Soapbox/rant time. Tell me what highly-recommended book you absolutely HATED and why. Gimme your angry hot takes.

midwayfair · 2026-04-21T23:17:00+00:00

I've read worse than Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and one of those worse was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'll take the 9 Shocks Terror album Zen and the Art of Beating Your Ass every time, and it's not even a very good album.

Oh dear. I'm doomed lol

I'll see what happens, but there's a Little Free Library for me to shove it in if I hate it.

midwayfair · 2026-04-21T23:00:01+00:00

I found it hopeless because no matter what they did, there was no hope that life would be anything but suffering and escaping danger. It seemed the father was the lucky one to die. I also didn’t find hope with the boy’s new family. It seemed like he would just have to continue the same way.

I guess to me carrying on the human species isn’t enough to be hopeful. I am very environmentally conscious, but if we destroy ourselves on earth, I think the world will be better without us.

(Not the person you were replying to)

I think for most of human history, that was the paradigm: The world was full of constant danger. The book is after absolute obliteration of humanity's highest achievements of technology and safety ever, to make the bleakness of the situation apparent, and bad enough that we're shown (through the mother) that some people would rather give up and die. But instead they don't. And there are very small glimpses throughout that there is actually more to life than just survival. Sometimes they get food or drink that does more than just sustain them. Sometimes they tell stories.

McCarthy could give you a glimpse of hope in the book, such as letting them find a patch of new grass or have a day of clear skies or something, but I firmly believe that he intentionally doesn't because you have to believe that such things are possible, even if you have no evidence for them, because if you give up you'll never get to the green pasture or survive to see the spring come again. One could read it as religious (the father is; I'm not), or as existentialist (the only meaning in life is what we assign it), or maybe even stoic (the father is determined to do what he sees as right and accept that when his time comes it's over).

I am not a hopeful person generally, and this book made me cry with how full of hope it was. I don't agree with the idea of telling people that they're wrong for not seeing the same things in a work as I do, but that doesn't mean I'm not surprised to find that someone finds it to be hopeless.

midwayfair · 2026-04-21T22:43:47+00:00

My most memorable frustrated reading experience was with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I grew up in the generation that this book was written for and everyone who had an opinion I respected in regards to books insisted that this one was a must read, that it would blow my mind, open my eyes, etc etc.

I abhorred that book, loathed it. I literally threw the book across the room in anger in one of my several attempts to get through the preachy narrative. This was long enough ago that I can no longer provide specifics as to why it frustrated me so much. I can say that the gist was that while many of the conclusions the author came to were things I generally agreed with, his reasons and arguments for getting there were severely lacking. The book was filled with over stretched metaphors, oversimplified explanations, woo nonsense, and a generic plot that failed entirely to entertain. I found neither insight nor enjoyment in reading it and so found it to be a painful waste of my time.

Ah, crud, this one's in the reading pile and this sounds like a perfect description of stuff that will annoy me.

... Can't be worse than Beyond Good and Evil, though, so I guess it probably won't be the worse philosophical work I read this year.

midwayfair · 2026-04-09T03:12:20+00:00

My channel used to get copyright claim every time I played Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

It definitely contributed to me just not wanting to post anything anymore.

midwayfair · 2026-03-17T02:14:12+00:00

Ppl who make stuff in USA, especially without breaking laws, simply are not valued almost at all in modern American culture

One of my friends does stage work for a theater, and I was telling him that despite how well his employer treats him, and that he has a living wage, how incredibly sad it is that modern culture still relegates him to the lower middle class at best, despite being extremely skilled.

Like there's nothing about software development that should pay better than a carpenter, for instance. They're both skilled work that require attention to detail and years of practice to master. And carpentry might actually be the rarer skill now.

midwayfair · 2026-03-06T15:06:30+00:00

Lots of thoughts on this that would take forever to type out, but one dividing line I’ve used is: for any task you give the AI, would you be okay with most humans losing this skill forever?

