rone | Reading

My neighborhood book club is reading Deciding to See: The View from Nathan’s Bus. Seattle readers, especially those who ride the bus regularly, are familiar with Nathan Vass, who’s been driving for King County Metro long enough that I first read one of his pieces, “Ode to the 358”, way back in 2013. He’s also a storyteller, photographer, and filmmaker, and that skillset together with a sharp observational sense and the plethora of stories available on city buses—especially the routes and times of day he tends to drive—make for the kind of work that reminds us of our shared humanity.

For awhile now I’ve been struggling to articulate just what it is about the kinds of stories and artworks I seek, the experiences I look to have, my passion for stories and for tracking (two things which are intimately and inextricably linked)—what is the thing that I’m after?

It came to me while reading Deciding to See: kinship with the unfamiliar. Comfort zones can nourish us, give us space to rest and heal, and provide a sense of safety. They can also become prisons.

I had cause recently to re-read T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which is the origin of one of those phrases that has since become a colloquial saying, divorced from its original context:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

…minus that context it still retains a great deal of its original meaning and power, mind you.

Here, have it read by Jeremy Irons. Chilling.

Speaking of hollow men, the Atlantic article, What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat, is enough to put you off your lunch. Every so often I interact with other people who worked at Amazon in the early days, and every so often one of these people comments on how much Jeff Bezos has changed. I don’t think he has.

I finally read Matthew Jackson’s essay on…well, it’s not really about “The Pitt,” that’s just his operative example, really it’s about storytelling and expectations and people who get absolutely outraged when a story’s plot doesn’t go the way they think it should. As he says, you can have whatever opinion you want about whatever’s happening on the screen (or on the page), but I agree with him that getting hung up on plot, to the point that you’re arguing for people to be fired, sells the entire experience of absorbing a story short. If one of the reasons I read, watch, listen is to acquire a feeling of kinship with the unfamiliar, part of that is intentionally immersing myself in the creator’s world. That’s not to say that I don’t often enjoy picking the thing apart afterwards, whether to work out how they did something or to analyze what I didn’t like about it, but I think there’s a difference between disagreeing with a creator’s choices and rendering a moral judgment about something that I personally didn’t like. Even when Roger Ebert wrote his review of North (the one that starts, “I hated, hated, hated this movie”), he wasn’t calling for the heads of the people responsible.

Awhile back I mentioned Jeff VanderMeer’s article for Orion magazine, about (generally speaking) how very odd it is that people go looking for cryptids like Sasquatch when there are amazing, verifiable, extant creatures out there. Such as bears.

Anyway, Orion did a Q&A with him and writer McKayla Coyle, who I wasn’t previously familiar with but whose work I now want to read. Check it out:

Watch on YouTube

(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)

Current Mood: tired

eaglespath_feed

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-33045-5.html

Review: Unwinding Anxiety, by Judson Brewer

Publisher:	Avery
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	0-593-33045-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	268

Unwinding Anxiety is a non-fiction self-help book about how to reduce anxiety. The author is a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in addiction and substance abuse, who has subsequently done clinical and research (and commercial, more on that later) work in anxiety. His previous book, The Craving Mind, was a pop science treatment of addiction research. This book is more deliberately structured as a self-help guide.

(The cover will assure you that he has an M.D. and a Ph.D. I don't include honorifics and degrees in author listings as a small protest against the weird social rules about which degrees count and which don't.)

There are a lot of self-help books out there about anxiety. There are a lot fewer that say something relatively original. I think this is one of the latter, but I certainly have not done a survey of the subgenre, and it's possible the ideas here are only new to me. Brewer makes three basic claims in this book, all of which I found personally useful:

Anxiety can be usefully analyzed as a habit. The rumination loop and other related anxiety behaviors such as excessive analysis, reassurance-seeking, and negative anticipation take the form of deeply ingrained habits triggered by stimuli.
Raw willpower is not a useful way to break habits in general and anxiety habits in particular. In order to displace the habit, you have to retrain the part of your brain that runs habits on autopilot. Attempting to override it with willful effort is exhausting and likely to fail.
Habit loops in general, and anxiety loops in particular, can be defused and replaced using mindfulness techniques.

