Daniel Cunningham > Recent Status Updates

Holy f@&$ing pathos, Batman. I'm not going to lie, the last 25%+ of this has been an increasing struggle for me. The books have really lost the thread, and now it's just wallowing in suffering. Verbose. F@&$ing. Suffering. Maybe, as the reader, my suffering is actually an incredibly clever ploy... but I think it's just the author really quadrupling down on, frankly, the least interesting part of this entire s@&tshow.

Not for the first time, the... incessant?... too strong... recurrent?... not pejorative enough. Eh, not for the first time, the incessant dorm-room philosophizing grinds. All is essentially shitty. Civilized people are barbarians. Wage-slavery is indeed slavery. Comfort is for the weak. Power rules all. Pain and death comes for us all. I mean, dude, have you ever just looked at your hand and thought... dude!

5/10 books finished (which brings me to 43%, so the later books are... longer!?)

Book 5 was very different. We've left the continent and history of the first 4 books behind, and some of the writing style and POV behind. This book flowed more and had much more humor. No children tortured to death. Significantly fewer rapes. More death raining down from above. An indictment of greed... and neoliberal empire?

Book 3 was a step back up for me after a somewhat off-putting book 2. I've settled into the way he does characters and humor, two things that keep poking me.

I'm trying to think of a similar "series experience" and the closest (the only) one I can come up with is reading the Dark Tower/Gunslinger series. Lots of problems, annoyances, doubts, but I was drawn onward and onward. And, frankly, Malazan is better.

14% of a ~10000 page "book"/series and... definitely into it, and deep. This is going to be one of those weird "books"/series where I plow through it, am into it, like it... but get to the end and am just unsatisfied. I can feel it now.

There is tremendous, amazing, epic, eybrow-raising world building here. I mean... this is the greatest world building I've ever read. But... ehh... ??? So far book 1 > book 2

If you like your prose florid and your POV high-school-theater-group melodramatic, read this book. "It's so much worse than you thought, except that is only a worse case scenario, but it's so much worse, but we could do stuff, agggghhhhhhh, there is no hope, but keep hope alive, okay, I'm going to talk about what I just wrote now, because it sounds hopeless, oh, what, were you looking for a period, agggghhhh!"

So far, Heidegger's thoughts seem to fall into three categories for me:

(1) What? No. That's idiotic.
(2) Ok, ok, ok, sure. So what?
(3) The fuck? The-actual-but-not-literal-contoring-the-fuck-ness?

Ooooff. Just the intro raises a lot of issues for me. To be an antiracist is to believe that any differences (in e.g. wealth, education attainment) between races *or between any subgroups* are absolutely caused by racism... To think that any culture is superior to any other culture is racism... Anyone who disagrees with the ideas of this book is a racist and irredeemably racist at that... This does not bode well.

Starting a book by Charles Murray, of "The Bell Curve" fame (or infamy.) Lets hope it's better than the Mamet debacle I read last month.

Yeah, I'm re-reading this:) It is not *nearly* as good as when I read it at age... 11? 12? Sigh.

Must. Force. Self. To. Finish.

Worst. Book. Ever.

God. 30% done, and have moved on a bit. Mamet hates bureaucracies. A lot. Government, management, labor (organized labor?), safety inspectors, and I'm sure more I am forgetting: all leeches. I'm not sure who, in broad strokes, this leaves, but apparently engineers (only good ones), writers (obviously...) and set designers. (I'm not making this up) are okay. I suspect he means some Randian class of creators.

Wow, terrible. One straw man after another. Clearly, Mamet hates (liberal) youth, who apparently all are rich, vain, idiotic, and constantly getting massages. He especially hates people with Liberal Arts degrees, and especially, especially hates people in film school.

One wonders how dissolute, naive, lazy 20-somethings (and perhaps 30-somethings) have had such a massive effect on the world. Time machines?

Wow, terrible.

One straw man after another. Clearly, Mamet hates (liberal) youth, who apparently all are rich, vain, idiotic, and constantly getting massages. He especially hates people with Liberal Arts degrees, and especially, especially hates people in film school.

One wonders how dissolute, naive, lazy 20-somethings (and perhaps 30-somethings) have had such a massive effect on the world. Time machines?