Sort-of borrowing the title from one of Randall Monroes books, it serves to remind us that there’s still relatively little that we know about ourselves on a fundamental physical and psychological level. Observe:

The transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration requires six weeks of once-daily sessions. Only about half of patients who undergo the treatment improve, and only about a third experience remission from depression.

Stanford Medicin: Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study

So by pulsing magnetic fields through that fatty blob you carry around in your head, you can potentially remedy the debilitating depression you’ve had your whole life. How is that for a discovery? It just feels so random – like percussive engineering. Then again, there’s plenty of research and DIY folks doing tDCS which uses current rather than fields – but it just feels so blackboxy. The subreddit tDCS is full of hopeful folks doing self-experimentation should you be into that.

All of this leads to something kind of strange. I’ve talked to other people about it, and a few bartenders have even brought it up to me. After a while, you start to develop a contempt for your customers, even the ones you like. It’s a tough thing, helping people make the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t juggle bottles for pretty people. I get working stiffs, many of them very lonely, very drunk.

Datasecretslox.com: Ask a bartender a question

Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law.

Spectator: Why is Canada Euthanising the poor?

Yeah, so as much as I’m in favour of the right to die, it should go without saying that every avenue of support should be offered to the person considering it. This is some dystopian shit right here, and even though the history of senicide and mercy killings isn’t anything new, this is truly a THX1138 take on it.

Our AI:s are being taught on the corpus of tagged images, and the world being what it is it’s impossible to completely avoid biad – and for many it’s even expected. Do a search for “two men” in any image search engine, and you’re likely to find caucasian middle aged men, and the problem of representation carries over into AI generators. It doesn’t stop the generators from being useful – you can just refine your prompts or nudge the image selection along whatever path you’re interested in – but the default bias is there, and it’s damaging since it cements what we ought to consider “the norm”.

Within this universe, characters can experience “omegapause,” a menopause-like end to their fertility, and “rut leave,” a personal leave from work or school to go off and fulfill their insatiable desire to mate. Some fics will include “heat suppressants,” birth control-like medications that prevent characters from experiencing the need to mate or emanating a scent. Again, it’s a lot.

Morgan Sung: What the hell is the Omegaverse, and why is it all over TikTok?

The kids do the darnest things, are all right, are species-fluid furry-adjecents with rape-fetisch.

Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” […] What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. […] For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.” 

Real life mag, Zachary Loeb: The Magnificent Bribe

I hadn’t heard of Mumford previously, and the themes that Loeb presents in his Real Life Mag (RIP 2022) essay are fascinating. There’s a convergence between the arguments presented and the Adam Curtis Hypernormality: human agency has receeded in favour of the an ever-more inhuman capitalist system – in Mumfords work embodied in the megamachine – and we can’t reason our way out of it.

This is the kind of stuff which is playing at the back of my mind when I’m reading about the design world. The hypernormality which Curtis speaks about is alive and well online – but instead of being manifested in a Soviet society, it’s the stories we tell ourselves on our Linkedin or Instagram feeds. The story being this: My opinion of the world matters, your opinion matters, and we are all the skippers of our ship of destiny.

I reached out to Zachary Loeb and he recommended two other essays on Mumford that he wrote (as well as the suggestion that I start with Mumfords Art and Technics as being the more accessible book):

In the twenty-first century, after the digital turn, it is easy to find examples of entities that fit the bill of the megamachine. It may, in fact, be easier to do this today than it was during Mumford’s lifetime. For one no longer needs to engage in speculative thinking to find examples of technologies that ensure that “no action” goes unnoticed. The handful of massive tech conglomerates that dominate the digital world today—companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon—seem almost scarily apt manifestations of the megamachine. […] And as these companies compete for data they work to ensure that nothing is missed by their “relentless eye[s].” Furthermore, though these companies may be technology firms they are like the classic megamachines insofar as they bring together the “political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal.” Granted, today’s “royal” are not those who have inherited their thrones but those who owe their thrones to the tech empires at the heads of which they sit. […] And yet, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not the megamachine, but rather examples of megatechnics; the megamachine is the broader system of which all of those companies are merely parts.

b2o, Zachary Loeb: From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’ After the Digital Turn

And all of this comes back to me studying UX. Because what much of the UX Design is focused on is making (digital) systems easier to use.

