seen from Canada
seen from Russia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Russia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from T1
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from T1
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United States
YESSS RED LEADER OMG look we're not gonna talk about all the fics I've read of red leader /silly BUT HES JUST SO COOL (i am also having fun i love eddsworld hehe)
GWHAAAHEHDJHS
ohmygosh i remember there was a time where if red leader wasnt mentioned in the description i did not want it ☠️☠️
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Left Hand Of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
This woman’s mind. I adored reading this book. Most of the time I read for world building and plot but she made me slow down in moments to read the writing. There’s maybe too much to say. I got lost in the bureaucracy of the first half in some moments but was just enthralled by every moment of Estravan and Genly’s journey of the second half, I was not seeing prison/prison break/Frodo and Sam walking for miles journey home. I loved that the alien was the character whose biology we related to, the otherness is lessened as both are other, in different ways.
I need to come back at write more on this, I am just doing this to be consistent rn.
Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel
My coworker, after a conversation about scifi, gave me this book and I honestly would not call it scifi. The world building of the portions in the future felt pretty pointless (all just to propose that we could have made a Time Machine with future technology? And that wasn’t even fleshed out so the time travel just felt like a fact I was accepting) and also boring. The outer colonies and the domes felt too stereotypical as portrayals of future world development idk I was so uninterested by the places of this story. The people that were flashed back to felt random except the author who wrote a book about the pandemic right before a pandemic hit, and that character just felt like a self insert. Which would have been fine if it had been more about her? The cultural touchstones all felt too close to home, which is probably why I like older stuff. There’s a weird short chapter which is an interview with Zoey where she talks about her next book, I wish this book was that one. That the time travel isn’t rationalized by a random theory that everything is a simulation, but instead it’s by the unexplainable moments of reality which stretch across time through physical place, OR that it is the book as a rationalization of a crazy experience or the enactment of an anomaly in time. I do think a self insert character is maybe the most interesting in a book about time travel, the act of writing becomes a practice of time travel (more literally than it is at any time) and the whole story feels reasonably like an extension of that insertion. Overall, not for me.
The Year of the Flood - Margret Atwood
I do think the first book of the series, Oryx and Crake, is better. Things felt very slow until about page 250 and the double character perspectives and many time settings was confusing (telling about the events of the past during post-flood (why not just have it set at that time when it’s in first person). The Adam One sermons felt long at times and I skipped all of the songs.
I really like the world of the series, it’s high tech (biotech) but it isn’t cyberpunk, it’s suburban.
It’s funny reading this as I started working on the vegetable side of a farm, not vegan, but inescapably a little culty.
200 pages into Ministry of the Future and I am calling it, I cannot finish this book. I hate the writing style so much.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
Recommended by Sage in August? Maybe? And sat as my book-to-read all fall. Read it in 2 days once I started. Really enjoyed it. Felt like a medieval true crime podcast and has the pleasantly brief time scope of a movie.
About the blur of self, truth, spectacle, what you can learn about yourself by playing another. How when art develops in conversation with events as information unfolds, what is life and what is a representation becomes intertwined. Maybe how they are always intertwined.
The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox
I first read a section of this book 2 years ago for class, I was drinking the kool-aid and reading it in full does not feel so world shattering. Nonetheless, this book is wonderful. The writing style is so smooth for a nonfiction book, it is written as narratives. It leads to moments of absolute disbelief, but I know there is not a fabrication so great in this story (thinking about the oil painting underwater chapter… it was real…). This book is for those who are concerned with color, with oceans, with early 20th century biology and ecology, with early 20th century conservation efforts ties to eugenics, and the instability and the unknowability of things and yet somehow the moments that we can measure them.
Notes:
“A blue so blue that it changes the way you see the yellow of the sky” (approx)
Sketching animals the artists had never seen and were never seen again after Beebe’s sighting
Beebe’s findings from the bathysphere being beyond precise scientific discoveries but instead it was the stages of the dives that stuck with him- the decent into the dark as colors fell away from sight, then the emergence of the luminescent fish.
My 2024 in books. I read far less than I would have liked. But luckily I enjoyed what I did read.