This is not the way Brewer lays out the book. He goes to some effort to lead the reader slowly through three techniques for handling anxiety (for which he uses the metaphor of "gears," like for a bicycle or car) by introducing them one at a time and encouraging the reader to become thoroughly familiar with each one before moving on to the next. Since this is a book review, I'm going to give you the whole argument at once so that you know where this book is going. This may be less helpful in practice; if you're trying to use this technique on your own anxiety, you may want to read the book instead and not jump ahead.

Brewer's three gears are:

Identify your habit loops and recognize when they're happening. (This part felt the most similar to traditional cognitive behavioral therapy to me.)
Focus on how those habit loops make you feel. Rather than trying to force the habit loop to stop, let it happen but pay very close attention to the outcome and its effects on you.
Find and focus on a different reaction that provides better rewards than the anxiety habit loop. Brewer suggests curiosity.

For me, the point where I thought "okay, you have my attention" is when Brewer described the way many people, particularly people without anxiety, tell people with anxiety to "just stop thinking about it" or "just do the thing you're anxious about anyway and you'll see it will be fine" and then described in detail why he believes that doesn't work. This is one of the few discussions of anxiety I've read where the author goes out of his way to stress that you cannot simply think your way out of anxiety and that repeatedly trying to do so and failing is exhausting and demoralizing.

Everyone is different and I know some people find cognitive behavioral therapy very helpful, but I find the constant effort to challenge cognitive distortions more draining and demoralizing than useful. His second gear, of not directly confronting the habit loop but instead watching its effect and thinking about its outcome, feels so much more approachable to me. Assuming, of course, it works.

Brewer's approach is essentially just mindfulness, although he mostly avoids the (to me at least) somewhat off-putting typical introduction to mindfulness via religious practice or general well-being and instead ties it to a theorized model of how habits work in the human brain. His contention is that habits, including anxiety, exist because at some point they provided a reward that was sufficiently compelling to make the habit-following part of your brain seek that reward. You were getting some benefit (a sense of control, a sense of being prepared, temporary reassurance, etc.) out of the anxiety reaction, which is why the anxiety habit formed in the first place. Once that habit is in place, it can continue without the reward. (Although in my experience there is probably still some short-term reward.)

Rather than trying to force yourself to stop following the habit, Brewer instead suggests letting the habit happen but then focusing (via mindfulness) on how following the habit makes you feel, whether it improves your sense of well-being or worsens it, and whether other actions produce different feelings. The goal, in other words, is to undermine the assumption of reward and to challenge any short-term reward with the long-term discomfort that made you want to stop being anxious.

This avoids using your conscious brain to exert direct willpower, which is exhausting and usually unsuccessful since the habit-following part of your brain is stronger (for various evolutionary psychology reasons he explains and that I found at least partly credible). Instead, you are using its strengths of observation and classification. You pay close attention to the ways in which the habit loop makes you feel bad, which in theory provides feedback to the habit-following part of your brain that can dislodge the habit. If the habit is recognized as no longer rewarding, it will weaken.

Brewer's background is in addiction treatment, so he is predisposed to see addiction in everything and one should probably be a bit cautious about his enthusiasm. He claims a great deal of success with this approach in clinical settings, mostly with addiction but also with anxiety, but this is always hard to verify. (Few doctors who write self-help books rigorously document their failures.) He apparently also has a company that produces various phone apps that assist with this technique. I'm rather cynical about anyone who talks about products their company has produced in self-help books of this type, and I'm also rather cynical about anyone who calls himself "Dr. Jud," but the book doesn't seem to be a sales pitch and there's no direct information in it about how to get the apps.

For me, the first two parts of the book were the most useful and the conception of anxiety reactions as habits made a surprising amount of intuitive sense. I thought the third part of the book, where he tries to describe a better in-the-moment reaction that you can try to build into a more beneficial habit, to be the weakest. It's mostly stock mindfulness advice that I've seen in other places, and you will be entirely unsurprised to learn that Brewer meditates and has studied meditation. I think it's clear that, for him, a feeling of curiosity works as an anxiety replacement; I'm not sure that's universal and I'm not sure it works for me.

