Shop Talk
not really talkin shop, but........
I've been reading a book here at work recently (which is why I haven't really been posting), and i found it to be an excellent read. The book is called Shibumi and it was written by Trevanian in 1979. It's a really good book. Here are some exerpts:
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a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupidl. It would involve doing unnatural things - bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the f...
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oooh....I love descartes....you should read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. It's a great read. Almost all modern psychology and the image of self come from Rousseau's writings (Freud and Marx both rip him off).
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i may look into it. first i have to finish up a few others. i'm also rereading 'the illiad', reading a book called 'world mythologies' covering all the religions/mythologies from around the globe, 'the vampire book' which is like reading an encyclopedia about vampires, and i just finished 'dork tower' - a comic book.
after i finish those, i'll look into it.
after i finish those, i'll look into it.
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does dork tower have a man in black? sounds like a spoof of Dark Tower by Steven King. The Illiad is a good read. My ex and I used have lots of good conversations about it.
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dork tower is a comic about gamer/roleplaying geeks. they always spoof names. dork tower is a spoof of dark tower. the collections are things like, the dork side and such... illiad is very good. hollywood destroyed the plot with 'troy', but i still really liked the movie.
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Haha. Ya troy wasn't even close. But then again they have to compresse a 10 year war (think it was 10 years but it's been a while since i read it) down to 3 hours. So i guess to do that they shrink troy down to one city and no land. Plus they change the reason they bring the horse into the city. But hollywood doesn't have to be accurate just entertaining.
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exactly. the war was 10 years, but the illiad only takes place in the last 2 years.
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That's cause they cut out the borring stuff. There's only so much hack and slash you can write about.
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illiad has a few hundred pages of, this guy killed this guy, and then he killed this guy... does get boring.
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I love the Illiad and the Odyssey. It's also considered the greatest poem ever, alongside Il Divino Comodea by Dante. And after all, what does Hollywood know about great works? There are very few films that I would rank as masterpieces (Schindler's List, Shawshank Redemption, etc.). But there are many literary works that I would (Dante's Divine Comedy, Augustine's Confessions, Plato's The Republic, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Homer's Illiad, Aquinas' Summa Theologicae, Milton's Paradise Lost, the list goes on)
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go for the real old stuff. beowulf, the gilgamesh epic, etc... both considered to be the first stories ever written, both very very good.
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alejandro said:
oh yeah... well i read meng de's new treatsie!
that's Mengde's new treatise (or the new treatise of mengde)
nig into romance of the three kingdoms?
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been playing the games since i first had a nintendo. and have the books currently waiting to be read.
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get to it. i haven't read any of the series myself, nor played the games. let me know how they are. i read 'art of war'. the book you mentioned is similar to that right? strategies and such?
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no, romance of the 3 kingdoms is "historical fiction" just about the fall of the han dynasty and the struggle for power that would ensue. there are about 90 freaking video games on it, sun tzu was a strategist at the time though.
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i thought the book you referenced was a fictional strategy for the cao cao(?) faction.
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mengde is cao cao, i only referenced it as a historical book, i have never actually seen the text.
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😲 How odd, im reading rene decartes' meditations as well.. What are the odds? I mean really..
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Im not even lieing. It was yesterdays philosophy class reading assignment. today is immanuel kant.
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I have some good books by Kant. It's very insightful. Kant has a very good metaphysic and an even more interesting ethic. You should also check out The Gift of Death, by Jacques Derrida. That's also a very interesting metaphysic.
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To be honest, im not really big on metaphysics. I actually did my report on.. Wow i forgot his name.. But i really liked the way he thought, he wasnt big on metaphysics because the truth is you can philosophize on things like god and the soul all you want but you will never know the truth.
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but that's the whole point of it......once you have knowledge, faith is unnecessary....and if it is knowledge, then we will take it for granted. A god is more godly if it requires a sacrifice (either mentally or physically, but moreso mentally) to worship than if the god is known and worshipped without any sacrifice. Faith is a sacrifice of logic. Logic is based on syllogisms and is only supported by knowledge. Faith is holding something as true even though you do not know it to be true or untrue.
But I digress.....sorry. Three years of theology and philosophy and I'm in the wireless industry. I don't have many opportunities to discuss it.
But I digress.....sorry. Three years of theology and philosophy and I'm in the wireless industry. I don't have many opportunities to discuss it.
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dj, i know what you mean. And i would love to talk about philosophy with anyone.. But your going to have to forgive me because i am only in my 2nd semester and i forget alot. >.< Ill make a new topic in lounge discussion about a philosopher and idea i know.
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Lucky my @$$! It's just some stilted perverts with over active imaginations & 14 year old boys... 🤣
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Pocket Sudoku presented by Will Shortz - The New York Times Crossword Editor. 🙂
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Just finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card for nth time and starting Dark Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz.
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Used to be a big Dean Koontz fan up until Tick Tock. at which point I immediately swore I would keep to Stephen King. That book was a constant WTF??
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Ender's game is great. Have you read any of the sequals? I'm told they are pretty bad.
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Read all of them up to Ender's Shadow. The ones worth reading was Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, which is basically about Bean's role in the story.
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constructive reading huh? lol... I just got done reading my latest cosmo mag lol hahaha ..
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"Black Medicine" by Mashiro... It's just a bit of leisure reading to pass the time, kinda like a coffe table book... 😁
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