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nickfourtimes's reviews
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The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
dark
mysterious
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
1) "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity–but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it."
2) "John is a physician, and PERHAPS–(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)–PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster."
3) "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off–the paper–in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."
4) "There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to."
5) "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will."
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity–but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it."
2) "John is a physician, and PERHAPS–(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)–PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster."
3) "It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off–the paper–in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."
4) "There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,–the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess.
I don't know why I should write this.
I don't want to."
5) "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will."
Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
3.0
1) "The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are.
When you ride a bicycle, you're airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself.
Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike's wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You're in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky."
2) "A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: 'Two wheels good, four wheels bad.' It's a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists."
3) "The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user's legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider's body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. 'The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,' Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais's intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future."
4) "There have been many innovations in bicycle design and construction since the arrival of the safety bike. Derailleurs, disc brakes, titanium and carbon-fiber frames—innumerable new components and building materials have appeared on the scene. Whole new genres of bikes have come into the world. There are collapsible bikes that fold on hinges so you can carry them around like a backpack or briefcase; there are bicycle designs that you can download on open-source websites and print out on a 3D printer. But the basic shape, the classic safety bicycle silhouette, remains and reigns. Lewis Mumford wrote: 'In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, 'eternal.'' Mumford had in mind such things as the safety pin and the drinking bowl, whose antiquity would seem to justify the heady designation 'eternal.' In historical terms, the bicycle is a new thing, but its form feels as fundamental and inviolable as any pin or bowl or Grecian urn."
5) "[Excerpt: The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1896]
The bicycle has appeared in a new role—that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison [...who was] married to Charles H. Dennison in 1892. At that time she devoted herself to household duties which were soon increased by the arrival of two pretty children.
Then, in an evil hour, Mr. Dennison presented his wife with a bicycle. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything her home, her children, and her husband. She lived only for her wheel, and on it. Soon she changed her bicycle for a man's wheel; then she discarded her skirts and adopted bloomers."
6) "As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. 'The feeling that you get when you're riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,' shering said. 'My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.'"
7) "The CEVIS [Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System] does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA's bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. ('Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!' wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all."
8) "There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976.
BILL: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it's not really a triathlon bike. It's a touring bike.
BARB: We'll probably never ride them again, but I don't think we'd ever get rid of them.
BILL: They're museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they'd ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years."
9) "Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies."
When you ride a bicycle, you're airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself.
Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike's wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You're in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky."
2) "A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: 'Two wheels good, four wheels bad.' It's a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists."
3) "The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user's legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider's body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. 'The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,' Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais's intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future."
4) "There have been many innovations in bicycle design and construction since the arrival of the safety bike. Derailleurs, disc brakes, titanium and carbon-fiber frames—innumerable new components and building materials have appeared on the scene. Whole new genres of bikes have come into the world. There are collapsible bikes that fold on hinges so you can carry them around like a backpack or briefcase; there are bicycle designs that you can download on open-source websites and print out on a 3D printer. But the basic shape, the classic safety bicycle silhouette, remains and reigns. Lewis Mumford wrote: 'In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, 'eternal.'' Mumford had in mind such things as the safety pin and the drinking bowl, whose antiquity would seem to justify the heady designation 'eternal.' In historical terms, the bicycle is a new thing, but its form feels as fundamental and inviolable as any pin or bowl or Grecian urn."
5) "[Excerpt: The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1896]
The bicycle has appeared in a new role—that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison [...who was] married to Charles H. Dennison in 1892. At that time she devoted herself to household duties which were soon increased by the arrival of two pretty children.
Then, in an evil hour, Mr. Dennison presented his wife with a bicycle. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything her home, her children, and her husband. She lived only for her wheel, and on it. Soon she changed her bicycle for a man's wheel; then she discarded her skirts and adopted bloomers."
6) "As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. 'The feeling that you get when you're riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,' shering said. 'My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.'"
7) "The CEVIS [Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System] does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA's bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. ('Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!' wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all."
8) "There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976.
BILL: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it's not really a triathlon bike. It's a touring bike.
BARB: We'll probably never ride them again, but I don't think we'd ever get rid of them.
BILL: They're museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they'd ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years."
9) "Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies."
GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
3.0
1) "The Stamper brothers' talent had shined from an early age. Chris started tinkering with electronics as a young boy and eventually built his own computer in college. He got his first programming job—in arcade games—before he had even graduated. Meanwhile, Tim brought to the table an artistic eye and a knack for graphic design. Uncanny business sense combined with excellent creative instincts and big dreams had led the Stamper brothers to enormous success in their earliest days as a company, when they produced games under the trading name 'Ultimate Play the Game,' chosen because, in Tim's words, 'it was representative of our products: the ultimate games.'
In May 1983, Ultimate's very first release—a 2D shooting platformer called Jetpac—hit it big on the ZX Spectrum home computer, selling 300,000 copies. Considering about one million people owned a Spectrum at the time, this was, in Chris's words, 'incredible penetration for a single product.' The Stampers worked insane hours to make this happen—eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. In fact, they only took off two days from work over the course of three years—both Christmas mornings."
2) "Brosnan's Bond was more technological than Dalton's or Craig's Bonds, and in GoldenEye, the bad guys weaponize information and surveillance technology, like Trevelyan's satellite or his security cameras in the bunker. It's no accident that you spend so much time in the game blowing up cameras and computers, the new enemies of the era.