The geeky version of crystal healing might be the nootropic stack – mixes of different pills and powders you take to effect cognition & memory. I’m enthusiastic about it since at least in theory there ought to be a bunch of chemicals which can pass the blood-brain barrier and make us more interesting. One established family of chemicals are the Racetams, which some people swear by – so I ordered a sample from Nootropics Depot and have chewed my way through the bottles.

In general, I can sympathise with people who don’t want to take any drugs or medication – be it painkillers or antidepressants or cognitive enhancers – but unless you’re actively feeling worse for taking the stuff, I see little harm in it (on an individual level). I’ve been on and off antidepressants for a bunch of years, and right now I’m on a new (for me) SNRI and can spend my energy on being creative and productive rather than awfully sad, which is a nice change of pace.

Of course, there’s the whole messed up situation we’re in now where doctors are prescribing massive amounts of antidepressants just to keep people functioning enough to keep the economy going, which might be political reason enough to avoid the stuff (similar arguments can be made for vaccines, opiates, blood pressure meds, etc), but on an individual level, if you feel better for taking something, why the hell not. Some notes on Ricetams below.

Coluracetam – 20mg capsule

Day 1: 20mg – Transient headache
Day 2: 40mg – No noticeable effect
Day 3: 60mg – same as above
Day 4: 60mg – same as above
Day 5: 60mg – same as above

Aniracetam – 750mg per capsule – start 2 days after Coluracetem

Day 1: 750mg – Depressed mood
Day 2: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
2 day break
Day 3: 2.25g – No noticeable effect
Day 4: 3g – same as above
Day 5: 3.75g – same as above

Fasoracetam – 20mg per capsule – start 5 days after Aniracetam

Day 1: 20mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 40mg – Maybe better mood?
1 day break
Day 3: 80mg – Mood still improved. Slightly better long term recall?
Day 4: 120mg – same as above
Day 5: 60mg – same as above

Pramiracetam – 300mg per capsule – start after a three week bout of Covid-19

Day 1: 300mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 900mg – Maybe a bit more focused?
5 day break
Day 3: 900mg – Noticeably more focused and calm
Day 4: 1.2g – same as above
1 day break
Day 5: 1.5g – slightly more focused

Oxiracetam – 750mg per capsule – start 4 days after Pramiracetam

Day 1: 750mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
3 day break
Day 3: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
1 day break
Day 4: 1.5g – Maybe a bit more focused? (Didn’t sleep much, groggy morning)
Day 5: 2.25g – No noticeable effect
3 day break
Day 6: 3g – No noticeable effect

Phenylpiracetam – 100mg per capsule – start 10 days after Oxiracetam

Day 1: 100mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 200mg – No noticeable effect
Day 3: 300mg – Sligthly manic / frantic? Might have been too much caffeine
5 day break
Day 4: 200mg – Elevated focus and drive
Day 5: 100mg – Elevated focus

Noopept – 30mg per capsule – start 3 days after Phenylpiracetam

Day 1: 30mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 30mg – same as above
Day 3: 60mg – same as above
7 day break
Day 4: 60mg – same as above
Day 5: 90mg – same as above

So, Pramiracetam and Phenylpiracetam might be worth experimenting with a bit more. Unfortunately, Nootropics Depot seems to have discontinued the stuff, so I’ll have to look elsewhere. Also, when I was trying the Ricetams I wasn’t on SNRI’s, and I don’t know how those might interact.

