nil’s Comments (group member since Mar 25, 2013)

nil’s comments from the nil group.

goodreads ftw

Fuck, why does Goodreads look so ugly? It's such a random cluster of shit that you can't sensibly focus on one thing at a time. What's worse is how non-configurable it is.

Once you vote on something, you'll regret it because it's now permanently plastered on your profile for now on. Once you choose some favorite genres in that section, now that section will always be displayed, even when you remove all your choices. What the fuck, Goodreads? I don't mind not being able to rearrange things, but at the very least let me remove certain sections. The only solution is to make a new profile and never check those incorrigible section blurbs again.

These are some remarks on organizing the shelf settings in a competent manner. All shelves that aren't specifically mentioned use the shelf settings indicated in the first item.

Shelves: I display Author, Cover, Date Pub., Date Read, Rating, and Title by default. Then it's sorted by 30 Per Page, Author ascending.

All/Read: Same as normal but sorted by Date Read descending. The only reason I browse this bookshelf is to see the last books I read anyways, so that sort order is my preferred.

Currently-Reading, Dropped, On-Hold: Same as normal but with Date Started instead of Date Read. For obvious reasons.

To-Read: Same as normal but without Date Read and Rating. For obvious reasons. I don't use a position order in the To-Read section because that's impossible to manage for 10-20+ items. When looking for something to read, I just browse through the whole "To-Read" shelf, and various internet sites, anyways.

Favorites: I include Position, omit Ratings. I don't need Ratings because all my favorites are 5s, and I include Positions to sort my favorites accordingly so that it's whatever order I want on my profile page. The sort order for this shelf is Position ascending, for obvious reasons.

As a note on the # of items Per Page, infinite scroll is obnoxious because it shows a little blurb at the bottom of the page while scrolling. 30 Per Page makes up for this.

Now of course, to use the other various columns, I just display and sort by them accordingly. For instance, if I want to see all the notes I wrote down, I display the Reviews column, then sort by that. But I don't need to see that all the time, so it's not part of the defaults.

This is a very, very difficult procedure for meticulous OCD people like me. Here I'll lay out some common routes and remark on all of them.

Genre: The problem with this methodology is quite obvious if you do not cross-over your shelves. Since many books fall under multiple genres, it is very very difficult to organize your shelves effectively with this. Only several genres could be categorized well here. The rest would overlap so often or be so incorrectly categorized that the purpose of cleanliness is already contradicted.

Trope/Reactionary Sentences: Funny one-bit jargon, but literally useless for organization unless you're prepared to handle over 25+ shelves. But then now you'll need shelves of shelves, in order to handle the amount of shelves!

Published Date Time Frames: This is nice if you like organizing your books and mindset by chronology. The more you read within certain eras, the more you can be split up the time frames on your shelves. However, this doesn't really help collect titles which share common ideas or genres. And if you go purely by this route, it's nothing that the "Sort by Pub. Date" column in the "All" shelf doesn't already do (save for the fact that rereleases don't indicate the original pub. dates, so you will want to organize that manually).

Alphabetical Groups: Same remarks as the date time frames.

Since there's problems with all, here's the solution which currently works best for me. It's a bit fudgy, and it keeps progressing to something new.

Literary Forms: Ideally, I would organize everything by shared common ideas. But as stated with the problems with the pure genre route, such a naive implementation would not work, and so I do the next best thing: the format of the medium. I also have localized genres shelved in this manner, which are more naturally categorized this way. This includes technical books, nonfiction, etc. Others include the form of its presentation, i.e., play, short story, novel. I don't include a novella bookshelf because it requires too much work to distinguish which books belong to novella vs novel (and this also crosses over to more subjective classifications).

What makes this organization technique superior is that the classifications are objective and far easier to handle. It's a simple fact check that allows one to break down large numbers of texts up into more manageable components. And unlike genres, a work can only belong to one of the shelves at a time! :)

One of the most natural methods of practicing cogent analyses is discussing works with others. I categorize clubs in two types:

Real-life: Ancient, antiquated, poorly resourced, and likely heavy on necessitative social requirements and small talk. In other words, you can't do anything if you're with particularly stupid people with particularly stupid arguments save for leaving the club altogether.

Online: The modern evolution. There are many useless subsets/types in here, and it's very difficult to find the proper clubs that facilitate the type of discussion indicated above. The most desirable would be relatively small member bases (less than 100), agreeable and sane members in general, semi-frequent (at least weekly) discussion with lots of substantive back-and-forth talk. Now if only I could find the C&C equivalent for books, although I'm quite sure there are innumerable amounts of them within this medium, which households smarter people at the end of the spectrum than anime does.

I will need to remind myself to explore this option (particularly Goodreads clubs) in more detail when I have the time. It's safe to say that the reddit r/books and 4chan /lit/ clubs, as well as the most popular Goodreads clubs, have left me very underwhelmed with the amount of intelligent discussion and profuse casual talk.

Organizing notes/informal analyses via Goodreads is abysmal; but I prefer cohesion in my social mediums, and so I would like to use Goodreads for that purpose.(Also to satisfying my daily craving of self-dictatorship, bwahaha) AFAIK, there's 4 ways to do this:

1. Reading updates: allows no editing...
2. Book comments: can see them just by hitting 'View' from the library page, but that's shit since you don't know which books you commented on until you took the effort to load the page on every book.
3. Book club: this is the most functional option but not very convenient when navigating from just the book libary.
4. Reviews: this allows for easy viewing from the libary via looking at the 'Reviews' column, but it's always public even when my main purposes for the writing are informal analyses; and this takes away any future desire to formalize the writing for public eyes (as it's already beholden to the public..).

A quick comparison for these 4 indicates that 'Reviews' are the best option, even if it slights other Goodreads members for reading shitty informal "reviews" -- to which I offer, "Blame the game, not the player!"