📖 Reading – 2021

Books here are only listed if I’ve completed them; recommended titles are in bold.

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The Psychology of Money
Anxious People
The Midnight Library
Look Alive Out There
The Space Between Us
The Secrets Between Us
No Filter
Interior Chinatown
Bark
Goodbye Things
Klara and The Sun
26 Marathons
From The Belly of the Cat
The Happy Runner
Fashionopolis
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Boundless
Nomadland
Think Again
Running: Cheaper Than Therapy: A Celebration of Running
The Tyranny of Merit
Killing Commendatore
Kicksology
Lost Connections
Heaven
Anthro-vision
Simply Invest
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The Great Indoors
Did You Ever Have a Family?
Land of Big Numbers
At Home
Spy Family
The Practice of Not Thinking
Four Thousand Weeks
Practical Magic
The Book of Form and Emptiness
Up Close with Lee Kuan Yew
Blockchain Chicken Farm
How to Do Nothing

Total:
41 books: 16 fiction

đŸ“ș Some things I’ve watched – 2021

Pretend It’s A City
Bling Empire
Bridgerton
Tiong Bahru Social Club
Cecil Hotel
Call My Agent
Vincenzo
èż·é›ąć€œ
WeWork
WandaVision
Friends reruns
Handmaid’s Tale S4
The Practice rerun
Boston Legal
Shang Chi
The Big Leap
Grey’s Anatomy
Squid Game
Sing China
The Royal House of Windsor
Light the Night
Criminal Minds (SS 14 & 15)
Spiderman: No Way Home

I would recommend those in bold. Seems like nostalgia and crime rule this year.

📖 Snow Crash

“This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
―
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash

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This book has never gotten on my radar. It is pretty cool that a book published in the early 90s speaks of augmented / virtual reality, a metaverse, and a virus pandemic that ties physical illness to a change in the brain structure. Is this caused by a virus, a drug or religion? Eerily relevant and still readable in 2021. The book abruptly speeds up towards the end, but overall, still a gripping book. Cyberpunk is quite a fun genre.

📖 How to Do Nothing

Repression is not silence, and is not “repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent and critique banal and ridiculous.”

Context collapse

“Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we’re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context.”

“In the last chapter, I try to imagine a utopian social network that could somehow hold all of this. I use the lens of the human bodily need for spatial and temporal context to understand the violence of “context collapse” online and propose a kind of “context collection” in its place. Understanding that meaningful ideas require incubation time and space, I look both to noncommercial decentralized networks and the continued importance of private communication and in-person meetings. I suggest that we withdraw our attention and use it instead to restore the biological and cultural ecosystems where we forge meaningful identities, both individual and collective.”
―
Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing

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The book meanders along in its own way, is not really trying to tell you how to do nothing, and instead examines how we have let the capitalist manager’s ideas of productivity taken over our attention. The book has somewhat of a misleading title or perhaps it is meant to attract attention. Odell does not mean for you to do nothing. Because if you withdraw entirely from society, you cannot make change or make things better for yourself. What Odell means by doing nothing is to disengage from attention economy, and engage in another framework e.g. speak to friends in person, engage in community, go take a walk and develop a sense of place. (She talks quite a lot about birds and birdwatching, which may or may not interest you.)

I especially appreciate the reminder that repression need not be by way of disallowing speech. Because living in this day and age, we know that by setting chatter atwitter, you can block discussion, create fatigue
 It made me reconsider what I choose to read (Twitter, RSS, Reddit), and whether I have unwittingly withdrew too much. Perhaps this book started me back on keeping a blog.

đŸ“» A note on Spotify

I’ve switched back to using Spotify. For the past two years, I was using Apple Music (AM). This was because I wanted to be able to play music on my Apple Watch (AW) while I went on my runs, without having to bring my phone out.

AM has the most beautiful app, and has most of the songs you may want to listen to. But among music apps (I loved Xiami too), AM is simply not good at discovery / recommendation.

If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have expected it to take two years for Apple and Spotify to sort out the AW functionality for music on-the-go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I was checking for updates on this issue every few months.

PS. There is an iOS app called Songshift that one can use to transfer playlists between different services.

Links from the past weeks

  • An economic history of restaurants
    “Nor were they destinations predominantly for the well-heeled. Before the use of coal became widespread in England in the 17th century, preparing food at home involved spending a lot on wood or peat. Professional kitchens, by contrast, benefited from economies of scale in energy consumption and so could provide meals at a lower cost than people could themselves. Today dining out is seen as an indulgence, but it was the cheapest way to eat for most of human history.”

    An interesting titbit (no, I don’t spell it as tidbit) and a reminder that things change and change.


  • Singapore and its history of adjusting its clock is captured in this piece titled “Why is Singapore in the “Wrong” Time Zone?”

    I wondered about whether it would be better or worse if 7 pm were 7.30 pm instead. Does it matter to me/ my brain/ my body if I see more light than I see now when the clock says 7 pm? Don’t we just adapt?


  • In the works for years, a suicide machine will soon be tested in Switzerland
    If you had asked me, when I was a young(er), more idealistic 20-year-old, whether assisted suicide will be legalised in 20 years, I may not have been able to imagine that this is still something to fight for.


  • I’ve Accidentally Become A Strava Stalker
    Strava stalking is a thing.


  • The Beatles: Get Back and the Arrogant, Tragic Genius of Paul McCartney’s Leadership
    Who knows what really went on, but I imagine that fame and fortune is a great distorter of reality. Is Paul the only one who comes out looking good? We sang along, and made playlists on Spotify.


  • Because of Loh Kean Yew, Singapore is very interested in badminton these days. I have not been keeping track and so had to go find out more about the ranking system and the World Tour concept. I loved looking at the BWF statutes.