When I learned about DALL•E last year it seemed like magic – basically casting spells at a computer and getting images out – and now there’s Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (the latter which I can now run on my M1 laptop) and overnight there’s a whole ecology of secondary AI tools that have popped up. Since most of the interaction with these tools consists of stringing barely coherent word jumbles together – prompting – there’s a market for selling the coolest prompts. And prompters are starting to claim ownership over their particular flavour of letters, and are doing so with no sense of irony considering that the AI models are trained on art trawled off of artists who now see their style mimicked in the service of furry porn and tentacle landscapes.

But I’ve been having a blast! It’s so much fun just sitting and prompting and poking and playing around – it’s a fantastic toy and whoever markets a fast upscale + printing service targeting this is going ot make a mint.

The technology & scene is changing at a breakneck pace, and hanging out in the MidJourney Discord is great, as is the Unstable Diffusion Discord with it’s abundance of digital horror erotica monstrosities being prompted into existence.

So I’m writing this post just to mark a moment in time. There are so many clever things being written about the latest wave of AI that just keeping up feels like a full time job – but Jon Stokes primer below is a good start.

What if I told you that every configuration of bits that can possibly exist — every abstract concept or idea, every work of art, every piece of music, everything we can put into a digital file for display or playback on a computer or in a VR headset — is already out there on the number line and that the act of turning any given chunk of information into a readable file involves first locating that thing in the eternal, pre-existing space of numbers and then reversing enough local entropy to give that number a physical form?

Jon Stokes: AI Content Generation, Part 1: Machine Learning Basics

The span of what these models can create is breathtaking – there’s literally no visual expression that they haven’t encountered. As per Jons article, all the images are already out there. Which is equally true of all pencil drawings being encased in every pencil lead, each marble statue in each block, etc, but never have the potential forms been so accessible. Indeed: Expecto Patronum JarJar Wang!

Lifting your eyes from your daily problems, you might see the edifices of human power stuctures outlined among the clouds, so all-encompassing that you don’t reflect on them most of the time. Networks of power, resources, influence and all around, oh my. And cheese:

People receiving meals from prisons, schools, and charities have little control over the ingredients they eat, and low-income individuals are the most likely to be recipients of these meals.^, In effect, government treats the poor and captive populations as wastebaskets for its excess cheese.

Brown Political Review, Allison Arnold: Let them eat cheese

As the comments on the piece point out, as well as the original mefi thread where I found the article, the author seems to bang a bit hard on the we’re-poisoning-minorities-with-lactose drum. But the image of bunkers full of cheese and cheese-adjacent products, and the political decisions leading up to the situation, is fascinating.

Beneath the good that CCHR has inarguably done, there is plenty of harm. Positioning themselves as reasonable skeptics who are just asking questions, their ulterior motive is to sow seeds of doubt about the whole concept of psychology. Not that the Church of Scientology has a sterling reputation for helping members who are suffering from mental illness itself.

The Baffler, Jess McAllen: The anti-antidepressant syndicate

Scientology is a perenniall boogyman – not without reason mind – and disentangling legitimate critique of mental health practices from the self serving agenda of that cult isn’t easy. McAllen has put together an interesting piece on the subject, and I imagine of the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” which here could be addended with “unless they’re Scientologists cause that makes me look like a nutter as well”.

These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there. […] Still, the visual remnants of vaporwave have long outlasted its radical ideological underpinnings. Almost immediately, its pastel, geometric, softcore aesthetics were gobbled up by media platforms, in particular the image-driven platforms Tumblr and Instagram. The pastiche compositions of Arizona Iced Tea cans and old Windows desktops were very quickly made available on all these commercial interfaces, which were not only feeding on a countercultural art movement—they were likewise consuming the ghosts of an internet they had long since murdered.

The Baffler, Kate Wangler: 404 page not found

I’ve felt the nostalgia of what Internet was supposed to be, and what it partially was, and Kate captures the feeling well. I dislike the online world that we have today and wish someone would strike an unknown underground well which would burst forth with new possibilities to connect, to create and to feel at home. The genre of waporwave had completely passed me by, but it’s late retro futurism is alluring. (As a side-note, Wangler mentions the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institite in that article, and their are.na site is a fantastic resource of design language.)

algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering.

