2022 May
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A Quote A single grain of rice can tip the scale. One man alone can make a difference. -- the emperor, Mulan The World PH/Politics: Elections are tomorrow! Destiny is at hand, one way or another. The Leni/Kiko campaign held their final rally / Miting De Avance last night at Ayala Avenue in Makati, with attendance estimates reaching 800,000 attendees (!!). A lot of people, especially the Leni supporters, have pre-election anxiety. I wrote about my ballot and my final pre-election words here. PH/Covid: Thankfully, cases remain low. A lot of people have been predicting we might have a surge -
A whole new month just crept up on us huh. I don't have anything particularly witty to say at the moment. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 10th week. No end in sight. Not sure if it's worth it to continue tracking this here since this may go on for a while. PH/Politics: One week remains until the elections on Monday the 9th. It's the homestretch! There was some kind of Baby Marcos-aligned sortie near our house last night. I briefly considered buying a tomato. I wrote a short note about my thoughts for the last
2022 April
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Today is Easter Sunday, if you celebrate that kind of thing. It's kind of a good time to start afresh. And maybe also to remember we are already three and a half months into this year, the third of the pandemic. A Quote 'We're all just people.' Nanny blew a cloud of blue smoke at the chimney. 'Everyone's just people.' -- Terry Pratchett in Wyrd Sisters This one felt really poignant to me for some reason. The World Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 8th week. Ukraine has managed to sink a Russian warship. PH/Politics: A bunch of
2022 March
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"Why did he have to go to prison?" "We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they're elected. Don't you?" "Why?" "It saves time." I had a physical copy of this book and started it maybe 2 or 3 years ago and put it down somewhere and forgot to pick it back up again until last week. (Not sure when I bought it, I didn't own it in 2016.) Luckily I had a bookmark telling me where I had stopped and was surprisingly able to pick up where I left all with only a little confusion. Finished it -
I wasn't sure what to read next so I randomly picked The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin to read, going in without knowing what it was about. It was surprisingly really good! I really enjoyed it and I burned through the book in around three sittings, which is a very fast rate for me these days. (The book wasn't very long so that helped!) The book is about a timid man who is afraid to dream because he discovers that his dreams are able to alter reality, something he does not want to be responsible for. He
2022 February
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Finished reading this recently. It's a collection of "notes to self" written by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (ca. 161-180), known for being a Stoic philosopher. The copy I had included introduction, notes and an index (total around 25% of the book) by Gregory Hays. The intro was interesting as an overview of Roman life in the time of Marcus Aurelius, though some may find it a bit dry. I picked up this book because over the years I had occasionally seen people talking about the book, Marcus Aurelius, and/or Stoicism, so I was a bit intrigued. One of the
2022 January
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Finished reading this last night. It's the first book of The Expanse series, on which the pretty good TV series is based. If you're unfamiliar, The Expanse is set a few hundred years in the future, at a time when humanity has expanded to most of the solar system. Mars is being terraformed, and there are stations set up in the asteroid belt beyond Mars and on the moons of the outer planets. The primary conflicts in the series revolve around the two major powers Earth and Mars and the people of the outer planets, collectively called The Belt, who -
Decided to kick off the year's reading with a short one: The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie. This was her first published novel and also the first appearance of famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot! I was able to finish the book in one sitting, something I haven't done in a while! I've only read two other Poirot books, and this one obviously came earlier in Christie's career. While it's still reasonably good, I found the pacing not as tight as those other two books. I guess it's mainly because those other two books took place in restricted environments
2021 December
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Finished reading this today. An entertaining enough read, basically gives a high-level overview of humanity's history, the different revolutions (cognitive, agricultural, industrial, etc) we went through and what tradeoffs each one made for society and the individual. Covers how ancient humans were subject to the whims of nature and biological limitations, how modern humans are on the cusp of overcoming those limitations and becoming gods themselves, and how we got there. Here's some stuff I highlighted: 2: The Tree of Knowledge Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the
2021 November
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When the son of the dictator announced he was running for the highest office in the country, I decided to add this book to this year's reading list. The reason was to be better informed about what life was like during the early years of Marcos' martial law regime and in the years leading up to it. The Marcos reign was a dark chapter in our nation's history and reading about it and knowing more about it can help us fight back against the forces that want to revise that history to make themselves look better, all for the sake
2021 October