That core idea that anxiety reactions are a type of addictive habit that have outlived their useful rewards but continue because habits are hard to change felt both useful and at least a little bit true, though. Your mileage may, of course, vary, but I've been trying out various ideas from this book since I first started reading it, and I think it's helping. If any of this clicks with you and you're also prone to anxiety, it might be worth a read.

One warning, though: Brewer's previous work on addiction includes binge eating, and while it's not a primary focus, he uses several weight loss and disordered eating examples and has a very traditional medical attitude towards weight. I'm somewhat dubious of the addiction model of weight gain in general, but more to the point, it's rather off-putting in a book supposedly about anxiety. It's something I was able to skim over, but be aware going in if you're likely to find this obnoxious.

I do think this book is a case of an addiction researcher seeing everything through the lens of addiction, and I'm a little dubious this is the right model for everyone's anxiety. But this is one of the good reasons why there are a lot of books about anxiety: Different approaches suit different people. This one made more sense to me than most; maybe you are similar.

I can't really recommend or not recommend a book like this, since I think so much will depend on whether you are one of the people for whom this specific explanation will click, but I'm glad that I read it and I think it's good to know that this model of anxiety exists.

Rating: 8 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-33045-5.html

emperor

There have been a number of magic school books in recent years; in The Incandescent, we largely follow events at Chetwood School through the eyes of Dr Walden, Director of Magic. She is an expert magician, and clearly an effective teacher, if a little weak on the pastoral front. And the fact that she is back as a staff member at what was once her own secondary school is definitely not a sign that's she's not moved on from what happened when she was a student there...

I enjoyed the way magic was woven into an English boarding school, and how nicely Tesh captures (and satirizes) the nature of institutional life. I like a competent protagonist, too, and Dr Walden is very competent, and pleasingly keen on the merits of education. I almost (but not quite) always understood the choices she was making. The plot works well, and throws up some surprises, but comes together pretty well in the end; although the motivation for Mark's behaviour is never really explained (nor is why we the readers are more aware of the red flags than Dr Walden is). I also appreciated the exploration of the ethics of demons and how magicians interact with them.

I enjoyed this a lot.

tcpip

Early last year, I became aware of the death of a young artist and environmentalist, Isla Bell. The circumstances were pretty awful, and it quickly became obvious that I had a few friends close to family who, with what I consider to be a passionate and inspiring response, had established a charity to support young women artists. I made contact with the family to seek permission to engage in a fundraising campaign through the sale of some tabletop RPGs, as I have done in the past (Medicines sans Frontiers, UNHCR, Effective Altruism) and, over a couple of months and helped by the Conquest games convention and co-contributors (especially Simon Stroud), over $15000 was raised.

However, two days ago, Isla's accused killer, Marat Ganiev, had the manslaughter (originally murder) charges dropped by the public prosecutor , as were charges against his alleged co-offender Eyal Yaffe. Using the grim calculus, I understand the OPP's reasoning; there was no reasonable chance of conviction, because it was not possible to determine the cause of death, "beyond a reasonable doubt", even though everyone is quite aware of what happened.

This Saturday, friends and family have organised an "Isla Bell Justice Rally" in front of the State Library. Isla is remembered, and one day there will be justice for her and others.

Current Mood: sad

unbibium

read a few Calvin and Hobbes comics recently, and I no longer sympathize with Calvin as I once might have. He seems utterly malicious to me. And I chalk that up to me being in middle age, childhood is an old foreign land I barely remember.

Why, then, do I still sympathize with Bart Simpson? He's twice as dangerous by any metric, but I still feel bad for him when he gets in trouble, which is all the time.

Maybe that's it. I don't remember seeing Calvin in detention very often. Meanwhile entire episodes are about Bart getting shipped off to France, to military school, to juvenile hall, etc. Getting caught is as much a part of his identity as causing trouble.

and, that fear of getting in trouble, that's followed me into adulthood, that's evergreen.

rimrunner

One of the tricky but rewarding things about tracking is gait analysis. This is the skill of determining how an animal was moving based on tracks left behind. It can be tricky, in part because most of the animals we’re looking at move on four feet, and humans only move on two (most of the time, anyway). This makes it challenging to map out that movement using our own bodies. Though it can be fun to try, assuming you’re flexible enough.