The Atlantic, Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Harmful Is Social Media?

We can’t blame technology alone for the ills of society, and the algos might not be the sole culprit of the curent societal malaise.

The failure of the Peruvian anchovy catch in 1972 led to a significant decline in the availability of high-protein feedstocks and increased demand for soybean meal. As a result, soybean prices soared in 1973 and 1974.

USDA: Agricultural Commodity Price Spikes in the 1970s and 1990s: Valuable Lessons for Today

An overview of two historical price hikes in world agro markets, it’s a fascinating insight into how huge the trade systems are, and how dependent we still are on the good graces of our planet to support us.

In a weeks time I’m starting a two year full-time course to become a UX designer, at iths. I’ve been doing the coordinator and project management stuff at KKV GBG for eight years by now, and it’s time to learn something new. I’m also trying to reinvent myself – It’s been fifteen years since I graduated from art school, and I’ve spread myself thin since then. I’m grateful for the perspective that the art world offers me, but I haven’t been able to apply it as much as I feel I ought to have done, and so I’m pivoting to a more applied path.

With that in mind, I’m trying to read up on some UX literature and listen to a bunch of podcasts, and will try to keep a tally here on the blog – if for no other reason than to have something to look back on and fondly recall my naïveté. I’ll be adding to the list below until I post something new that pushes this post down.

One of the podcasts I stumbled across was the now defunct Product Breakfast Club Jake and Jonathan, which was run by the author of Sprint, and the CEO of AJ&Smart, a design/workshop company in Berlin. The podcasts are chatty and not particularly informative per se, but they do provide a feeling for the ambiance of how design folks might talk, which feels useful somehow. Book recommendations abound, and even though many of them are of the American self-help variety, I’m trying to set my prejudice aside and read them with an open mind.

Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart has also been evangelizing Workshopping as a next stepping stone for people doing design/research work, and he’s published a book called “The Workshopper Playbook” – a short read where he gives an example of a hypothetical workshop. It’s fun to imagine that facilitators and workshoppers have their own little secret book of exercise recipes, ready to pull out the perfect workshop for a “3 hour workshop for automotive investors in North Africa” or somesuch.

Whenever I’ve tried to do right by web standards, or understand some nuance of code or semantics, I’ve ended up on A list apart – a blog which looks and reads great – and they’re also publishing a bunch of books. One of them is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall, and I just finished it. It’s a pragmatic breakdown of the reasearch part of design work, and it’s a great primer for someone who’s just starting out. Like I. We’re actually doing research & survey stuff right now at school, so this is very timely. Easy to read, well explained, good stuff. (Hall also works at Mule Design, and their blog is worth a read)

I’m typing this in the stillness between the stabs of acute lumbago. Most likely it’s a delayed bill for overdoing it at the gym a week ago, and in combination with a cold the past week has been so-so; I’m fearful of sneezing because it throws my back out and is really painful.

Summer is in full swing with 35°C – scorching heatwave by Swedish standards – and I’m in front of a screen, gently flexing my spine and sweating. Sara is on a road trip to Malmö with Tura so my plan was to catch up on some work. Which is somewhat hampered by having to take a break every half hour to do stretching exercises or just lie down for a bit. Whine whine, whinge whinge.

In a weeks time I’m going back to work for a short spell, and then I’m on leave for two years to go to school! It’s a vocational course in UX design, and my hope is to find a new line of work where I can combine my analytical and pedagogical skills.

I’m looking forwards to focusing full time on studies and finding my own space within the field. Most of all I’m looking forwards to reevaluating what I actually enjoy doing. I have 40-odd years left before I expire, and I’d like firmer steerage of the sloop of my destiny, instead of drifting along the shores of placability.

