#+SETUPFILE: ../org-templates/level-1.org #+TITLE: Reading Corner #+BACKGROUND_IMAGE: images/reading-background.jpg * Why do a boring old person thing like read? :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: why-do-a-boring-old-person-thing-like-read :END: I use to dislike reading because I thought reading was for boring old people. It turned out I was correct, reading is for boring old people. Than I became a boring old person, so now I read. * How to find a good book :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: how-to-find-a-good-book :END: The more questons that answer with yes the more likely it is that the book is worth a read: + Do christians dislike the book? + Did a school board in florida or texas try to ban it? + Is the author mentally insane? + Did a German dude write it? + Do book reviewers struggle to wrap their tiny brains around it? * Reading list :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: reading_list :END: ** Ever growing list of things I need to read :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: ever-growing-list-of-things-i-need-to-read :END: + The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (currently reading) + Danzig Trilogy: + The Tin Drum + Cat and Mouse + Dog Years + The People's Republic of Walmart + Cybernetic Revolutionaries + Jailbird + God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater + Brave New World + Fahrenheit 451 + The Flounder * A few reviews I guess :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: reviews :END: *Warning, most of these are Kurt Vonnegut books.* I really need to try more authors rofl. ** The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: the-last-of-the-really-great-whangdoodles :END: A underrated masterpiece. A must read. This book is mind opening in so many ways and will improve your life. Read it to your dog, your cat, your braindead grandparents... Afterwards give the Whangdoodles in Whangdoodle land a visit and tell them I said hihi. Its one of those childrens books that is strangely enjoyable for all ages. ** Cat's Cradle :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: cats-cradle :END: Dont waste your time reading the fucking bible. Read Cat's Cradle instead. Its a book with countless layers that all play into each other. Every detail is important and meaningful even if its enteracting with the story on a abstract level that doesnt show up at first. Cat's Cradle is the golden example of how to write a story. It has a way of almost feeling like its putting you in the middle of a historical event instead of simply telling a fictional story. It has a tastefully dialectical natural that makes every detail in the story work more like parts in a well tuned machine. Cat's Cradle might even be your vin-dit into Bokononism. ** The Sirens of Titan :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: the-sirens-of-titan :END: Kurt Vonnegut books arent known for making very good movies but reguardless *I need this one to be turned into a movie right now!* It has a surreal almost dream like vibe like the army on the rusting metal surface of mars, the beautiful landscape of titan, and a flavor of sci-fi that seems fitting for the time it was written but strangely modern all at the same time. How the fuck can a book have so much blunt foreshadowing yet leave you completely unprepared for whats about to happen?! You must read this book. I will stage an entire war if you dont, I will make you get into a rocket and fly to titan if you dont. *You have to read this book!!!* ** Galapagos :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: galapagos :END: Jesus be dammed, booked reviewers are harsh af on this masterpiece. Its always shit like "I cant understand the small clever details and it doesnt hold my hand and tell me everything in simple tv news approved words there for its a bad book". This book does a good job putting down Social Darwmism and explaining how evolution actually works. The way every detail connects is just wonderful and the way it so very carefully frames every moment passing by and choices what to bring into focus at any given moment. It has a way of spending most of the book on just a few days worth of events yet going into detail about the next one million years of humans. Its a work of absurb chaos carefully looked at under a microscope. ** The Children's Crusade :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: the-childrens-crusade :END: An anti-war book from the 60s? Already sounds based! Anyways if you read this book you will become unstuck in time. Time doesnt move, we dont control time... Everything is already planed out and we are just looking at one moment at a time. Once you read this book you will instead see time for what it really is. ** Goodbye Blue Monday :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: goodbye-blue-monday :END: This book starts out with a hand drawn picture of the authors asshole just to prove a point. It continues to include hand drawn pictures of the most random things throughout the book. What does the book say? I dont know because I never read it... fooled you! You believed me for a second didnt you? dumb ass! Well anyways, the book is about some dude who reads a sci-fi book and thinks its real. You know the same thing happened to me when I watched Star Wars for the first, second, and 10th time! Anyways, even though this book is a fucking mess everyone should be required to read it. In some twisted way you might learn a thing or two. ** Ready Player One :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: ready-player-one :END: Its kind of a fucking mess of a book. Nothing about the story line itself is that creative by any means and the character design is kind of flat, but just the amount of details packed into it is insane. I dig the world building and just the grand scale of it all. The movie puts it to shame. Unlike the movie the egg hunt is actually difficult. ** 1984 :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: nineteen-eighty-four :END: This book is part of something I call the "read it in high school effect". The best way to keep people brainwashed without causing a uprising is to make them read these kinds of books while at the sametime making sure they dont understand them. High schoolers being forced to read books wait until last second to read it than skim through it carelessly, watch the movie and pretend they read it, flat out dont read it at all, find a article online summarizing it, use chatgpt to do their home work... the only kids who actually do their work correctly in high school are the ones loyal enough to know the truth while still being loyal supporters of our corrupt society just like the inner party members in 1984. Years later no one remembers what they read in high school and only remember what they are told they read. No one wants to reread a book they were forced to read in high school. Lucky for me I was home schooled and got to read it based off actual interest.