Bookclub

glennmagusharvey · 2024-04-19 02:10:11

I hear that that show is good.

I have yet to check it out, of course.

Anyhow I wasn't really looking for an answer, as much as just idly wondering "what if anime were Polish instead of Japanese".

lrdgck · 2024-04-19 08:46:33

That said there's V411 HALL-A if Venezuelan "anime games" count.

what is it with you guys and anime-girlies-that-are-not-from-anime

Anyways:

VA-11 Hall-A's developers come from Venezuela.[20] As such, according to Ortiz, their visions of a dystopian bar scene are based on their own experiences of living in a third world country, leading them to create a cast of characters that, in the middle of a "depressing society", try to go on with their lives and be as happy as they can with what they already have.[20]

"what if anime were ~~Polish~~ Venezuelan instead of Japanese", seems like?

So, I was about to try something different, like cowboy movies ~~and nominate Glenn~~ - but that's probably getting too far from, like, a topic for the book thread.

Stormtroper · 2024-04-19 16:57:52

what is it with you guys and anime-girlies-that-are-not-from-anime

Cute things are cute.
But for a more serious answer, I never got that idea, although I'd like it if that were the case.
Sometimes I wonder if animu (and animu-style stuff) is less popular here than it is in the rest of Latin America.

"depressing society"

Speaking of that, did I miss something in the international scene that puts us in the spotlight? I've been reading oddly often unprompted, tangentially-relevant comments in about how it sucks here. Weird that it happens now that things have been looking up for a while and not, say, six years ago when things were truly awful.

lrdgck · 2024-04-19 18:37:39

did I miss something in the international scene that puts us in the spotlight?

From what I can gather, nah. But since you guys have election season, I might be speaking more of it, and so may international media. Perhaps it's this, perhaps it's that thing when you see something once and then you begin to notice it everywhere.

Stormtroper · 2024-06-29 06:15:26

I think Frankenstein is a pretty cool guy, eh kills his creator's loved ones and afraids everyone.

So, I read Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, one of the many works based on the 1931 original, this one with huge differences to it.

I always thought the main character was a German doctor but turns out he's a (French) Swiss non-doctor science student.

I also read somewhere that the work was in part against galvanism (the electricity ⇒ moving bodies ⇒ life thing), but apparently that's not in the original.

Also, hot contrarian take: I don't see why he would be "the monster", as the modern narrative goes, his screw-ups are either based on short-sightedness or are despite an earnest attempt at fixing things up*. I dunno, obviously the parental abandonment and "playing God" parts are bad (the latter at least for a reader ~200 years ago), but I didn't expect to find out that the first external hint that something is going on is [ a loved one getting murdered and another framed ] (no wonder he doesn't reconsider rejecting the monster after that), or that his reaction to that would be to set out to confront/kill/subdue the monster so as to set things right. I knew that the novel is more morally ambiguous about both the creation and the creator (in reverse directions) than they are elsewhere but still, it surprised me to not find him all that disagreeable.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've watched any non-parody movie about it, not that it's hard to figure out what happens based on references to it.

* Assuming his account is reliable, but I don't see why it wouldn't be. Granted, a bunch of stuff he semi-reasonably decides is the best way out is conveniently also the easy way out for him.

glennmagusharvey · 2024-06-30 00:21:32

sometime during the height of the pandemic i watched a theater production of Frankenstein

i forgot whose production it was

lrdgck · 2024-06-30 19:01:31

probably lot of various people's

theater production of Frankenstein should be made from parts of a lot of various people's theater productions amirite guys

glennmagusharvey · 2024-07-01 04:31:22

the above post is win

Stormtroper · 2024-09-20 08:37:14

lrdgck · 2024-12-03 20:34:31

https://ardbark.com/

This site has a bunch of disaster preparedness and homesteader e-books. A nice addition to my collection (of PDFs I'll hoard but never read or use).

fourteenwings · 2024-12-28 16:52:09

Katharine McGee's latest YA series is called (or begins with a novel called) A Queen's Game, and unfortunately it is not a sequel to the American Royals series but some sort of period piece...?

In the last glittering decade of European empires, courts, and kings, three young women are on a collision course with history—and with each other.

In a story that sweeps from the glittering ballrooms of Saint Petersburg to the wilds of Scotland, A Queen’s Game recounts a pivotal moment in real history as only Katharine McGee can tell it: through the eyes of the young women whose lives, and loves, changed it forever.

I really hate when YAs go historical fiction, nobody ever does this right and nobody likes historical YA and then the series will bomb and get cancelled at two books like Kiera Cass' The Bethrothed series and then she will never get a chance to write again.

I wish she'd do something like Thousanth again. I miss Thousanth's style and setting so bad...

lrdgck · 2024-12-31 15:03:37

The fun thing about the anarchists is that they don't believe in copyright.

(The unfun thing is that yoou need to sift through all manner of shoplifting manuals and retvrn to monke manifestos to find the good stuff.)

So, just before the year ends I managed to read two things: How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos and Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

The first is basically halfway to a terrorist manifesto, which I think the author would acknowledge if it didn't look like written specifically as a polemic towards other anarchists, I'm gonna give him this much of a credit of doubt. Well, yeah, he did convince me that violence gets the normies to pay attention, but I'm not sure he'd like every potential conclusion that I could draw from it.

Now, moving on to the good stuff. (Which seems not to be there in English version of the site, ironically.)

David Graeber is one of these hip authors of today. Or would be, if he hadn't died a few years ago. The dude was an anthropologist and the book I read through was an analysis of a bunch of basic assumptions of modern economy from an anthropological perspective, mostly revolving around, you guessed it, the concept of debt, its beginnings and changes in meaning throughout the centuries. He is making an interesting kind of point concerning the current state of the global economy, but the book could be just as worthy of reading even if it was just an ethnographical work consisting of the examples he's using.

A few quotes (back-translated by me):

in certain decades, frequency of peasant rebellions in China reached as high as 1.8 per hour

Augustin the Executioner, also called "Master Ouch"

whenever a pawn shop burned down, the neighbourhood braced for a wave of domestic violence as husbands discovered their wives left their best Sunday suits there to make ends meet

lrdgck · 2025-01-12 21:57:20

I dunno where else to put it, so -

how to cop

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

Bookclub

Comments