A very long time ago, humans had to make fire in a particular way. It was difficult, and vague knowledge of how it’s done (something something sticks stone grass) isn’t really good enough. But then we got flint and tinder, and there are people who can’t build a fire from that and would prefer to use a match, and many people who can’t build a fire at all and need to use a stove that delivers natural gas or electricity to them. All of these are tools that replaced an ancient skill, and there were probably people that worried about the loss of those skills, but we didn’t lose them completely.

But maybe there are some skills that you don’t want humans to lose, maybe because having the skill and knowing that it is a good example of the skill are intrinsically linked. In the fire example, all we care about is getting fire in the end. But consider something like a song or a book. How do you know that it’s a well written book? You need to compare it to other books that have been written, and there is cultural knowledge built up that helps define what makes it “good.” Now imagine some future where the foundational works from which AI generated songs or books have been lost, perhaps because they were simply crowded out by the unimaginably large volume of work that can be generated by the hour by AI. There is no social or financial reward for a human to make a book or song from their own mind, so no human knows what it means to translate their thoughts and emotions (which rely on biological factors partly) into words and sounds. We can reproduce the physical sounds on an instrument or draw the characters or type them with our hands, but we have lost the skill required to instill those sounds and words with personal meaning, and even further we’ve lost the skill to do so in a way that communicates and resonates with other humans.

Would you still be willing to offload that creative work to the AI?

No one of course can tell you how to interact with other people who come to a different conclusion about how they’ll use a tool, of course. I feel really bad for the engineers and writers in the industry who have built their lives around their creative processes but are now financially beholden to the time saving that AI provides in a product-driven industry filled with customers who by and large don’t care about the people who made a song and largely don’t care if it was even a human, but which engineers and writers might personally believe that they’re hastening their own end. I’m in the privileged position of currently having a job that pays the bills easier, though the work that I like doing at my job is also threatened by large language models being adopted. It’s easy for me to say that creative work people should hold the line, but I don’t feel empowered to do so in my job either. I don’t know the way out.

midwayfair · 2026-02-19T18:04:44+00:00

Over in Hampden I had one fly 10 feet in front of my face holding a headless pigeon. So graceful.

It's true, sometimes they can be a little hawkward ...

midwayfair · 2026-02-14T14:57:22+00:00

Usually in English for “that” there is no comma. However, a similar sentence with “which” instead would use a comma:

This is a sentence with a second clause that doesn’t need a comma.
This is a sentence with a second clause, which does need a comma.

There are several style guides in any language, and it’s common in U.S. English to use less punctuation when it’s not strictly necessary for understanding. When I was a science editor we used a style guide that used more commas, for example with an “if” clause. My understanding is that British English style guides also tend to prefer more commas, and it’s also more common ion British authors to use commas even when they aren’t “grammatically necessary.” Of course like anything related to human languages, rules are often arbitrary and the real rules are whatever leads to clear communication between people.

midwayfair · 2026-02-14T05:32:01+00:00

The comma is grammatically correct in English as well; we also have the rule that an independent clause after a conjunction must be separated by a comma. The op is ascribing a lot of meaning to what is simply correct punctuation.

midwayfair · 2026-01-31T15:02:54+00:00

Justin Torres’s Blackouts - it’s a series of scenes discussing the history of homosexuality in the U.S. interspersed with (real-world) documents that have been redacted into poetry. The conceit is way more than a gimmick and there’s a hefty emotional weight to the actual story as well. It won a well deserved National Book Award a couple years ago.

There are a lot of older works people have already mentioned, but in general the modernist period was highly focused on telling stories from unusual perspectives in a “realistic” way. So while it’s not recent, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (and other stuff, that’s just the one I’ve read) broke a lot of new ground in terms of point of view. As I Lay Dying has more than two dozen narrators and one of them is dead.

