stormdog | Entries tagged with book

Rambles about the book I'm reading ("Regarding Saeki Sayaka: volume 1") and love:

At the start of the book I'm reading, the main character, Sayaka, is in (the Japanese equivalent of) elementary school. A girl she takes swimming lessons with keeps wanting to talk to her, and swim together with her, and make changes to the way she behaves so that Sayaka will like her more. Eventually, they have a moment where Sayaka realizes that this girl has a little kid sort of proto-crush on her. Sayaka's confused and terrified response to her own feelings in reciprocation is to decide that she must never see this girl again and to immediately quit her swimming lessons.

This sort of reminds me of a meme about a bunch of lesbians together at a party who are all talking about how they're looking for girlfriends, and then going home alone. When Sayaka is older, she'll fit right in!

In junior high (or the equivalent thereof, I think) another girl tells Sayaka she loves her and asks her to go out and her response is very different. It made me think about the ways I've felt when someone tells me they love me. I have a strong memory of the joy of Miriam telling me that for the first time. I have a strong memory of confusion and fear, like Sayaka but for very different reasons, when one of my ex's boyfriends told me that. I felt like I barely knew him and was being pushed into having a relationship with him and him saying that felt really wrong.

Sometimes people share a meme talking about how great it would be if we could tell people we don't have romantic feelings for that we love them: to be open about how important people are to us in non-romantic contexts. Intellectually, I think that would be wonderful. Emotionally, it's pretty scary. It's a big word that I don't feel like I'd know how to approach in that context. I think I'd either run away from it, or try to analyze it to death.

I don't really have a point. I just wanted to record thoughts and feelings I'm having about this book.

I empathize with Sayaka a lot. As a kid, she was better than her peers at everything she did. Not necessarily because she had more innate ability (though she might), but because she loved learning things and knowing things and improving skills. She took everything she was doing pretty seriously, unlike her peers, and took pride in being the best among kids her age at the things she did. As she got older, she realized that just putting effort into something doesn't mean you're going to be better than everyone else, or even most people, at it. I had to make that realization at some point, when I left elementary school or junior high where I could just ignore everything happening in class and still do fine on tests and assignments.

I think of all the characters in Bloom Into You and the related media, I feel the most kinship with Sayaka. I know she's going to have her heart broken by the end of this book and I'm kind of hurting for her already.

I love Red Dead Redemption and have been excited about trying RDR2 since it came out in 2018. It was on sale a couple days ago, so I finally bought it.

The world is immense, and so full of things to do! Creatures to study and track, plants to locate, fish to catch, legendary animals to hunt. The collector in me could be very happy spending hours finding all these things to fill in the entries in the in-game compendium.

The graphics are gorgeous! Whether riding through the rocky landscape or playing poker at a makeshift telegraph wire spool-turned-table, the detail of everything is amazing. I want so much to spend the approximately 77 hours it takes to do all the primary story content and extras in the game.

But I can't. The character I'm playing is simply not someone I can enjoy being. I've only played a couple hours and have had to kill guards on a train my gang is robbing and threaten two different witnesses to what I did with death. The next work I'm supposed to do for my gang is to find three people who've borrowed money from our loan shark and extract it from them. On top of that, I went into a bar where a friend was talking to some women, probably sex workers. Without confirmation (or choice on my part) I asked one of them "So how much do you cost?"

I confirmed last night via reviews that, while you can do your best to make honorable choices and refrain from killing innocent people unnecessarily, this kind of horribleness is an inescapable part of the game's story.

I was trying to think last night of something in my life to analogize this experience to and I remembered starting to read "Lord Foul's Bane," the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. The books are held in high regard by critics and readers alike and represent a vast, immersive world to be lost in for scores of hours. Shortly into the first book, I read the scene wherein the protagonist rapes someone and I gave up. I just couldn't keep going and enjoy what I was reading.

I feel like that with RDR2. There's so much amazing content there that I *know* I could happy spent many hours losing myself in. But not as that character. That I can't do. The protagonist of the first RDR was a former gang member (who is actually in your gang in RDR2 - it's a prequel), but while the moral choices for him to make are often complex and the world is often a dark one, I could make choices that left me feeling like I was genuinely doing my best to be a good person. I think that's mandatory in my escapist fiction. Because it's not an option in RDR2, I just can't enjoy it.

I'm going to see if we can return it.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1384526.html

And my brief review of Salvadori's other book (with Matthys Levy), Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail. I just finished that yesterday. As much as I miss biking, I do appreciate all this time on the train to read. Today, I'm starting on Alexandra Horowitz' "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know."

Salvadori's dedication notes that his mother-in-law thought that his book "Why Buildings Stand Up," was nice, but she would be much more interested in why they fall down. She had a good point; I found this book more engaging than the other one. As well as covering structural theory in a way that I mostly was able to follow (there's an appendix in the back that covers things at a more basic and abstract level too), that theory is tied into specific instances of building collapse, both famous and relatively unknown. One of the authors has professional experience as a forensic engineer and has testified in court proceedings in that capacit. His discussion of those proceedings in the book adds some interest too.

More strongly and clearly than the other books on architecture and design I've read, Why Buildings Fall Down gives me a sense of awe at the number of different pieces, both literal and metaphorical, that must fit nicely together for a building to do what it's supposed to do safely.

Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1290595.html

My brief review on Library Thing of Mario Salvadori's "Why Buildings Stand Up: the Strength of Architecture."