On the flipside, technical knowledge—like Natalya's computer expertise and the datathiefs and covert modems Bond uses to steal information in the game—proved particularly powerful in 1995. In this way, GoldenEye addressed concerns like, according to academic Martin Willis: 'What place is there for the human in an increasingly technological world? What power will technology wield in the future? What impact will global information and communication networks have on the continued prosperity of the nation-state?' Bond's bungee leap off the dam at the start of the film and game might as well be him diving into the unknown modern world. This tech dive persists until, in the final Brosnan film, Bond drives an invisible car like a superhero."
3) "Hollis told me that he based the delayed watch pause on the same four principles he always uses when making games: Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it self-consistent in the world of the game? and Is it fair?, meaning: 'When you die does it feel like it was your fault?' 'It doesn't have to seem fair straight away,' he told me. 'Sometimes I think it is okay if the player has to spend time and come to a realization that the game rule is fair. As one example, the random placement of the scientists in the gas plant push this rule a lot, but it is okay to play with the rules a little bit I think, and to worry the player on the hardest difficulty. The pause menu delay is highly unconventional, and is definitely pushing the issue of fairness. But once you know the rule, it does always feel like your fault when you die in that moment. You can imagine the game speaking to you softly, saying, 'You should not have paused then.'"
4) "The game's most controversial weapons weren't any of the powerful guns or the massive grenade launcher but rather the knives. The game's throwing knives inflicted a huge amount of damage in total silence and could be picked up and used again. 'We have throwing knives in the game because they're hilarious,' Doak told me, even though they aren't very Bondian per se. 'They were very nearly cut at the last moment because there was a tragic murder in Japan' involving a hunting knife, Doak added. The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant 'too much murder in the close distance'—an explanation that tickled the team. 'We just loved that phrase,' Doak told me, laughing. 'It became a phrase we would use. Murder in the far distance is great—knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance.'"
5) "The most famous of GoldenEye's scrapped design elements remains visible to players. The Dam mission is home to one of the game's most tantalizing mysteries—a distant island viewable through the sniper rifle's scope, impossible to get to but so seemingly intentional that it left a generation of gamers wondering. Botwood and Edmonds said they had originally been planning to add a boat that would allow you to get to the island to complete a mission objective.
'If I did it today I'd probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond's [bungee] jump there, so you'd have to go there to turn off the water,' Botwood speculated later. 'I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.' Late in development, it was way more difficult to take something like the island out than to just leave it in, Hilton told me.
Looking back on it now, Botwood considers the island a mistake. 'I should have never put it there,' he told me. 'It's a visual annoyance.' But messy things like the island add to GoldenEye's mythology—they add life to the world and give players something to theorize about, and are some of the best examples of the handcrafted quality of the game."
6) "The best example of how the team's inexperience benefited the final product is in their 'backwards' or 'anti' game design process. Today, much of the advice on FPS design says to start with objectives and work backward from there—tailor your level spaces to your objectives instead of building level architecture with no idea what will happen within that architecture.
Instead, the team designed GoldenEye backwards—levels first and objectives second. When Hilton created the level spaces, he paid little to no attention to the player's starting place, exit point, mission objectives, or enemy location. All of that came later, with Doak and Botwood's work.
'The benefit of this sloppy, unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel,' Hollis has said. 'There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.'"
7) "After the cheats and bonus levels were added and GoldenEye was tested and scoured for bugs, it went through 'lot check,' a two-week process of playing the game to death on various types of televisions. In these final days, testers reported back a fairly serious problem: on one of the levels, (probably Frigate), if you played it in a certain order, the characters would appear with awful-looking textures due to a glitch in the game's dynamic memory system. In a single day, Hollis had to make a few particularly clever last-minute hacks to the ROM that would get it working with as minimal a touch as possible to the game's code. With that final eleventh-hour adjustment made, and without recompiling anything, Hollis sent the ROM back to Nintendo. GoldenEye was finally finished."
8) "In the end, the reimagining's updates only reveal what made the original so special. The 2010 game's shift from 'slappers only' to 'melee only' 'is almost the same [as the original],' one reviewer noted, 'but perhaps not as hilarious at three in the morning with three other slightly inebriated chums.' GoldenEye's goofiness—its messiness, even—is lost in a game as slick as the 2010 GoldenEye.
The Daniel Craig stunt double and martial arts expert who did all the 2010 game's motion-capture acting contrasted sharply with Duncan Botwood in a smelly suit getting beat up by sweet British nerds. But 'bigger' isn't always better. You can feel it as you play the two: the 2010 GoldenEye was created by a corporation, and GoldenEye by human beings."
In May 1983, Ultimate's very first release—a 2D shooting platformer called Jetpac—hit it big on the ZX Spectrum home computer, selling 300,000 copies. Considering about one million people owned a Spectrum at the time, this was, in Chris's words, 'incredible penetration for a single product.' The Stampers worked insane hours to make this happen—eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. In fact, they only took off two days from work over the course of three years—both Christmas mornings."
2) "Brosnan's Bond was more technological than Dalton's or Craig's Bonds, and in GoldenEye, the bad guys weaponize information and surveillance technology, like Trevelyan's satellite or his security cameras in the bunker. It's no accident that you spend so much time in the game blowing up cameras and computers, the new enemies of the era.
