Andrea > Recent Status Updates

Another successful treasure hunt at a thrift store. Really happy about all of them, but it was especially cool to find that Einstein biography, The Cider House Rules, and Good Earth.

Another great haul from my favorite Goodwill. Not as much nonfiction this time around, but several great additions to my historical fiction shelves. Most excited about A Prayer for Owen Meany that matches my edition of The World According to Garp perfectly.

No road trip south is complete without a stop at my favorite Goodwill in Calgary. I always leave with a bag full of seriously good stuff. The Agatha Christie and Jeffery Deaver are old favorites I had to have on my shelf, and I can't wait to discover the rest:

“These integrations affect internal states in the brain, such as memories and thoughts. Intelligence is an emergent behaviour as the brain instructs the body how to react and respond to external stimuli. If this hypothesis is true then the brain can be replicated in any medium that can process information in a similar, granular, logic unit base fashion.”

Idealist monists believe [.] that the material world is an illusion; only minds are real, they say, because everything that we can possibly know about the world is filtered through our minds. To substantiate [.] they point [.] to the fact that there are no 'colors' in nature; and that only our minds see 'red', or 'blue'. Isn't that evidence that we live in the world of pure ideas, rather than of molecules and atoms?

‘We Will Be Stuck With One of Them’: Canadians on Their Upcoming Election

Another attempt to silence academic debate on a difficult subject: White professor investigated for quoting James Baldwin's use of N-word

Book 23: Funeral games, which feature Ajax face down in some cattle dung. Best! Book 24: Priam ventures out of Troy to beg Achilles to release Hector`s body. True to his own self the dude has to make things difficult.

Book 21: Achilles goes on a murderous rampage and angers the river Scamander, which attempts to drown him. Book 22: My homeboy Hector meets Achilles in battle and finally fulfills the prophecy. *sadface* Like a frat boy he is, Achilles refuses Hector one last dying wish. What a douche.

My love for film goes hand in hand with my love for books. Is anyone else using Trakt.tv, which acts like Goodreads, but for movies and television? I’d love to follow you if you do! My account is here: https://trakt.tv/users/wynter02

Book 19: Achilles and Agamemnon reconcile their differences. Book 20: The gods are now free to interfere in the conflict, and they take sides as a great battle is about to begin. Achilles and Aeneas exchange insults, and Hector is unable to stand idle while his friends perish at the hands of the great warrior.

Book 17: A fight breaks out for Patroclus’s body, with Trojans aiming to desecrate it, and Greeks hoping to bring it back for proper burial. Hector puts on the legendary armour to brag of his victory. Book 18: Achilles learns of Patroclus’s death, mourns, and begs his mother to appeal to the divine Smith for new armour, so he can rejoin the battle and kill Hector.

Book 15: Zeus wakes and is angry at Hera and Poseidon for tricking him. But soon he reveals that why he may assist Troy for a while, it’s all part of the plan to punish Achilles, and that the great city will still fall. Meanwhile Trojans rain fire on Achaean ships. Book 16: Patroclus begs Achilles to lend him his armour to assist the ailing troops. Successful, Patroclus fights, but his enthusiasm gets him killed.

Had all intentions of making a dent in current reads tonight, but got too cozy with the man and Netflix. Sometimes I just want my brain on snooze.

Давешний страх опять охватил его всего, с ног до головы.

Он вошел к себе, как приговоренный к смерти. Ни о чём он не рассуждал и совершенно не мог рассуждать; но всем существом своим вдруг почувствовал, что нет у него более ни свободы рассудка, ни воли и что всё вдруг решил окончательно.

Book 13: An extensive battle complete with entrails spurting, brains splattering, and eyeballs popping out of skulls. Poseidon gets heavily involved on the Argives’ side, but his hands are tied under the watchful eyes of Zeus. Book 14: Fantastic chapter where Hera devises a plan to seduce Zeus and put him to sleep so that her brother in law can reverse the tides of war. Great Ajax gravely wounds Hector.

Book 11: Zeus rains blood on Argives, but Agamemnon leads a vicious attack against the Trojans until he is wounded. Taking advantage of his enemy’s shock Hector charges ahead. Nestor begs Patroclus to put on Achilles’s armour to inspire the troops. Book 12: Hector storms fortifications despite Polydamas’s bad omen.

[…] there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! [...] Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money—that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind […] Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of the matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we could give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. […] That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.

I mean I look at this land and, and I love it. I want to be out on it travelling over it always, to study it and live on it and learn it. But when I do that, I change it – I destroy what it is, what I love in it. This road we made, it hurts me to see it! And base camp is like an open pit mine, in the middle of the desert never touched since time began […] Let the planet be, leave it wilderness...

The skulls were strangely elongated and frosted like sugar candy, covered with glittering crystals of calcite.

...that astronomer’s gateway drug, the ringed giant Saturn.

I need to read 43 books in three months to finish my GR challenge. Definitely "challenging", but doable. No?

[...] it is too painful to think that she is a woman, with a woman's destiny before her—a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish.

Loot from yesterday's trip to my favourite thrift store. I can't wait to get to all of these. What luck!