Every species has a baseline gait, the way members of that species move when they’re relaxed and not in a rush. For humans it’s a walk; if we’re running, there’s usually some urgency afoot, pun not intended. Think about every dog you’ve ever seen, especially if they aren’t leashed. They might be dashing around and chasing things, but if they’re just kind of checking things out, the baseline gait is a trot. This also holds for coyotes and wolves, as well as African wild dogs and jackals.

One of my favorite tracks to find is American porcupine, which I’ve only seen at the Oregon Dunes and at Ancient Lakes in eastern Washington. The baseline porcupine gait is a direct register walk, which means that the animal’s hind feet step exactly where their front feet did. Each track you see on the ground is actually two tracks, one on top of the other. There’s also the indirect register walk, where the overlap is not complete. Like this:

This gait, combined with porcupines’ short legs—I’m not sure they’re even capable of running—caused me to designate their baseline gait as a trundle. This is highly unofficial, but it was amusing enough to me and the others at the Oregon Dunes tracking course that by the end of the class, we were all referring to porcupine movement this way.

Trundling really means to move by rolling, or to move an object by rolling it—this can be a wagon, a ball, or a wheel of cheese. But it can also mean moving heavily or clumsily. Porcupines aren’t clumsy, exactly, but with their short legs and unhurried movement, they don’t inspire descriptions of grace the way a deer or large cat does:

Watch on YouTube

Thus, the trundle. It really gives a porcupine vibe, don’t you think?

Current Mood: nerdy

lnr

I've got very little of interest to report :) I had a lovely visit to Wandlebury with Becky and Stu with a picnic lunch and photos of dead people. (Very dead, roughly saxon/viking era archaeology, which is interesting given it's an iron age feature). Since then I've mostly been reading and playing minecraft and whinging about my shoulder. I've asked the GP if there's anything else I can do until I hear back from the waiting list for NHS physio/possible hydro-distension and a GP will get back to me on the 21st. I've contacted the Spire to ask how much it is privately and they said they'd call me yesterday morning but didn't.

But I am going to do things next week! Heading to London on Sunday to see Jess, Paul and Emi in the pub (they're visiting back from the US), and then BEER on Tuesday 19th. If the weather co-operates I'll be at the beer festival all afternoon and possibly into the evening. And the week after next is half term and we're off to Whitby for a week, which will hopefully be lovely

Do come join me for the beer!

rimrunner

Guess what? Coyote butt!

…a little over three weeks, actually. Though I’ve had longer gaps in blogging before, lately I’ve been trying to make a more regular practice of it, for a few different reasons. The main one is that I enjoy it. Other reasons include reflecting on things in a way that accounts for the possibility that someone might read them, as well as my annoyance at how many people I know who, instead of sharing their own thoughts (however awkwardly phrased), repost narratives that are either obviously AI-generated, or (more troubling in my view) written in that rhetorical style, because that’s what’s getting shared. This mostly happens on Facebook, and is a major reason that I’m spending less time there.

Probably good for me.

The week before last, I went down to the Oregon Dunes for a three-day tracking course, followed by a CyberTracker evaluation. I’d scored a 99% on my last track and sign eval in the Pacific Northwest, and I was hoping this time around to gain that elusive one hundred. That didn’t happen, but I learned a lot and got to enjoy being in my tracking community, and those are what count.

The Dunes are an amazing combination of vast stretches of sand, and a coastal rainforest ecosystem. I’ve found salamander tracks leading across the dunes in between the forested deflation zones or larger tree islands. From the tops of the dunes you can see all the way to the sea. The shape of the landscape shifts over time, and yet there are landmarks. Dangers are few, but the one that always unnerves me are the stovepipes. The sand has buried entire groves of trees, and when these die and rot away, they can leave hollow columns behind. Step in one of these and your leg might go in up to your hip.

I’ve gone there alone a few times in spite of this, and that can be fun, in the way that chosen solitude is fun. I’ve chosen my own route across the sand and napped on the beach. But going with a group, especially a group of fellow trackers, is the best. Not just for safety reasons, but because you learn more with a group.

When I got back I spent much of the week getting ready for the community garage sale. This is a huge annual event that this year involved over 600 households. Mine was small and off the beaten path, but I still had a steady trickle of people all day. I was surprised at how popular the CDs were, but perhaps the same people who haunt garage sales are also fans of physical media. In the final ten minutes I sold off the second of two tents, a battery charger, and an old rice cooker—it still works of course, but we’d replaced it with a bigger one.

