thejdizzler
9d ago
You can download shared decks from ankiweb.net. I've used some for spanish colloquial phrases, logical fallacies, and basic vocab for Italian and French. Most of my cards are self-made though.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I agree it's well established, but the last time I made an effort-post on /r/slatestarcodex there were many people that seemed to doubt that Anki was an effective way to learn things.
There's also the question of long-term effects of spaced-repetition. Ebbinghaus's original experiments certainly didn't go as far out as five years, and neither have any academic studies. The long-term posts I've seen on less wrong and other blogs are also not as glowing. I haven't really experienced this, but I'm not sure how to convey it.
thejdizzler
9d ago
It's been 5 years since I started using Anki (Wow!). For those of you who don't know, Anki is a flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to optimize remembering whatever you put on the flashcard. You can use Anki for just about anything, although higher skill levels are required for certain kinds of cards (math cards, cards that randomize questions, etc.). I primarily use Anki for language learning (Spanish and Italian), but I also have cards for lots of work things (biology, stats, math) and things like peoples birthdays and phone numbers. I'm thinking of making an effort post on my blog/here/r/slatestarcodex about this at some point, but I'm struggling to think of objective measures I could use to show that Anki is actually working/useful/worth it. Thoughts TheMotte?
thejdizzler
9d ago
Agree with what you said here and with your assessment of me. I am very agreeable, which is why I think I struggle with these kinds of attacks so much. I also tend to doubt many of my beliefs about the world. There are only a few (veganism, various Christian moral virtues) that I'm very sure about, which makes it very easy to poke holes in my armor.
thejdizzler
9d ago
I've read a lot in Spanish (108 books total, 62 originally written in Spanish). I have a list that needs to be updated a little bit, but some of my favorites below.
Olvidado Rey Gudú: This actually doesn't have a translation to English at all, so you need Spanish (or Italian or German to read it). It's basically Game of Thrones crossed with a fairy story. Haven't read anything like it. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
El Sentimiento Tragico de La Vida: This is a philosophy book that tries to tie together christianity and existentialism. Much like Kierkegaard. I wrote an in-depth review of it here
La Invención de Morel: This is a short novella about a guy trapped on a creepy island filled with holograms. Was intended as a parable against TV.
Los Cuerpos del Verano: This is also a short science fiction novel about a world where death no longer exists because people are uploaded to the net when they're dying. New bodies are an option, but the quality of the body you get depends a lot on your social status. Our protagonist gets the body of middle-aged women (he's a dude). I really recommend this one, and you can find my longer review of it here
thejdizzler
10d ago
Yes, definitely something I missed. I didn’t really want to comment much on that because I don’t know much Latin American history.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Your old interpretation made me laugh out loud. There is some backing for that reading in the text. It's been while for since I read it, but I think one of the main characters kills herself by eating a box of candles.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Hmmm maybe not the best Italian book for me to start with in that case. Thanks for the info.
thejdizzler
10d ago
I have tried multiple times to get into the habit, but I have never been consistent or really seen gains or benefits. Something that I've thought about restarting, so maybe this is the time.
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude in English) follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they head the foundation, growth, and ultimately, destruction, of the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The book doesn’t have an overarching plot per see: each chapter consists of a number of vignettes about the family in a certain epoch of Macondo, which are pumped up on magical realism and read to me like someone describing their exploits in a multi-generational game of the Sims 1 . There are some patterns to the madness: most male members of the family are called José Arcadio or Aureliano, and share personality traits, memories, and perhaps destinies with all the individuals of that share their name. Common plot threads also abound: incestuous forbidden love, vague political conflict, and a push-pull with the outside world. There is also a civilizational plot at work here: Macondo is a being that grows, flourishes, becomes decadent and finally dies.
My Background with the Book
I started learning Spanish all the way back in 2020, and this was one of the book was one of the reasons for doing so. We had read A Chronicle of a Death Foretold in one of my high-school English classes, and I was fascinated by the way Gabriel García Márquez (I’ll be referring to him as Gabo from now on) wrote and constructed his stories. This was apparently THE Gabo book to read, so pretty much as soon as I had finished the Harry Potter series I ordered the book. Looking back through my blog records it seems like I tried to read it two or three separate occasions. The first was around 400 hours of Spanish, and I think I gave up about 30 pages. The second and third attempts in 2023 and 2024 respectively went much better, but I still only made it around a quarter of the way through, after the first patriarch of the book dies. I added the book to my ten books to read before I die list, which was enough motivation for me to finish the book this time, though the last 200 pages of the book were like pulling teeth. I’m sad to say it, after being 3/3 on my ten books, but I don’t think Cien Años is a good book, and would recommend you read some of Gabo’s other (and better) stories. I’ll elaborate on why this is below, but in short I had issues with the structure of the novel and the use of magical realism. That being said, I still thought that Cien Años did have something valuable to say on the dangers of self-absorption for social elites.