This had a lot of great information for someone like me; an interested layperson with no professional design training. The style is a classic sort of stuffy academic prose, and in places goes on at unnecessary length about how much of a genius someone was (the paragraph-plus extolling the mind of Gustave Eiffel being a good example), but it's certainly informative and engaging if I put that aside.

I did feel like a lot of what was here was similar to Edward Allen's (no relation!) book, How Buildings Work: The Strength of Architecture, which I read recently. Allen was rather broader in range of topics, and Salvadori more in depth in examining structural design theory and specific historical and modern buildings. It was worth a read, for sure.

basefinder, this book was written in 1980 and the author is quite excited and optimistic about the future of thin shell concrete construction! You might find that portion in particular interesting.

Current Mood: content
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1290322.html

I just finished reading Ed Sobey's "Unscrewed" which is a fun little book about taking household things apart and using their parts. The book notes that he also wrote a book about roadside technology systems, so I looked that one up on Amazon, and then found my way to this book.

I've wanted this book for at least ten years without knowing it existed. I have to decide when I can afford to buy it. Maybe not right now, but I must own this book.

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape (Revised and Updated)

ETA: At first I was going to hold out for the revised edition, but I think I'm going to go ahead and order the much less expensive original now, and maybe get the revised one later on.

Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1272882.html

I read all of Pat Miller's "The Power of Positive Dog Training" (thanks to Lissa Werbos for the recommendation), got a few chapters into Condit's book on American architecture, and then decided I wanted a better knowledge of some basics before reading it so I bought Edward Allen's "How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture." It arrived yesterday so I started it on the train on the way in.

This is the most I've been reading since grad school. It feels good.

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I knew I was behind on updating Quicken with all my financial transactions. I didn't realize I was quite that far behind. As of yesterday, I'm caught up to this month at least.

Current Mood: working
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1262609.html

I remembered a book I was going to buy a while back so I looked it up on Amazon to buy it. I was then also reminded that I will never be as cool as the author of said book.

"Michael Jay Geier has been an electronics technician, designer and inventor since age 6. He took apart everything he could get his hands on, and soon discovered that learning to put it back together was even more fun. By age 8, he operated a neighborhood electronics repair service that was profiled in The Miami News. He went on to work in numerous service centers in Miami, Boston and Seattle, frequently serving as the “tough dog” tech who solved the cases other techs couldn’t. At the same time, Michael was a pioneer in the field of augmentative communications systems, helping a noted Boston clinic develop computer speech systems for children with cerebral palsy. He also invented and sold an amateur radio device while writing and marketing software in the early years of personal computing.

Michael holds an FCC Extra-class amateur radio license. His involvement in ham radio led to his writing career, first with articles for ham radio magazines, and then with general technology features in Electronic Engineering Times, Desktop Engineering, IEEE Spectrum, and The Envisioneering Newsletter. His work on digital rights management has been cited in several patents. Michael earned a Boston Conservatory of Music degree in composition, was trained as a conductor, and is an accomplished classical, jazz and pop pianist, and a published songwriter. Along with building and repairing electronic circuitry, he enjoys table tennis, restoring antique mopeds, ice skating, bicycling, and banging out a jazz tune on his harpsichord."

https://www.amazon.com/How-Diagnose-Everything-Electronic-Second/dp/0071848290/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1514660384&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=how+to+diagnose+repair+anything

Current Mood: awake
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1191280.html

I finished reading "Rebel Cities." I guess I was hoping for a sort of direct plan of action for creating resistance to neoliberal trends in an urban context. It's not really that, at least partly because, as Harvey notes, there's isn't a simple plan.

Discussion of the tension between cities as fungible commodities vs cities as unique sites with unique resources was interesting. He discusses the the way "monopoly rent" (that is, rent or value related to uniqueness) is important to capitalist practice, and that cities are being positioned (or positioning themselves) as sites of authenticity and uniqueness in order to be attractive. But when authenticity is commodified, it undermines itself. These sorts of cracks, he says, are where anti-capitalist resistance can make room for itself.

His discussion of the need for activists on the left to look beyond horizontal, non-hierarchical organization is really interesting stuff too. I'm someone who tends to romanticize the structure of groups like Food Not Bombs or Occupy Wall Street, or even the Rainbow Family of Living Light; groups that are radically democratic and without a power structure. But of course, all groups have power structures, whether explicit and formal or implicit and informal. And without a formalized structure of power, organization fails beyond a local scale.

Harvey looks at a couple of case studies demonstrating some of his points. His mentions of the Zapatista autonomous zone was interesting to me. The fact that I've been to Chiapas, talked with some of the Zapatista compañeras and compañeros, and seen (in a very superficial way) the working of a couple of Zapatista communities helped contextualize Harvey's observations. I think I should write an email to the professor who organized that trip and tell her how much I feel I've learned from it in some very indirect ways. Anyway, Harvey points out the problems of trying to interact with the external capitalist world when, as a group, you have rejected all capitalist structure. It was a point I wondered about while in Chiapas and afterward. How can you be truly independent and autonomous while still being enmeshed in larger infrastructural systems of economy, electricity, petroleum products, and more? These things are complicated, but I feel like creating an autonomous zone can't be a permanent solution. It needs to go somewhere from there, and I'm not sure where.

Rebel Cities had a lot to say both about cities specifically, and about neoliberal economics and politics in general. It wasn't quite what I was expecting. It was worthwhile reading, but left me with more questions than answers.

Well, next I'm going to read Keller Easterling's "Extrastatecraft."