Hey friends,
Some things I’ve learned through experience lately:
- Squirrels can chirp like birds.
- I still don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up.
- Whales are so incredibly big. And playful! And individual.
See ya around,
Maya
links
- On the perils of free parking, the modern day tragedy of the commons
- A new principle that can let humans perceive novel and programmable colors
- Wise words from dynomight, as always: “If you’re a quitter, I guess you accept the limits of biology… [these authors] chose fun.”
- He even made a lil’ app for us to play around with “non-ecological colorspace” ourselves!
- “The wired headphones resurgence is effective because they are the easiest way to signal resistance to the Big Tech agenda.” I just know I’d lose anything wireless in a heartbeat, but I like this as a more profound motivation to endure endless tangled wires.
- How the modern backlash against lab-grown meat has surprising parallels to a resistance movement a century ago… against “artificial ice.”
- 1931 newspaper headline: “NATURAL ICE IS BEST CLAIM EMINENT PHYSICIANS”
- “When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.”
- Relatable, from E. B. White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
books
- Darkmotherland — Samrat Upadhyay
- 🇳🇵 Nepal book
- Very long and very disturbing— wasn’t sure I’d make it through all 24 hours, but I surprised myself by starting to follow the characters a little more closely about half way through.
- A lot of names and vocab I didn’t know the spelling of, which probably contributed to the slow start for me to get into it. Should have read the first chapter in text or something?
- Orbital — Samantha Harvey
- Listening to this book felt a lot like watching Planet Earth, or maybe one of those space-themed IMAX movies at a museum? Beautiful and vast imagery, but with more existentialism than those examples. Not much plot to speak of, but it was sorta… atmospheric, maybe, and poetic, to listen to.
- Blue Sisters — Coco Mellors
- Very pleasing audiobook narrator!
- Hit harder than expected, some very relatable moments.
- Someone Like Us — Dinaw Mengestu
- 🇪🇹 Ethiopia book
- Started out a little quiet (purposefully?) but I was curious about the main character from the beginning… This made the slow and subtle hints that he was a somewhat unreliable (to us, at least, and maybe to himself as well?) narrator that much more impactful.
- Friday Night Lights — H.G Bissinger [in progress!]
- And I continue my quest of listening to books that popular TV shows / movies were based on (previously: Masters of the Air, Killers of the Flower Moon, American Prometheus /Oppenheimer…)
- Another recurring theme: impact of sports on societal structures (previously: Spanish soccer & politics)
- Odessa → one of many small towns in America, isolated from the big cities, defined by quintessential conservatism, individualism… tight-knit community (often centered on the church) and racism…
- Terrible agricultural resources but happened to be on the Permian Basin → rode the booms and busts of the oil economy
- What is there to talk about in towns like these? In Minnesota, it was hockey. In Indiana, basketball. In Ohio, Alabama, Texas, and many more, it was Friday nights.
- Odessa’s Permian HS → winningest football dynasty at any level (as of 1988)… not the most skilled or strongest players, but the most fearless
- Football was a crucial factor for both why desegregation of schools was opposed for so long (“redistributing the kids will ruin with the team!”), and how it eventually gained support (“they could be such good running backs, though…”)
- The tragedy of high school sports & the false (for all but 200 kids a year) promise of going pro