I also went to see Carmen at Seattle Opera with an old friend. Carmen has a lot about it that’s pretty problematic, mostly having to do with race, but there’s a lot you can mitigate with staging and presentation. This production was more sympathetic to its lead than some I’ve seen. (I’ve never found José, the male lead, sympathetic at all, though he’s supposed to read as normative at least. Hmph.)

And then, of course, Sunday was Mother’s Day, so I visited my parents and then went on an outing with South Sound Tracking Club.

Anyway, all that means I haven’t had much time to write, though I did complete some freelance work.

I don’t have any clever note to end this on, but that’s what’s up.

(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)

Current Mood: tired

rimrunner

Walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm.

The Oregon Dunes is one of my favorite places to visit, full stop. It’s also one of my favorite places to go tracking. The large expanses of bare sand punctuated by patches of vegetation and trees, together with what’s still a coastal Pacific Northwest rainforest in terms of weather and ecology, makes for a perfect combination. In the early morning, the sand is often damp from the previous night’s marine layer; if you get out on the sand before it dries out and the wind erases the tracks, you can find everything from bears and coyotes to salamanders and Pacific chorus frogs on epic journeys.

The week before last I had the opportunity to spend several days out there, tracking with beloved mentors, longtime friends, and new acquaintances brought together by our love of this mode of engagement with our world. As epic as my journey to the Kalahari was, it was a good reminder of the wonder and community to be found closer to home.

(Oh, the photo caption? This is where Frank Herbert got the idea for Dune.)

(Originally posted at Following Curiosity. You can comment here or there.)

Current Mood: grateful

tcpip

In the middle of last week, I went out with my old friend Des to see Dr Strangelove at RMIT's Capitol Theatre. It was inevitably going to be a good night because Des is one of my best friends, Dr Stangelove is one of my favourite films, and the Capitol is one of my favourite theatres. The movie was introducted by a film studies academic who gave a delightfully funny exposition on the broken masculinist themes throughout the gallows-humour farce, and a few pieces of movie trivia I that I had forgotten, such as the fact that the war room table was in green casino felt to emphasise the idea of those assembled were gambling the fate of the planet, even though the film was in black-and-white. As a superb work of satire, and as it should be (albeit terrifyingly so), almost everything about Dr Strangelove was actually based on reality.

One character in the film that particularly stands out is General Jack D. Ripper and his obsessive paranoid delusions of how there was an "international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids" through fluoridation. Ripper, in a position of great power, cunning, and madness, is the driving plot device of the film. It has been several years since I've seen the film, and one thing that struck me is how similar his reasoning is to that of others, more contemporary conspiracy theorists, especially those of the anti-vaccination or AGW denial bodies of opinion. The selective use of facts, the invention of alternative facts, the suppression or deflection of inconvenient facts, and, of course, the suggestion that somehow nefarious communists are responsible, whether it's fluoridation, vaccines, COVID, or their remarkable control of all the world's meteorological stations over the past one hundred and fifty years. Fun fact, ironically, when it was released, Dr Strangelove, some argued that it was a Soviet propaganda plot.

In recent years, there has been some good research into the nature of conspiracy theories. One study indicates that "even if it's bonkers" a substantial section of the population will believe a conspiracy (an important metric for those who benefit). Conspiracy theorists tend to be angry individuals, and believe the perceived conspirators are "evil". And one particularly good study identified that "regression model indicated odd beliefs/magical thinking, trait Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy were significant, positive predictors of belief in conspiracy theories.. the individual more likely to believe in conspiracy theories may have unusual patterns of thinking and cognitions, be strategic and manipulative, and display interpersonal and affective deficits". I especially like how this one used regression analysis to determine the accuracy of those traits (e.g., corroborating previous research on Machiavellianism) and to remove spurious correlations identified in previous research (e.g., trait narcissism). Recently, we have also discovered that conspiracy theorists are unable to handle complexity; they see the world as fundamentally unfair and want simple, unambiguous explanations.

