Things never change. When I was a kid, the librarian at the public library in my little rural town with 23 churches tried to steer me away from Lord of the Rings (which I had already read) and towards Narnia (also read) because CS Lewis was such a good Christian. Ironically, she didn't know Lewis and Tolkien were best friends and that Tolkien had guided Lewis to go back to church after a youthful agnostic phase.
Readit Newsjohngossman commented on Banned The 20 books they didn't want you to read theguardian.com/books/202... · Posted by u/andsoitis
johngossman commented on Palantir: The Most Evil Company politicaleconomist.substa... · Posted by u/mgh2
I posted this a few days ago on a separate Palantir-related thread, but it probably is more relevant here. The world could use fewer Alex Karps.
--
This quote from the CEO of Palantir (Alex Karp) haunts me. ---
> “I actually am a progressive,” he said. “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Almost a paraphrase of the Melian dialogue in Thucydides
johngossman commented on $83B Wasted: Showing up at the airport 3 hours before your flight viewfromthewing.com/83-bi... · Posted by u/speckx
I've always assumed they tell you to arrive early in order to account for the chance it will take you longer than you guess to get there, just like doctors do. I've never had it take 2 hours from arrival to gate, but I have been 90 minutes late because of traffic and would have missed my flight (not a big deal) if I hadn't aimed for being there two hours early. In any case, the assumption that this time is wasted is spurious whether you're a road warrior catching up with e-mail or a tourist researching your trip, you're not sitting in a lounge chair like a zombie.
I'm not that familiar with this subject in general (and not at all for japan) but I have read some about grain agriculture in east asia. And one thing resounds from the record here: people do not like millet and will do their best not to eat it. In northern china (the region I'm most familiar with) people who could afford to eat rice or wheat did so as much as possible, the wealthiest landowners generally did not eat millet at all.
I don't know how this fits into the history here, but if they got rice & millet at the same time and could farm enough rice, it fits with what I've read about other places where both grains were available.
FWIW millet eats fine to my modern palate but then I've only had the probably better tasting modern varieties, who knows what that shit was like a few thousand years ago. I also have access to a wide variety of grains and I might feel differently if I had to pick one to eat every day of my life. Similar thing with oats, which have occupied a similar role in the mediterranean for a long ass time: animal fodder if you could afford wheat, your food if you couldn't.
One of the plot points in Seven Samurai is that the peasants save their rice for the samurai and themselves eat millet. When the samurai learn this, they are horrified at the privation the peasants are putting themselves through.
johngossman commented on "English Translators of Homer": A Review whatisthequestion.wordpre... · Posted by u/johngossman
I think the thing I love most about Logue's retelling is that when reading it I hear the voices so clearly. I often think it's a shame that nobody (as far as I know) has put on a play of War Music.
Apparently it has been done. There were BBC readings and I found this:
https://variety.com/2009/legit/reviews/war-music-1200507311/
johngossman commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
Stand on Zanzibar is often mentioned for it's amazing predictions, but if you actually read it I would be amazed if you didn't think it was crap.
You should be amazed then. It's brilliant.
johngossman commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
Regarding the complicated, jargon-filled prose in most cyberpunk stories: If you were to read an actual report from the future, you also wouldn't understand everything. The future doesn't just have new stuff, but also new concepts and new language: Things that would be confusing and overwhelming for people from the past, but perfectly familiar and ordinary for people of the new present. Nobody in the future would bother to phrase things in a way that is digestible for people from the past.
I think this was one of the main contributions that cyberpunk made to science fiction. Get the language right, make the future feel like the actual future would feel for people from the past: confusing.
Ada Palmer makes this point. She teaches Renaissance history and tries to write her sci-fi as if she was trying to describe today to someone from the 15th century. Stanislaw Lem was also brilliant in describing his future worlds in ways that were hard to understand, as alien as he guessed they would actually be.
johngossman commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting.
I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
Alan Moore identifies as an anarchist (and is friends with Moorcock iirc). Warren Ellis also comes to mind. Yes, both work primarily in comics, but of the highest order.
johngossman commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
tbh I don't think "researches language structure" has much at all of a correlation with "uses language in a pheasant manner".
it happens to with Tolkein. but it's kinda like claiming a compiler optimization specialist is a good video game developer simply because games use compilers.
I've been comparing Iliad translations. Some of best classicists, who best understand Greek and the original text, are lousy poets.
johngossman commented on Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025 mbh4h.substack.com/p/neur... · Posted by u/keiferski
Zanzibar holds up as well or better than Neuromancer. I recently reread both and Molly having a clock in her eye inserts really dates that one bit in Neuromancer, the chyron like news updates in Zanzibar call to mind todays social media sound/video bites.
Agree. Same experience. Zanzibar (1968) is almost eerie sometimes.