\\ \\ I know what your about to say "You are a socialist so you clearly didn't understand 1984". I have a quote from 1984 for you "... the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.".\\ \\ *GO READ 1984 EVEN THOUGH YOU ALREADY READ IT IN HIGH SCHOOL* ** Animal Farm :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: animal-farm :END: Its a clever little book indeed. Had me laughing the entire time. Anyways, *its not designed to be used entirely as a anti-socialist book*. Think it through: so in the book the animal revolution is a socialist revolution, the humans are the capital owning class, the leaders who took control after the revolution was a pigs, years after the revolution the pigs started walking and dressing like humans and they even became friends with the humans. Aka revolution needs to put democracy first or risk going back to square one. *If you read Animal Farm and think "the animals should have just happily put every ounce of their geist into working for the humans instead of rebelling" I have to ask: do you know what stockholm syndrome is? You better call the doctor because you seem to have it for the capital owning class.* Thinking in simple black and white terms is a clear sign of mind control. * Book ideas :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: ideas :END: I have lots and lots of ideas floating around in my head. Things for video games, programs, music, religions, ideologies, and books. How much do I get done? Nearly nothing. Maybe someone reading this can make use of it (: Though whats more likely to happen is a LLM will use it ): ** The War on God :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: the-war-on-god :END: This one I started writing but never finished. I have had many names for it like The Dialect of God, The Scale of the Universe, and The Side Quest of God. Its about a christian star ship flying to a poor planet to convert the life forms. The story is less about the christian star ship and more about the effects its existence has on the world. The bunk of the story is side stories that are only loosely connected to the star ship. The star ship during its journey goes off course due to the captain never listening to the engineers warnings. They end up flying all the way to heavens gates where they are greeted by god and jesus. god is not happy with them. They have always viewed god as kind and loving when really god is to be feared. Their god creates diseases that kill billions, earth quicks that pull entire cities into the ground, mass starvation... The christians didnt fear god and he hates them for that. After a speech from god about how much he hates the christians to prove a point he takes one of the babies, hands it to jesus, and jesus drop kicks the baby into a black hole. btw jesus looks pissed off at them the entire time. After the shock gets through god says "fuck you" and flicks his all mighty finger sending them into the deepest depths of hell. *** War on god side stories :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: side-quests :END: During their journey one of the side jets come off and fall onto a planet of hunter-gatherers. This triggers an entire war over who gets the jet. Its worsted by a particle gun which they were given as a joke by another star ship crew a 100 years ago. It triggered a similar war and they all thought the conflict was finally over than the jet come and starts it back up. The most boring member of the ship has a really pricy cleaning machine. After using it without running the cleaning cycle for a long time germs start to grow. This are smart germs with an entire civilization. When he finally runs the cleaning cycle the inflection is too bad and only makes the survivors angry. From their point of view time goes much slower. After 1000 years (to them) of mass political movements, revolutions, and infighting over limited resources they finally unite. They all kill the cleaning machine owner and use his body for resources to build a ultra advanced civilization that quickly works it way up as the most advanced civilization in the universe. As soon as they start running low on resources someone comes in to check up on him and they kill those people to for resources. On the planet the star ship is heading missionaries are already there starting to convert the natives. The natives dont like them. Their planet was destroyed by corporations who stole all their natural resources and left them with nothing. Those same corporations spent a tiny fraction of their profits to send environmentalists, mutual aid, and missionaries to the planets they destroy. They dont actually do much for the people and the planet. All they do is protect the image of the corporations. Out of crazy luck a army of giant cats shows up on the planet. The natives become friends with them and ride them into battle against the missionaries and take their ship all while the star ship is on its way over. ** Rat Race :PROPERTIES: :CUSTOM_ID: rat-race :END: The whole idea started with this idea "you dont win the rat race by running the fastest". This idea sat around in my mind and mixed with other ideas until I ended up with the concept for Rat Race. One of the things that mixed was The Sirens of Titan. In many ways The Sirens of Titan is a follow up to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Rat Race would be a alternative way to follow up The Sirens of Titan. The story would start out by following around a Kill Droid on a large metal plane in a unknown location in space and time. It spends its time looking for humans and collection them for experiments. The humans are tiny compared to the Kill Droid. The experiment requests just seemingly magically show up when it returns and while its gone the experimented on humans and research papers are collected by an unknown entity. It has all sorts of strange objects in its lab/home. One of which is a old tv turned fish tank full of sturgeons. It feeds the unused humans to the sturgeons. Throughout its day (its always day there) it has strange almost flashback like day dreams of a scientist experimenting on rats. The scientist, Boaz works at The Rumfoord Pure Research Center. Boaz spends his time there doing experiments on rats. His favorite are rat races. Another peep at the Research Center