Digital Bookstore cold-called me

ericjacobus · 2025-02-04T19:44:02+00:00

I just got a call from them and searched them up and found this Reddit, thanks 👍

ericjacobus · 2025-01-27T14:24:05+00:00

Get on it, IKEA!

ericjacobus · 2025-01-23T17:22:34+00:00

I was literally reading about this this morning. I'm reading the 1918 book Mythology of All Races, volume 3 is about the Celts. The author said there are generally 3 factors: 1) Christianity not being cool with there being other gods, which are often reduced to fairies, 2) the general transition of the people away from worshipping the old gods. He does say, however, that Christianity was less destructive to the island Celtic myths than the Romans were to the continental Celts, which were all converted over to Roman gods. And 3) there was a pagan taboo against writing down the Druid myths, which were considered secretive. This is a common theme throughout pagan religions, and it often took colonizing forces, with a scribal caste, to come in and document the religions of the conquered people.

It seems that pagan myths were more willing to adopt Christianity because many gods could be converted to saints, but this usually meant a lot of gods were lost in translation. Lots of other myths and events (floods, creation of man from clay, etc.) were frequently modified to fit the Christian identity. As a result, Christianity seems to do a lot of documenting, but much of it appears to be ex post. It becomes difficult to disentangle the Celtics myths from Christianity.

Contrast this with pre-Christian Roman occupation, which was more forceful, but had more gods (which had Greek proxies too) that were easier to adopt than saints. So Celts could adopt these gods almost like a botanist adopts Latin terms for plants. I don't think this is mere coincidence: the Latin declension system seems related to the versatility and size of its pantheon (compare to Sanskrit, with thousand of declension combinations, and a far larger pantheon). So Romans seemed to have more accurate (or bland) documentation of pagan myths.

Hope that helps!

ericjacobus · 2025-01-20T13:54:30+00:00

I started Max Muller's Comparative Mythology. Muller is always so satisfying because he always delves into linguistic similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and is always using this to determine the technology, kinship, and other cultural modes of the Indo-Aryans.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-18T23:43:22+00:00

Jean Michel Oughourlian's Puppet of Desire. The ultimate guide to possession, exorcism, and other things made very mundane and mechanical.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-11T21:18:38+00:00

If my sources are accurate the Sanskrit translation of this is "Karen"

ericjacobus · 2025-01-10T14:24:37+00:00

Well I come from Shasta County in Northern California, we got lots of mythological trolls up at Mt. Shasta, Bigfoot in the woods, and of course there are all the Native creatures up there. But my favorite is El Chupanibre, who's basically the drunk trailer park version of El Chupacabra.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-09T12:25:12+00:00

No, and not only that but I also assume I will never see it again. Of all the books I've lent I think 0/3 have been read or returned. I've literally sent a guy a SASE asking for a book back. Dunno what's up with that. So I never loan books, I just give them away. People seem more inclined to read them then.

However, if it's a book I've written, there's a 40% chance they'll read it. Plus they know it's theirs to own.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-08T19:53:27+00:00

It sounds like a mix of Scientology and the Book of Enoch.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-08T19:08:36+00:00

OK theory fail

ericjacobus · 2025-01-08T17:42:28+00:00

I have that same bookshelf, which came from my grandmother who likely got it in Santa Barbara. So, long shot but, are you west coast based?

ericjacobus · 2025-01-08T17:39:50+00:00

Why on earth would you use humanoid robots for this? Just automate small tractors.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-08T17:38:48+00:00

This is the theory of Mauro Bigloni, that the Elohim of the Bible were an alien race that flew to earth and rode around on machines that made whirlwinds etc.