Current Mood: nerdy
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Klaus Schulze, Time to Go

emperor

This is the first of a trilogy, set in Orrun, a fantasy world where people tend to associate with one of 8 (demi-)gods, one of which is the Raven. We see much (but not all) of the action through the eyes of Neema, the Raven Scholar of the title. Hodgson has written murder mysteries before, and it's not entirely surprising then that Neema ends up tasked with investigating a murder.

It's not, though, primarily a murder mystery - that's just one of the things that's driving a pretty twisty plot; and while I spotted some of the plot points coming, it's a cleverly written book that keeps you guessing and only a couple of times did the plot twist feel entirely like it was "cheating". There's a range of interesting characters (although some of them didn't get fleshed out enough to really make an impression), although not all of their behaviour entirely makes sense with hindsight. Without spoiling anything, events of the first part made me reluctant to invest in some of the primary characters in the subsequent book.

Being the first of a trilogy, it ends rather in the middle of things, which is a bit disappointing (if unsurprising). While I enjoyed it, I don't think I'll be seeking out the second book until the trilogy is completed.

infrogmation

Last night I dreamed I was one of 3 people from the US who went to Ukraine to get some honey. That we were in the honey business was actually a cover for that we were journalists investigating irregularities in the international honey trade. And really it was all part of a television show.

I was the youngest of the 3 US honey traders, I think we were supposed to be brothers, the other two did most of the talking I mostly just stood and watched, but secretly I was the one in charge of all the machinery which was secretly recording everything.

We were inside a large tall room in a building somewhere in Ukraine (no evidence of a war going on in my dream). It was a commercial establishment and office, and there were lots of shelves crowded with things, some of which had clearly been sitting there for decades if not more than a century.

The leader of our group went to the owner of the business with a jar of honey, complaining "We paid for top quality honey, but you gave us bottom quality honey! Taste this!" The business head tried to brush us off, until the leader of our group told him, "Look, I have a market for top quality honey in the US, and if you can get it for us, we can both make lots of money. If you can't get top quality honey, I'll look elsewhere." So then we were trying to work things out.

Then a group of Russian spies came in with guns, and took us upstairs and were going to kill us, but somehow we escaped.

Back in the States, my character only had a few minor scenes to film. It turned out our whole adventure was just a subplot and we were minor characters in the tv series. However the tv series turned out to be very successful, the biggest hit series. I hadn't known until we were in a car on the freeway, and when the show came on everyone pulled over and stopped their cars to watch the show on their smart-phones.

The most famous episode was one where Brad Pitt and Elly May Clampett had explicit and vigorous sex on live tv (!) which became the most talked about tv episode ever. I hadn't known any of this while I was busy filming in Ukraine, but now that I was in a hit tv series, even as a minor character I was getting some good residuals as payments for all the reruns.

infrogmation

I wrote this elsewhere a while back. As this seems a better place for things I wrote that I might wish to find again later, copying it here.

----

Today's "Lost Cause" myth to expose: That slavery in the US South was supposedly "fading out" or a "dying institution" before the American Civil War.
(For those not up on it, the "Lost Cause" movement was a romanticization of the Confederacy in the US South decades after the Civil War was over, including major rewrites of history, especially in constructing counter narratives to deny that the war was about slavery, even though when the original Confederate leaders were actually seceding and fighting the war they clearly and repeatedly announced that was exactly what it was about.)
One of the "Lost Cause" myths still sometimes heard is that slavery was slowly fading away thanks to industrialization, so it would have been gone soon anyways even if there were no Civil War.
On a global scale, that slavery was diminishing by 1860 was certainly true. In the US slave states, however, this was certainly untrue! (The Southern slave owning political elite did however fear it might start to fade eventually, which is a reason they favored expanding their institution into new territory to help it thrive. ) Humans as commodities to be owned, bought and sold was not only thriving, it was bigger business than ever.
Perhaps the best way to show slavery was NOT "fading away" in the US South is simple economics: quantity and price. 1830 census showed about 2 million slaves; by 1860 that had almost doubled. But despite much increased supply, price per slave continued to rise. Here's a nice chart of average price of a slave over time from the site linked below. Note that on the eve of the Civil War, far from being in decline, both supply and price per unit were at all time highs.
(The dips in price are interesting, if tangential, stories in themselves: for example the Panic of 1837 was triggered by something much like subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago, except that instead of investors buying dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on houses they bought dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on slaves.)