It’s that time of year again. Birds shake pollen from trees, young men rev their cars by the waterfront, and I change the blog theme for no apparent reason. Or, supposedly, the reason being that my old theme relied on plugins which weren’t compliant with php8, but whatevs, here we are and I’m running a modified Twenty Fifteen. I tried making it ugly-fun, but maybe it’s just ugly, time will tell.

Speaking of ugly, I’m also finally redoing my homepage at monocultured.com, which has been living in a decrepit Koken CMS for years without updates. I’ve written about this before, and I’ve spent too much time just trying to decide between a simple html/css system, a static site builder, a minimal CMS, or another WordPress install. Like, I’ve literally spent at least a hundred hours trying different solutions out without being happy with any.

I thought I’d found a friend in Automad CMS but it was slow as molassess. This could be due to my cheap shared hosting, but after five minutes of looking into migrating to a dedicated server I luckily saw the procrastination for what it was and abandoned the task. I almost bit the bulled and got a cargo.site but I don’t want recurring fees. the mmm.page which I used for the WITP project isn’t responsive and creates a bit too much bloat to be used for a whole site, so that’s out.

So fuck it, I’m just relearning html/css for the n:th time and am making an ugly-fun site all of my own, and I’m doing it live. What will take the most time – as it should – is deciding what to include and doing the writeup for each project/set. We’ll see, but since I’m hoping to take unpaid leave from work soon, I’m going to need a portfolio site of some sort. (Also, I still have pozar.se for a more proper contact surface)

One headache for the site development is hosting video. I’ve used Vimeo previously, but can’t motivate the cost any longer, and migrating my stuff to Youtube is depressive as all hell – I’d rather not feed content to Google if I can avoid it – so once I get the website up and running I might as well copy/paste some javascript as well. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something!

Two weeks ago Russia invaded Ukraine, and I’ve been on edge since. The threat of escalation into a wider European war which might turn nuclear suddenly feels tangible. It’s frightening – I wonder if this is how my parents generation felt growing up during the cold war.

In the tv series Lost, Jack gives a pep talk to a frightened survivor along the lines of “I allow myself to feel panic and fear for three breaths, and then I do what needs to be done” – and that is all well and fine, but you need to somehow know what needs to be done. And if you believe that there’s a risk of end-of-the-world nuclear all-out fuckupery, it’s difficult to know what you ought to do.

To mitigate my anxiety I’m trying to read up on international releations, and I thought the 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer was a clearly presented case of how “offensive realism” has played out in the Ukraine example:

My argument is: When security considerations are at stake. When core strategic interests are at stake, and there’s no question, ladies and gentlemen, in Russia’s case this is a core strategic interest. Countries will suffer enormously before they throw their hands up. So you can inflict a lot of pain on the Russians and they’re not going to quit. And they’re not going to quit because Ukraine matters to them. And by the way, Ukraine doesn’t matter to us. You understand there is nobody calling for us to fight in Ukraine. Even John McCain, who up until recently has never seen a war he didn’t want to fight, is not calling for using military force in Ukraine. What even John McCain is saying is Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest for the West.

RealClear Politics, John Mearsheimer: Why is Ukrain the West’s fault

What’s compelling about his analysis is that the ideologies of the actors are secondary to security considerations. Countries are basically single cell organisms looking to expand their resource base as much as possible, acting aggressively to defend real or perceived threats. For those of us playing computer games it’s the most rudimentary behaviour of AI opponents in a 4X game: if you’re closing in on our borders I will perceive it as a threat, and if you don’t repell my encroachment of your borders I will see it as a weakness to exploit.

It’s also a very depressing view of how human society functions. Then again, perhaps we won’t be functioning that much longer:

There is no denying that China is a rising superpower confronting the U.S. Reporting a study of Harvard’s Belfer Center of International Affairs, Graham Allison argued further that the so-called Thucydides Trap is likely to lead to a U.S.-China war. That cannot happen. U.S.-China war means simply: game over. There are critical global issues on which the U.S. and China must cooperate. They will either work together, or collapse together, bringing the world down with them.

