Dale
I went into this hoping to have my views challenged, to be confronted with some uncomfortable ideas that would ultimately be worth considering to anyone willing to face the hard truths. Instead, I either got ideas that were pretty well established by now, or else woefully out of date (mostly the Freudian stuff). Either way, it seems like the age of the book finally caught up with it. I can see how it was a game changer in its day, but it felt antiquated by modern standards.
A fantastic story told by two authors in unison to great effect. I loved the winding story and the lyrical prose. I was initially reading this book before bed but was finding it too hard to give the focus it needed that way, so started reading during the day instead. Once I did, I was immediately hooked. I may re-read this one to appreciate what I missed on the first read (a staple of any good time travel story).
I love that people are still finding ways to surprise me with time-travel stories. Agents from two alternate futures fighting to bend the threads of time to their desired outcome, that's so original! And then blending sci-fi with romance to have the two agents fall in love. Great stuff! Thoroughly enjoyed.
This book was a lot of fun, and I literally laughed out loud on multiple occasions. From the beginning, discovering Seth Rogen is all too familiar with Winnipeg (there is only -TOO- familiar with Winnipeg), my home town, I was on board. Lots of funny stories, and some cool behind-the-scenes stuff regarding the whole fiasco with The Interview and North Korea. Really enjoyed this, and recommend for anyone looking for a light, funny read. If you have the option, I also strongly recommend the audio-book, as he really went above and beyond to make it an enhanced experience!
After getting back into photography a few years ago, I went down a rabbit hole of youtube photographers. Many great channels comparing gear, giving tips on editing photos, etc. But one channel immediately stuck out to me, with its more existential approach to photography. Sean's views on creativity and expression struck a chord with me from the get go. When I saw he was putting out a book I didn't hesitate to pick it up.
This book was exactly what I expected, and that's a good thing. Part biography and part philosophical ruminations on the act of creating art, it was thought provoking in all the right ways. As a hobbyist photographer, it inspired me to trust my own personal evolution, and not pressure myself to be something I'm not, or more than I am; to follow my inspiration wherever it takes me, as far as it takes me.
Sean uses his experience in photography to contextualize many of his life lessons. I especially found the chapters on embracing shadows but protecting the highlights poignant. But you do not need to be a photographer to get something out of this book, just a creator. If you engage with self expression in any form, I recommend this book!
I might have rated this higher if it didn't take so long to get going, but I only really got invested during the final third.
VR has always seemed to me to be a niche product with a niche market, and like most niche markets they are passionate about their field, with an almost cult-like devotion. VR is definitely more mainstream now than it has ever been, but it's still a far way off from mass adoption. Call me a luddite, but I've never felt true mass adoption was in the cards for VR. I think the far more likely outcome is the market for VR in its current form plateaus, and other technologies eventually replace it, cannibalizing the tech and its market in the process. I just don't see a future where gaming is primarily done standing up and swinging our arms around, let alone with a device strapped to our face. I think the final application of the tech is likely to look very different than its current iteration, and be much broader than just cool video games.
All this to say, I've never been a big believer in VR. Instead of reading this as a story about a few visionaries changing the world, I simply saw it as a few people who couldn't find the product they wanted, and so made it themselves. Along the way they discovered a market of likeminded people willing to spend their money. Hardly revolutionary, but still has potential for an interesting read!
Unfortunately that wasn't the case for most of this book. It wasn't until the final third, when the “drama” began that I found it truly interesting. Going into this book I knew very little about the backstory of VR. I knew Oculus had kickstarted a new modern resurgence of interest in VR, and eventually sold to Facebook, which angered a lot of people. That's it. I knew nothing about the people involved, or their politics. By the halfway point of the book I could already tell I didn't like this Palmer guy, so when I got to the part where he sold to Facebook and deluded himself into thinking it wasn't greed, my opinion was only confirmed. I can confidently say I didn't go into this book with my mind made up about the founder of Oculus.
I had no idea a hard turn was coming, and the final third of the book was mired in politics. Suddenly I was reading about Palmer's political donations, and the blowback that came as a result. I'm no fan of Trump, and don't often have much sympathy for his voters. I do think it's a bit concerning, however, that it seems Palmer was fired over his political views, views which half that country shares.
As thought provoking as the final third of the book was, however, I can't say it really held a candle to the author's previous work, Console Wars.
I enjoyed this one. Random insights by a passionate writer. Makes you examine your everyday routine and the things you take for granted in your life. I especially appreciated how seated it was in this unique moment in time. I'd be curious how this book will read once this pandemic is truly behind us.
An interesting read. Even after finishing, I find it hard to not to follow intuition when it comes to risk management. In some areas I have more risk tolerance than most, but in other areas I'm quite conservative. I suppose the trick is to remember that areas traditionally considered low-risk may be better thought of as “accumulating risk”. Everything crashes eventually. I might need to let this one percolate for a while. I give it three stars right now, but that may change.
I liked Schreier's previous book a lot, but I loved this one. In this industry everyone has horror stories. I started in Edmonton at BioWare in 2008 right before the market crash, and after my two contracts ran out I had no choice but move to the other side of the country to take a new job. If my current job ever falls through, I'll likely have to move again. Reading through similar experiences from across the industry, you can't help but feel a sense of camaraderie, but also that we need to do better. Sometimes the lows lead to higher highs, but sometimes the lows are the end. It was also a reminder of just how small our industry really is. Often I'd be reading and come upon people a few degrees of separation away, people who worked with people I worked with, etc. And after just reading Masters of Doom not too long ago, seeing the overlap of many of these stories with the stories in that really pointed out the incestuous nature of this industry. A great read, and I'm looking forward to Schreier's next book!
