This is the shelf of items and moments I have written thoughts about. You can also see the shelf of everything or the shelves of items by year finished.

The Genetic Book of the Dead

Dawkins is of course the author who kicked off my adult nonfiction reading habit, and I’ll always read his new book when it comes out. I don’t know how many more times that will happen, if any. But I found “a sense of wonder” in his explication of how the immortal gene works, stumbling into the invention of such a vast and strange array of organisms along the way.

Sir D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), that immensely learned zoologist, classicist, and mathematician, made a remark that seems trite, even tautological, but it actually provokes thought. ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way.’

The primatologist Richard Wrangham has promoted the intriguing hypothesis that the invention of cooking was the key to human uniqueness and human success. He makes a persuasive case that our reduced jaws, teeth, and guts are ill-suited to either a carnivorous or a herbivorous diet unless a substantial proportion of our food is cooked. Cooking enables us to get energy from foods more quickly and efficiently. For Wrangham it was cooking that led to the dramatic evolutionary enlargement of the human brain, the brain being by far the most energy-hungry of our organs. If he’s right, it’s a nice example of how a cultural change (the taming of fire) can have evolutionary consequences (the shrinking of jaws and teeth).

Successful genes, then, survive in bodies down the generations, and they cause (in a statistical sense) their own survival by their ‘phenotypic’ effects on the bodies that they inhabit.

Is there an equilibrium needed to make these vehicles tho? DNA for ribosomes can’t do anything without many other genes in the right proportions

But even song loudness is not the end of the causal chain. As far as natural selection is concerned, song loudness only matters insofar as it attracts females (and deters males, but let’s not complicate the argument). The causal chain extends to a radius where it exerts an influence on a female cricket. This has to mean that a change in female behaviour is part of the extended phenotype of genes in a male cricket. Therefore, the extended phenotype of a gene can reside in another individual.

Surely gene replication is the end of the causal chain

The male gathers decorative objects – coloured berries, flowers, even bottle tops. Movies of male bower birds at work irresistibly remind me of an artist putting the finishing touches to a canvas, standing back, head cocked judgmentally, then darting forward to make a delicate adjustment, standing back again and surveying the effect with head on one side before darting forward again. That is what emboldened me to use a word like ‘tastefully’. It is hard to resist the impression that the bird is exercising his aesthetic judgement in perfecting a work of art. Even if the decorated bower is not to every human’s taste, or even every female bower bird’s, the ‘touching up’ behaviour of the male almost forces the conclusion that the male has taste of his own, and he is adjusting his bower to meet it.

Something eerie and Eternal about animal constructions

I do not know whether exposure to a more than usually magnificent bower stimulates a hormone surge in the blood of a female,

Every time you mention something unknown, I want to become a scientist

The gene’s-eye view of evolution necessarily incorporates the idea of the extended phenotype

Cf. deltas between Level III universes. Alleles create real alternate worlds!?

In 2002, Kim Sterelny, editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Extended Phenotype by commissioning three critical appraisals, plus a reply from me.

I concluded my piece with a humorously grandiose fantasy about the building of a future Extended Phenotypics Institute. This pipedream edifice was to have three wings, the Zoological Artifacts Museum (ZAM), the laboratory of Parasite Extended Genetics (PEG), and the Centre for Action at a Distance (CAD).

My main authority – indeed today’s world authority – is Professor Nick Davies of Cambridge University. His book Cuckoo is a delightful amalgam of natural history and memoir of his field research on Wicken Fen, near Cambridge. Described by David Attenborough as one of the country’s greatest field naturalists, he achieves heights of lyrical word-painting unsurpassed in the literature of modern natural history: North towards the horizon is the eleventh-century cathedral of Ely, which sits on the raised land of the Isle of Ely, from where Hereward led his raids against the Normans. In the early mornings, when the mist lies low, the cathedral appears as a great ship, sailing across the fens.

If it finds itself sharing the nest with either eggs or chicks of the foster species, the hatchling cuckoo fits them neatly into the hollow in its back. It then wriggles backwards up the side of the nest and tosses the competing egg or chick out. There is, of course, no suggestion that it knows what it’s doing, or why it is doing it, no feelings of guilt or remorse (or triumph) in the act. The behavioural routine simply runs like clockwork. Natural selection in ancestral generations favoured genes that shaped nervous systems in such a way as to play out this instinctive act of (foster) fratricide. That is all we can say.

I want to watch this evolution happen

The Eye of the Heron

My read-through of the five novels in this Library of America volume continues. A few images and moments certainly grabbed hold of me and put me in a pretty particular 1978 SF state of mind. Other moments felt like too bare an exposure of the author’s own opinions about how societies ought to work; Always Coming Home seemed to me to be a more thorough and nuanced realization of a similar aim.

Luz Marina Falco Cooper sat in the deep window seat, her knees drawn up to her chin. Sometimes she gazed out through the thick, greenish glass of the window at the sea and the rain and the clouds. Sometimes she looked down at the book that lay open beside her, and read a few lines. Then she sighed and looked out the window again. The book was not interesting. It was too bad. She had had high hopes of it. She had never read a book before. She had learned to read and write, of course, being the daughter of a Boss. Besides memorizing lessons aloud, she had copied out moral precepts, and could write a letter offering or declining an invitation, with a fancy scrollwork frame, and the salutation and signature written particularly large and stiff. But at school they used slates and the copybooks which the schoolmistresses wrote out by hand. She had never touched a book. Books were too precious to be used in school; there were only a few dozen of them in the world. They were kept in the Archives. But, coming into the hall this afternoon, she had seen lying on the low table a little brown box; she had lifted the lid to see what was in it, and it was full of words. Neat, tiny words, all the letters alike, what patience to make them all the same size like that! A book—a real book, from Earth. Her father must have left it there.

“Sasha’s house is down there,” said the variegated child, pointing down a muddy, overgrown lane, and sidled away so effectively that he seemed simply to become part of the general mist and mud.

I imagined The Eye of the Heron as a Falcom PC-98 JRPG and something clicked:

• I was disappointed in the stories of actual JRPGs in comparison
• I liked the book a lot more

It’s so vivid in my mind how memorable a well-executed game, in that style, of this exact story, could be. The wistful aesthetics of a Legend of Heroes III or a Princess Maker 2, but the narrative and poetic weight of Le Guin.

ファイブスター物語 15

The bit with Weinzel and Palsuet meeting Mrs. Cyan stands out as one of my favorite episodes of all of FSS: character drama that also enriches the history and culture of the Joker Star Cluster. As is my new method, I skimmed over a bunch of the standing around in nondescript outdoor environments yelling about military campaigns.

ひらやすみ 6

This has continued to be the representative heartwarming slice of life manga of recent years. Every line is gently rounded, every corner softened — both in the art and in the story.