Noam Chomsky: US Push to “Reign Supreme” Stokes the Ukraine Conflict

Again with the annual list of books read and listened to. I’m not sure if it makes sense to differentiate between what I’m reading on my digital screens or on paper – it’s still reading, right? The feeling might be different but I’m not sure if it matters enough for a list such as this, so let’s skip it this time.

The post is started January 2021. It’s the last week of the Trump presidency, Sweden is hitting record mortality to Covid-19 and I’m working from home most of the time. Here are the books I’ve read, listened to or abandoned in 2021, as well as a comment or two.

Books read

Michael Lewis: Flash boys. It’s a hard sell evoking sympathy for Wall Street, but Lewis does his best when he’s writing about the plucky team behind a new stock exchange [IEX] which is trying to combat predatory skullduggery perpetrated by banks, brokers and especially high frequency traders. I’ve read about HFT and flash crashes before, but just had no idea of all the different ways brokers had found to fuck each other – and everyone else – out of billions of dollars. The book is well written, but I could have done without the personal portraits – there are only so many ways you can come up with non-negative ways of “moneygrubber,” and I really don’t care for descriptions which call leaving a $600k job for a $200k job “brave.”

Steve Burns, Nicolas Darvas: How I made $2000000 in the Stock Market. I’ve come across Darvas Box as a technical analysis tool for doing swing trading, so thought I’d read his book. The book was originally published 1960 and is worth reading – he’s candid about his shortcomings and the pitfalls of arrogance, and the descriptions of how he worries and overinterprets markets is genuinly fun to read. This edition has comments by Burns at the end of each chapter where he restates what Darvas has written – it seems more of a cheap moneygrab rather than adding anything of value to the original.

Paolo Bacigalupi & Tobias Buckell: The Tangled Lands. In a world where magic use has the unwanted side effect of creating a bramble which chokes everything else, and on top of it has nettles which cause a eternal cinderella sleep, we get four intertwined stories of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. The parallell between the magic/bramble and civilization/anthropocene is a bit on the nose sometimes, but it’s a well written book and worth reading – just like about everything by Bacigalupi I’ve read (Water knives, Windup girl, Pump 6).

Oyinkan Braithwaite: My Sister, the Serial Killer. A short novel about a two sisters; one a conscientious nurse who can’t do good enough in her mothers eyes, the other a beautiful aloof narcissist who is most likely a serial killer of men who fall for her. Well written and the frustrations of the good daughter Korede are never written for laughs, even if the story is morbidly humouros.

Frederik Pohl: The Gateway Trip. A colletion of vignettes from the Heechee universe, recommended by way of a thread I started in ask.metafilter. I think I’ve read this before, but Pohl has clever enough ideas that he’s worth a revisit. I like reading a story which is just a bit more clever than I am – that way I’m surprised, but can still see the reasoning. It’s a good fit.

Paolo Bacigalupi: Tool of War. A YA version of the world presented in Windup Girl. People and animals are genetically modified and created for the purposes of global corporations and fiefdoms. The creations are conditioned to total obedience and loyalty, but through an experiment-gone-wrong scenario the chickens come home to roost, etc. A romp but some nice world building.

Sayaka Murata: Convenience Store Woman. A fantastic short story about a woman trying to fit in between social expectations and her own free will. Great read, not a word wasted.

Sarah Pinsker: We Are Satellites. In a near future where there’s pressure on kids and adults alike to get a brain implant which allows functional multitasking, a few holdouts suspect that all is not as it should be. Nothing wrong with the premise, but the ideas are thin on the ground and there’s enough for a ten page story, not a novel. (the colophon mentions that some chapters have been published as short stories) There’s a parallell between the anti-implant folks in the book and our current anti-wax movement, and reading them as the good guys is an interesting take.