On the flipside, technical knowledge—like Natalya's computer expertise and the datathiefs and covert modems Bond uses to steal information in the game—proved particularly powerful in 1995. In this way, GoldenEye addressed concerns like, according to academic Martin Willis: 'What place is there for the human in an increasingly technological world? What power will technology wield in the future? What impact will global information and communication networks have on the continued prosperity of the nation-state?' Bond's bungee leap off the dam at the start of the film and game might as well be him diving into the unknown modern world. This tech dive persists until, in the final Brosnan film, Bond drives an invisible car like a superhero."
3) "Hollis told me that he based the delayed watch pause on the same four principles he always uses when making games: Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it self-consistent in the world of the game? and Is it fair?, meaning: 'When you die does it feel like it was your fault?' 'It doesn't have to seem fair straight away,' he told me. 'Sometimes I think it is okay if the player has to spend time and come to a realization that the game rule is fair. As one example, the random placement of the scientists in the gas plant push this rule a lot, but it is okay to play with the rules a little bit I think, and to worry the player on the hardest difficulty. The pause menu delay is highly unconventional, and is definitely pushing the issue of fairness. But once you know the rule, it does always feel like your fault when you die in that moment. You can imagine the game speaking to you softly, saying, 'You should not have paused then.'"
4) "The game's most controversial weapons weren't any of the powerful guns or the massive grenade launcher but rather the knives. The game's throwing knives inflicted a huge amount of damage in total silence and could be picked up and used again. 'We have throwing knives in the game because they're hilarious,' Doak told me, even though they aren't very Bondian per se. 'They were very nearly cut at the last moment because there was a tragic murder in Japan' involving a hunting knife, Doak added. The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant 'too much murder in the close distance'—an explanation that tickled the team. 'We just loved that phrase,' Doak told me, laughing. 'It became a phrase we would use. Murder in the far distance is great—knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance.'"
5) "The most famous of GoldenEye's scrapped design elements remains visible to players. The Dam mission is home to one of the game's most tantalizing mysteries—a distant island viewable through the sniper rifle's scope, impossible to get to but so seemingly intentional that it left a generation of gamers wondering. Botwood and Edmonds said they had originally been planning to add a boat that would allow you to get to the island to complete a mission objective.
'If I did it today I'd probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond's [bungee] jump there, so you'd have to go there to turn off the water,' Botwood speculated later. 'I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.' Late in development, it was way more difficult to take something like the island out than to just leave it in, Hilton told me.
Looking back on it now, Botwood considers the island a mistake. 'I should have never put it there,' he told me. 'It's a visual annoyance.' But messy things like the island add to GoldenEye's mythology—they add life to the world and give players something to theorize about, and are some of the best examples of the handcrafted quality of the game."
6) "The best example of how the team's inexperience benefited the final product is in their 'backwards' or 'anti' game design process. Today, much of the advice on FPS design says to start with objectives and work backward from there—tailor your level spaces to your objectives instead of building level architecture with no idea what will happen within that architecture.
Instead, the team designed GoldenEye backwards—levels first and objectives second. When Hilton created the level spaces, he paid little to no attention to the player's starting place, exit point, mission objectives, or enemy location. All of that came later, with Doak and Botwood's work.
'The benefit of this sloppy, unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel,' Hollis has said. 'There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.'"
7) "After the cheats and bonus levels were added and GoldenEye was tested and scoured for bugs, it went through 'lot check,' a two-week process of playing the game to death on various types of televisions. In these final days, testers reported back a fairly serious problem: on one of the levels, (probably Frigate), if you played it in a certain order, the characters would appear with awful-looking textures due to a glitch in the game's dynamic memory system. In a single day, Hollis had to make a few particularly clever last-minute hacks to the ROM that would get it working with as minimal a touch as possible to the game's code. With that final eleventh-hour adjustment made, and without recompiling anything, Hollis sent the ROM back to Nintendo. GoldenEye was finally finished."
8) "In the end, the reimagining's updates only reveal what made the original so special. The 2010 game's shift from 'slappers only' to 'melee only' 'is almost the same [as the original],' one reviewer noted, 'but perhaps not as hilarious at three in the morning with three other slightly inebriated chums.' GoldenEye's goofiness—its messiness, even—is lost in a game as slick as the 2010 GoldenEye.
The Daniel Craig stunt double and martial arts expert who did all the 2010 game's motion-capture acting contrasted sharply with Duncan Botwood in a smelly suit getting beat up by sweet British nerds. But 'bigger' isn't always better. You can feel it as you play the two: the 2010 GoldenEye was created by a corporation, and GoldenEye by human beings."
Wonderbook (Revised and Expanded): The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer
inspiring
medium-paced
3.0
1) [From "What Is/What If: The Beauty of Mystery, by Karen Lord]
"Fiction is both process and mystery, knowledge and imagination. It lies somewhere on a spectrum that begins with poetry and ends with statistics. It is art. It takes the forms and shapes of the real world and re-views them with new perception: the shade, texture, and weight of the subconscious and the unreal."
2) "All of these approaches are valid, depending on context, and each can achieve interesting artistic effects."
3) "As indicated, each of these approaches can work, as long as they don't represent a failure of control or thought. So much depends on the proper execution of your intent."
4) [George RR Martin on magic]
"[If] you're going to have magic in your story, you have to keep it magical, so to speak. This is a supernatural element. It doesn't follow the laws of nature. It doesn't follow any laws we understand. There's something frightening about it. This is the unknowable. I think magic should be handled that way. Magic should always remain a little mysterious and a little dangerous.