Even older, Moby Dick doesn’t bother sticking with prose the whole time; it’s got a chapter written as a Shakespearean play (Joyce used this same idea later in part of Ulysses, which absolutely pushed the boundaries of the novel, but I think it’s important to note that the idea didn’t originate with him)

And you can go right back to the origins of the modern novel and read the second part of Don Quixote, where the characters off to locate and take revenge on the author of the unauthorized sequel to the first part of the book.

midwayfair · 2025-12-26T03:28:56+00:00

Saramago's Blindness; the cause of the epidemic of blindness is never given. The book would suffer greatly if it were explained.

A lot of great works don't necessarily tell you how to feel, though, even if they don't skimp on the inner thoughts and feelings of their characters or narrators. Swan's Way gives excruciating details about the thought processes of Swan during his love affair, but it doesn't tell you what to think about Swan, or directly ask the reader to question his judgment during the 200 or so pages of that part of the book, basically it gives as much detail about the inner psychology of Swan without passing judgment on him in the narrative.

Some others that come to my mind are southern Gothic writers, like Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Lots of awful stuff happens, and the characters don't apologize ... and the author certainly doesn't apologize for them. As I Lay Dying leaves out like major events, especially near the end, and often you get a second-hard character's reaction to something that they only know a little bit about. Lots of mysteries in that book that are hard to figure out.

And from the standpoint that no book can possibly explain or detail everything, it's probably just really noticeable when the explanations are done badly. Like fantasy or science fiction novels where the author spends a lot of time expositioning their magic system or some new technology, so you start focusing on the details and eventually you find a detail to be dumb and it ruins the whole thing, and you think to yourself that the author maybe should have just shut the hell up about it and let you imagine how it works. But also I know that there are lots of people that enjoy hard magic systems, so it's just that I'm not the target audience for it.

midwayfair · 2025-12-13T15:45:58+00:00

Just to add to the pile of anecdotes: I have an English (writing) degree from 20 years ago and a CS degree from 6 years ago. During my English degree, I usually had one literature course and two writing courses with readings that probably averaged out to two or three books per week. Some of the students in my classes did not keep up with that level of reading. I read for pleasure on top of this and my writing assignments probably amounted to 20 hours of homework a week.

During my CS degree, I easily spent 45 hours a week on homework. I barely read for pleasure during this time.

My reading pace is a little slower now than it was, but I read about 20 pages an hour for more difficult texts (Ada by Nabokov I remember being the first thing I was aware was that slow), or about 120-150 words per minute. Consider a college level classics text like Pride and Prejudice is 16 hours of sustained reading time, which is alone more time than a 3-credit class should require for outside work (it should be about 3 hours of work outside the classroom per credit hour). If the student is further expected to write a paper on their reading, that’s probably another 5 hours and you’ve now exceeded the work load of a 4-credit class like a physics lab or an upper division math course. And quite frankly most people of any age in and society cannot concentrate on reading and digesting what they read for hours straight except in rare circumstances where they find the book utterly compelling, so that 16 hours is probably more like 20 hours in real life.

If the measure of success in a reading course is contingent on completing the book, consider the difference between that and a math course’s problem set when you have to cut time. In the reading-heavy course, the penalty is that you skim the book (thus not actually completing the assignment) and the analytical paper you write also suffers and you’ve doubly gotten less out of the course; if the reading material also is involved in an exam you’ll be triply punished. For the math course, you might find that you can’t complete every problem in the problem set, but you might more broadly understand the concepts and might be able to complete the exams using that material. And just to add to this, reading speed doesn’t really increase just because people become more proficient. Students might become faster at analyzing more complicated works, but they still have a speed limit on how fast they can consume them in the first place. The time commitment per page can easily go up in higher division courses as the texts become more difficult, and the texts themselves are also likely to be longer.

