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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2898 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Master and his Emissary, slow progress. This book has a way of making one reflect on things he's heard or seen in the past.

The right temporal region appears to be essential for the integration of two seemingly unrelated concepts into a meaningful metaphoric expression. Fascinatingly, however, cliched metaphorical or non-literal expressions are dealt with in the left hemisphere...

I recall George Orwell's (I think?) quip that people were forgetting how to make their own metaphors, and were just using ones that don't have any relation in themselves to the topic at hand or to each other.

Edit: There's a good book thread in the Fun Thread.

Blindsight, because people have been mentioning it here and other boards a lot lately. So far (20%) I think I mostly like it, but am having trouble imagining a lot of the descriptions, especially of the ship and the planet thing they're observing.

Finally listened to MacBeth and the associated lecture from the "Late Works of Shakespeare" course I was working my way through. It was the last one, but I couldn't do the Scottish accents in the audio collection on youtube i was working off of. I've imbibed Macbeth in written form in high school, and three separate live performances (including a table read done entirely in the voices of Simpsons characters. I picked up on so many new things this time around. There's a reason the classics are the classics.

I'm still working my way through The Good Soldier Svejk. I'm finding it very relaxing.

I just finished Project Hail Mary and it was excellent. A fun sci fi novel. I had worries at the beginning because "man wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia" isn't typcially a genere I enjoy, but the book really works.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms in English. Sixty pages in, it’s a royal pain to keep track of the names. I wonder if something like Game of Thrones is equally daunting in Mandarin. Would the names be represented by some approximation of meaning or phonetically?

Phonetically, such that we get "Daenerys Targaryen 丹妮莉丝·坦格利安 (Dān nī lì sī·tǎn gé lì’ān)"
https://ltl-school.com/game-of-thrones-in-chinese/
But the article talks about how the translation uses some classical and literary Chinese for flavor.

You could try watching 3 Kingdoms from 2010 or other adaptations? Putting a unique face, costume and demeanor to a character helped me a lot.

You could try watching 3 Kingdoms from 2010 or other adaptations? Putting a unique face, costume and demeanor to a character helped me a lot.

A Chinese friend of mine recommended the graphic novels she read in Singapore in the 90s as the best english adaptation.

Matthew B. Crawford's Why We Drive and The World Beyond Your Head.

Why We Drive is a vitalist paean to driving (and motorcycling), specifically the kind that involves risk and skill. It's also a rant against self-driving cars, glowing rectangles, and checking out of the real world.

I didn't hate it, but given its title, I expected "Why we road trip", "Why we go for a drive to clear our heads", "Why we explore that highway we've never been down", etc. Instead, it was more like "Why we speed", "Why we do donuts in the parking lot", "Why we tinker with gearhead shit".

Specifically with the gearhead stuff, the book did not do a good enough job of selling it to me. I fully believe it's part of why Crawford drives, but gearhead shit is not at all on the radar for me, or the vast, vast majority of people I know. The rare one or two that could MacGyver a timing belt out of pantyhose (or even know what a timing belt is) tend to be either the children of auto repair professionals, or else very deep in some automotive subculture already. That just makes the "We" in "Why We Drive" way more exclusive than it needs to be.

Partway through The World Beyond Your Head, which I'm already liking much better. It's so far a more general case of the topics surrounding attention in WWD. Probably should have read this one first.

I wonder what Crawford would make of the fact that I'm listening to it over a shitty TTS voice reader while: driving, making dinner, eating, playing video games, cleaning my apartment, swiping notifications away, only hitting pause when something else demands the vocal-processing-modeling part of my brain, such that I can no longer concentrate on the book in the background.

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