Hi everyone! Welcome back to the frog pond. Set a spell.
I thought I’d begin with an Oblique Strategy that seems perfectly appropriate for the middle of the week, or really any time of a week, month, or phase of life:
https://twitter.com/dark_shark/status/1379601088664379392
Although the original deck of cards was developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt primarily as a means of breaking creative blocks experienced by musicians, I find them helpful as a non-musician. I’ve never seen any of the original decks that were printed in the 1970s (if you can find them, they fetch a high price), but I’ve seen versions of Oblique Strategies pretty much since the start of the Worldwide Web back in the 1990s. I think I saw the first random Oblique Strategies generator online around 1996 or 1997. That website of course is long gone. Turned out to be useful as I worked to complete a graduate program.
A friend of mine created a shiny app of the Oblique Strategies right before 2020, and highly recommend it. The interface is very minimalistic, which is ideal from my vantage point.
Anyway, I just thought I’d share just a bit more of what makes your friendly neighborhood Cafe/Lounge host tick. I’ve been an Eno fan since I purchased my first David Bowie LP (Lodger) back around the start of 1980, and I’d learn about Oblique Strategies a little bit later. Enjoy your favorite beverage, and if you’re in a bit of a creative jam, draw an Oblique Strategy and see where it leads.
The bar is open, and the jukebox is working. Stay safe and stay well.
Cheers!
I notice that a number of related posts to the most recent posts go back to near the beginning of the Booman Tribune. I had forgotten that there was a BooBooks Book Club back in 2005. There were quite a few community experiments back in the day. It’s always great to look back and remember some of the cool people I got to encounter on the predecessor to this blog. I am far richer for having known them. Until we meet again.
What are some good books that you’d recommend?
I tend to enjoy mysteries and oral histories (including fiction that reads like oral history). At the top of my list for mysteries is the original Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest). There are quite a number of characters and story lines to keep straight, but the care put into all of the detail of the characters’ psychology, the surroundings, etc. is impressive. The story arc benefits from being written by a journalist who had some genuine expertise in right-wing extremist movements, organized crime, and human trafficking, and who understood how economic and political systems could create real damage to real people. Plus the protagonist is genuinely kickass. When there is action, there’s a lot of it. I also enjoy Max Brooks’ World War Z. It was worth a re-read at the beginning of the pandemic. It reads like an oral history of a zombie pandemic, and what would be required to deal with it, and all the ways governments and individuals would fail along the way. I tend to like to read fiction that’s a bit on the dark side.
In the way of non-fiction, I probably have my share of recommendations as well. I’m a bit of a minor-league polymath (in other words, I’d most likely lose during an audition to appear on Jeopardy), so I tend to get obsessed with a topic for a while, read what I can on it when I have some spare time (or what I delude myself into believing is spare time), get enough of a feel for the topic and move on to something else. But there is a constant in a lot of my non-fiction reading: in some way most of it is connected to the social sciences.
One book I would recommend to just about anyone who is a parent, especially if their kids are gamers (all of mine are) is Moral Combat by Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson. The book’s topic is video games with violent content (the authors refer to them as action games), and it takes as its thesis that much of our research on violent video games, as well as public policy, is driven by moral panic. The authors spend considerable time defining the concept of moral panic, and give earlier examples of moral panics for context. They offer a fairly extensive history of video games in general, including the improvements in graphics over the last few decades. And then they go on and work their way through the research. And while they really go into the weeds, they both write in a very conversational tone. They also offer some guidance for parents, as well as identify some areas where game play might or might not be problematic. It was a book that once I picked up, I had a difficult time putting it down. It was published in 2017, so it’s still contemporary enough.
Another Oblique Strategy:
https://twitter.com/dark_shark/status/1379958071657594881