On a lurgid bee

I work in a print shop.

The problem isn't the stickers. It's that the people buying the stickers don't understand that adhesives and paper matter.

It's the same with price tags and sale stickers. It's all well and good until you try to peel off the sticker and it doesn't come off cleanly. In a perfect world, the people buying the stickers would purchase the correct sticker stock for the application so that it's always easy to remove.

When done correctly, stickers are always better than the movie/tv show tie-in cover.

Douglas Adams also wrote a book series called “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”. Here are some fun quotes from that

I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be

Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

...was friend the word? He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than a person.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?

Oh-- GoodReads has a list of books on the Eugenics Movement and it's relationship to racism, nazi Germany, America, and Europe. Here are some of the titles on the list:

Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity by Harry Bruinius

In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics

by Victoria F. Nourse

Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities by Suzanne E. Evans

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism

by Stefan Kühl

I actually have a good laugh at the ads sometimes

According to othrr comments, they are memorized reviews of said songs. Additionally someone mentioned Ellis is a huge fan of pop music according to his podcast, so he may have written these out of a personal passion for music

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Oh, and I’ll echo someone else’s comment that this style of writing is also just kind of bad. I consider it sort of abusive to the reader. After Pynchon, I decided I never again needed to read some white guy banging on and showing off all the words he knows (sorry David Foster Wallace)

Edit: lol I forgot a basic rule: never tell book people you don’t like DFW

Excellent book. A difficult and eye-opening read. Some of America's most influential politicians and business tycoons supported the Eugenics movement. Did you read IBM and the Holocaust, also by Michael Black?

I always took this as differing meanings to the language. I think by interpreting these as more affectionate we could be imposing more modern understandings of language on to what would be 19th century meanings of words.

Yes, absolutely. I went through this reading Pynchon as well as James Joyce. The first time it happened was while reading Ulysses. I was struggling through it, trying hard to parse out the meanings and references… and then I just let go, stopped trying, and allowed the text to become like a sea of words I was floating on. I guess I believe that style of writing is meant to be instinctive and evocative, to make you feel, to activate your deeper instincts less so than your processing and analysis functions.

Could I tell you the plot of these books? No. Am I one of the few people I know who actually read them and didn’t give up in agony? Yes.

No idea what the authors would think of this approach, but it is truly a lovely experience! Glad you found your own way to connect and enjoy a very experimental text. Congratulations.

Had more or less the same reaction. Amused at points but overall didn't think it lived up to the hype.