[...] Don't just make it fake science."
"Fiction is both process and mystery, knowledge and imagination. It lies somewhere on a spectrum that begins with poetry and ends with statistics. It is art. It takes the forms and shapes of the real world and re-views them with new perception: the shade, texture, and weight of the subconscious and the unreal."
2) "All of these approaches are valid, depending on context, and each can achieve interesting artistic effects."
3) "As indicated, each of these approaches can work, as long as they don't represent a failure of control or thought. So much depends on the proper execution of your intent."
4) [George RR Martin on magic]
"[If] you're going to have magic in your story, you have to keep it magical, so to speak. This is a supernatural element. It doesn't follow the laws of nature. It doesn't follow any laws we understand. There's something frightening about it. This is the unknowable. I think magic should be handled that way. Magic should always remain a little mysterious and a little dangerous.
[...] Don't just make it fake science."
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour A. Papert
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
1) "If people believe firmly enough that they cannot do math, they will usually succeed in preventing themselves from doing whatever they recognize as math. The consequences of such self-sabotage is personal failure, and each failure reinforces the original belief. And such beliefs may be most insidious when held not only by individuals but by our entire culture."
2) "One day I was surprised to discover that some adults—even most adults—did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears. I no longer think much about gears, but I have never turned away from the questions that started with that discovery: How could what was so simple for me be incomprehensible to other people? My proud father suggested 'being clever' as an explanation. But I was painfully aware that some people who could not understand the differential could easily do things I found much more difficult. Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult."
3) "In many schools today, the phrase 'computer-aided instruction' means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building."
4) "Thus this book is really about how a culture, a way of thinking, an idea comes to inhabit a young mind. I am suspicious of thinking about such problems too abstractly, and I shall write here with particular restricted focus. I shall in fact concentrate on those ways of thinking that I know best. I begin by looking at what I know about my own development. I do this in all humility, without any implication that what I have become is what everyone should become. But I think that the best way to understand learning is first to understand specific, well-chosen cases and then to worry afterward about how to generalize from this understanding. You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something."
5) "What is happening now is an empirical question. What can happen is a technical question. But what will happen is a political question, depending on social choices."
6) "The ethic of school has rubbed off too well. What we see as a good program with a small bug, the child sees as 'wrong,' 'bad,' 'a mistake.' School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is to pore over them, dwell on them, or think about them. The child is glad to take advantage of the computer's ability to erase it all without any trace for anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it."
7) "Imagine a microworld in which things can be ordered but have no other properties. The knowledge of how to work the world is, in terms of the Bourbaki school, the mother structure of order. A second microworld allows relations of proximity, and this is the mother structure of topology. A third has to do with combining entities to produce new entities; this is the algebraic microstructure. The Bourbaki school's unification of mathematics is achieved by seeing more complex structures, such as arithmetic, as combinations of simpler structures of which the most important are the three mother structures."
8) "The emergence of motion pictures as a new art form went hand in hand with the emergence of a new subculture, a new set of professions made up of people whose skills, sensitivities, and philosophies of life were unlike anything that had existed before. The story of the evolution of the world of movies is inseparable from the story of the evolution of the communities of people. Similarly, a new world of personal computing is about to come into being, and its history will be inseparable from the story of the people who will make it."
9) "In 1964 I moved from one world to another. For the previous five years I had lived in Alpine villages near Geneva, Switzerland, where I worked with Jean Piaget. The focus of my attention was on children, on the nature of thinking, and on how children become thinkers. I moved to MIT into an urban world of cybernetics and computers. My attention was still focused on the nature of thinking, but now my immediate concerns were with the problem of artificial intelligence: How to make machines that think?
Two worlds could hardly be more different. But I made the transition because I believed that my new world of machines could provide a perspective that might lead to solutions to problems that had eluded us in the old world of children. Looking back I see that the cross-fertilization has brought benefits in both directions. For several years now Marvin Minsky and I have been working on a general theory of intelligence (called 'The Society Theory of Mind') which has emerged from a strategy of thinking simultaneously about how children do and how computers might think."
Aramis, or the Love of Technology by Bruno Latour
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
1) "Can we unravel the tortuous history of a state-of-the-art technology from beginning to end, as a lesson to the engineers, decisionmakers, and users whose daily lives, for better or for worse, depend on such technology? Can we make the human sciences capable of comprehending the machines they view as inhuman, and thus reconcile the educated public with bodies it deems foreign to the social realm? Finally, can we turn a technological object into the central character of a narrative, restoring to literature the vast territories it should never have given up namely, science and technology?
Three questions, a single case study in scientifiction."
2) "'You see, my friend, how precise and sophisticated our informants are,' Norbert commented as he reorganized his notecards. 'They talk about Oedipus and about proximate causes... They know everything. They're doing our sociology for us, and doing it better than we can; it's not worth the trouble to do more. You see? Our job is a cinch. We just follow the players. They all agree, in the end, about the death of Aramis. They blame each other, of course, but they speak with one voice: the proximate cause of death is of no interest-it's just a final blow, a last straw, a ripe fruit, a mere consequence. As M. Girard said so magnificently, 'It was built right into the nature of things.' There's no point in deciding who finally killed Aramis. It was a collective assassination. An abandonment, rather. It's useless to get bogged down concentrating on the final phase. What we have to do is see who built those 'things' in, and into what 'natures.' We're going to have to go back to the beginning of the project, to the remote causes. And remember, this business went on for seventeen years.'"