ファイブスター物語 14

Four years trying to get through this; the hardest volume for me, on account of how much of it is just military operations conveyed by close-ups of characters talking from inside GTM cockpits or vague “outside” locations, with minimal detail in the way of environments, objects, culture, or general sense of flavor. Every now and then you get to look at a GTM from the outside.

But even Nagano advises that folks skip ahead whenever they find they’re not enjoying an FSS story, and in the spirit of tadoku I finally took him up on it. I dashed through to the end and into Volume XV, already bringing me back to what I love about this series.

スピリット　サークル 2

This volume deepens the sense of what it might really be like to become aware of one’s past lives, if such a thing were true. It successfully made me feel the gravity of waking up having witnessed your own entire lifespan in a medieval Europe or an ancient Egypt.

Off Book 340: Spark of Salvador Dali

It may be my favorite Jessica McKenna fact that she of course always built Lego sets exactly according to the instructions and then left them in that perfectly constructed state. The childhood version of me who did that, displaying them all on a shelf, appreciates her for that. (It also seems significant that I later dumped all the Legos in a huge bin and invited the neighborhood over to create their own domains all across my room for a summer.)

A Story

KSR on Wolfe, including a detour through Proust!

What I mean is that after Wolfe read Proust, he understood he was free, free to become himself in any way he wanted, to become, like Proust, one of the great Modernist writers, all of whom make their own tradition, style, subject matter, and reality. After you’ve read a novel that contains a 240-page garden party, why should you fear anything? You can’t. Anything is possible.

A genius in Wolfe: and if there are any fellow postmodern materialists reading this and groaning at the idea of there being anything unusual inside an artist or anyone else, anything beyond the workings of the brain, I will agree immediately, but point out that the latest news from brain science makes it clearer and clearer that saying “only the brain” is not much of a delimiting statement. The brain is not a clockwork, nor a steam engine, nor a binary or digital computer, nor any of the machines we conceptualize it to be with our simple metaphors based on our own feeble handiwork, as if the brain could only be as complex as something we ourselves could make. Very much not the case. The brain is a kind of pocket universe. The mind is huge, and consciousness a small part of it. The unconscious may well be inhabited by “subroutines,” as the computer people would have it, processes that may actually be more like characters. Maybe they are like Jungian archetypes—a shadow seems likely, perhaps an anima or animus—but who knows. Very probably the brain consists of organizations even stranger and more various than that. It may be a kind of library of stories all telling themselves at once. And by way of stories written down, one unconscious mind communicates with other unconscious minds.

His stories usually are not allegories but events in themselves, something like dreams or vases.

Off Book 338: Mistake on a Plate

Favorites:

• “All Are Welcome As Long As You Come Correct”
• Blake Sparkles' short jingle about the lemon drops

Notable for being Zroundbls’s early favorite during their induction into fandom. Also notable for having a surprisingly satisfying moral arc. Feels like part of a little golden age for Off Book, along with “The Center of the Bullseye”, “The Names of Our Family”, etc.

Off Book 339: A Club for You

Favorites:

• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy” (38:00)
• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy (Reprise)”

Off Book 340: The Center of the Bullseye

Favorites:

• All-time favorite Off Book song: “Keeping it Plain”. I’d like to analyze this one line by line, rhyme by rhyme.
• “I Will Help You Follow the DoorDash Driver”

スピリット　サークル 1

I’d worked my way through a couple of volumes of 惑星のさみだれ from the big Mizukami pile that my brother-in-law lent me, but set it aside for its unremitting shounenness. This series, he assured me, is more “spiritual”. So far I’m quite enjoying the admixture of the everyday modern Japanese setting and historically-inspired past societies.

Swann’s Way

I’d been curious about reading Proust for about a decade: I gave him the tentative research treatment in bookstores where I examined the editions they had, practiced on CDs in the 1990s when you couldn’t know much about an album except what you could glean from the packaging. I read De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and then didn’t read Proust for eight years thereafter. I read the Atlantic article about reading Proust on one’s phone. I stood in a Brooklyn bookstore on a work trip and seriously considered picking up the shiny red Swann’s Way there, but had to admit I couldn’t be sure I’d really read through it, let alone the rest of the volumes.

Upon moving to Tokyo, the Katsushika Central Library became one of my favorite places. We visited nearly every day in the course of bringing the kids to Kumon, Shichidashiki, or other activities. On the shelf in the quite decent English section I found two volumes of the Penguin Proust, translated by seven different people, and learned that two more were in the stacks. All of my prior research and concern about getting just the right translation and the right format were replaced by the notion of how meaningful it would be to start reading Swann’s Way any time I was in the library, and only when I was in the library. It could be something to look forward to, something to add beyond my regular reading pile, and something to progress slowly without worrying about how long it took to finish.

I lasted for a few weeks of only reading it when physically present in the library building, but eventually had to admit that I was captivated enough to want to borrow it for an overnight stay at my in-laws’. Not long after, I also got ahold of the ebook edition so that I could continue reading at any time.

I developed a habit of capturing each passage that hit me like a gust of wind, or tingled my nervous system, or rooted my feet to the ancient ground, or otherwise made me stop and boggle at its gravity. I’d photograph the page in the iPhone’s text recognition mode, copy the text, and paste it both to my commonplace-book in Ulysses and to my friend Sben, who I’d decided was the person I wanted to talk about Proust with. I also sent some to my cousin Stephen, who’d shown interest in reading Proust himself, but I stopped when he committed to starting to read it.

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical. And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a person’s soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.

And so — while some artist who reads the memoirs of the seventeenth century and wants to be like the great King, and thinks he will be making progress in that direction if he fabricates a genealogy for himself that traces his own descent from a historic family or if he carries on a correspondence with one of the current sovereigns of Europe, is actually turning his back on what he mistakenly sought in forms that were identical and consequently dead — an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness, saw, without ever thinking of Louis XIV, the most insignificant occupations of her day, those concerned with her rising, her lunch, her afternoon rest, acquire, because of their despotic singularity, some of the interest of what Saint-Simon called the “mechanics” of life at Versailles, and could also believe that her silences, a nuance of good humor or disdain in her features, were for Françoise the object of a commentary as passionate, as fearful as were the silence, the good humor, the disdain of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest lords, handed him a petition at a bend of an avenue at Versailles.

This bit o’ doggerel:

Love a dog’s arse, and to thy nose ’Twill smell like a rose

Was originally:

Qui du cul d’un chien s’amourose Il lui parait une rose.

But! The orienting snippet for the footnote quotes a different version, presumably from an earlier draft of the translation. That one apparently ended in “plum”, suggesting that it employed a stretch to rhyme with “bum”, until Davis found a way to rhyme with the literal “rose”. I wonder what the Moncrieff had it as? … Holy crap, he embellished it like so:

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, And dirty sluts in plenty, Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses When the heart is one-and-twenty.

Then this; Proust must have known this stuff is hilarious, right?