Episodic stories and the phantom plot development
I talked earlier in my review of Infinite Jest about how important the relationship between story structure and theme is. Infinite Jest does this through the difficulty of its first 300 pages, using this structural choice to reinforce Wallace’s point about how culture and entertainment are not equivalent. In Cien Años, Gabo uses the vignette to emphasize similarities between the lives of different characters, reinforcing themes of cyclical history, that there is nothing new under the sun, and historical determinism: that much of what will happen has been foretold by previous generations, although they may not have the tools to decipher the vague prophecies that they have been given.
There is nothing wrong with an episodic structure per see. Most books use it to some extent. But usually the individual episodes are in service to a larger plot or character development. Two books that do this really well I think are Harry Potter and The Hobbit. The middle half of every Harry Potter novel usually consists of various unrelated adventures that take place through the school year. Yet each adventure either drops a key hint about a larger overarching mystery plot of the novel, which comes to be important in the final quarter of the book, or serves to develop one or more of our characters (or both). In The Hobbit, each of the self-contained adventures in the chapters of the first half of the book serve to make us (and the dwarves) trust Bilbo as a burglar and leader, without which his interactions with Smaug and the Arkenstone in the finale would be unbelievable.
I think the episodic nature of Cien Años didn’t work for me because the multigenerational nature of the story means it can’t do the things that Harry Potter and The Hobbit can. There is no overarching plot, so the story can’t drop important tidbits that will be important for the finale: there isn’t even really a finale, rather just a vague descent into decadence and doom. While in the first half of the novel there was some character development, by page 150 characters were already dying off, meaning Gabo had to start all over again. Now I appreciate some of what Gabo was trying to do with this structure: namely create a confused sense of the passage of time, which is present even in the first iconic line of the book 2 , but the overall structure just didn’t work for me.
Magical Realism Cheapens Character Development
There’s some debate as to what “Magical Realism” as a genre or creative choice actually means, and whether it is distinct from fantasy. My personal position (and definition) is that magical realism is distinct subset of the fantasy genre that places fantastical events in the midst of every day life, and that these events are not treated as abnormal by the plot or the characters. The sub-genre in some way has always been a thing: this is exactly what fairy stories are, but was popularized by the “Latin American boom” of the mid-20th century by writers like Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabo himself.
Let me be clear, I don’t think magical realism is a ticket to a bad story. Cortázar uses magical realism to great effect in many of his short stories, creating an aura of strangeness and unreality that help to highlight those same emotions in the reader 3 . Similarly, in Como Agua para Chocolate, Laura Esquivel gives food cooked by the main character absurd magical powers to highlight the important role that food has in our sense of self and family. Magical realism works best by turning up to 11 the personal struggles, wants, and fears of our characters. There are instances in which this works well in Cien Años: my favorite example is how an American banana planation just pops up in Macondo overnight, at least from the point of the Buendías, emphasizing how disconnected they really are from what is going on in the town.
Yet unfortunately, magical realism seems to used in this novel quite a lot to get out of inconvenient plot snafus. Have Aureliano fall in love with a prebuscent girl. Rather than actually deal with how messed up that relationship is, have her prematurely hit puberty and become wise beyond her years. Have a woman so beautiful that every man that sees her fall in love with her while she is completely oblivious. Rather than work through the potentially interesting character development that could result from that, instead have her carried to heaven by her laundry. Have one of your characters have seventeen kids all named after him by different women. Quickly kill them all off because you don’t know how to develop those characters. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Elite’s Should be Connected with the People they Govern
One thing that I did like about Cien Años de Soledad is the emphasis it placed on the dangers of self-absorption of a social elite. The tension between self-absorption (or solitude) and connectedness is present in the very first chapter. The matriarch and patriarch of the Buendía family are second cousins, a sign of the incestuous obsessions that will plague the family for the rest of the book. José Arcadio Buendía, the first patriarch of the family, spends the first few chapters vacillating between vainglorious scientific endeavors, and actually being a practical, good leader of Macondo, a trait which all his descendants share to some extent. While better than her husband to some extent in terms of being practically minded, Ursula, the first matriarch, is obsessed with appearances and the reputation of the family above all else, which also leads to disaster on multiple occasions. This endogamic self-absorption leads the characters to fail to connect to one another, giving the book its title, but also for them to blindsided by social forces, such as civil war, commercial colonization by the Americans, and finally the decadence and decay that dooms Macondo. I think what Gabo is trying to say here is that elites need to be connected to the people and places they govern, which might seem like a rather obvious message, but its one that historically seems very difficult to learn.
