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Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Its quite the yarn: hard to believe it was hidden inside my string
Homestuck.
Not in the reading of it, which I did out of the momentum of Bard quest and Problem Sleuth, but in the way that it rippled through the online media landscape and affected discourse and things like Undertale, webcomics, and crowd funding.
Not in any “profound” way, but in a measurably gigantic one.
Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer”. Both beacuse it reminds me that I might never find what I’m looking for; and because it taught me to never give up on looking, anyway.
I was bored on an airplane a while back and discovered a Japanese movie adaptation of A Door Into Summer: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_door_into_summer
It’d been 25 years since my mom read the story to me so I can’t tell you how accurate the adaptation is but it hit the parts I remembered.
“In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat” - John Gibbon (1984)
Crash course in quantum physics and reality. Changed my perception of the world in a way that “things could be worse” could never accomplish on its own.Andor baybee, Star Wars is at it’s best when it’s at it’s most
Vagabond manga.
Books.
Steven Universe defined my high school years and made me who I am.
Books: Plato’s Republic (mostly interesting for a deep dive in the Socratic method, but also interesting to see where some modern ethics and philosophy is derived from in western traditions)
Go ask Alice (first real experience with experiencing what it’s like to be truly a victim of abuse and addiction)
Flatland (great book about challenging fundamental assumptions!)
Think like a Freak (Really got me wanting to better analyse and thing about the world around me)
Harry Potter and the methods of rationality (great fanfic overall, but what really stuck with me was challenging my own conclusions after new evidence comes in, I really had to take a break and just think about that for a bit while reading this one)
Movies: The Troveosky (sleep on film that really explored being weird and asking the why not give people more control over their lives)
Game: Morrowind (First game that let me just ruin the plot and keep going, as a kid it probably one the most formative moments of really feeling like I had autonomy)
Thus spoke Zarathustra. I’ve been thinking about this day pretty much everyday for the past 20 years. It made me want to enjoy life and create great things.
They Thought They Were Free. Book caused me to reevaluate exactly how politics at individual and social levels happened and how fascism works without any individual being inherently “evil.” Class politics and interests followed closely behind to explain how evil can arise among populations that all consider themselves “good people”
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
Honestly, I see this text often quoted form the book but I don’t find it super useful as a way to understand fascism. The steps and reforms were all taken for a reason and people agreed with that reason, even the apprehensive agreed enough to stay seated. I think this “separation” isn’t the best thesis out of this book, because the Nazi Party didn’t shift too much in terms of popularity throughout these shifts, except to grow more popular during wartime. The government promised something and many accepted those conditions or at least lent moral license to the achieving the goal and were unwilling to oppose the conditions.
Fascism is Liberalism when and where Liberalism fails to accomplish it’s promises and must consume the people and stuff at the periphery to achieve its goals. A government is just as “far” from its people when it is doing good things that it’s people desire as when it does bad things.
I love the book but have major issues with the ideological assumptions, mostly surrounding fascism’s relationship to its people and to other ideologies
A friend once gave me an ipod mini with Tony Robbins’s Personal Power series on it, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.
In fact, I’m gonna get in touch with that guy.
Max Payne 2 had a huge influence on my interest in narratives in general and also ingrained noir into my skull permanently.
Terminator 2 made me want to get into movies and cameras. Along with The Thing
Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature death does an excellent job at breaking down how capitalism literally profits off of your death.
I can see Craig of the Creek being changing for little kids
Podcasts count? Huberman Lab has been such a life-changing listen! Lots of great information about sleep and how our body functions
+1. I have condensed the entirety of all of his podcasts into a 250 line text file, and am polishing it further for myself.