He passed close to us, did not break off his conversation with his neighbor, and from the corner of his blue eye gave us a little sign that was in some way interior to his eyelid and which, not involving the muscles of his face, could go perfectly unnoticed by the lady he was talking to; but seeking to compensate by intensity of feeling for the somewhat narrow field in which he had circumscribed its expression, in the azure corner assigned to us he set sparkling all the liveliness of a grace that exceeded playfulness, bordered on mischievousness; he overrefined the subtleties of amiability into winks of connivance, insinuations, innuendos, the mysteries of complicity; and finally exalted his assurances of friendship into protestations of affection, into a declaration of love, illuminating for us alone, at that moment, with a secret languor invisible to the lady, a love-smitten eye in a face of ice.

The whole episode of trying to get Legrandin to admit his sister lives near Balbec is perfect comedy

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her. I liked finding its image again in paintings and books, but these works of art were quite different — at least during the early years, before Bloch accustomed my eyes and my mind to subtler harmonies — from those in which the moon would seem beautiful to me today and in which I would not have recognized it then. It might be, for example, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre in which it stands out distinctly against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works which were naively incomplete, like my own impressions, and which it angered my grandmother’s sisters to see me enjoy. They thought that one ought to present to children, and that children showed good taste in enjoying right from the start, those works of art which, once one has reached maturity, one will admire forever after. The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one’s needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one’s own heart.

How French that church was! Above the door, the saints, the knight-kings with fleurs-de-lis in their hands, wedding and funeral scenes, were depicted as they might have been in Françoise’s soul. The sculptor had also narrated certain anecdotes involving Aristotle and Virgil just as Françoise in her kitchen was apt to talk about Saint Louis as if she had known him personally, usually in order to put my grandparents to shame by comparison since they were less “fair-minded.” One felt that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval countrywoman (living on into the nineteenth century) had acquired of ancient or Christian history, and which were distinguished by containing as much inaccuracy as simple good-heartedness, were derived not from books, but from a tradition that was at once very old and very direct, uninterrupted, oral, deformed, hardly recognizable, and alive.

It was right here that I started hearing Tim Rogers’s voice

No; just as what I needed so that I could go to sleep happy, with that untroubled peace which no mistress has been able to give me since that time because one doubts them even at the moment one believes in them, and can never possess their hearts as I received in a kiss my mother’s heart, complete, without the reservation of an afterthought, without the residue of an intention that was not for me-was that it should be her, that she should incline over me that face marked below the eye by something which was, it seems, a blemish, and which I loved as much as the rest, so what I want to see again is the Guermantes way that I knew, with the farm that is not very far from the two that come after pressed so close together, at the entrance to the avenue of oaks; those meadows on which, when the sun turns them reflective as a pond, the leaves of the apple trees are sketched, that landscape whose individuality sometimes, at night in my dreams, clasps me with an almost uncanny power and which I can no longer recover when I wake up. No doubt, by virtue of having forever indissolubly united in me different impressions merely because they had made me experience them at the same time, the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way exposed me, for the future, to many disappointments and even to many mistakes. For often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns, and I have been led to believe, to make someone else believe, in a revival of affection, by what was simply a desire to travel. But because of that very fact, too, and by persisting in those of my impressions of today to which they may be connected, they give them foundations, depth, a dimension lacking from the others. They add to them, too, a charm, a meaning that is for me alone. When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méséglise way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

But in this strange phase of love, an individual person assumes something so profound that the curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evi-dence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

On taste vs. online sludge

What we must find out is whether you are really that creature which ranks lowest in mentality, and even in charm, the contemptible creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasant thing. Now, if this is what you are, how could anyone love you, for you’re not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible? You’re only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope one offers it, a fish without memory or reflection which, as long as it lives in its aquarium, continuing to mistake the glass for water, will bump against it a hundred times a day. The image of a weak mind as simply a stream running downhill without manifesting any will, exhibited by what it chooses to consume…

Oh goodness:

When his eyes fell upon Odette’s photograph on the table, or when she came to see him, he had trouble identifying the figure of flesh or cardboard with the painful and constant disturbance that inhabited him. He would say to himself almost with surprise: “It’s she!” as if suddenly someone were to show us in a separate, external form one of our own diseases and we found that it did not resemble what we were suffering. “She”— he tried to ask himself what that was; for one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality. And this disease which was Swann’s love had so proliferated, was so closely entangled with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

A Month in the Country

There are some mysterious items on my OmniFocus project “Books to Read v9”. Usually I try to capture where I got a recommendation and why it stuck enough for me to record it. This one was just there, and when I looked at it I got a vague sense that whoever had recommended it had made it sound meditative and nourishing.

On a rare visit to California for work, I discovered the utopian Kepler’s Books, which felt like it belonged in a hip urban center, not a dismal walk down the unwalkable American street from my suburban hotel. There I spent an agonizing amount of time wandering from section to section, squinting at every recommendation card, trying to look like I needed a staff member to ask, “Is there anything I can help you find?” But I was too exhausted from travel and emotionally raw to approach someone myself, and unsure what question I would even ask. In the end I picked out this book and Thiese’s Notes on Complexity, all on my own.

I made some of my most vivid and satisfying reading memories carrying this around under my arm, sneaking pages whenever I could. On a trip to the publicly-owned lodging in Nikkou, maintained for residents of Tokyo’s Katsushika ward. At a tsukemen joint around the corner. At my in-laws’ creaky four-story house, about as old as me.

“Look, how many times have I to tell you I’m not an artist. I’m the laborer who cleans up after artists. And my coat doesn’t signify a thing: I wear it because I feel the cold round my ankles like other people feel it round their ears.”

From their accounts and from judicious pumping, their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen—rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs. Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who … Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

His hands talk like monks’ hands must have talked in the long silences

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Late in high school I was sitting in the lobby of the administrative wing of my boys’ Catholic school. I cannot for the life of me remember what I was there for, but it has an equal chance of being because I was in big trouble for something, or because I was doing some sort of collaboration or meeting with someone important at the school. I was doing a reread of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps in the big Bible-looking edition I was proud to have. Someone’s mom was coming out from the school office and she stopped in her tracks, striking up a conversation with me about books. She was impressed to see a student her son’s age reading one of her favorites. I have no idea whose mom she was. We connected easily and she made several recommendations, including A Canticle for Leibowitz and the work of Tom Robbins. I ended up reading several Robbins books soon after, but never got around to Canticle. (At some point I think I started confuse it with Flowers for Algernon.)

There’s apparently a copyright issue keeping the book off of the US Kindle store, but I found a SF Masterworks edition on the JP store and stripped the DRM.

ChatGPT looked at my reading list and, based on what it knows about me, acted surprised that I hadn’t read it yet.

A warning of the fragility of humanity’s extraordinarily low-entropy state: all the intricate interconnections between systems of political order, prosocial culture, objective understanding of the world, and the transmission of that understanding. We take it for granted how far we’ve come since the dawn of the Enlightenment, but rather than taking us back to a time before we had it, this book takes us ahead to a future where we’ve destroyed it and rejected attempts to salvage it.

