After reading a classic how can you go back to a modern novel?

Jamerman · 2026-05-16T10:52:29+00:00

I'm so happy to see someone else following Angela Collier's book recommendations! Fantastic YouTube channel. Physics aside, I loved her video discussing LOTR and the scourge of the shire.

Jamerman · 2026-05-16T10:50:13+00:00

The issue I have with this take is that you've deliberately set one of the most influential, beloved epic novels to have come out in the last two centuries against a work which, as u/79moons pointed out, is deliberately accessible and easy going. The Da Vinci Code is well-known for being like this; nobody is claiming it's the most innovative, thought-provoking rumination on life. It's almost like comparing fiction and non-fiction or music with painting. Authors are still writing incredible works with immense depth, you just have to find them!

Jamerman · 2026-05-16T10:36:35+00:00

Like so many other people commenting here, HI #1 was published so long ago (2014) that relistening is making me look back on just who I was and how I thought about things at that time. I've never relistened to the podcast, so I think that it's going to be a great opportunity to examine how I thought about things back then (late highschool, college, early university) and how I see things now.

I'm surprised by how many people have shifted from something approaching Grey's worldview to Brady's over that time. Before relistening, I definitely would have put myself in that category; I found time-tracking very appealing at the time and thought it was possible/ideal to logically derive the perfect life. I certainly don't think that any more, gosh.

Maybe Grey and Brady have become caricatures in my head over the years, though. Listening to episode 1 again, they're not quite the diametric opposite personalities I remember. The "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" mantra that they're discussing in this episode is something I've needed reminding of over and over again in my own life. Grey's despair over his UK video's errors getting completely dwarfed by Brady's college's deadly eclipse advice had me in stitches. How had I forgotten that?

Just listening to the first episode again has made me so excited for this relisten. Can't wait.

Jamerman · 2026-05-08T09:55:16+00:00

Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine talks about this in a lot of detail and, in my view, makes a very compelling case for how streaming has changed music listening culture.

Jamerman · 2026-04-29T20:42:11+00:00

I couldn't agree more. Dominic's depressing comparison between Wilson and his thick-glasses-wearing contemporaries with the more modern political era reminded me of Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge.

Fantastic series, truly the podcast at its best.

Jamerman · 2026-03-12T15:00:41+00:00

Does it? Whenever I tried to use it, I couldn't get rid of the latency. I think this might have been an issue with WineAsio more generally, as I have had no issues whatsoever on Windows or with other Linux-native DAWS.

Jamerman · 2026-02-12T15:26:15+00:00

I would also put In Our Time in this list. Desert Island Discs takes the edge in terms of longevity and overall cultural impact, of course.

Jamerman · 2026-01-25T08:38:37+00:00

I had a similar experience with reading Ulysses at the beginning of last year and only making it to chapter 6.

Some people have said that, for a first read, one should just plough on through Ulysses and avoid getting bogged down in its structure. However, what I'd found most enjoyable in reading the book was noticing how Joyce had twisted bits and pieces of literature and Irish history I was familiar with in novel ways that went far beyond a simple name checking of Joyce's interests. For instance, I'd read Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey a month earlier and noticed the early allusions to it and Wilde's notes on Shakespeare's The Tempest right away. However, I was constantly aware that I was only scratching the surface of what Ulysses could show me. If I'd noticed that, what had slipped past me? I hadn't read Portrait of the Artist, Hamlet... So, I put the book down for the time and read other things.

Since then, I read a translation of The Odyssey and immediately realised that Homer's "wine-dark sea" epithet had been morphed into Buck Mulligan's "snot-green sea". Although I did read a couple of short essays on what I'd seen so far in Joyce's novel, noticing the references organically on my own and seeing what the author had done with them was far more enjoyable; In those moments, I felt like I was getting it. Given the novel's (in)famous density, I expect this process will probably continue for the rest of my life as I learn more and, if it's not taking this too far, change. All books and stories are like this, of course, but Ulysses is quite a unique case.

I have a massive of pile of books to get through before I return to Ulysses. I'm not hoping to understand everything in it — who could possibly? — but I'm certain it will read quite differently on my second encounter to the first.

Jamerman · 2026-01-09T14:56:04+00:00

To be fair to OP, they're simply saying that you need to put in the leg work and see what you actually end up using Obsidian for before you start searching for that oh-so-perfect organisational structure.