Overall, although Cien Años did have some interesting things to say, and in some ways was a very entertaining and fun book, I found it a bit of a slog, and would recommend reading other Gabo stories, probably his shorter works, instead.
3/5 stars.
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This is an early 2000s video game where you control a household of Sims (simulated humans). The intended gameplay is for you to live out quotidian fantasies such as building your own mansion, or working as firefighter, but the functionalities of the game mean you can quickly go off the deep-end.
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Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano had to remember that remote afternoon in which his father took him to encounter the ice”.
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My favorite story of his is Casa Tomada
thejdizzler
11d ago
How difficult was the first book? I'm thinking of reading it in Italian (my Italian is workman-like but not good). Do you feel like it works as a stand-alone?
thejdizzler
11d ago
Before I stopped going to mass completely (~2 months ago), I would go to confession every couple weeks and not usually receive Communion unless I did so (I too am a miserable sinner that tells stupid lies and masturbates).
My goal in converting to Catholicism was to try and connect with the divine that I know is out there in the world. I didn't write this in my post but I had a mystical experience at the church of the holy sepulcher in 2019 that convinced me that something around Jerusalem/Jesus/Christianity was special and true. I've very rarely felt this at mass, but this is perhaps from trying too hard to connect with other parishioners/the institution rather than what I came there for (God).
This is all true and helpful and has inspired me to make another effort to find Christ. I'm going to return to mass and read the book that you suggested and see if it helps me overcome my philosophical doubts and recenter myself on the sacraments and a connection with God.
thejdizzler
11d ago
I like this metaphor a lot! I'll have to use it myself.
thejdizzler
11d ago
I have thought about it before and will see if there are any Orthodox churches near me.
Yes I do. But it doesn't all follow from there unfortunately because the church is built on much more than just Jesus' passion, resurrection, and death. It's largely built on Pauline interpretations of the Gospels, and the entirety of the Old Testament which is largely contradictory to the New Testament. It's not as simple as just "repent and believe the gospel" because so many things have been grafted on top of that are required to be part of the church.
I think you're reading me extremely uncharitably here (as the other catholics that I complain about do too), and actually makes me want to leave more than I already do (which is perhaps what you would want anyway, which I have some sympathy with). Things empirically do not just follow from reading the scriptures (or else why would there be so many denominations of Christianity). I believe in Papal Authority and church hierarchy which is one of the reasons why I am catholic. The Jesuits' have a much more open interpretation to theological problems where I struggle with the Dominican positions.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Reading the second book in "La Saga de Los Confines" by Liliana Bodoc. Trying to only reading in Spanish until my DELE exam in May.
thejdizzler
12d ago
Maybe better suited for the culture war thread, but I think I'm leaving the Catholic Church. I converted in 2022 for a number of reasons. I had already felt drawn to Catholic literature/aesthetics for almost as long as I could remember (I loved Silence and A Canticle for Leibowitz), was incredibly dissastisfied with the secular attitude towards spirituality and morality, and was drawn to the simplicity of Jesus' simplification of the Jewish Law: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Love God. I choose the Catholic Church over other denominations because it was not woke, open to revising stances on scripture (evolution), and concerned more with works over just belief.
It's been three years since I went through RCIA and converted, and a combination of contradictions between the church and my other beliefs about the world has become difficult to resolve. This center around two big areas. The first revolves around veganism/animal rights/environmentalism. Although this certainly wasn't always the case historically within the church (St. Francis and the Benedictines come to mind), there seems to be this attitude at least in my parish that animals and nature were only created for us to do with as we please. This is backed up by an interpretation of Genesis that suggests that God created man to rule over animals and nature. Not only do I think this is wrong ethically, we know many animals have conscious experiences and shouldn't be treated "however we want" (not to say that they should be treated like humans necessarily), but it also seems to have led to disaster in relationship to our environment. Even if you don't believe Climate Change is a serious issue, we have replaced most of the vertebrate biomass on land with us and our (maltreated) farm animals. Certainly there are many in the Church who would see this as wrong (the Pope included), but it doesn't seem to be so in parishes I've been to, and to justify it scripturally it seems like you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The second issue has to do with the relationship between divine revelation, philosophy, and science. It's not the church hasn't historically changed its position on things (slavery, evolution, not doing everything in Latin), it's that any change has to conform to certain core dogma and be based in an interpretation of scripture. But the more I read of philosophy, the more I've started to believe that certain tenets of catholic theology don't agree with objective reality and are poorly argued for by the "greats" (Augustine, Aquinas). The problem is not necessarily that these tenets are wrong: more so that they can't be interrogated in a reasonable philosophical manner because divine revelation is unquestionable.
