Neocities

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

2 days ago

trades/elementary_particles.html

saddleblasters

trades/index.html

16 likes

saddleblasters 2 days ago

I took suboptimalism up on his book trade offer: https://saddleblasters.com/trades/elementary_particles

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saddleblasters 2 days ago

Also, in hopes of doing this again with someone else, I made a page for future book trades: https://saddleblasters.com/trades/

5 likes

suboptimalism 2 days ago

i've been called out... https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/secret/wang.xml

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saddleblasters 2 days ago

My plan to strong arm you into writing something worked! I will have to add Wang Xiaobo to your Murakami vs. Houellebecq analysis at some point and make a three way venn diagram out of them, since he also exhibits many similarities and interesting differences...

1 like

saddleblasters 2 days ago

Also you might have read it already, but Vonnegut's Bluebeard is another meditation on "what is art?" that specifically focuses on Pollock. I like to pair it with his earlier novel Deadeye Dick, narrated by the son of a failed painter.

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suboptimalism 2 days ago

haven't read either of those but i have read the one that came out right in between the two, galapagos...

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

5 days ago

drops.html

essays/noise_poetry.html

saddleblasters

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swiftred 5 days ago

I really enjoyed reading ‘On Waking’ !

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malletunderheaven 1 day ago

good shit bud

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

1 week ago

essays/noise_poetry.html

13 likes

saddleblasters 1 week ago

I wrote an essay about noise performances I saw last year and poems I wrote about them: https://saddleblasters.neocities.org/essays/noise_poetry

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daliwali 1 week ago

Chinese noise is crazy... i know about Merzbow, Masonna, Gerogerigegege, Les Rallizes Dénudés, ...but had not much clue about the Chinese noise scene.

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saddleblasters 6 days ago

I only really talked about the Shanghai scene in this essay. If you're curious about the Beijing scene, you can read Yan Jun's English language writing (though a lot of it is outdated): https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/contributors/yan-jun/yan-jun_which-hell-do-you-prefer_

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 weeks ago

saddleblasters

drops.html

13 likes

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 weeks ago

saddleblasters

drops.html

15 likes

saddleblasters 3 weeks ago

Added a section for short pieces that don't fit what "records of a saddle" has come to represent.

5 likes

sorbier saddleblasters

1 month ago

thanks for pointing out the delineation of xiang3 vs think. it's tempting to draw conclusions about what the two languages presume is primarily on your mind (desires vs beliefs). in general i think it's really fun to observe how the two different language (families) draw lines around concepts and group them into words -- thinking/speaking in mandarin changes how i think about things compared to english.

2 likes

sorbier 1 month ago

that said i think (haha, jue2de) that the average mandarin word performs more roles than the average english word, which renders mandarin more figurative/conceptual broadly. apologies for stating it so definitively though -- agree that it's totally my subjective impression.

padma updated 紅蓮的個人網站

1 month ago

hokkien.html

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

1 month ago

saddleblasters

records.html

13 likes

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

1 month ago

saddleblasters

essays/murakami.html

12 likes

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

2 months ago

saddleblasters

snapshots/index.html

snapshots/yuyintang.html

12 likes

palmistshouse 2 months ago

A local venue that my friends would perform at frequently recently shut down and is set to be demolished. It's always so heartbreaking when those kinds of things happen :-((

2 likes

balckwell 2 months ago

In our apartment, "upstairs" is the top shelves of the kitchen cabinets that my wife can't reach.

2 likes

readingproject saddleblasters

2 months ago

Sorry. You would have probably gotten an email sent to you from neocities from a post I made about your RSS not working. It does. Ignore it. I'm an idiot

1 like

underwhite 2 months ago

you know you can disable email notices right? I did it for my site cuz it's unnerving

2 likes

readingproject 2 months ago

Thanks for that. I’ll look into it. I assume others get them because I do.

saddleblasters 2 months ago

I have email notifications turned on so I did see the messages, but it's fine! This is exactly the sort of mistake I can imagine myself making too haha. Glad to hear RSS actually does work. I'd used a validator to check it and had tested subscribing to it myself, but as always was a bit paranoid I might have done something wrong.

1 like

readingproject saddleblasters

2 months ago

Thanks for your interest in our site. I found your follow this morning and started reading through your site. Despite lack of sleep and very tired eyes, I just kept reading. I felt what you said about dogs, among other things. They are great animals and can get a rough deal sometimes. Hoping to read more from your site. Cheers

4 likes

saddleblasters 2 months ago

Thank you for the kind words! I'd seen your website before, but it was only yesterday that I finally started reading through some of the reviews you did last year (*The Red and the Black* and *The Ark Sakura* to be specific) and I felt like you did a good job writing about some very tough-to-analyze books.

2 likes

padma updated 紅蓮的個人網站

2 months ago

unconstructable-implastic.html

tiantai-curriculum.html

semiotics.html

saikano.html

reading-hocquenghem.html

queer-theory-childhood-book-guide.html

padma updated 紅蓮的個人網站

2 months ago

紅蓮的個人網站

dot.html

bibliographies/language-resources.html

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

2 months ago

translation/lyrics.html

saddleblasters

webrings.html

10 likes

saddleblasters 2 months ago

Added RSS!