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Finally managed to finish The Three-Body Problem this week, despite the recent challenges. It's a very... interesting novel at the very least. CHaracterization isn't super strong, it's one of those novels where the focus is on the world building and how it affects society and humanity at large. It's nice to have a decent sci-fi story that isn't so American centric though. The story revolves around two main characters: Ye Wenjie, a Cultural Revolution-era astrophysicist who was able to secretly establish contact with an extreterrestrial civilization called Trisolaris, and Wang Miao, a modern day applied physicist, working in nanotech, who
2021 September
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This is the second Le Guin piece I've read, following the short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. This one is a full-length novel, though not particularly long. It took me about a week and a half to get through, reading a chapter or two a day. The book covers the attempts of Genly Ai, an envoy from the Ekumen, an alliance of spacefaring human worlds, who has come to the brutally cold planet of Winter to invite the residents to join the Ekumen. The residents of Winter, though human, are unique among all other known human species,
2021 August
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Well, comic strip collections, collecting the kind that comes out in daily newspapers, not the Marvel or DC stuff that comes out monthly. (Click photos to view full-size) Early this year, someone gave me a stack of them. I decided to go through them about a month ago after the last book I read, taking up my regular book reading slot. These aren't even the most well-known ones like Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert or Foxtrot, most of these I hadn't heard of before. I don't think they've ever been syndicated to newspapers here; if I hadn't gotten them for free,
2021 July
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Some stuff I've watched lately. Spoilers for Gunpowder Milkshake and MotU: Revelation are marked. Casino Royale (2006) Bond film no. 21, and the first for Daniel Craig. The final era in this James Bond run, looking forward to it. Casino Royale is new to me, but I've seen two of Craig's Bond films, so I have an idea of what to expect: a more serious and much less campy James Bond, grim and determined. The tone here is much closer to Dalton's two films than any of the other runs. Since it's kind of a reboot, it takes place early
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I used to do these "Watching Lately" posts to talk about movies/tv/books I'd recently consumed, but for a while I folded up the reviews into the weeknotes and sometimes via short notes but the reviews have been getting longer so I guess I'm bring the "Watching Lately" tag and series of posts back. Die Another Day (2002) Bond film no. 20 and Brosnan's final appearance. The main question for me going in was: have I actually watched this before in the theatre? My memory says no, but this movie does have the ice palace scene I originally thought was in
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Someone gave me a copy of this book last week, just after I had finished the previous book (Excellent timing!). Einstein's Dreams is a short book which explores different concepts of time. It's filled with short vignettes, each 1-2 pages long, describing an alternate universe where either the rules of physics are altered so that time proceeds differently, or humans perceive time in different ways. The book is framed as being a collection of dreams of Albert Einstein in 1905 as he develops his theory of relativity - there are short interludes where Einstein discusses his theories with his friend
2021 June
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Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? is a 2010 book by Seth Godin. The book's primary thesis is that in the modern world, you have to avoid being a conforming, replaceable assembly line worker, and instead be a linchpin, someone who is indispensible, someone who goes the extra mile, who invests emotional labor into his work and his art. The book covers topics such as the problems with the "old way" of working, what it means to be a linchpin, the resistance from your lizard brain, gift culture, connection, the importance of shipping, etc. He summarizes the book as: All I wanted
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After reading a couple of Hercule Poirot mysteries, I decided to try an Agatha Christie book from outside that series. I found that And Then There Were None was one of those commonly appearing on lists of her best works, and the concept intrigued me: Ten people are invited to an island and get trapped there and then murders start to happen. Kind of hard to talk about it without spoiling too much (and what I've said might already have been spoilers!). It's one of those things where the whole setup seems super contrived and way too clever for it
2021 May
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I've not read any Agatha Chrstie, so I thought I'd rectify that by getting into the Hercule Poirot series of books. To start off I chose Murder on the Orient Express because I watched the 2017 movie a couple of years ago and Death on the Nile because it has a movie coming out next year. I figure it would be a good contrast of movie-first vs book first. Took me a bit under a week of leisurely reading to finish Murder on the Orient Express. I wasn't in a rush since I already knew how the mystery turns out.
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I finished reading What Matters Now by Seth Godin, a book that is basically a collection of short blog posts by "big thinkers", released for free back in 2009. Interestingly, a lot of the ideas presented in the book still feel relevant today. I didn't think it needed a full review post.
The funniest part for me is that one of the entries is by Jason Fried about how to apologize, advice he certainly could have used during the recent Bandcamp brouhaha
You can get a copy here