Matthias > Recent Status Updates

I hate that I have more to say for books that I disliked than those I didn't. How would I review the best book I read this year (Reach of the Roach God) for instance? It was good because it exceeded my ability to analyze it; I could never write a prompt that would get an AI to generate it. TBTIF so far is (without being slop per se), otoh, exactly what you'd get knowing the plot summary and year of composition.

deployWarElephants => (
if enemy.hasSeenElephantsBefore(false) {
enemy.print(“aaah fuck elephants!!!”)
enemy.flees()
}
else {
elephants.print(“aaah fuck I’m in a battle!!!”)
elephants.trample(ownTroops)
}

Say what you will about chatbot prose quirks (awful, hate them) but at least it wasn’t modeled on ancient philosophy. “Gallant does the good thing, Goofus does the bad thing. Shall the things done by Gallant be counted among the bad things? Assuredly not, for no bad thing is a good thing. But Gallant does all the good things, eats his vegetables, is kind to children, and is happy, for it is good to be happy…”

I don’t think I’ve ever hated a book this much whose ideas I found this inoffensive.

I thought I knew this book entirely by osmosis and w/r/t all the politics and worldbuilding, yeah, I totally did. *Completely* unprepared for what a 2025 Type of Guy Winston is, the degrading office job, seething misogyny, parasocial fantasy life, the whole book practically narrated in Wojaks.

In the middle of Spider Mountain Temple and I don’t think I’ve seen this combined level of toyetic and evocative together before. The potion room (the potions are snorting bits of the dust of these mummified saints) with absurdly powered effects. There’s the mech you can pilot (by going into someone’s meditation dreams and find a secret chamber to another dreamer.) And no violence or the robots will kill you!

like that cutting pizza with a sword meme. "oh actually ron chernow style biographies are bad because people don't have beliefs or desires." like writing a letter to the irs that you don't have to do your taxes because parmenides proved reality is a single featureless sphere. (as another book i'm reading this is not exactly convincingly argued but does get fun points for being so charmingly insane.)

Say what you will about archaic Greek literature, it’s just SO neatly divided by its class origin - Homer with his aristocratic morality that weirdly has been taken as standing in for the time and place in general; Hesiod with his tedious middle-class wisdom, as recognizable as if he were speaking at a local Rotary club; enslaved Aesop’s wily tricksters and boasting idiots.

I want to like this book. On the strength of the (super interesting and promising) introduction and Ben Burgis’ qualified recommendation, I will keep reading this book. But so far? A boring and catty recitation of slights. Fingers crossed for the rest of it.

There's a soft- (sometimes hard-)antisemitic saw about contrasting the moral brutality of the Old Testament with the loving God of the New. I feel like this has a rational kernel, but the big gulf is between the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim. I also feel like I have a better sense now of my original question of how Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both "turned out okay," but that's a blog post or more.

I’m not informed enough to settle any of the “how gay were David and Jonathan” debates but (1) there’s definitely a thematic parallelism between how Jon and Michal adore him (with David really only reciprocating Jon’s love) and (2) the narration makes sure you know that David is, like, real good looking, a real snack.

Shallow reading, but the curse section of Deuteronomy is so metal. Love it.

(Genuine!) props to Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism for ending up with some pretty good moral teachings in spite of this abhorrent text.

“No sorcerers pls! (Btw here’s a magic spell to see if your wife is cheating on you. Purchase from authorized priest only.)”

Genesis is often set up as a foil to Darwinism - and yet its least realistic feature is just how monomaniacally its characters pursue inclusive genetic fitness. Were people really like that, or think themselves to be? No, but the redactors, pretty blithe about duplication or continuity errors, must have been ruthless about excising anything not on-theme (that is, on patrilineal descent.)

Not for lack of trying, today’s right-wing grifters will never debut anything as funny as “Klan water” (special communion water for Klan ceremonies, available exclusively for purchase from central HQ.)

Bored out of my mind listening to this thing, which for most other Great Books would probably register as a greater put-down to me than the work itself, but. I don’t think I can blame Wilson, either - I liked her Odyssey, certainly more than Fagles’ - but my god, these endless tedious fight scenes, with their interchangeable characters and speeches and intensifying modifiers.

You know when you’re reading some potentially interesting work that happens to be, say, Marxist stuff from the 70s, and they have to spend a bunch of time positioning themselves vis-a-vis a bunch of Lacanian nonsense you don’t care about? This has that going on just for an entirely different intellectual universe. Content still sounds interesting though!

Alexievich: “through these interviews, we see that women’s experiences undermine traditional patriotic, heroic narratives”

Every woman she interviews: “When I was 14 I ran away from home to serve on the front. The men doubted me at first but then I killed thirty fascist dogs with a rusty nail and roll of floss. Once, I cried, because there was no makeup at the front. All glory to the motherland!”

I’m too dumb to properly appreciate this book, which is of course true generally, but in this case the editors bear at least some of the fault: “o ho ho, you don’t have a passable knowledge of Middle French? fuck you, one passage translated per chapter is more than enough for you.” Appreciating what remnants I can glean from a rich harvest, though!

this is such a good dnd setting

Almost dropped this; glad I didn't.

Very dead dove meme of me to say this, but wow, what an uncomfortable listen. Jeremy Iron’s expertly sensuous narration makes it even more so than “the Kindly Ones,” which is really something.

As far as the combo of "poorly organized and written with an insufferable voice" and "full of really super important info I'm embarassed not to have known," nobody really quite does it like Smil. 59 Anki cards from just the last chapter!

Man, everybody who's somebody in this story is someone's son-in-law. Obviously not surprising, from a comparative perspective, and these aren't necessarily failsons (a lot of them are clearly very smart.) Elites passing on positions and privileges to sons-in-law is interesting insofar as it's less strictly nepotistic than sons but more than blind advancement - a bit like Roman adoption practices, maybe.

Man, everybody who's somebody in this story is someone's son-in-law. Obviously not surprising, from a comparative perspective, and these aren't necessarily failsons (a lot of them are clearly very smart.) Elites passing on positions and privileges to sons-in-law is interesting insofar as it's less strictly nepotistic than sons but more than blind advancement - a bit like Roman adoption practices, maybe.

Feygin points out the irony that during the Khruschev thaw the economists with more radical policy proposals re: embracing markets came from a more orthodox Marxist background, while the ones whose reform proposals centered around more rationalized, actually-comprehensive central planning used non-Marxist frameworks. But this isn't surprising at all: all the categories of Marxian economics are capitalism-specific!

One thing I’m surprised by: how sincerely the USA and USSR tried to restrain their respectively favored parties *not* to launch a civil war against each other and instead just play nice in some kind of grand popular front even after the defeat of Japan. Gives credence to the thesis that the Cold War wasn’t all that inevitable.

I doubt I’ve seen a worldview that’s as blatantly self-negating as BAP’s. The core complaint is basically that in order to experience freedom human males need to *conquer terrain*, but every actual space you can find is “owned space” regulated and surveilled by mysterious elite (pedophiles/jews/reptilians/whatever.) but dude! that’s just the logical outcome of your anthropology of freedom!