Dominic

This book reads like a smoky, late night dorm room conversation on “how culture is just a myth” or some similarly thought provoking topic. Not that culture isn't a myth, but explaining this in a history book requires a more rigorous explanation than Sapiens offers in its breezy narrative.

It's a fun read but demands the reader take breathtaking leaps in the causal chain to move through 200,000 years of history and anthropology in 400 pages. Stepping us from A to Z means making sure B, C, J, O, and X are all accurate and scientifically sound. This book doesn't do that. Sapiens asks us to imagine what early farmers were thinking and extrapolate theories of why the current social order is shaped the way it is. It asks us to cherry pick single examples from civilizations thousands of years ago to explain all of Homo Sapien motivation. Worse yet, the author intersperses ethical judgement throughout, leaving me to wonder how much of the research is motivated by his own worldview.

If you are along for Harari's ride then I can imagine the view is fantastic. If you want to make a stop along the way and ask a few questions, there's no time.

One of the more lucid and pragmatic books on the topic that clearly delineates boundaries between the terms “sonic art”, “sound art”, “audio art”. Quite enjoyable for its technically wonky perspectives on the field. After reading too much theory on the subject, it's refreshing to read about how artists engage with the AV equipment and recording media. This revised edition, in particular, is also a pleasure for the sheer amount of artwork cataloged. Rather than deep dive on a few important pieces, Sound Art Revisited enumerates hundreds of pieces and clusters them around meaningful categories such as “Sound in the Art World”. It seems obvious to discuss how visual artists use sound in their work but this book addresses it earnestly and historically. The lack of philosophizing about abstractions such as “Silence” and “Listening” also brought a real clarity to the material. Like every book on sound art, it does lean heavily on 4'33” and I Am Sitting In A Room to tell its story, but that only illustrates the relationship sound art has with the space containing it.

“It would be admittedly easy, on first glance, to draw parallels between the ambient chill out room and the sound installation in a gallery, and environmental sound as a source and model for both ambient and sound art. Both the ambient chill out room and sound art installation can be a respite from the urban environment, as an atrium would–the sounds are often meant to approximate natural settings. But ambient was meant to decorate a room, not to map it; it was perhaps a commercialization of some of sound art's qualities, rather than an extension or mirror of them.”

Basically a 250 page Sports Illustrated article, this book is a bit more “baseball” than it is “big data”. That being said, the data story is far beyond Moneyball, which was essentially how the A's started paying attention to the under appreciated slugging stat. What the Pirates did in 2013 was much bigger and changed the game forever.

I read this book years ago, but for whatever reason I'm seeing it pop up on a daily basis right now. Maybe it was featured on some prominent TV show or something. Anyway, it's a good excuse to tell the world why I didn't really like it. I don't mean other people shouldn't like it, only that I found this book roughly in the same category as The Secret or literally anything by Deepak Chopra.

Her advice has all of the efficacy of these New Age or self-help gurus. That is to say, it's pages of empty platitudes with not nearly enough meaty tips for actually decluttering. It would be like writing a book on changing careers and simply rephrasing “follow your passion” over and over. Or perhaps a diet book that tells you only to eat things that are green. I mean, yeah, that would probably work for enlightened beings on a different plane of spiritual awareness, but not for most of us.

If you are like me, you aren't a hoarder and have no actual problem letting go of legitimate clutter. However clutter happens and you need real strategies for mitigating the mild chaos it produces. You need helpful tips for how to not let a drawer full of dead pens and batteries accumulate. You want solid advice for container and shelving solutions or how best to manage recycling. You want to know helpful tactics for telling your spouse the thing they want to keep doesn't actually spark joy in your life.

This book is just not that. It is for people who strive to live in an empty room save for a single desk with a favorite pen and moleskine notebook full of things they want to throw out next. This is the kind of book that helps you for exactly one week and then it's right back to junk mail piling up on the coffee table the moment life becomes more hectic than the state of transcendence you were in while reading the book.

Decluttering is about regular trips to Goodwill, the recycling center, and the landfill. It's about having a place for everything, whether it sparks joy or not. It's about spending 15 minutes a day cleaning up rather than waiting to do a massive Spring cleaning that never comes. Much like getting in shape, it's about consistency and not freaking when there is a setback. This book offers little of that and offers far too much weird animism and advice for folks who already have their shit together.

A great treatise on philosophical materialism and evolutionary psychology, Wilson attempts to settle some existential questions with biology. Also interesting was the call for a dialogue or collaboration between the humanities and the sciences - what physicist Sean Carroll calls “poetic naturalism”. The sciences need the stories and meaning-making of the humanities and the humanities need empirical evidence.

These might be real skills, but it's pure entertainment for basic folks like me who want to pretend they will ever have the day in a life of a “violent nomad”. This kind of non-fiction is better than any spy novel or video game because it lets you imagine for a few hours that you may actually need to survive in hostile territory or engage in covert activity. Reminds me of the children's Spy Handbook that I was obsessed with at the age of 9. Very fun.

I missed this book of BASIC games in 1984 but I guarantee I would have been way into it. As the title says, it's a collection of weird computer games with names like Tower of Terror, Monster Wresting, Flying Witches, and more. Here you go, I took the liberty of typing in Tower of Terror for you and saving as a .cas file for your favorite TRS-80 emulator. I used JS Mocha since it runs in a browser. In Tower of Terror, you race up a tower avoiding ghosts, skeletons, trap doors, and headless axemen. You must keep your heart rate under 150 bpm before you make it to the top.

terror.cas

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By2PNqVBxbgQR005aUJsdnVzOEk/view?usp=sharing

This book is super trash, but I still liked it. Do not read this novel as a novel. Read it as the most glorious playthrough of the Keep on the Borderlands module a D&D group could ever possibly pull off. Trust me, you'll enjoy the book way more.

The story starts off with a good old fashioned caravan ambush and ends with a whole lotta Caves of Chaos. Instead of character development you'll get normal adventuring stuff like divvying up loot, hiring retainers (they run 26 people deep), and of course combat.

Of the encounter areas (from the module) outside of the keep, the author chooses #3, the Raider Camp to explore. This is a good choice over other alternatives like the Spider Lair. It counterpoints the monstrous Caves later in the book with a little humanity.

I come back to this book from time to time whenever I get interested in sound art, but it's never as juicy as I think it should be. I don't mind dense theory, but Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts is too vague and too opaque to hold my interest for long. There are very good chapters such as “The Parameters of All Sound”, which touches on inaudible Fluxus work, but others have little to do with auditory phenomena at all. Paint dripping on canvas? Language virus? I don't think so. There's the obligatory discussions of Cage, Black Mountain College, musique concrète, futurism, and experimental soundtracks, but little to do with actual Sound Art from artists coming out of a visual arts tradition who collage and arrange audio as their primary medium. Too much Wagner and not enough Whitehead for my taste.