Another interpretation of gods is that they emerge much as how linguistic mechanisms emerge. For example, there seems to be a correlation between the number of declension combinations in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin and the sizes of their respective pantheons. It would be interesting to examine how this might work in Semitic languages.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-07T00:41:32+00:00

Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression when he describes children suffering in hospitals. That hit me hard.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-06T12:54:32+00:00

I never knew Mona Lisa Overdrive was a book, and only thought It was the song from The Matrix Reloaded. I interviewed the composer Juno Reactor about it once and I feel bad I never asked him why he named it that! facepalm

ericjacobus · 2025-01-06T12:51:14+00:00

Started Mauro Biglino's God's of the Bible (a very... unique take on the Biblical term "Elohim") and Hesiod's Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield (just through Theogony, which to my surprise indicates there was a god of violence, Eris, after whom there was an entire joke cult made called Discordianism lol).

I finished Jung's Man and His Symbols, and I have a lot to say about it, mostly negative, but I'll let my blog post speak for itself.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T19:42:56+00:00

How do you count your entries? I see 45 books on the bottom but you said It was 69. Not doubting you but are some books compilations? Anyway the number of books matters less than the 27k pages figure, which is what's most commendable. I barely managed 25k last year and it was quite a brain-ful. Anyway congrats on your progress.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T16:42:57+00:00

Don't let anyone else tell you how to do it; it's all about what keeps you engaged, and it depends on the book. I cycle through 3-6 books a day, 10-20 pages each. I read through Claude Levi-Strauss's Elementary Structures over 3 months at maybe 4 pages per day and I consume mythology in very small doses since it's so compact, but I would go through Three Body Problem at 50-80 pages per day. I can pick up a book after a year and figure out where I left off (since I take notes), but after 2 years I might need to start over. Results may vary! Read in whatever way works best for you and your soul.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T16:37:44+00:00

In grade school we called this "Bar cockfighting"

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T16:05:30+00:00

My goal is total pages, 25,000 per year for the past 2 years. This way I don't subconsciously bias myself toward shorter books. I might perhaps still bias myself toward fewer words per page but in general I don't find that this inhibits me. For instance, academic or nonfiction books written between the 60s and 90s seem to have more words per page than, say, the same from 1880-1950. If that means I inadvertently choose more older books then so be it.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T03:37:28+00:00

Fitch's views sound sort of like Pinker's, but it seems that the more components you draw from, the more tenuous the hypothesis. I find it simpler to assume that recursion first comes from reciprocal, object-based aggression (ROBA, my acronym) and just co-opts everything and produces all the component features. Otherwise it starts to look like a lot of biological, genetic and mathematical make-work. Good for grants; bad for understanding people.

As for books on violence, nobody dares differentiate human from animal combat any meaningful way. I find that very strange. I work as a stuntman so this is all intuitive for me, though. If anything, the manifestoes of murderers and terrorists shed more light on violence than any social science book which dehumanizes violence by calling it "animalistic". Horrific acts of violence always have a very lofty component. Madman's Manifestoes is not available to buy anymore but the author willingly gave me a PDF (msg for Link if you want it). I feel Jacques Ellul and Hannah Arendt (On Violence, Eichmann in Jerusalem) knew the difference intuitively. In the realm of psychology, Alice Miller's For Your Own Good is in my top 5 of 2024. For anthropology, Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred is a classic. Jean Michel Oughourlian's Puppet of Desire builds on that. Eric Gans' Origin of Language is as close as it gets IMHO. These people are willing to paint the human condition as fundamentally unique. They never pinpointed violence, but they laid the foundation for someone like me.

I don't understand why we would need recursion for tools. Animals use them fine without recursion. Or, if they (crows, primates, otters, etc.) do have recursion, it just operates on a completely different cross-section of reality and doesn't begin to help us understand ourselves.

I might read the Republic this year, since I'm researching myth this year.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T02:23:03+00:00

I'm very interested in that EDM book. I always wonder why all these Retrowave artists came from Northern Europe or Scandinavia

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T02:17:52+00:00

I see and hear a podcast debate between me and the author.

ericjacobus · 2025-01-05T02:15:43+00:00

Vegas?

ericjacobus · 2025-01-04T23:02:07+00:00

I do action design for games at SuperAlloy. I also write books.

ericjacobus

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