A portrait of the devotion of individuals to give their entire striving lifetime just to get one iota closer to a promise of a distant and unknown better state; or at least to minimize our backsliding away from it. The parallels between religious faith and the faith that we can make sense of the world and meaningfully better our state in it. The portrait of centuries of longing toward a world that’s actually meaningfully different and even better. The absurdity and the poignancy of individual fallible humans trying to assemble themselves together into less-fallible, anti-fragile, progress-making super-humans. The necessity of reverence (ever more vanishing since Miller’s time) for the success of such projects.

Hello from the Sikaku, where I’m glimpsing the Eternal in A Canticle for Leibowitz’s third part: Fiat Voluntas Tua. What’s grabbing me about this text is the explicit connection of religion, particularly the long and “unbroken” heritage of Catholicism as an organizing principle for reverence and devotion; the project of science as an effort to understand and make sense of truths about our physical universe; and the fate of humanity as an instantiation of self-aware consciousness and civilization. All of these are founded on the same longing to behold the Eternal.

レーエンデ国物語

Upon moving to Tokyo I was determined to get reacquainted with the current landscape of fiction, with how to navigate the overwhelming bookstores, and to choose something just right to read through like a relatively normal member of the Japanese-language reading public. On visits to my local bookstores, this volume kept standing out to me. I committed to reading it, and diligently dungeon-crawled through more than half of it at about a page or two a day. I took a break to read some other books in Japanese, namely the lighter Recovery Kabahiko and some manga. It eventually called me back and I was proud to finish it just over a year after beginning it.

Tasaki has a prodigious number of books out in this series and others, highlighting how hard it would be for me to truly latch on to an author and follow all of their work. She can write quite a lot faster than I can read. I likely won’t continue on with this series any time soon. But it felt like a fine journey to take on my first year living here, and it’s a book I’ll always look back fondly on.

My enjoyment of what turned out to be a pretty standard fantasy novel was closely correlated to how much it felt like a Dwarf Fortress campaign (charting the geography of a potential trade route, secrets of castle architecture, carving a defensible complex into a mountainside, risky endeavors in controlled flooding), and inversely to how much it felt like an anime (“You mustn’t go, it’s too dangerous!” “No you mustn’t go, it’s too dangerous!”).

Polostan

It’s startling how short this book is, and as I read it digitally I didn’t even have the clue of an uncharacteristically slim Stephenson. Apparently he’s trying something new, which is to release individual volumes the size of normal novels rather than compiling several books worth of material into one. As a person who enjoys immersing way into the perspective he crafts, which makes the world seem cooler and smarter, and makes me feel cooler and smarter, I may end up waiting until more of them are out before continuing.

The Anxious Generation

Four aspects of “real-world” interactions

• Embodied
• Synchronous
• Accountable
• High barrier of entry and exit

Stephen points out a main message of Haidt’s book — people are growing up with too little nurturance of the spirit. This connects to my own wish for my kids to have a sense of reverence, for something.

Went to some trouble to find the Meta deck described as “chilling” in this book, and it was… just a normal marketing deck that probably didn’t significantly influence any product decisions, and which had some maliciously-misinterpretable slides way into the appendix. A significant Gell-Mann effect moment for me.

Overall, though, I appreciated my usual periodic dose of Haidt telling society to get a grip on itself, and the simple reminders of concepts like:

• Kids should spend more time in “discovery mode” and less in “defend mode”.
• Kids need more unstructured time.
• Kids shouldn’t have phones, or other potentially unhealthy devices, until later than we think.

Original Love

Shukman has been my main conduit to Zen, and I’ve recently shifted from Sam Harris’s Waking Up course to his The Way course for a more focusedly Zen-based practice. I picked this up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, partly to have an excuse to look around for something there on my second visit in two nights, during a precious two-night stay there for work, my first time really spending time in the city since moving away eight years ago. This was a fine tour of the concepts undergirding the practices of The Way, and left me with even more of an appetite to find the right text for getting deeply into kōans, preferably in (modern) Japanese. I’ll treasure the memory of reading this with Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera in my AirPods at the Kanamachi McDonald’s, where I’d stopped for a maximally quick meal before picking up my kid at school: the pleasant discord of the Wyatt particularly amenable to blending with the background music and advertisements — logos and mythos; mind and soul.

Some say other life-forms are practicing too: trees are masters of stillness, fortitude, and graceful acceptance, and whales move through the seas suspended in oceanic awareness, communicating with one another across vast distances. Even smaller creatures move through their lives with the focus and intention of master meditators: ants tirelessly follow the call of their nature, and mice, moths, and patient cattle all practice and implicitly trust the life they are given.

We were hungry for inspiration. We tracked the contemporary poets we loved and then tracked the thread back to the poets they had loved: to Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the Imagist poets of London just before the First World War. From them, we followed their provenance back to Wordsworth and Shakespeare, but also to ancient China, to the Tang dynasty poets they had loved and translated to Hanshan, the “Cold Mountain” poet, and Tu Fu, Li Po, and Wang Wei, who had wandered the ravines and cloud-wrapped peaks of the Middle Kingdom, stalked by vagabonds and monks who had given up on urban life and taken to the hills. There, entranced by lakes and streams, gazing at waterfall, drifting deep into the forests or high into the mountains, they wrote their clearest poetry. They drank wine and shed tears for lost friends. They also sat still in meditation, losing themselves, dissolving their minds into the peaks, becoming part of the land itself.

Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. You yourself. Forever this. If you don’t feel the love, if you’re not quite getting it yet, then no worries. All of us will. We surely will.

So why is emptiness about love? It sounds more like the absence of anything at all, including love. There are two possible answers here. The first is that our human response to finding this basic emptiness is an eruption of joy. It triggers a state of blessedness. It’s like finding that all our life has ever been is an unconditional goodness. Somehow, stripped of all its show and disguises, bare existing itself is an unalloyed goodness. As if the most basic reality of all, beneath and behind every other, is a total absence, and to touch or taste it is to find the ultimate relief from all suffering. It is to find a truth that can’t be reduced or damaged or corrupted in any way. And it is to find that it is the ultimate core of our being. All else — all our life — is secondary.

Notes on Complexity

It felt significant to proceed through a big-ideas science book like this and grapple with it the whole way, in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done myself on the wide range of topics it presents. Making a point of taking notes while I read, treating it as an interactive process that makes a permanent mark, has been a major development for 2024. Compare this heap of notes to what remains of, say, my 2003 read-through of The Selfish Gene: a vague sense that it was a great, life-changing book and that genetics is really important.

As typed up on the flight back from Silicon Valley, where I discovered and bought this portable volume at Kepler’s Books.

Not sure I understand this definition of complexity even a little; it’s the “edge of chaos” where stability and chaos “pull in opposite directions”, but it’s actually more unpredictable than chaos?? And how can a computer simulation with the same starting conditions “never be predicted”?? How does a different outcome arise each time?