5 likes

saddleblasters 2 months ago

Also, despite the frivolousness of it all, I translated some Milk@Coffee lyrics in honor of madeinv's most recent post

5 likes

cult-master-status 2 months ago

good advice

cult-master-status 2 months ago

but I still left some words of disencouragement

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

2 months ago

saddleblasters

records.html

14 likes

daliwali 2 months ago

two girlfriends... gigachad.jpg

1 like

saddleblasters 2 months ago

Well, that phrase only describes the situation in retrospect. At the time I didn't really think of it that way exactly, and spent all day worried that they both hated me (the internet girlfriend had already broken up with me once before, during which time I met the real life girlfriend... it was all very complicated, and being honest to everyone didn't really help (i was in fact slightly insane at the time))

5 likes

cult-master-status 2 months ago

eww you make becomeing an adult sound really terrible id hate to go to collage and spend a couple of years like that but I cant really say everything up until this point has been any less chaotic then your story regardless im little more scared about becomeing and adult now if stuff like that can happen on a side note you are a very good writer

saddleblasters 2 months ago

for a whole host of reasons, i have a greater propensity for bad decision making than most people, so i wouldn't read into my experiences too much. you'll probably be fine. that said, i don't really feel like anything i've written about was that terrible. it's just the long road to understanding other human beings.

1 like

cult-master-status 2 months ago

yeah your right I avoid everyone so I havent had a chance to really mess up yet I think I can still be pretty sure I will tho not because of "bad decisions" but because of who I am as a person

padma updated 紅蓮的個人網站

2 months ago

unconstructable-implastic.html

tiantai-curriculum.html

saikano.html

reading-hocquenghem.html

queer-theory-childhood-book-guide.html

mandarin-chinese-learning-resources-guide.html

padma updated 紅蓮的個人網站

3 months ago

padma.html

紅蓮的個人網站

dot.html

bibliographies/tiantai-annotated-bib.html

2 likes

sorbier saddleblasters

3 months ago

thanks for the comment on my essay about revision -- so happy it struck a chord! i guess it goes without saying but i think "i would be more satisfied with my writing" is a perfectly good justification to edit!

2 likes

americasdecline 3 months ago

love this! I was going to comment something similiar — part of my attraction to the slow web is that I don't have to focus on what would get maximum views if I don't want to. Good writing should always keep audience and context top-of-mind, but at the heart of great writing is authentic self-expression. That's the sort of stuff that sticks with people, as opposed to something they "like", scroll past and forget.

1 like

saddleblasters iwillneverbehappy

3 months ago

responding a little late re: rote learning. a lot of the people in the classical chinese study discord i'm in, especially the ones that are most generally knowledgable, often post pictures of long texts they've copied, all with very careful and neat handwriting. i think copying, especially by hand, is very much a comprehensive learning method: you're not necessarily conscious of all the things you learn doing it

2 likes

saddleblasters 3 months ago

copying is essentially a very slow kind of reading. back when the literary language was often very different from the spoken language, comprehension wasn't some immediate thing that could be taken for granted. even the surface grammatical meaning of a sentence might not be obvious. struggling with all of that leads not just to the thoughts the author intended, but all sorts of other alternate possibilities

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saddleblasters 3 months ago

the same thing happens when i read mathematics (esp. research papers). for close readings, you treat the written proofs as a "cookbook recipe" for reproducing the argument in your own brain. often there are steps that are unclear at first and which require deep thought, but in the course of trying to understand those, you learn other things the author perhaps didn't intend, or didn't find worth writing

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saddleblasters 3 months ago

e.g. many of the developments in algebraic geometry up to the 80s or so could essentially be characterized as ideas people had while reading EGA and SGA.

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saddleblasters 3 months ago

I guess what I'm trying to say is simply that reading is a much slower and more complicated process than we might give it credit for, so rote methods of learning like copying and memorizing are ways to trick ourselves into slowing. of course this only works when one is doing it willingly. when forced to memorize or copy by a teacher, many people manage to learn to do so without actually paying attention to the text

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saddleblasters 3 months ago

(sorry for writing so much -- in retrospect this probably should have been an email...)

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saddleblasters 3 months ago

Also, rereading these now, I realize I was basically doing some version of "redoing" by writing these: taking the ideas you wrote about and reworking them into my own words. I guess this is the particular sort of "copying" that a modern university education generally trains it's students with (as you noted with your reference to "the last few hundred years of scholasticism")

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iwillneverbehappy 3 months ago

Thank you for the thoughtful comments and no need to apologize, these are all great. What is interesting to me is how pointless (close) reading is if you don't apply yourself to it 100%, yet how useful it is in learning something. And there's no external way to tell the two apart; it's even difficult for the learner themselves to tell if they are in fact learning something. The "inefficiency" of rote learning (1/2)

2 likes

iwillneverbehappy 3 months ago

and how easy it is to make it an utter waste of time, plus the fact that the yields aren't immediate or quantifiable, might all be part of the reason why it's looked at so negatively in American schools nowadays, but we lose a lot if we banish it entirely. (2/2)

2 likes

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