The final unrelated reason that I'm leaving is the people. When I first joined the parish, we had a much more vibrant young adult community that actually did stuff together, had interests beyond theology, and generally was much more concerned with works than beliefs. Through a combination of people moving away and/or leaving the church, it seems the only people really left are trad-caths who I find boring, close-minded, and fail to see the core of what Jesus was trying to say. The Dominicans who run the parish, while being excellent administrators, and kind people, aren't much better when it comes to intellectual openness.
Anyway, I'm open to coming back to the church when/if I move away from the current parish I'm in to more Jesuit-friendly pastures. But without massive reform, both philosophically and practically (being much more concerned with environmentalism and non-human life on this planet), I think this era of my life is over. I'm not sure where to go next spiritually, but hopefully that will come with time.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Yup I think that's a big part of it! I should know better about spaces like the one I got burned in (alt right biohacking is not exactly an intellectually open environment).
thejdizzler
14d ago
Thanks man for the sanity check. I know I'm fit and I know I don't look like an old man at the ripe age of checks watch 27.
thejdizzler
15d ago
How I can I be less bothered ad hominem attacks by randos online? I recently was pushing back against some seed-oil sophistry on substack (not even advocating for no-meat/veganism like you might assume, there isn't actually good evidence that vegan/vegetarian is better than the mediterranean diet), and some dude told me my profile picture looked like that of a prematurely aged teenager (for reference, here is the picture). I know this is bait because most of the time seed-oil sophists don't have any real arguments, but I couldn't prevent it from really bothering me. I've had similar experiences with non-appearance comments about intelligence, personal character, etc. and they all bother me to some extent. In real life this isn't really an issue because it's faux pas to make these kinds of comments (or at least has been since I graduated high school). Maybe a sign of some underlying insecurities I need to work through, or that I need to get a bit more sleep. Thoughts the motte?
thejdizzler
16d ago
Nothing wrong with LARPing as a Victorian gentleman, and in many ways a worthy goal for an individual in a world that is decidedly against many aspects of that. As a goal for an educational curriculum that's supposed to prepare youth to be citizens, leaders, and humanistic contributors to be members of Western society, I'm less sure. It's almost certainly better than what we have now, but it's also a system that produced, in large part, the generation that allowed Europe to commit collective suicide in the First World War. Maybe it's not fair to pin the blame on the war on the education system, but the way the European elite were educated during that era certainly influenced the propaganda, mass hysteria, and doubling down that allowed the war to get so out of hand.
All this being said, I think your LARP is good for both you and for the community. It is good to go church, the Opera, museums, play sports, and read old books. There are plenty of countervailing influences in society that want to shove the things I believe are absent from these lists in your face (although they never seem to choose actually good books/media from any of these categories). I just worry that as an ethic to guide society it's incomplete, which is perhaps true of any system we could come up with (José Ortega y Gasset seemed to think so at least).
In terms of the first novel, may I introduce the "Golden Ass" by Apuleius as another contender. It as episodic as Don Quijote, but also contains an overarching plot that I think would qualify it as a novel. And it was published in the 2nd century AD. It has elements of what we might consider post-modernism (nothing new under the sun), while still forming a bridge between antiquity and more modern novels.
thejdizzler
17d ago
This is a good point. Things have fallen further than I might like to think.
thejdizzler
17d ago
We know from studies of memory formation that interleaving (i.e. mixing your study sessions for two subjects) improves retention and cross pollination of different subject matters. Studying multiple strands of literary culture I think would same to have the same effect. Same with languages. High-school and university students are plenty fluent in English to start an L2 (if not L3), without having to worry about mixing up the two languages which often occurs when one is at low levels in multiple languages.Since I started studying Spanish seriously I know my own knowledge of English has grown immensely.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I think I came off too harsh against St. John's in my post. I haven't attended the college and so I don't know what the experience is like on the ground, and from what you and other's have said, it seems like I'm missing quite a bit of what they do there. What I'm more frustrated with is people using this list on substack to peddle a way to become a well-read, well-rounded humanistic individual. It's part of the path to be sure, and if you don't read any of these books I think that's not a good sign. But merely checking the box isn't enough. You need to move beyond the curated list. Which hopefully these kinds of things actually spur people to do. So maybe there's not a real problem after all...
Just ran the Boston marathon without really a proper training cycle before hand. Got injured in February and hadn't done more than 30 miles a week since then. I was going to just jog the race, but my college friends (who are all low 2:30 marathoners) successfully bullied me into trying somewhat. I held just under 6:30s for the whole thing, which felt great and re-qualified with a 2:48 (about ~15 min off my PR), but now my legs are absolutely destroyed and am having trouble walking around work. Any tips for dealing with DOMs in the legs?
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