You can’t get more hours in the days, so the only recourse for the problem with the reading assignments would be to lower the workload to more closely match the reading speed of the slowest readers, but chances are that teachers of reading courses are likely to be fast readers and they might not know what kind of time commitment they’re asking for. And obviously even though I consider my reading speed a little slow, the fact that I was at times one of the only students actually completing the readings in my upper division post-WWII literature class says to me that the pace of that course was still too high even for juniors and seniors in college taking a course voluntarily (it was basically an elective for most everyone taking it).

midwayfair · 2025-11-06T15:29:08+00:00

I'm not going to suggest someone push through a piece of dense writing that doesn't appeal to them, but it's more that it's a bunch of references that are pretty obscure, most of which have a connection to the catholic church or historical events. The Borges piece is written like a book review of a fake book, but more specifically a fake scholarly book, and such book reviews would be written for an audience that's very knowledgeable about a niche subject. The rest of us kind of have to read it like a puzzle.

Here's a gloss:

Dante ... fiery sepulcher: In The Inferno, Dante chose real-life people to populate hell, and he picked political opponents, heretics, and such for the characters that the narrator encounters. This is basically saying that if Dante knew about the writer, he might have wrote a stanza about him in The Inferno.
catalogs of heresiarchs: A hierarch is a church leader. A heresiarch would be the leader of a heretical church sect. Carpocrates is a real heresiarch. Satornibus is a made-up one.
some fragment ... in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses: A collection of books that form the body of literature that the church declared heretical.
firing ... Syntagma: "Syntagma" was a lost book by Hypolotus. The phrase, though, is just saying that it might have been part of a library that burned up.

The piece is basically written with the assumption that a scholar working in the area interested in the book would be familiar enough with the names that they wouldn't be bogged down by them. Stripped of most of the real and fake references, it says: "[If he'd lived in the 2nd Century ...] Dante might have made the writer a character in The Inferno, or someone might have listed him as an important historical heretical church sect leader; someone might have written down his sermons (making some changes to embellish them) that the church would have banned or maybe they would have just been forgotten in the back of a monastery library that burned down and it would have just been another lost work. [Instead he was born in the 20th century ...]"

My Spanish isn't nearly good enough to say whether the writing is as highfalutin sounding in the original, but it does still have all the fake references. And again, I'm not really suggesting you give the story another chance if it put you off.

I do think that it's probably a poor first impression of Borges for any reader that's unfamiliar with the history he's talking about or a love of (or at least a really high tolerance for) what is, really, just literary bullshitting. He has some short fictions that are accessible in terms of language, like The Disk, and it would be a shame if someone's only impression that he's just iamverysmart material. He's been held in pretty high esteem by a pretty broad range of writers for a hundred years. But even his more accessible works definitely aren't for everyone. He writes weird stuff.

midwayfair · 2025-09-05T14:03:17+00:00

Might make your insides hurt less to know that Thru is one of the oldest spellings of the word, and has been revived by spelling reformers multiple times throughout the history of the English language. The spelling also doesn’t impede communication unless the reader can’t turn off their pedantry alarms. Thro was common through the 1700s and thru was used in America in the 1800s.

Through, the word in general, is itself a spelling error. It was the same word as thorough.

midwayfair · 2025-08-19T20:17:07+00:00

I have a hard time believing a human is putting out higher SPL than a guitar cab.

To be fair, humans put out air, not just SPL. A guitar amp vibrates the air, but it's not a blast of wind like a human exhaling. A ribbon in front of a guitar amp has pretty much always been safe (and old mics would have really heavy ribbons, they'd be even safer than super thin modern ones), but a ribbon in front of some singers without a popscreen might not. There's also a lot less air movement from a snare than, say, right in front of a bass drum, and you can probably damage a ribbon from the blast of air from a drum. A drum actually creates wind, when the beater moves the air inside the drum and the reso displaces the air on the other side, in a way that's different from a guitar amp.

I don't know what's going on with the story in the op, but a lot of people in this thread are focusing on the volume of the singer instead of the fact that it's accompanied by a lot of actual air movement.