Argument that there’s no such thing as top-down control, ever: all interactions are local.

Systems need a little randomness to reach into the adjacent possible: consider this for your own life!

Cells move by “aiming” existing Brownian motion, not by moving per se!?

Flight attendant gives a mischievous smile while asking, ラーメンなどは召し上がりますか？

From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever rose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

She called me Van-sama and invited me through the galley where all the ladies were working, to use the opposite bathroom.

I’m not convinced that the randomness of quantum fluctuations is, complexity-wise, the same as the randomness of ants not following the same trail… but maybe kind of. I can sort of see how each level “uses” randomness to achieve enough interestingness to build up to the next level.

I’m not convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation and the way it centers consciousness, but I see how consciousness is what makes quantum world splitting “feel” random. It’s just an interpretation after all, solving the Schrödinger equation in another way, right? Still I’m with Tegmark and Carroll on what’s really going on.

I do appreciate the reminder of everything emerging from spacetime itself, as all one vast whole. Zen indeed.

Getting a bit woo with the holarchy argument here, unnecessarily if you ask me. The universe can be purely physical and still a living whole, buddy, without complaining about “western biases”.

Here we get to zen: interdependence, impermanence, and emptiness.

Emptiness for me is about how everything emerges from, and ultimately equates out to, zero.

Idealism: the universe emerges out of a grand whole Consciousness, and out of that emerge our little local consciousnesses. Maybe! Kinda still seems to be shifting the problem to a different level tho.

Thinking again about decoherence, and starting to understand it as a ramp depending on scale, which quite rapidly slams into a maximum where fields appear to reduce to points (thus settling which branch you’re in); but below that scale they can remain wavy. “Randomness is what branching feels like.”

Infinitely throat-clearing ojisan

Thinking again about the mathematical universe hypothesis, in light of Godel’s mathematical platonism: Does each universe comprise both rules (code) and conditions (data)? Like, there can just be some constants defined at the front of the file for conditions, right?

As typed up after landing, at baggage claim and such.

Not sure I like this invocation of Gödel to claim that “intuition” is as important as science and mathematics, or that the Copenhagen interpretation is inescapably true.

Also thinking about the way the world unfolded in real life in the 20th century (Godel’s long escape from Austria) but unfolds online now (Trump’s campaign and MSG rally today)

I don’t know how I feel about this suggestion that because of decoherence, we can’t measure things and do experiments well enough to understand the universe, so we need “metaphysics” instead. I think Deutsch would argue that even when you can’t measure everything precisely, you can still come up with parsimonious explanations that match with what we do see and make sense of it.

I do appreciate the illustration of how our universe needed a stack of such narrowly complexity-compatible infrastructure. Most mathematical structures probably don’t give rise to much of interest?

Plenty in here about the Eternal tho, which I’m enjoying. Taking it in that light without fuzzy claims about mapping to science, I’m on board.

And as handwritten while waiting for my driving test at the Samezu Licensing Center, where no electronic devices are allowed.

I appreciate the complementary view of science, philosophy, and spirituality including Zen, for personal spiritual purposes.

I don’t buy the idea that “Consciousness” is somehow prior to physical existence, as it doesn’t seem to solve infinite regress problems (which Tegmark does more satisfyingly) and it smells like trying to bend science to confirm ideas you find comforting.

リカバリー カバヒコ

At the Katsushika Central Library, in the foreign language section looking for children’s books in English for my son, I discovered a display explaining a language learning method called “tadoku” (多読), or “copious reading”. Its principles include proceeding quickly through material that’s easy enough for you to enjoy, not referring to a dictionary when you do encounter unfamiliar words, skipping sections that are too hard, and guiltlessly setting aside anything that you’re not fully enjoying.

That day I set aside the hefty Japanese fantasy novel I’d been struggling through and went to my neighborhood shop Daiwa Books to find something I could proceed through more casually and briskly. Robin Sloan had recently recommended Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for is in the Library, in English translation, so I recognized her name on a new book in the recommendation display near the entrance.

The book comprises five loosely connected short stories revolving around an urban legend about a hippo statue in a local playground: if a part of your body is troubling you, touch the statue on that same part and you’ll be cured. Five people partake in the practice to heal various problems in their lives that are literally or figuratively associated with the brain, the eyes, the ears, et cetera. Each one then experiences a healing process which, of course, was actually about mending relationships, refreshing the perception of the self, or some other motion of the soul.

This is an archetypical example of the trend of modern Japanese “healing” fiction, books meant (and explicitly advertised in train cars and such) to be calming and restorative to the stressed and anxious modern mind. A mental prescription akin to a Spotify playlist to help you study, for better or for worse.

I did appreciate having something written in typical modern colloquial Japanese about modern Japanese people having recognizable everyday problems, if only for the language-learning benefits rather than as a great work of literature. Dashing through this got me back on track with reading Japanese as a smooth and pleasurable activity, and afterward I was much more prepared to finish out that hefty fantasy novel….

Forlesen

This may be my favorite Wolfe short story yet. It came with a somewhat infamous reputation from Wolfe circles online, but I couldn’t remember why and can’t seem to dig up any of those discussions now. The blend of Wolfeian mystique, weird religiosity, and absurdly hilarious Kafka/Gilliamesque bureaucracy made for a satisfyingly surreal meal.

Postscript of January 2025 — I watched the television show Severance since reading this story, and just all of a sudden put the two together. Could there be an inspirational connection?

The Lathe of Heaven

While in Seattle for work, I met up with my best bookfriend and we walked to the Elliott Bay Bookstore. I invited him to choose any book in the store for me to buy and bring home, and he found Le Guin’s Lavinia. (We had an existing connection over her Always Coming Home, which we’d read through together a few years back.) Not far from it on the shelf was a Library of America compendium of five novels spanning her career and culminating in Lavinia, her last. So I chose that superset and committed to reading through them all. This was the first in the collection, from 1971, a sweet spot in the New Age era that I’d been freshly interested in since reading Anthony’s autobiography in which he eye-rollingly claimed that Le Guin had won a Nebula that was rightfully his; and had been craving more of since discovering Priest’s Inverted World.

In any case, the experience was thrilling from the level of the sculpting of individual sentences, all the way up to the Taoist theme running through the whole thing. I felt the moral questions and frequently paused to contemplate how one might even begin to formulate an algorithm for answering them.

“Come on up with me,” he said. “It’s raining already.” In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring— the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it."

The moral architecture of problems that extend beyond the current universe, or even planet: Is an ordinarily immoral act moral when it shifts the entire existence that generated our moral foundations in the first place?

I need you to the extent that-if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here-then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther—of Personal Welfare Constraint. If neces-sary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psy-chotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me."