https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php

tcpip

"Jurgen Habermas is the most influential thinker in Germany today". Thus begins Thomas McCarthy's 1975 translator's introduction to "Legitimation Crisis" ("Legitimationsprobleme in Spatkapitalismus", 1973), and he wasn't wrong. Whilst he may have fallen a little off the radar a bit in the last decades (especially after his attempted "post-secular" rapproachment with religion), fifty years as Europe's most important and serious philosopher is a fairly good innings. Habermas dies last month, aged 96, and I was fortunate enough to be offered to give a presentation to the Existentialist Society this weekend on his philosophy of universal pragmatics and communicative action, which was both well-attended and had many excellent questions. The video, alas, missed the first couple of minutes, but everything is available in the transcript.

The weekend was not only an afternoon of deep and complex emancipatory German social philosophy in the idealistic tradition, however. Marc C., joined me for dinner on Friday before we ventured to The Old Bar to see some music; opening act "Trappist Afterland" was a subtle one-man band with Indian sub-continent backing tracks and songs about dogs, Star/Time provided quasi-improvised space-funk, and headline act The Gruntled accurately describe themselves as "avant-medieval psychedelic noise combo"; it all helps when you know several of the band members. The following night, I caught up with Liza D., and we made our way to "Impossiblistic: A Night of Surreal Performances, which was poetry, theatre, music, costume, puppetry, clown shows, and more. It was less surreal than enjoyable nonsense and was just fine.

Between all this, I also managed to visit the "Creative Antarctica" exhibition at RMIT on its last day, on Australian artists and writers who visited that grand continent. Of course, my own emotional and intellectual attachment to said continent is very strong; not too many people can say that they've spent New Year's Eve there. The exhibition was quite delightful. I really like Janet Laurence's "Ice Remembers" and Sally Robertson's "Atlas Cove". But the standout image for me was Frank Hurley's photograph of 1916 of Shackleton and Worsley leaving Elephant Island on a tiny lifeboat that would somehow make it to South Georgia Island over a thousand kilometres away and would lead to the rescue of the crew of the Endurance. It is one the greatest stories of survival against all odds and, for what it's worth, Elephant Island was the last location of my own trip to Antarctica this year. As Sir Raymond Priestley, Antarctic explorer and geologist, poetically put it: "For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."

Current Mood: content
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Dystopian Soundscapes channel

eaglespath_feed

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7564-1947-6.html

Review: Full Speed to a Crash Landing, by Beth Revis

Series:	Chaotic Orbits #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	August 2024
ISBN:	0-7564-1947-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	153

Full Speed to a Crash Landing is a science fiction novella and the first of a series. Beth Revis made the New York Times bestseller list for an earlier series of young adult science fiction novels, but somehow I had not heard of her before this series.

Ada Lamarr is a salvager. She picks up material from crashed or dead ships for resale. As the story opens, she has a large hole in the side of her ship, she's running out of oxygen, and the other ship nearby is refusing to answer her distress call. By the time they finally respond, there is barely enough time to get aboard before she is entirely out of air.

Ada's first-person narration drops hints that she may not be entirely what she seems. But then, neither is the Halifax, so it's only fair.

The captain of the Halifax treats Ada with a great deal of suspicion and wants her out of the way of their ongoing salvage operation. However, the captain does not appear to be entirely in charge. Ada is immediately struck by the mysterious Rian White, who seems to have some authority over their mission and is more thoughtful and calculating than the rest of the crew. He's also handsome, which doesn't hurt.

I was tempted to keep writing about the plot, but given the short length of this book, I should stop there and let you enjoy the twists and turns for yourself. This is a fun science fiction action romp: lots of banter, lots of tense moments, and a cagey first-person protagonist with an irrepressible sense of humor and a knack for brazening her way through conversations. It's not long on world-building (there isn't enough room), but Revis works in enough details to be intriguing and to set up some interesting motivations.