3) "In the beginning, there is no distinction between projects and objects. The two circulate from office to office in the form of paper, plans, departmental memos, speeches, scale models, and occasional synopses. Here we're in the realm of signs, language, texts. In the end, people, after they leave their offices, are the ones who circulate inside the object. A Copernican revolution. A gulf opens up between the world of signs and the world of things. The R-312 is no longer a novel that carries me away in transports of delight; it's a bus that transports me away from the boulevard Saint-Michel. The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the nature of things."
4) "The difference between dreams and reality is variable. The guy who spray-paints his innermost feelings on the white walls of the Pigalle metro station may be rebelling against the drab reality of the stations, the cars, the tracks, and the surveillance cameras. His dreams seem to him to be infinitely remote from the harsh truth of the stations, and that's why he signs his name in rage on the white ceramic tiles. The chief engineer who dreams of a speedier metro likewise crosses out plans according to his moods. But if the AT-2000 had been developed, his dream would have become the other's world."
5) "A technological project is neither realistic nor unrealistic; it takes on reality, or loses it, by degrees.
After the Orly phase, called Phase 0, Aramis is merely 'realizable'; it is not yet 'real.' You can't use the word 'real' for a nonfailsafe 1.5-kilometer test track that transports engineers from one beet field to another. For this 'engineers' dream' to continue to be realized, other elements have to be added. So can we say that nothing is really real? No. But anything can become more real or less real, depending on the continuous chains of translation. It's essential to continue to generate interest, to seduce, to translate interests. You can't ever stop becoming more real. After the Orly phase, nothing is over, nothing is settled. It's still possible to get along without Aramis. The whole world is still getting along without Aramis."
6) "The time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar.
The history of Aramis spreads out over eighteen years. Is that a long time, or a short one? Is it too long, or not long enough? That depends. On what? On the work of alliance and translation. Eighteen years is awfully short for a radical innovation that has to modify the behavior of the RATP, Matra, chips, passengers, local officials, variable-reluctance motors— what an appropriate name! Eighteen years is awfully long it the project is dropped every three or four years, if Matra periodically loses interest, if the RATP only believes in it sporadically, if officials don't get excited about it, if microprocessors get involved only at arm's length, if the variable-reluctance motor is reluctant to push the cars. Time really drags."
7) "'Why do we do the sociology and history of technology,' asked my mentor Norbert, with tears in his eyes, 'when the people we interview are such good sociologists, such good historians? There's nothing to add. It's all there. 'Built into the nature of things: there you have it-technology! Insert, engrave, inscribe things within, inside, right in the middle, of nature and they flow on their own, they flow from the source, they become automatic. Give me the remote causes let's go back to the mainsprings of the tragedy give me Matra, the Communists, the Right, the Left, the mayor of Paris, the traitorous technicians; let's put them on stage in 1984... and in 1987, here comes the death blow. An implacable clockwork is operating before our very eyes. And it's he, the company head, who inscribes, who engraves, these things in nature. He himself machine-tools the fatum that is going to bring the plot to its conclusion with no surprises; he's the deus ex machina, the god of machines. Enshrine the interviews and shut up-that's the only role for a good sociologist.'"
Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents. by Octavia E. Butler
adventurous
dark
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
1) "All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change.
EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING"
2) "For whatever it's worth, here's what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right—just the way it has to be. In the past year, it's gone through twenty-five or thirty lumpy, incoherent rewrites. This is the right one, the true one. This is the one I keep coming back to:
God is Power—
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable—
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.
This is the literal truth."
3) "Sometimes naming a thing—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it. The particular God-is-Change belief system that seems right to me will be called Earthseed. I've tried to name it before. Failing that, I've tried to leave it unnamed. Neither effort has made me comfortable. Name plus purpose equals focus for me. Well, today, I found the name, found it while I was weeding the back garden and thinking about the way plants seed themselves, windborne, animalborne, waterborne, far from their parent plants. They have no ability at all to travel great distances under their own power, and yet, they do travel. Even they don't have to just sit in one place and wait to be wiped out. There are islands thousands of miles from anywhere—the Hawaiian Islands, for example, and Easter Island—where plants seeded themselves and grew long before any humans arrived.
Earthseed.
I am Earthseed. Anyone can be. Someday, I think there will be a lot of us. And I think we'll have to seed ourselves farther and farther from this dying place."
4) "I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as 'the Apocalypse' or more commonly, more bitterly, 'the Pox' lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended."
5) "Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of 'heathen houses of devil-worship,' he has a simple answer: 'Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.'"
6) "Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life.
Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live."
7) "'We need the stars, Bankole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we're to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That's why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don't want to hear verses right now, but that one is... a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.'"
8) "Dreamasks—also known as head cages, dream books, or simply, Masks—were new then, and were beginning to edge out some of the virtual-reality stuff. Even the early ones were cheap—big ski-mask-like devices with goggles over the eyes. Wearing them made people look not-quite-human. But the masks made computer-stimulated and guided dreams available to the public, and people loved them. Dreamasks were related to old-fashioned lie detectors, to slave collars, and to a frighteningly efficient form of audiovisual subliminal suggestion. In spite of the way they looked, Dreamasks were lightweight, clothlike, and comfortable. Each one offered wearers a whole series of adventures in which they could identify with any of several characters. They could live their character's fictional life complete with realistic sensation. They could submerge themselves in other, simpler, happier lives. The poor could enjoy the illusion of wealth, the ugly could be beautiful, the sick could be healthy, the timid could be bold..."