This imagery:

One of these shops under the ramp was a secondhand store; the sign above the windows said ANTIQUES and a poorly lettered, peeling sign painted on the glass said JUNQUE. There was some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old rocker with a motheaten paisley shawl draped over it in the other, and, scattered around these main displays, all kinds of cultural litter: a horseshoe, a hand-wound clock, something enigmatic from a dairy, a framed photograph of President Eisenhower, a slightly chipped glass globe containing three Ecuadorian coins, a plastic toilet-seat cover decorated with baby crabs and seaweed, a well-thumbed rosary, and a stack of old hi-fi 45 rpm records, marked “Gd Cond,” but obviously scratched. Just the sort of place, Orr thought, where Heather’s mother might have worked for a while. Moved by the impulse, he went in.

These unconventional moments of infatuation:

“This is Heather Lelache,” said a soft, suspicious alto. An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. “Hello,” he said again.

He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory “well.” She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.

The Safe-Deposit Box

A little too dualist, “ghost-in-the-machine” for me, though there’s a bit of believable Permutation City dust theory in the mechanics of how the consciousness-untethering works. A philosophical sketch that was worth following along on. You could make a movie out of it.

The Caress

What made us so fixated on “art-crime” in the 90s? This story, se7en, Bowie’s “Outside”, and so on. For some reason we thought that what we ought to be afraid of was the disintegration of restraint in creative expression, and that the scariest villains were going to be brilliant and well-resourced artists!?

Blood Sisters

A fine thought experiement in scientific and medical ethics, with a bit of the grimy 90s Egan edge.

Inverted World

After my reread of Bio of an Ogre, I was in the mood to better understand the New Age era of SF, and to find better specimens of its wild and challenging explorations of possible universes than Anthony. I had never heard of this book, nor of Priest himself, but upon hearing the briefest introduction decided that I ought to plunge in before learning anything further. As with music, it seems that somehow the 1970s just keep on giving.

Reading this over a Mexican burger at Brave in Kanamachi ended up being one of the more vivid reading experiences I’ve had, enshrined alongside The Source of Magic on the plane to San Jose as a kid, Children of the Mind in the De Pere bunk bed, A Fire Upon the Deep in Ballard after getting my wisdom teeth out, and so on. I look forward to the stores of pleasure waiting for me in the rest of Priest’s corpus. I particularly enjoy the mental state of being led through an aesthetically potent world, feeling just at the edge of having any idea of what’s going on, but trusting that something coherent is, in fact, going on.

Bio of an Ogre

A lightly edited account from messages to a dear book-friend, on why I worked through a distant reread of this book over the course of a couple months’ worth of nights waiting for my kid to fall asleep.

So I’m semi-hate-rereading Piers Anthony’s autobiography

Because it was the first memoir I ever read, at probably about age 11, and I wanted to do a bit of personal archaeology on that time

(screenshots of the 1969 Nebula incident)

🙄

The whole book is a heap of grievances spanning from “one time I got in this argument with a guy in the line to pick up our kids at school” to “Le Guin stole my Nebula”; boasts of what a genius he is but in a world where nobody is smart enough to recognize it; and non-sequitur objectification of women

All the same, I can’t help being compelled by the stories of his upbringing and early struggles as a writer — getting thousands of words out per day, in pencil on a clipboard on his lap while wrangling his infant daughter; adding another yet-unsold novel to the pile, while his wife worked to support the family for another month…

Getting in disputes in fanzines and writers’ conferences; it’s heady sci-fi new wave era stuff

Plus, he’s the guy who introduced me to fiction not-strictly-for-kids, which will always be a warm association

Remembering going on my first “long” flight at 9 years old, Chicago to San Jose, and my brother-in-law put his The Source of Magic in my hand to read on the plane

Which I did, the entire way, prolly accompanied by unlimited 7-Up or whatever

Later on, my dad brought me to Father Steve, the “cool” priest at our church, and prodded me to tell him who my favorite author was. “…Piers Anthony…”, at which he perked up and started telling me all about the other authors I should get into next. Not long after, he had a huge box of sci-fi for me, insisting I take the whole thing home and enjoy it.

It was an intimidating collection of books, and while I looked at them and flipped through them a lot, I only really got into a small fraction of them. I didn’t have the attention span, especially versus all the other entertainments of the early 90s, for much that was deeper than Xanth.

In retrospect, he recognized Anthony as an experimental 60s–70s new wave guy, and I knew him as an 80s settled, formulaic fantasy potboiler guy

Sure wish I had that few shelves worth of books now, tho

Or even that I could remember most of what was on it

Matter

Banks is a heavy meal, which I’m always glad to have enjoyed but reluctant to enjoy more than one of within the span of a year or two. The idea density is satisfyingly high, and I enjoyed a number of moments of staring off into space, savoring an evocative, galaxy-scale notion. But I did once again find myself wishing that the ever-building tension was toward something deeper, more universally philosophical, than the human adventure it ended up as. It does seem to me that Banks writes “true” sf, in a galaxy that is likely to really be out there and operating according to these principles in some corner of the greater multiverse.

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Third read, this time with a solid foundation of having lived by the philosophy contained within for nearly ten years. Took my time, highlighting passages with particular philosophical or spiritual resonance, and writing many interrogatory notes. This remains the most important book to me, and one I hope to return to again and again.

I Am A Strange Loop

Finished this while technically still in the middle of Gödel, Escher, Bach, the message of which this book was conceived to more succinctly and clearly convey. I’d like to spend more of my life in mental modes like Hofstadter seems to inhabit: his particular formula of deep scientific understanding, philosophical import, genuinely warm emotion, and general joie de vivre.

I was especially struck by the arguments and personal stories about identity and even consciousness being distributed across brains (and other substrates) via the influence we impart — a Dawkinsesque “extended phenotype” of the self.

The Vanishing Tower

This one was a bit more of a slog than the other Elric I’ve read so far, but I do have pleasant memories of reading it on my phone in the back of an eight-person van carting two families around Tokyo in the earliest months of our arrival there.

The World Before Us

Some exhilarating moments of truly being able to imagine the deep history of humanity, especially the simultaneous existence of distinct human species. In particular, I was dizzied by the colliding of history and prehistory in the story of Eugene Dubois who was working in Indonesia to discover human species from millions to hundreds of thousands of years ago, but whose work was interrupted by the Japanese occupation in World War II, and required him to hide specimens until they could be safely studied.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

This was precisely the book I wanted after Game Wizards: an account that covered the culture, creativity, and business surrounding D&D during the formative era when I discovered and devoured it. I came away with the impression that tabletop roleplaying is such an extraordinarily powerful and important technology that it shone through even the abysmal environment and practices of the company where it was invented.

Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

This was quite boring in a welcome way, and just the thing I needed for bedtime listening after establishing the habit with Geddy Lee’s memoir: Interesting enough in its pop-culture storytelling, while also forgiving of drifting off to sleep and having to jump back the next night. It left me craving more history after Gygax’s ouster in 1985, especially about the seemingly explosive 2nd Edition era in the 1990s, when I got into the game.

H.M.S. Surprise

Another dose of pleasure, texture, and flavor to be infused into the rest of life. It’s astonishing to think that there are twenty of these.