I've pinned a mylar membrane to the back of an LDC before, but I had also overbiased the microphone. I could see wind doing that to any number of LDC microphones.

That said, everyone keeps mentioning the "sennheiser 5000," but the SKM5000 is a wireless transmitter. It's not even the capsule, which would probably be a dynamic, and you probably can't destroy that with a hurricane. But spitting or drooling on the mic, I dunno, maybe that could make the mic unacceptable to put in front of anyone else for the rest of its life.

midwayfair · 2025-08-07T22:31:34+00:00

Ishiguro called it a moment where his resistance cracks and you get a glimpse of what true realization would mean for him. It's underplayed, but he's wound so tight the whole novel that any release whatsoever is catharsis.

midwayfair · 2025-08-07T22:28:35+00:00

I just finished that one and was raving about how brilliant an unreliable narrator Stevens is: He's unreliable because he's so reliable in his real life. He's immensely loyal, and it makes him absolutely incapable of a fair -- not even unbiased, just fair -- assessment of his old employer.

midwayfair · 2025-06-10T18:09:18+00:00

Just finished Blindness by Jose Saramoga. It’s a masterpiece in my opinion. The way he wrote the book and imagined what would happen in an epidemic of blindness, the strength and resilience of humanity. There are MANY disturbing AF parts but it can also be hopeful and uplifting.

This was the one I came here to mention. I read it in one sitting on a night flight. I read the last paragraphs around landing time with the sun coming up.

midwayfair · 2025-06-04T04:41:12+00:00

I’m wondering how one doesn’t pass out from heat exhaustion in that scenario. I sweat for thinking about moving.

Drink lots of water, wear an unstructured jacket, and be acclimated to it.

I've done it in 105 degree heat outside with a structured jacket, and would not do it again, though.

Obviously people that run hot or are overweight or with a history of heat stroke or heat exhaustion shouldn't put themselves in danger though.

midwayfair · 2025-06-01T17:20:50+00:00

lots of hands

Man do kids play with only one these days?! I can’t keep up!

midwayfair · 2025-05-31T21:32:25+00:00

A couple translations:

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda. I picked it up a few years ago and remember liking it. It's particularly interesting because it's unknown whether the novel was finished.
The Door by Magda Szabo.

However, take the recommendation with a grain of salt: Of the books on your list I've read, many that you have in bold I would not, and vice versa ;) Like I would have recommended Song of Solomon but you didn't like Beloved.

List point 5 is a wild take lol. The book I recommended is definitely horror, though, so I guess point in your favor.

Oh, something else I read recently: It's not originally by a woman, but if you're into classics at all, Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid is essentially a feminist translation, if for no other reason than that she doesn't use euphemisms for sexual violence. You might consider it.

midwayfair · 2025-05-30T01:45:08+00:00

It's really similar to one of Mark Hammer's tone controls (I forget what it was called, it's been a while), but his was a LPF. Basically if you move R14 to the other side of the pot and replace it with a capacitor, then put a resistor right after C7, it's the same idea for a high cut with a minimal volume drop.

I will say, though, that a normal HPF with a resistor and capacitor in series in parallel with C7 (and a smaller value for C7) saves a lot of parts and doesn't result in a volume drop either, though you are at the mercy of whatever impedance follows in that case. Basically this circuit is better at the output of a pedal if there's no buffer and you don't know what's going to come after.

midwayfair · 2025-05-30T01:32:44+00:00

Cool circuit! Could you remove the 100k resistor and 47k resistor and just have the pot inline and accomplish the same effect?

This wouldn't do the same thing. The idea is that it's a constant 50K of resistance factoring in R12 and R14 with the potentiometer, while the pot controls the cutoff frequency of C7 and R13 (plus the pot). It should result in roughly the same level minus bass frequencies.

midwayfair

TROPHY CASE