Reviews and Comments

Nice short read, crossing boundaries between the analytical and the existential. Was looking for something chess-related and this itched that scratch, but also was very emotional. People pour themselves over the board given the right circumstances.

The end stuck the landing really well on this one. Liked it a lot for very early Pynchon - you could really feel the formulations of ideas used with his later works, albeit these are a bit more scattery.

“ Let me interject for a moment - What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is

Lots of great ruminations on history and rich visuals of perceived landscapes of time, and how people graft themselves to different arrangements of time or try and transcend them. I’m liking the surging back in and out of scenes with The Whole Sick Crew a lot.

Finally finished Thomas Nail's 'Lucretius' series.

For my next read I want to apply some of the ideas around kinetic materialism, pedesis, and mostly what he calls out (via Lucretian thought) as Western history's hatred of motion and fear of death. I'll be doing this through a reading of Tarnas' 'The Passion of the Western Mind'.

I think this will be an interesting exercise.

Really great follow up to the first book. I enjoyed reading this so much, its finally some materialist thinking that I can really get behind more holistically.

Excited to read the final book in the series now.