My Effin’ Life

What a treasure it is to get to hear directly from the single most influential creative person on my young self. I’m a better person, who’s had a better life, than if this guy hadn’t been there doing his thing. I could listen to him talk about everything, indefinitely.

A Brief History of Earth

I’d still like to understand more about the deep, geological-time history of this planet, especially in light of my suspicion that our planet is very, very weird and lucky. Plate tectonics and our unlikely escape from runaway processes leading to snowball planet; mass extinction events repeatedly failing to wipe the planet; ramifications for the Fermi paradox.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

I enjoyed occupying this chamber precisely like I expected to: stories that ask at every turn “what if everyone was flawed yet did their best to care for one another” rather than modern fiction’s usual “what if everyone was flawed and despicable”.

Mostly Harmless

From reading this final book when it came out, around age 11, I had an impression of it being darker and sort of resigned, compared to the zaniness of the prior ones. But upon rereading it as an adult, I found it to have a weird kind of hope and peace that fits well with my own understanding of possibility space and the multiverse.

Armageddon

Just continuing my gradual reinterpretation of religious tradition as fascinatingly human history.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

I was shocked by how immediately compelling and fresh this felt, after the first three novels; especially with my prior memory of the series having the inverse sentiment. What was an unfamiliar and confusing “grown-up” tone back then made for a more mature, warmer, wiser experience this time.

韋国日記 11

Ikoku Nikki is complete. I realized in conversation with a friend recently that much of what I love about this manga is that I have come away from it feeling meaningfully better-equipped in my own life. It’s not just entertainment or dwelling in a certain feeling or aesthetic, like much manga is — it’s got a philosophy of its own that’s worth learning from.

Man's Search for Meaning

Sign me up for the central idea of Logotherapy — that life is not about finding pleasure or even happiness, but meaning.

50 Years of Text Games

I so looked forward to reading an entry in this book each night. It offered a warm welcome-home from a hobby subculture I’d been adjacent to since playing and building text games in the 1980s. This is how I want to replace the otaku-lifestyle video games I said farewell to over the past couple of years. Next I’ll go back, comb through the hundreds of games mentioned, and compile a list of titles to try.

Seveneves

2023 fortress reread. I don’t reread books often but I needed something familiar and guaranteed to be enjoyable, a fortress to return to while otherwise delving many dungeons in other areas of life. I could have set up some elaborate project for choosing just the right book to revisit, but that itself would have been a dungeon. This stood out from the Kindle library screen and before I knew it I was well into it.

It was even more captivating and enjoyable the second time around, and has joined its sibling Anathem on the “personal canon” shelf. Stephenson has both a myth-making mind and a scientific mind, and loves to show us again and again how real heroes and gods, resonant with our spiritual instincts, could come to be in a rational universe.

女の園の星 2

Sometimes I forget that I have a sense of humor that can be reached by media; but this series is sparking it repeatedly.

Post Captain

An ordinary good book is pleasurable while you read it. But O’Brian seems to be able to create an experience that continues to deploy enjoyment throughout the day, as you reflect back on it. The echo of having read it last night, and the promise of getting to read it again tonight, infuses life itself with additional texture and flavor.

女の園の星 1

Every panel is a micro-masterpiece of warmth and quiet hilarity.

What’s Our Problem?

I agree with most of the points in the book, but spent most of the book frustrated by how the points were made. Given the argument of the whole text, I expected more nuance, complexity, and compassion throughout.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rereading this series along with my cousin Steve, after last reading it together in 1992. This story is so well-worn in my mind, through rereads, the Infocom game, the television show, and so on; that I barely noticed it going by. The theme that emerges for me as an adult reader is the absurd contrast between the overwhelming grandiosity of reality and the idiotic banality of life in it. The book itself is wry and hip, while no character is more than incidentally admirable; from clueless Earthlings to vastly powerful extra-dimensional beings.

韋国日記 10

Ikoku Nikki is quickly becoming an emblem of what I want manga to be. Each character is treated with love. Each scene is handled with grace. The entire stack of books exudes poetry and warmth. The message is delivered again and again: the world is hard and absolutely worth it.

If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare

Mostly glad I read this paper behind the popular grabby aliens model in order to find elements which my disagreement with generates ideas for a fiction project I’m pursuing. Most centrally — I sure do philosophically dislike the principle of mediocrity, and I don’t at all buy that expanding into the galaxy ends up looking like a worthwhile thing to do for advanced civilizations.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: The Nitpicks of Power

This series developed quite a bit my understanding of wanting stories to feel grounded in reality and like they are made of consequences. For me it completes a sort of trilogy of critiques of modern Tolkien screen adaptations, including Lindsay Ellis’s series about the Hobbit films and Moviewise’s video about the main Jackson trilogy.

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe — Space, Time and Motion

For decades I’ve been reading physics books that purport to explain the nature of the universe without including inscrutable equations, but that end up requiring the reader to trust that the math undeniably and elegantly leads to this or that conclusion. It came gradually clear that in order to feel the significance of what we know, one really needs to understand the math at least somewhat, not just stories about the math and the people who discovered it. This book is the first of a promised trilogy from Sean Carroll, who was already one of my favorite science explainers. I appreciate his willingness to at least sometimes start from the most fundamental principles of what we know rather than defaulting to telling the historical sequence of who discovered what when and then who later found something more fundamental. The idea of the series is to cater to people who want to make the effort to understand the math, but don’t plan to study it at an academic or professional level. That’s me! After reading this I feel a dramatically deeper understanding of what is going on in the universe than any physics book has ever given me, and understanding the universe is one of my elementary particles of meaning.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. The darkness and cynicism about humanity came through much more strongly for me this time, and while the experience was enjoyable I found myself left wondering, “so what do you propose we do about it, then?”

Life, the Universe, and Everything

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. This was my favorite as a kid in the 90s, which is unsurprising given the surreal wackiness.

The Weird of the White Wolf

Felt the crustiness more prominently in this volume of some of the oldest Elric stories. The iconic imagery, esoteric mythos, and personal significance offset the grim nihilism. It does feel like delving to the primal roots of Elden Ring, Shin Megami Tensei, and of course a thousand D&D campaigns.

The Fortress of the Pearl

Came back to my almost lifelong aspirations to get into Moorcock, ignited probably around 1989 when I saw my brother’s copy of The Cornelius Chronicles. I had tried once during a college librarygoing stint in 2003, then again upon visiting the prodigious Moorcock section at Powell’s in 2004, and then once again while making my way through Matthew Colville’s back catalog of videos about the history of gaming and geekery in 2021. The new Elric Saga omnibus editions are precisely what I needed to navigate the absurd tangle of titles and revisions. The story itself, being chronologically early but written much later, was refreshingly mature and thoughtful while still having the same surreally hip fantasy aesthetic. The Dream Realms in particular, and Elric’s passage through them, seem to be well-crafted allegories for common thought traps and how to avoid them.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

I needed something comfortable after the harrowing trek through Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. This science-feelings story seemed to build upon the argument Graeber puts forth in The Dawn of Everything — namely that human societies are wildly weird and flexible, with no single correct or natural configuration. Reading that primed me to be more willing to believe in the post-gluttony solarpunk utopia it presents, though heck if I know how we might get there peacefully.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Bread, How Did They Make It?