Jan Chipchase: Hidden in Plain Sight. A guide/handbook for how to analyse your surroundings when doing design research. I heard an interview with Chipchase on the podcast On Margin and his job and life seems enviable – not that I would be able to do what he does, but the way he describes being so aware of his surroundings, travelling the world trying to understand people, sound fantastic. It’s like a career in targeted mindfulness or something. I’m going to reread this book in a years time or so; it’s a very practical book and I’d need to have something practical to apply it to.

Jo Walton: The Just City. The Greek pantheon is real, and Pallas Athene gathers people from different moments in time – our past, present and future – to enact Platons ideal city – the just city. We follow the recruitment and/or kidnapping of the people who will become the masters, as well as the first children of the city, and the story is told from multiple perspectives. I haven’t read Platos Republic, nor many of the other references the book makes, but it’s Walton doesn’t let the references get in the way of telling the story. The novel peters out after a while, and ends with a literal godly intervention – but it’s still worth a read.

Brandon Sanderson: The Mistborn Trilogy. A coming-of-age rags-to-riches story about Vin, a gutter-kid who is found to have rare powers, gets involved in overthrowing the government and discovers Power of Friendship™️ along the way. The main idea of some people being able to use metals to temporarily gain superpowers is interesting, but not enough to carry the story which has to drip-feed epistolary exposition to keep going.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Ruin. Followup on the interesting Children of Time, but this time it’s squids evolving instead of spiders. Still an interesting story, and interspecies communication is interesting and well done.

Mike Monteiro: Ruined by Design. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” is a quote from Upton Sinclair which appears multiple times in this collection of essays on the role end responsibility of designers. The author is pounding his morally indignant chest a bit too hard at times, but there are valid points made mixed in with the hyperbole and repetitions. The blurbs present it as a contemporary version of Victor Papaneks books, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Papaneks clarity of though – although perhaps the sense of urgency.

James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Falls. The ninth and concluding book in the Expanse series. I had looked forward to see how they would wrap up the Chtuluisch corner they’d written themselves into, and the result is a serviceable book which sees the main characters play out the consequences of their personalities.

Louise Penny: Still Life. The first in a long series of detective novels, and came highly recommended by Sara. Not much of a whodunnit, but the jumping between perspectives – going from third person to second person omniscient in the same paragraph – is interesting. It’s either a good technique for showing the mulitplicity of social life, or used to gloss over where the writing falters, but regardless I can imagine picking the series up again.

Arkady Martine: A mamory called empire. Mehit, a new ambassador to the galaxy spanning empire Teixcalaan, is immediately embroiled in court intrigue while trying to solve the murder or her predecessor (with a mind-copy of him implanted in her own brain). A story about indetifying with your conqueror, and finding your own place as an other.

Books listened to

Kameron Hurley: The Light Brigade. As many reviews point out, the book is a revisiting of Heinleins Starship Troopers as many of the arguments made in the original appear here – albeit handled differently and with more nuance. Well paced story but occasionally hard to follow – time travel makes it tough to keep track of characters, and I had a hard time understanding why protagonist Dietz cared for some people more than others; their names just hadn’t registered. Fun all around thought!

Max Brooks: Devolution. It’s a zombie book by a zombie author but instead of zombies it’s Bigfoot. An epistoraly novel with few likable characters, even fewer interesting ones, and some sort of point being made about humans getting their comeuppance? Written as if for a movie, boring as all hell. Listened to it mostly to practice slow jog on the threadmill without having to be paced by music.

Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary. Following on his success with The Martian, here’s an even more engineery story about a clever guy solving stuff in space. It reads like a science teachers attempt at making physics interesting, and I’m only barely interested in the story – the stakes are high but I don’t really care. Some interesting ideas, but otherwise meh. Well produced solution with an alien who speaks in tones though – the audiobook format really lends itself to that kind of stuff.

Books abandoned

C.J. Box – The Disappeared. Murder, corruption, an old lady who’s a concentration camp survivor witnesses a murder? Abandoned 20 pages in.

Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation. There are only so many grizzled Russians talking to musclebound mexican mercenaries in the company of a dandy Scot I can take. Abandoned the audiobook an hour or two in.