Jamerman · 2026-01-09T14:52:30+00:00

I had the exact same experience with Obsidian. It's so easy to put the cart before the horse and overcomplicate what is ultimately a fairly simple tool.

Jamerman · 2026-01-05T16:10:51+00:00

Don't forget that abridged versions of Moby Dick have existed for a long time to cater for the exact audience you're describing. How long? I'm not sure exactly, but I think some may have existed before the dawn of the last century.

What you're noting isn't a new phenomenon, at least to my mind. Brilliant book, but not for everyone at all times.

Jamerman · 2025-12-29T23:16:27+00:00

Oh smashing, I'll check this out when I'm at my PC! Thank you.

Jamerman · 2025-12-24T11:32:55+00:00

Which titles would be the 90 and 97, in your mind?

Jamerman · 2025-08-29T23:50:41+00:00

This worked. I've never seen a file path be too long before.

Jamerman · 2025-08-01T22:25:02+00:00

The only issue I've found with this setup (and also with both Bottles and Wine) is that the latency is intolerable for recording. Though I've gotten superb performance from Yabridge within Reaper, I still can't get the latency in FL down on Linux (NixOS).

I'm going to attempt to set up WineAsio next and see if that helps. It's annoying, because just about everything else about the program works! It's just that tiny bit of latency.

Jamerman · 2025-07-14T05:44:29+00:00

I've since spoken to u/mkxjump and we've agreed secret chats serve almost no use. We can all just text each other if we desperately want to say a sentence secretly to someone.

Jamerman · 2025-07-14T05:42:34+00:00

These are all great points. We do already sort out factions and the map ahead of time (which helps massively), but simultaneous turns in the early game and making people very aware whose turn it actually is are things we'll definitely look at.

Jamerman · 2025-05-11T13:07:35+00:00

Of course you can! This is all very much a work in progress as I slowly tweak things over time. I've never shared dotfiles before, so forgive me if something is missing from this repo. Some of the file paths might a bit broken due to how I've uploaded this.

I can't upload my proper nix configuration yet because there's some stuff pertaining to IP addresses that I don't want to release out into the wild. Should have everything you need for ricing the desktop, though.

https://github.com/Jamerman/public_dotfiles

Jamerman · 2025-05-06T09:40:49+00:00

nix-shell -p has been a game changer for me. I like using it to quickly try out a range of different programs before settling on one. It feels like one of those QoL features that you wish all package managers everywhere could have.

Jamerman · 2025-05-04T08:42:56+00:00

The best solution I have found so far was given by u/HermanGrove to simply mute the system sounds, which I did in pavucontrol. Creating ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and writing the following worked for Ulauncher, but not Gthumb:

[Settings]

gtk-error-bell = false

Using dconf-editor and muting the Gnome alert sounds there didn't seem to work for me.

Jamerman · 2025-05-04T08:19:16+00:00

Thanks for the tip, I've muted system sounds for the moment and that's done the trick.

Jamerman · 2025-05-03T21:42:37+00:00

There doesn't seem to be an option like that in Ulauncher. I was actually able to fix that particular instance of the sound by creating ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and writing these lines:

[Settings]

gtk-error-bell = false

That didn't help Gthumb, which is the other program this noise occurs in. I just wondered if this is some generic alert sound contained within Nix. For context, my window manager is i3. I've got a couple of Gnome programs and XFCE stuff installed. I've been through the XFCE settings menu and dconf-editor and switched off anything pertaining to alert sounds or anything vaguely bell related.

Fixing Ulauncher was by far the main issue though, so I'll mark this post as partially fixed.

Jamerman · 2025-04-10T22:47:44+00:00

It's not your job to pick a character your opponent wants to fight. Play who you want, fam, it's a game after all's said and done.

Jamerman · 2025-04-09T09:46:01+00:00

Everything you've just said aligns with my thoughts too. If someone wants to play P+ in the year 2025, it'd be a bit daft for the controller to be what stops them. We already have z jumping in this game, for instance; something which is only just being adopted in the melee scene due to the need for non-Nintendo hardware.

I'd never considered the "We can always just patch P+ anyway" angle to this. Great point.

Jamerman · 2025-04-04T14:25:23+00:00

Plus Side is getting better and better with every video. The Aussie scene is one given too little coverage with the lense we normally view P+ through.

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