9) "'I wonder whether it was your abduction that made your father give up on Jarret.'
'Give up on him?'
'On him and on the United States. He's left the country, after all.'
After a moment, she nodded. 'Yes. Although I'm still having trouble thinking of Alaska as a foreign country. I guess that should be easy now, since the war. But it doesn't matter. None of this matters. I mean, those people—that man and his kids who you just fed—they matter, but no one cares about them. Those kids are the future if they don't starve to death. But if they manage to grow up, what kind of men will they be?'
'That's what Earthseed was about,' I said. 'I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that's the way things are. That's the way things always have been.'
'It is,' Len said.
'It is,' I repeated. 'There seem to be solid biological reasons why we are the way we are. If there weren't, the cycles wouldn't keep replaying. The human species is a kind of animal, of course. But we can do something no other animal species has ever had the option to do. We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them. And some of the new people who emerge from all this will develop new ways to cope. They'll have to. That will break the old cycle, even if it's only to begin a new one, a different one.
'Earthseed is about preparing to fulfill the Destiny. It's about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It's about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are. It's...' I glanced at Len, caught a little smile on her face, and wound down. 'It's about a lot more than that,' I said. 'But those are the bones.'"
10) "To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past Go."
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
4.0
1) "Already at work on the building site, which sprawled through the heart of Florence, were scores of other craftsmen: carters, bricklayers, leadbeaters, even cooks and men whose job it was to sell wine to the workers on their lunch breaks. From the piazza surrounding the cathedral the men could be seen carting bags of sand and lime, or else clambering about on wooden scaffolds and wickerwork platforms that rose above the neighboring rooftops like a great, untidy bird's nest. Nearby, a forge for repairing their tools belched clouds of black smoke into the sky, and from dawn to dusk the air rang with the blows of the blacksmith's hammer and with the rumble of oxcarts and the shouting of orders.
Florence in the early 1400s still retained a rural aspect. Wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards could be found inside its walls, while flocks of sheep were driven bleating through the streets to the market near the Baptistery of San Giovanni. But the city also had a population of 50,000, roughly the same as London's, and the new cathedral was intended to reflect its importance as a large and powerful mercantile city. Florence had become one of the most prosperous cities in Europe. Much of its wealth came from the wool industry started by the Umiliati monks soon after their arrival in the city in 1239. Bales of English wool—the finest in the world—were brought from monasteries in the Cotswolds to be washed in the river Arno, combed, spun into yarn, woven on wooden looms, then dyed beautiful colors: vermilion, made from cinnabar gathered on the shores of the Red Sea, or a brilliant yellow procured from the crocuses growing in meadows near the hilltop town of San Gimignano. The result was the most expensive and most sought-after cloth in Europe."
2) "Yet by 1418 what was by far the grandest building project in Florence had still to be completed. A replacement for the ancient and dilapidated church of Santa Reparata, the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was intended to be one of the largest in Christendom. Entire forests had been requisitioned to provide timber for it, and huge slabs of marble were being transported along the Arno on flotillas of boats. From the outset its construction had as much to do with civic pride as religious faith: the cathedral was to be built, the Commune of Florence had stipulated, with the greatest lavishness and magnificence possible, and once completed it was to be 'a more beautiful and honourable temple than any in any other part of Tuscany.' But it was clear that the builders faced major obstacles, and the closer the cathedral came to completion, the more difficult their task would become."
3) "Filippo, on the other hand, offered a simpler and more daring solution: he proposed to do away with the centering altogether. This was an astounding proposal. Even the smallest arches were built over wooden centering. How then would it be possible to span the enormous diameter called for in the 1367 model without any support, particularly when the bricks at the top of the vault would be inclined at 60-degree angles to the horizontal? So astonishing was the plan that many of Filippo's contemporaries considered him a lunatic. And it has likewise confounded more recent commentators who are reluctant to believe that such a feat could actually have been possible."
4) "Given the experimental nature of Filippo's plan, the 30-braccia limit seems to have been a wise precaution, especially since a sound logic governs the restriction. At a height of 30 braccia the bed joints of the masonry would have risen to form an angle of 30 degrees to the horizontal, or just inside the critical angle of sliding. Friction alone would keep the stones in place up to an angle of 30 degrees, even when the mortar was green; therefore, no centering would have been required until that point. Above that level, however, each course of masonry would incline more sharply, reaching a maximum angle, near the top, of 60 degrees to the horizontal. No doubt it was impossible for the wardens to imagine how these courses might be held in place without centering of some sort."
5) "Religious feasts were numerous in Florence, averaging almost one per week. The populace was accustomed to grand spectacles on these occasions: to the sight of priests and monks
in rich habits of gold and silk bearing through the streets the standards of their orders and their most prized relics, all to the tolling of bells, the blaring of trumpets, the chanting of songs and the splashing of holy water. But in 1436 the Feast of the Annunciation, observed on the twenty-fifth of March, was the occasion for a celebration that was spectacular even by the standards of Florence.