is Kazakh. Kazakh is the janitor. The place tends to stay clean since its just a bunch of nerds so Kazakh gets a lot of time to fuck around. One of the labs has a tank of sturgeons and Kazakh often spends her breaks watching the sturgeons while she programs and updates her website on a beatin laptop running unix. Boaz and Kazakh are both in one way or another modeled after me. Kazakh likes sci-fi, programming, playing bass, and philosophy. Boaz likes math, science, video games, and anime. I dont care much for stereotypical love stories. To torture people who do I will set things up perfectly for Boaz and Kazakh to have a love story though I will instead go for a much more natural and organic type of love between them. Kazakh is bisexual and tends to go in and out of relationships quickly but always remains lonely in some way or another. Boaz is too focused on his work and video games to really care about anything else. They will be good friends but also keep their distance in fear of hurting each other and direct any interest toward each other into a will to understand how each other brains work while still keeping a distance out of fear with progress away from that fear only happening in small seemingly pointless steps. All this build-up will not have any fully satisfying outcomes purely to torture readers (: Boaz slowly loses his mind in his work. He keeps comparing things in the news to things he finds during the rat research. Everywhere he goes he sees these connections which push him deeper and deeper into isolation. Society is just one big rat race. In the races Boaz is always looking for the rats who dont put their all into it. Rats that just sit there or slowly walk to the end. The race is pointless yet the rats put so much effort into it. Society just seems like one big experiment we waste so much time and effort into. Why even bother? Go to school for years, go to even more school, get a job, work your ass off, start a family, pay taxes... All this just to soon die. There must be a answer. The answer is found in the rats. For another project they are giving the rats a new mind bending drug known a goofball. Goofballs cause many effects like /Gestaltzerfall/, feeling like you yourself are multiple people and the things you do and think are the result of teamwork of those multiple beings inside your head, feeling that the entire universe is nearly a internalized image of the world protected outwards, and very fractalled hallucinations. Long term it effects the way the rats interact and the entire dynamic of their colonies. Boaz sneaks some home hoping for more answers to his questions. During his trip he finds out we are being researched by human sized these rats in lab coats. At home, work, in public... he notices rats watching and writing things on clipboards. They disappear as soon as he tries to look at them. This drives him deeper into his research. One thing he keeps telling himself is "you dont win the rat race by running the fastest". Though ever since taking the goofball he has felt a part of him missing, but somehow not an important part. Everyone gets more weirded out by him than they already were, except Kazakh who's strange little crush on him mixes with a almost scientific interest in finding out how his brain works. One of Kazakh's favorite things to mess around with programming is procedural generated worlds. One of these worlds you start by splitting the world in two. The upper half the air and the lower the ground. You than split forwards and backwards. Forwards is a flat plane and backwards is Perlin noise generated terrain. Than you split right and left. Left stays the same and right has random noise applied to it making the land sharp and threatening looking. Kazakh's website is kazakhsplane.org which has a web assembly compiled version of the program for the world I just brought up. On this site she posts whatever is on her mind. No one really looks on this site but its more for herself than anyone else. Oneday Boaz wakes up in a dull jail like room with no door and hears a bunch of people making noise. He goes out and first thing he sees is giant godzilla sized rats in a lab coats standing an unknown distance away looking down at them from the sky. The rats tell them stage one of the experiment is complete and they are now on stage two. They created a list of different types of humans and picked out one of each type. Each person here has their label on their jump suit. The rats make them play many different games. Throughout there are many things that turn everything into chaos like really bad choices for how people are grouped, food storage's, lack of good places to piss and shit. While people are creating gangs and getting into fights Boaz just stays in his cell or where ever has the least noise and people. He notices many of the "mistakes" along closely with variables he would change in experiments. One day the rats have them race. If you win or lose doesnt make a real differences though a lot of people get really into it and base their entire self worth on it. As long as everyone makes it to the end they will be given food regardless of speed. Boaz with a piece of chalk he found writes in big letters "its all by design". The rats take interest in Boaz and send human sized rats to him. Out of one of their pockets they pull out what looks like a suit made of his own skin. They say its the version of him he shedded away when he outgrew it than they force him back into it. The rats start adding cyborg parts to him and once he is a Kill Droid they erase his memory, open up a portal, and place him on the other side. The Kill Droid from the start is Boaz and the metal plane strangely looks like Kazakh's plane. All the humans on the plane are the ones who were not picked for stage 2. When Boaz finally connects the dots he just gives up on everything and walks off toward the random noise and Perlin noise part of the world until he somehow runs into Kazakh who walks up to him, and unzips his skin reveling the real him under the shedded skin he no longer needed and the Kill Droid gear freeing him. She uses a strange looking device to open a portal to earth and they go through to find the planet with no more people left. The device dies right there preventing them from bringing over the people stuck on the plain. The tech needed to fix it doesnt exist on earth so they live out their lives just the two of them which they find to be quite easy and peaceful. They quite enjoy watching nature reclaim what humanity took from it. They never have any children and agree maybe humanity shouldnt continue. Decades later they die peacefully from old age.