Dull, samey-samey, silliness...letting your trainees DIE? super stupid, wasteful, and...well, none of This is what y'all said was The Best Thing Ever?
Dull, samey-samey, silliness...letting your trainees DIE? super stupid, wasteful, and...well, none of it can make up for that garbage world-building. Violet's a caricature not a character. This might be worse than the Mormon lady's celibacy/emotional abuse porn. Honestly, it's just bloody unreadable bad writing, ghastly social politics, appalling message crafting for young women, and therefore hyped to the fucking moon and back. This makes Dan Brown look like Stephen King.
Two things you should know up front: I believe reincarnation, of some sort, is real; I have little faith in the direction of brain aPearl Ruled at 13%
Two things you should know up front: I believe reincarnation, of some sort, is real; I have little faith in the direction of brain and neurological research as of 2022 answering the question, "what is your mind? what is the soul?" That does not require belief in some sort of supernatural bookkeeper whose Ledger tots up, infallibly and constantly, your personal record of naughty-vs-nice behaviors. It means there is nothing to explain why you're you in the structures of your brain and firings of your nerves. Science isn't looking into the subject because it's like the third rail in a drunken subway pissing contest: contact will be unpleasant and possibly fatal.
And neurological research is crucial, leads to amazing insights into a host of issues, but no one can yet tell us based on neurology or brain anatomy what your mind is. We need to develop the questions before science can apply its astonishingly powerful array of tools to discovering the answers. Not, at present, happening.
So I Pearl-Ruled this book not because it was trying to skip scientific steps and present unfounded answers but because it literally cannot, and does not claim to be able to, answer anything. That got old fast. I'm on board: My Jesus-freak mother was my source of early information about past-life memories. My oldest sister was apparently quite garrulously willing to talk about her bizarrely sophisticated memories of things she couldn't have known about (she remembered having sex as a man but had no idea what any of it was, for example) from age two until she was about four.
As those conversations were memorable to me, I wasn't in need of any persuasion to accept the possibility that these are actual memories of some strange sort. So just watching the evidence pile up was, frankly, tedious. I bailed because I was already on board not because I disagreed, in other words. I don't know if these case studies are the sort of material a skeptic would care about, and a fence-sitter would do well to take it in doses. It's not without value; it's just not designed to meet my need for deeper context....more
"There were twelve, by the way," he says. "I know you have stuff to do, I'm not saying you don't, but could you maybe wash the toilet
First, read this:
"There were twelve, by the way," he says. "I know you have stuff to do, I'm not saying you don't, but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs."
It's not me, it's you, Book. Vaginal discharge, uninterested male fertility specialist, inexperienced boy abusing a girl's vagina, another whiny husband....
I loathe vaginas. I disassociated myself from their functions a long time ago because they aren't to my taste (!) at all. I am not interested in reading about their mal/functioning. But there is nothing more important in today's political landscape than protecting people's rights, and that includes women's inalienable bodily autonomy. I want to keep supporting those stories and their tellers.
Then I get the litany of "men are clueless/malevolent/indifferent" delivered in a cloud of vaginal discharge and I am out....more
No rating. Sexist body-shaming in the first few paras. That...is not for me.
I officially tapped out, though, when Jay says to Ami, "If he's already asNo rating. Sexist body-shaming in the first few paras. That...is not for me.
I officially tapped out, though, when Jay says to Ami, "If he's already asleep, we bite the bullet and either back out as gracefully as we can or get our asses killed on the river tomorrow."
"Deal." This from Ami.
They're talking about a deeply stupid, dangerous decision made in a group. So not only does this young woman let others make bad decisions that she accepts as applying to her as well, but she's a fat-shaming ageist jerk.
Not a damn chance is this story going to get enough better to rise above these deficits....more
Three stars for the premise, none for the execution. The first-person narration was entirely too girly: clothes and cakes and her hawt boyfriend. ThenThree stars for the premise, none for the execution. The first-person narration was entirely too girly: clothes and cakes and her hawt boyfriend. Then, at the end of the sample *bam* everything changes.
I've been down that path too many times to want to do it again...disbelief, anger, whining "I wanna go home" ad nauseam. Plus I don't care about clothes and only slightly more about cakes if we're not going to be seeing a lot of them. As in, if cakes are the point then I'll go with it.
What I won't do is spend 99¢ on a whiny girl....more
April is National Poetry Month! Isn't that just the most *me* holiday of them all?! And what should today's email deliver unto me but Harvard UniversiApril is National Poetry Month! Isn't that just the most *me* holiday of them all?! And what should today's email deliver unto me but Harvard University Press's delightful offer of a free sample from Poems of the First Buddhist Women: A Translation of the Therigatha? Well, I mean! Could any reasonable poetry person turn this down?