On this day Pope Eugenius IV processed eastward to the center of the city from his residence in Santa Maria Novella. He was accompanied by seven cardinals, thirty-seven bishops, and nine members of the Florentine government, including Cosimo de' Medici. The procession moved along a 1,000-foot-long wooden platform, six feet in height, that was bedecked with sweet-smelling flowers and herbs. This gangway had been designed by Filippo to carry the pope safely above the crowds teeming in the streets below, a method of crowd control evidently selected in place of a much-used alternative, that of throwing coins into the street in order to scatter the people and keep them from pressing too closely upon the Holy Father. As the entourage turned into the Via de' Cerretani and creaked across the boardwalk in the direction of the thronging Piazza San Giovanni, the new cathedral rose suddenly into view. After 140 years of construction, the time had finally come to consecrate Santa Maria del Fiore."
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
1) "The sky above the Mississippi River stretched out like a song. The river was still in the windless afternoon, its water a yellowish-brown from the sediment it carried across thousands of miles of farmland, cities, and suburbs on its way south. At dusk, the lights of the Crescent City Connection, a pair of steel cantilever bridges that cross the river and connect the east and west banks of New Orleans, flickered on. Luminous bulbs ornamented the bridges' steel beams like a congregation of fireflies settling onto the backs of two massive, unbothered creatures. A tugboat made its way downriver, pulling an enormous ship in its wake. The sounds of the French Quarter, just behind me, pulsed through the brick sidewalk underfoot. A pop-up brass band blared into the early-evening air, its trumpets, tubas, and trombones commingling with the delight of a congregating crowd; a young man drummed on a pair of upturned plastic buckets, the drumsticks in his hands moving with speed and dexterity; people gathered for photos along the river's edge, hoping to capture an image of themselves surrounded by a recognizable piece of quintessential New Orleans iconography. After the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed in 1808, about a million people were transported from the upper South to the lower South. More than one hundred thousand of them were brought down the Mississippi River and sold in New Orleans."
2) "What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together."
3) "Although Monticello has been open to the public since the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the property in 1923, the plantation's public wrestling with Jefferson's relationship to slavery began in 1993, as part of the foundation's Getting Word oral history project, in which the foundation interviewed the descendants of enslaved people from Monticello in an effort to preserve those histories. The oral histories represented an attempt to get the descendants to share stories their elders might have shared with them. The stories that arose from Getting Word became part of the tours Monticello created based on the lives of the enslaved population there. 'This is how the word is passed down,' remarked one of the descendants in an interview for the project."
4) "I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it."
5) "Only a few minutes after we entered the Red Hat we were told it was time to get back on the bus. I kept sitting in the chair and clutched my hands on its rough wooden edges before lifting myself up and walking toward the haze of the door. As I stepped out of the Red Hat, the air smelled like smoke even though nothing was on fire. Or maybe everything was."
6) "The erection of Confederate monuments in the early twentieth century came at a moment when many Confederate veterans were beginning to die off in large numbers. A new generation of white Southerners who had no memory of the war had come of age, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had raised enough money to build memorials to these men. The goal, in part, was to teach the younger generations of white Southerners who these men had been and that the cause they had fought for was an honorable one. But there is another reason, not wholly disconnected from the first. These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. In the late nineteenth century, states began implementing Jim Crow laws to cement this country's racial caste system. Social and political backlash to Reconstruction-era attempts to build an integrated society was the backdrop against which the first monuments arose. These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement."
7) "As I looked at Edwards's statue and then back at Ashton Villa, I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting."
8) "By the early nineteenth century, the New York financial industry became even more deeply entrenched in chattel slavery. Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish. As the cotton trade expanded, New York City became the central port for shipments of raw cotton moving between the American South and Europe. By 1822, more than half of the goods shipped out of New York's harbor were produced in Southern states. Cotton alone was responsible for more than 40 percent of the city's exported goods."
9) "The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories. Across the United States, and abroad, there are places whose histories are inextricably tied to the story of human bondage. Many of these places directly confront and reflect on their relationship to that history; many of these places do not. But in order for our country to collectively move forward, it is not enough to have a patchwork of places that are honest about this history while being surrounded by other spaces that undermine it. It must be a collective endeavor to learn and confront the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today."
2) "What they gave our country, and all they stole from it, must be understood together."
3) "Although Monticello has been open to the public since the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the property in 1923, the plantation's public wrestling with Jefferson's relationship to slavery began in 1993, as part of the foundation's Getting Word oral history project, in which the foundation interviewed the descendants of enslaved people from Monticello in an effort to preserve those histories. The oral histories represented an attempt to get the descendants to share stories their elders might have shared with them. The stories that arose from Getting Word became part of the tours Monticello created based on the lives of the enslaved population there. 'This is how the word is passed down,' remarked one of the descendants in an interview for the project."
4) "I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it."
5) "Only a few minutes after we entered the Red Hat we were told it was time to get back on the bus. I kept sitting in the chair and clutched my hands on its rough wooden edges before lifting myself up and walking toward the haze of the door. As I stepped out of the Red Hat, the air smelled like smoke even though nothing was on fire. Or maybe everything was."
6) "The erection of Confederate monuments in the early twentieth century came at a moment when many Confederate veterans were beginning to die off in large numbers. A new generation of white Southerners who had no memory of the war had come of age, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy had raised enough money to build memorials to these men. The goal, in part, was to teach the younger generations of white Southerners who these men had been and that the cause they had fought for was an honorable one. But there is another reason, not wholly disconnected from the first. These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. In the late nineteenth century, states began implementing Jim Crow laws to cement this country's racial caste system. Social and political backlash to Reconstruction-era attempts to build an integrated society was the backdrop against which the first monuments arose. These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement."
7) "As I looked at Edwards's statue and then back at Ashton Villa, I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting."
