50 Books # 8-10 (or 13)

#8: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

This book was absolutely fascinating. The idea behind the book is what would happen to all our stuff, and the world, if humans all disappeared suddenly? No specifics as to why, if it's zombies, aliens, the Rapture, nanotech, whatever, because that's not the point. But in the process of that, it ends up being much more about society and civilization and what it takes to keep them running. And what effects humans have already had on the world, and continue to. It's extremely well written. The parts about wildlife returning to Chernobyl, and sea life returning to nuclear weapons test atolls are scary, yet amazing. They have photos of the mountaintop removal "mining" for coal, and I'd heard about it, but pictures are worth a thousand words. See some here.

This book is amazing, and I totally recommend it to everyone.

#9: Marx for Beginners by Rius

It's a cartoon introduction to Marx and his economic theories, and the history he lived in. It was published first in 1976, so it's kind of dated. I'm trying to read some more economics stuff and so figured I'd start with the cartoon compressed version.

And frankly, some of the quoted passages of Marx looking at the inequalities of capitalism could come from a modern analysis of how Wal-Mart works and treats its workers. (In short: Not Well.)

#10 (or 10-13): Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki

I'm not sure to count this as 1 or 4, since it's a 4 book manga series, but all one story. I guess I've included other comics as individual books, but sometimes it feels slightly cheaty. Depends on the comic, I suppose.

Anyway. I haven't seen the movie version yet, though I've seen many of Miyazaki's other ones. It was interesting, and good. Though the end, like a couple of Miyazaki's other stories (such as Castle in the Sky) makes it seem like he has serious issues with technology. I think I'm just tired of the trope of "Humanity can't be trusted with this knowledge! So now we'll destroy it!" Aside from that gripe though, it was a very good read. Fantastic environments, good characters, and the other main theme is the futility and waste of war, which I don't have any issues with.

Previous Books:
#1: Grave Peril
#2: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
#3: DMZ Vol. 3: Public Works
#4: Bad Prince Charlie
#5: Making Money
#6: How to Win Friends and Influence People
#7: H.I.V.E. - Higher Institute of Villainous Education

Nano - Day 1

Nothing. I'm not even sure of an idea yet, and I had class and then lunch with my girlfriend then my last day of work at the bookstore.

Maybe I should do a mystery novel.

With dinosaurs or something, because I'm an unrepentant geek.

Snap.com Previews

I know Leti, at least, was complaining about these, and no wonder. They're damn annoying, any time you move the mouse over a link, it pauses to load the snap preview. Luckily, there's ways to get around it. One can be found here, at the LJ of somebody named shlomif. Go to the Viewing Options under settings, and uncheck the "enable graphic previews" box.

Or, if you have Firefox, there's a plugin called NoScript that lets you selectively enable scripts by different domains and such. According to a quick Google, apparently you can do something similar in Opera by disabling Javascript and then selectively enabling it in site preferences.

A Good Man

I know my girlfriend will disagree with this.

I'm not a very good man. I don't think I'm a particularly bad man, I'm mostly neutral, with hopefully some good tendencies. But I don't feel I do enough to actually call myself good. I try to be honorable, truthful and most of the rest of the stuff like the Boy Scout Oath. And I think I manage to usually not be a jerk and not be evil, but that's not enough to make somebody good.

Good has to be active, and actually work to make things better, not just not make things worse. Or even, in the case of all the stuff tied up in living in modern industrial America, make things worse slower. Not being evil's not enough to qualify as good, but it's the first step. Good has to actually make a positive difference

Much of it's my own fault, my besetting vice has to be sloth, I keep saying one of these days I'll get around to not procrastinating any more, but it's not really been happening. I need to get out and get more involved and active, which I've been working on. The root word of activist is active, after all.