I believe this was my introduction to ACoUP and its delightful blend of accessibility and academic rigor. This marked a renewed interest for me in getting to know the people of history.

Xenoblade 2

Fond memories of semi-impulsively buying a Switch in Shinjuku, much like many console purchases before, and sneaking Xeno time during baby naps on our long stay in Tokyo. Lost interest for half a year, much like the first Xenoblade, then got way back into it during a hectic time at work that called for some mindless JRPG decompression.

Why Buddhism Is True

This book encapsulates the essential messages of a heap of evolutionary psychology and mindfulness books I’d added to my personal canon over the past several years. Now I can just recommend this one brilliant book for that whole complex of ideas.

Braving the Wilderness

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”

The Gene

Genetics and evolutionary biology might be the most deeply mysterious and strange field of study there is. I sort of resent that all this bizarre and profound discovery about the origins and mechanisms of life was going on while I was in school, but I learned nothing of it until I was an adult choosing books for myself.

The System of the World

Thus concludes the Baroque Cycle. This was the last of his novels that I hadn’t read: an eight-volume, three-thousand-page opus that dominated my fiction consumption for a year and a half. Visiting the Metropolitan museum and the Tower of London while in the midst of it made the thing come alive. It’s good!

The All-or-Nothing Marriage

A survey of the history of the institution of marriage, and a study of what makes a modern marriage work. I appreciated the idea of keeping a “social portfolio” of people who can serve your various emotional needs rather than relying solely on your spouse. And the idea of temporarily descending the mountain of fulfillment during trying times, in order to just focus on surviving together is especially relevant right now!

Strangers in Their Own Land

Guess what: Trump voters are human, and they operate according to genuine human emotions. A Berkeley professor explores first-hand how unrestrained pursuit of profit and indifference to human well-being has caused tragedy and despair in places like rural Louisiana, shaping the political opinions of families there.

The Gardener and the Carpenter

Parents tend to want to shape their children to a blueprint, like a carpenter. But the best we can hope for is to give them a healthy environment to thrive in and grow their own way, like a gardener.

Life 3.0

This author remains one of my favorite science explainers, this time taking on our possible AI future, which might turn out to be the most consequential thing that has ever happened. I recommend pairing this book with a playthrough of Universal Paperclips.

Believe Me — A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

An utterly charming memoir from a truly unique, inspiring, and unflappable soul. Izzard was boldly transgender before it was widely understood, before we had good language for it, certainly before it was cool. And he happens to be a delightful and vivid storyteller, besides. The audio version is positively encrusted with bonus impromptu jokes and digressions and footnotes on footnotes; don’t even consider the text version.

The Highly Sensitive Person

Dramatically helpful and satisfying. This book has given me introspective concepts and tools I wish I’d had all my life.

Quiet — The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

If you are an introvert or you love one, please read this book. We aren’t broken!

Quicksilver

Third attempt to read the Baroque Cycle in ten years.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

I’ve been timidly edging toward the idea of reading Proust for quite a while now. This helped quite a bit.

Xenoblade Chronicles X

This was not at all what I’d hoped Xeno would become, and much of the depth and mystique that made me such a fan of the previous games just isn’t here. But it’s fantastic at what it does. I eventually got genuinely hooked on exploring its colossal world, meeting its silly inhabitants, and beating up a wide variety of aliens. Much like the first Xenoblade, I find myself a bit homesick for it long after it’s over.

Soma

This had some of the most provocative decisions I have ever seen in a game. Not just mundane “whose life do you save” choices, but ones that are genuinely philosophical and that often split our group down the middle.

Persona 2 罪

I played the P2 duology out of order, which was actually probably ideal. More late PSX-era graphics, more weird psychology, more Amano Maya, more Persona 2! These games are so emblematic to me of the strange, hip, geeky Japan of the 1990s.

初音ミク Project DIVA F 2nd

I think Project Diva is the perfect artifact to represent the entire Vocaloid phenomenon. So many creative folks’ efforts went into creating it, but my favorite fact about this game is that the motion capture for when Miku plays guitar was done by one of my favorite bands, Gacharic Spin.

フェイト/ステイナイト［レアルタ・ヌア] extra edition

The joke was that nobody would want to watch a Japanese visual novel on Twitch. But a few friends ended up immersing ourselves in the day-to-day rhythms of this game together, and developed elaborate inside jokes and rituals for the narrative’s meditatively repetitive nature. I wish Nasu Kinoko was better at editing, though; I like drawn-out pacing but nearly every scene felt about 50% too long!

Gone Home

I am so ready for the generation of mature, intelligent, heartfelt games that this heralds. Played through it with my cousin Steve as a revival of our MacVenture days, then again on my own with commentary, then played through it for H.

The Legend of Heroes — Trails in the Sky

Solid, meat-and-potates, earnestly pre-moe JRPG. Focuses on the experience of traveling around a rich fantasy world, which feels like it existed long before you came along, and discovering the complex relationships between its people and institutions. Doesn’t focus on gimmicks, technology, or unlockable swimsuits for your female party members. The promising beginning to what seems to be a truly epickal series.

Xenoblade Chronicles

Given how often I find myself wanting to go back and play this again, maybe it should have gotten five stars. The excitement of a brand-new Xeno title that Shishka and I could play together was huge; he’s the one who got me into Xenogears in the first place, so many years ago. The world and much of the story felt appropriately epickal for the Xeno name. The tedium of the back third of the game cost me so much enthusiasm, though.

Persona 4

The one game that Hiroko and I enthusiastically played through together in its entirety.

Ar tonelico 3 世界終焉の引鉄は少女の詩が弾く

Impressions; Button Trance: Ar tonelico 3; Addendum: Of Tilia

Ar tonelico 2 世界に響く少女たちの創造詩

Button Trance: Ar tonelico 2

SIMPLE2000シリーズ Vol.50 THE 大美人

The people at Pink Godzilla practically made me take this when I bought some other game there, and I can see why. It made for a pretty dumb couple of hours at Shishka’s house.

Xenosaga エピソード I 力への意志

The announcement of a new Xeno game marked my first phase of fervent video game geekery. I ended up teaming with some folks online to create a guide and script translation.

サクラ大戦

A personal account of my experiences with Sakura Taisen.

An article about the series that I wrote for HG101.

CAPCOM VS. SNK 2 MILLIONAIRE FIGHTING 2001

The first video game I ever imported (from good old NCSX). I used to pack up my precious PS2 and bring it to Jon’s apartment so we could play this. Eventually I just moved in with him.