8) "By the early nineteenth century, the New York financial industry became even more deeply entrenched in chattel slavery. Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore. The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish. As the cotton trade expanded, New York City became the central port for shipments of raw cotton moving between the American South and Europe. By 1822, more than half of the goods shipped out of New York's harbor were produced in Southern states. Cotton alone was responsible for more than 40 percent of the city's exported goods."
9) "The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories. Across the United States, and abroad, there are places whose histories are inextricably tied to the story of human bondage. Many of these places directly confront and reflect on their relationship to that history; many of these places do not. But in order for our country to collectively move forward, it is not enough to have a patchwork of places that are honest about this history while being surrounded by other spaces that undermine it. It must be a collective endeavor to learn and confront the story of slavery and how it has shaped the world we live in today."
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill
lighthearted
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
1) "In a labyrinth constructed out of a rosebush in the Golden Mile neighborhood of Montreal, two little girls were standing back‑to‑back with pistols pointed up toward their chins. They began to count out loud together, taking fifteen paces each."
2) "The house in the Golden Mile was their ticket to security and prosperity. Mr. and Mrs. Arnett were both determined to use their address to climb to the top of the social ladder. Mr. Arnett was a politician known for his zealous advocacy of moral decency. He repeatedly requested that prostitutes and houses of ill repute be closed down. The minute he criticized a play, it extended its run, knowing full well the publicity would bring people out in droves.
His address loaned him an air of respectability. The illusion of wealth was what had kept his career afloat. The Arnetts often thought of selling it because they needed the money. But they knew if they did sell it, they would no longer have the status of living in the Golden Mile."
3) "Sadie took a notebook out of her basket and scribbled a thought down with a fountain pen. Marie was overcome by a desire to know what Sadie had written. What was it like to have a thought so interesting it belonged in a notebook? She didn’t know whether she had thoughts like that. She felt that she didn’t leave a thought in her head long enough for it to be organized, thoughtful, and worth recording."
4) "Marie was immediately smitten by the manner in which Sadie complained about things. Sadie analyzed everything. She found everything wanting. Her distaste for the world around her caused her to visualize and desire more. Marie had never realized how intelligent being negative made you."
5) "Before she had met Sadie, she had always been the best girl her age at whatever she did. But now there was someone else their age who was very good at things. While this was fascinating and attractive, she found it stirred odd and ugly emotions in herself. It planted the seed of jealousy in her. And that seed began to grow and it bore thoughts that were like tendrils. Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive."
6) "She would be a different person after this. She knew what she was capable of. That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of."
7) "There was never a moment of peace and quiet in the city. It was always in the middle of building itself."
8) "She closed her eyes and absorbed the violence that was spoken from one lover to another."
9) "She had so many so many fingers at her disposal now. She had been so right to give away one. Look how many she had in exchange. She could do anything with them. She could pick locks, she could slit throats, she could light fires. With enough fingers, she could pull a building to the ground."
10) "Outside, the snow was falling down in Montreal in a way that it never did anywhere else in the world. It was coming down so thick. Its snowflakes were made out of fur. They were in a snow globe that had been shaken wildly and then put back on the shelf ever so gently and allowed to rest. The roses were dreaming underneath the ground."
2) "The house in the Golden Mile was their ticket to security and prosperity. Mr. and Mrs. Arnett were both determined to use their address to climb to the top of the social ladder. Mr. Arnett was a politician known for his zealous advocacy of moral decency. He repeatedly requested that prostitutes and houses of ill repute be closed down. The minute he criticized a play, it extended its run, knowing full well the publicity would bring people out in droves.
His address loaned him an air of respectability. The illusion of wealth was what had kept his career afloat. The Arnetts often thought of selling it because they needed the money. But they knew if they did sell it, they would no longer have the status of living in the Golden Mile."
3) "Sadie took a notebook out of her basket and scribbled a thought down with a fountain pen. Marie was overcome by a desire to know what Sadie had written. What was it like to have a thought so interesting it belonged in a notebook? She didn’t know whether she had thoughts like that. She felt that she didn’t leave a thought in her head long enough for it to be organized, thoughtful, and worth recording."
4) "Marie was immediately smitten by the manner in which Sadie complained about things. Sadie analyzed everything. She found everything wanting. Her distaste for the world around her caused her to visualize and desire more. Marie had never realized how intelligent being negative made you."
5) "Before she had met Sadie, she had always been the best girl her age at whatever she did. But now there was someone else their age who was very good at things. While this was fascinating and attractive, she found it stirred odd and ugly emotions in herself. It planted the seed of jealousy in her. And that seed began to grow and it bore thoughts that were like tendrils. Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive."
6) "She would be a different person after this. She knew what she was capable of. That was perhaps a definition of innocence: not knowing what one was capable of."
7) "There was never a moment of peace and quiet in the city. It was always in the middle of building itself."
8) "She closed her eyes and absorbed the violence that was spoken from one lover to another."
9) "She had so many so many fingers at her disposal now. She had been so right to give away one. Look how many she had in exchange. She could do anything with them. She could pick locks, she could slit throats, she could light fires. With enough fingers, she could pull a building to the ground."
10) "Outside, the snow was falling down in Montreal in a way that it never did anywhere else in the world. It was coming down so thick. Its snowflakes were made out of fur. They were in a snow globe that had been shaken wildly and then put back on the shelf ever so gently and allowed to rest. The roses were dreaming underneath the ground."