There's an extremely long introduction, about five hundred pages or so, and then the first gem of lyrical perfection floats ineffably before one's wondering eyes:
Therika spoken by the Buddha to her
Now that you live among theris, Therika, the name you were given as a child finally becomes you.
So sleep well, covered by cloth you have made, your passion for sex shriveled away like a herb dried up in a pot.
Yes, there is nothing like poetry to celebrate the threads that bind us together across cultures, is there? Who here has not had these very feelings? The sheer delight of making one's own shroud, the joy of losing interest in sex, the reminder that one's parents thought ahead and named an unlucky girl a double-meaninged word that is both "sudden, shocking stroke of good luck" and "old, dried-up crone"!
And thank the goddesses I live in the time of Google or I'd have literally *NO* idea what any of these words meant, what cultural context to put them in, and why the hell I should care about them anyway.
This collection of Asimov's deathless Robot series, shorter works that add up to a guiding vision of what Humanity strives for in the creation of a coThis collection of Asimov's deathless Robot series, shorter works that add up to a guiding vision of what Humanity strives for in the creation of a computerized mechanical slave class, starts with an essay entitled "The Robot Chronicles." As I assume most everyone reading Asimov in this day and time is reasonably familiar with the stories that make up the series, I'll confine my observations to the essay which is not otherwise available in print, though it exists on audio for your edification.
Asimov, a lecherous old hump with a *terrible* (richly deservedly so) reputation among female fandom, made some conceptual leaps in his career that have remained extremely relevant to the modern world. His centenary was this past second of January. His reputation is such that the jollifications in fandom were...muted. This is understandable, even laudable, but still regrettable. The Three Laws of Robotics, with which his essay deals in a way I did not expect, alone should guarantee his place on the podium of Authors of Merit. But as sensitivity and awareness and the need for all of us to do better now that we know better are in operation, there must needs be a period of desuetude for famous offenders against our new order.
Nothing will knock his contributions out of use. His name will, whether temporarily or permanently, be expunged from the common usage of the robotics conversation (or so I predict). But he remains the originator of the modern technical and social conception of the Robot.
This essay is a personal history of how and why and who and what led Isaac Asimov to develop the Laws, the concept of the robot that he adopted and adapted so thoroughly from Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., and the enduring trope of the machine that longs to be human. (No, he was not the first to bring that idea to the table. Please spare me comments about Galatea and other inanimate objects of personification. They are all stipulated as predecessors to Asimov's creation and influences thereon, conscious or unconscious, herewith.) As a personal essay reflecting on Asimov's reasons for and responses to his robotics work, I found the half-hour or so of reading deeply pleasurable.
Not five-star's worth, though. I found a smugness, arguably earned, in his telling (retelling, more like, since he had given this text as talks over the years he was lionized) that is a fundamentally squicky emotion for me. I don't think anyone really intelligent is ever free of smugness. I also think it ill becomes the intelligent not to include some self-deprecation in their smugness, some overt and clear signal that they understand and are sorry for the feeling of irritation and annoyance their (however well-earned) expertise elicits in the hearer/reader. Asimov does not do that here...his response, for example, to the OFTEN brought charge that Roddenberry used Asimov's Bicentennial Man as source material for Lt. Cmdr. Data: "I didn't mind."
Aren't you kind.
Still, there it is. Along with being a handsy old letch he was an arrogant bastard. And a genius at some things (though not particularly at the *craft* of writing). And a light gone out too soon. He was a stripling of seventy-two when he died, and I for one would give a not-very-affordable decade off my life to hear what he'd have to say about the modern world.
If you don't want to read his Robot stories, listen to the essay on audio. But I think you'll want to read them once you do....more
Real Rating: 2.5* of five, rounded up because reasons
Too many anachronisms in two chapters. The first one damn near derailed me: the Abbott's spyglassReal Rating: 2.5* of five, rounded up because reasons
Too many anachronisms in two chapters. The first one damn near derailed me: the Abbott's spyglass. Such a thing *did*not*exist* until 1608, a thousand years after this tale is set; then the monastery had glazed windows in its infirmary. The Abbott's writing project? Codswallop! Maybe if we'd been in the Byzantine Empire I could've bought one of those (not the spyglass) but the ass end of creation (north of England)? NO.
I liked the evocative descriptions of the wild land. Mostly I just don't want to crap all over others' pleasure read. But if you're au fait with this time period's realities I'm gonna wave you off. It's not going to work out well between you and the book....more
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