Question OneWhy did the chicken cross the road? To get to the Other Side. I only realised a couple of months ago that this is a joke about suicide. Back to the BlogWell, well, well. I just finished listening to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. He’s one of my favourite people. The return to writing was catalysed by this book. I realise that I like writing, I would like to be better at writing, and being better at writing in the future will definitely be beneficial to me. Outliers made me realise that the only way to not only get better, but to get good, is to practice. Deliberately practice. So I’m going to try out different styles to see which suit me the best, and try to write for 25 minutes per day. This includes any research I might do. I’m not sure which topics I’d like to write on, but I think I’ll mix up between books/podcasts that I’m consuming, things I’m thinking about, and random topics that will focus more on research, learning and simplification. I’ll play around with SEO and stuff like that, but if I find it interrupts the flow too much, I’ll ditch it because I don’t overly care if people actually read what I’m writing, it’s just practice. Though it would be good to practice incorporating it, I suppose. Catch 22Catch 22 is my favourite book. I read it for the first time in 2014 because some girl on Tinder had as her bio a quote from it, which I looked up to impress her, then decided I liked the sound of the book. Once I finished it, I immediately started over. I have read it five times in total and it makes me giggle every time, on almost every page. Its absurdity is so realistic. While on holiday, my girlfriend and I tried reading it to each other, which made me realise for the first time that it uses an incredible number of relatively complex words. I think my vocabulary is pretty good for a 27 year old human, but there were not only many words per chapter that I couldn’t easily define (sometimes not define at all), but there were many that I couldn’t pronounce. Despite having read the book five times without registering this, I think it was one of the reasons I liked the book so much from the start. Language is becoming simpler, and communicating loquaciously is not looked upon favourably in many circles. In fact, you’ll likely come across as a bit of a dick. Dan CarlinisationSo I’ve gone a bit mad lately listening to Dan Carlin. I was first turned on to his history podcast and immensely enjoyed the one about the rise of the Persian Empire (the King of Kings series). They are very long and I would recommend listening at 1.5x speed. I then moved on to the six part series about WWI, then The Road To Armageddon about the nuclear situation. At this point I was out of free Hardcore History shows (after two or three years they archive them and make them a couple of bucks a show) and I was about to buy the whole back catalogue when I came upon his other podcast. Common Sense with Dan Carlin is fantastic. I knew I liked the guy and the way he thinks, but when he spells out the political situation for what it really is, it truly clicks for me. I know that the whole thing these days of listening to the news/social media that interests you gets you more and more in an echo-chamber of your own people, continually reinforcing your own ideas. For me, that’s Dan Carlin. When I was in the US on the campaign trail, I had the feeling that it was all a farce, and I’m generally a cynical person by nature, but the way he spells it out, I find it difficult to imagine someone arguing against it. “In 93 percent of House of Representatives races and 94 percent of Senate races that had been decided by mid-day Nov. 5, the candidate who spent the most money ended up winning, according to a post-election analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.” That statistic alone is frightening when you think you are in a democracy. I don’t want to go into the whole Trump thing too deeply, but I think there are arguments that he’s good and bad. He’s obviously bad, but he’s potentially so bad that he’s good. In a system that is so obviously broken to some, but apparently functioning to many, the way to get people to see what is wrong with it is to have someone come through who doesn’t pay much attention to “the way politics is done”. Bernie on the left and Trumpy on the right both did this and I think now the American people *should* be better informed for it. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party should now see that people are pissed with those in the system only to benefit themselves and will protest vote on a scale that actually gets someone like the Donald elected. Yeah, it’s probably worse under someone like him than an insider in the short term, but voters are saying f*ck you to the insiders, we’ll wear it for now. The same thing happened to a lesser extent in Australia when we voted in so many minor parties in our last election. I don’t think the major parties have listened at all, as they seem to be playing the same “oh but look what the other team did” card every day of the week now. Anyway, if you’re interested in this stuff (and things like US foreign policy, why Russia was forced into doing what they’ve done recently, why ISIS isn’t a terrorist group, but actually a group which has some members that use terrorist tactics), listen to old Dan Carlin’s Common Sense and see if you like it. I’m not sure which to start with (I just listened to 30 hours of it in a week, so it’s all blended into one for me), but I would give “Trumped” a go. “In Search Of Context” is good and “The Illusion Of Control” if you are interested in the Russia situation. My New Favourite QuestionWhat is your favourite thing to do outside of work that you do by yourself?
I came up with this a few weekends ago and I love asking people. Y'all should try it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|