This is the sort of book that lives and dies by how much you like the protagonist, something that you will easily figure out by the end of an ebook sample if you're the sort of reader who uses those. Ada is irreverent, talkative, and very adroit at diverting attention (entertainingly) onto anything other than the critical piece of information other people are missing. If you want to, I suspect you could easily figure out most of what Ada is up to before the book reveals it explicitly. It's not that complicated, and the book isn't really trying to hide, although it doesn't give you all the necessary information in advance. Personally, I was happy to sit back and enjoy the ride.

There is no romance in this book beyond frequent comments from Ada that she would have liked there to be a romance in this book under different circumstances, but I will be surprised if that romance doesn't show up later in the series. Ada and Rian are clearly being set up as a pair. I didn't like Rian as much, mostly because he's less memorable as a character, but he comes into his own in the appendices after the plot proper.

I thought those concluding appendices were the best part of the novella and question the Kindle formatting decision to treat them like supplemental material. They purport to be a series of government memos, fill in a lot more of the backstory and world building, and have the best footnotes. Don't skip them!

This isn't the sort of book that I am inspired to immediately push into everyone's hands, but it's a fast, well-paced story that delivered a few reading sessions of entertainment. I'm not sure the political philosophy in the background makes a lot of sense, but at least not a standard stereotype of current politics seen in so much science fiction. It's going to set up some interesting character conflict in later books. I'm certainly intrigued enough to keep reading.

Recommended when you're in the mood for some fast-paced fun that's short and undemanding.

Followed by How to Steal a Galaxy.

Rating: 7 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7564-1947-6.html

infrogmation

YouTube video "The Lies We've Been Told About Frank Lloyd Wright"

https://youtu.be/zji7Zc-AYxA

I believe I've discussed Wright online previously, and my opinion got some dramatic pushback, but I couldn't find in in a search - perhaps it was on Usenet or some lost forum of yesteryear.

I acknowledge his brilliance as an artist, creating buildings that are interesting to look at. But if one considers part of the job of an architect is to design structurally sound buildings useful for people, he was not even competent.

My opinions developed from visiting some of his buildings on road trips in the US Midwest in the 1980s.
One in particular was the Neils House in Minneapolis, a private home at the time, and I got not only a tour but a good bit of family backstory. I first noticed the open carport which needed a short walk to the front door - Minneapolis has very cold winters and lots of snow, so almost every other house has garages with garage doors that can close and an interior door into the house. Inside, there were multiple levels requiring regularly going up and down a few steps, and otherwise open space separated by walls that went up 6 feet but left space before reaching the ceiling, and separated living spaces without any evident usefulness and just made going from one part of the house to another more awkward. There was also the maid's quarters, designed for the family maid, a short woman of 4 foot something - the ceilings were 5 feet tall, so the rooms unusable for many people of average height. When the water-heater had to be replaced, it necessitated hiring a crane and dismantling (and later reconstructing) part of the chimney and fireplace to remove the old water heater and lower a new one in - the only other option would have been to demolish multiple interior walls. The Neils family found the house impractical to live in, but maintained ownership because, hey, it was by the famous Frank Lloyd Wright - it was irregularly occupied by various young relatives as their first place out of their parents' house while going to college.

Uncyclopedia: https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright

The intro seems basically the same as the snark I put there in my brief time on uncyclopedia some 20 years ago:

"Frank "Lloyd" Wright (b. horse & buggy era – d. hula hoop era) was the world's most famous incompetent architect.

Known for creating improbable buildings out of untested materials, he inflicted hundreds of unlivable houses, unusable office buildings, and frighteningly ugly landmarks on the gullible public. The hallmarks of Wright's architectural style are the leaking roof, the broken window, and the crumbling foundation. Along with Le Corbusier, he was key in changing the discipline of architecture from providing basic shelter for people into a series of passive-aggressive pranks."

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Reading

Deciding to See, Hollow Men, Bezos's Private Retreat, What Stories Owe Us, Writer Q&As

Review: Unwinding Anxiety

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh

Isla Bell Rally

Comparing troublemaking cartoon kids.

Every day I'm trundling, sayeth the porcupine

No stuff - but beer?

It's been a minute...

Dunes in the rainforest

Dr Strangelove and Conspiracy Thinkers

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson

Dream: Honey importer journalist spy tv actor

Slavery was not "dying out" in the Confederacy

Habermas Presentation and Artistic Experiences

Review: Full Speed to a Crash Landing

Frank Lloyd Wrong

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