This author can do no wrong. Romance is not typically my genre of choice, but I've always loved this author's talent for prose, so romance seemed like a logical fit. Filled with his unique writing style, the story is split between France and Japan in the 19th century, and the protagonist is equally split. A loving wife at home in France and an alluring young woman in Japan with whom he falls in love without a single word shared. Over the course of four years and four trips his life is torn in two. With an incredibly bittersweet ending I did not see coming, this was a great read.
A serviceable plot, but with a really compelling main character. A tight and concise read, it was never boring, and never dragged. It didn't deal with many big picture sci-fi concepts, though it did brush against them. I usually like some big concepts in my sci-fi, but this felt like a refreshingly straight-forward story. I'll probably check out more in the series, as this was quite enjoyable!
A great insight into how the iconic games of my youth came to be. I remember when I was young, my uncle was living with us, renting a room in the basement. I was getting into computers, playing the free Shareware copy of Commander Keen on the family pc, and making levels in a game called Jetpack. My uncle was also into computers, and one day he told my brother and I check out the new game he just got. It was Doom. We all huddled around his CRT monitor with the lights off and his speakers turned up high. The growls of the demons was scary but exhilarating for me at 12 years old. When I was double that age I got into the games industry myself, which I've been in ever since.
Listening to tales of the industry in the early days is a mixed bag. It sounds like it was a the wild west, for better or worse. You could be an outsider, a rebel, but if you had the talent and commitment, the sky was the limit. But forget work/life balance, forget any kind of industry protections. Crunch and office politics were the norm. Overall, I'm certainly glad the industry has legitimized since then.
A great read, especially for anyone with fond memories of the early days of PC gaming.
Some really interesting stuff. It changes the way you look at society, as you suddenly see how many of its defining qualities are really just pure chance. There's a sense that civilization was inevitable for the human race, and maybe that's true, but this book shows that it was up against a lot of opposition along the way, and only in very specific conditions does it arise. I do feel this book could have been more succinct though. Once a concept has been established, I don't see the need to walk me through it again for each continent as though it were completely novel. It definitely felt like the book was padded out for length at times. This is what cost it a fifth star for me.
It's hard for me to rate this one. I read this immediately after seeing the movie. Ultimately, I feel I enjoyed the movie more, but it's hard for me to say if that's just because I saw the movie first. It's rare I find myself liking the movie more than the book; it may just be that I really like Charlie Kaufman. I also feel like the main concept of the story plays out better over 2 hours, as opposed to the more drawn out process of reading through a book. I knew where the story was going, but I could see this book being frustratingly vague for far too long without that prior knowledge, but that's pure speculation on my part. I feel well enough equipped to recommend the movie, but as such I feel less equipped to recommend the book. It's hard to say how I would have felt if I read the book first though.
Pretty good read showing that every country, every economy, every social group is susceptible to this kind of corruption from within. It starts amidst your disbelief, grows under your sarcastic mocking, comes to power as you grow exhausted with it, and eventually rules over you with fear.
Definitely an eye opener in terms of how universal the process is, and how communal pride and slight contextual variations give each victim the plausible deniability they need to believe “it couldn't happen here”.
Still, it was based a bit more in personal anecdotes than I'd like for a subject matter like this, and would have preferred something a bit more objective. Overall a very relevant read for our times though. Unfortunately.
Normally a book like this would be right up my alley, but I found this one too scatter-brained to keep my attention. It was a struggle to get through this, and I honestly credit this book for missing my Goodreads yearly book target by one last year.
A collection of historical anecdotes told in no particular order, many of which seemed to be semi-moralized and yet oddly conflicting with one another, the book felt like it was trying to make a point, at any cost. It was also arguably more Biography than Science or History, which wasn't really what I was after. Otherwise, I liked the content of the book. There were some interesting takeaways, I was just really put off by the writing style and the structure of the book as a whole.
I'd recommend the vastly superior Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
Growing up my Dad always told me he loved this book, so I figured I'd give it a read. Overall I was pleasantly surprised; I'd worried that it being an old book it'd read stuffy and bland, but it was filled with humor and personality. A good read of living in the wild with a misunderstood animal. It was also neat getting glimpses of Canadian history, and even my home province of Manitoba.
In the end it didn't leave the same impression on me as it left on my Dad, but I did enjoy it.
Excellent mix of personal biography, business history, and management advice. I found my management ideals and principles very much in line with the author's, and it was fascinating seeing how they can play out in such a major company. It also helped prepare me for some of the potential pitfalls I will no doubt face sooner or later.
The heaps of praise on John Lasseter for his ability to inspire those around him, and his personal connections with his team take on a bit more of a sinister tone now that so many allegations have become public, but it also shows that someone being a “nice guy” to most people doesn't mean he can't be a terrible person to others.
I found the similarities between creating a fully CG movie and creating a video game interesting, if not surprising. Overall, a great read, and quite relevant to my role and industry.
I've read his previous book, Dark Matter, and quite liked it, but this one was on a whole other level.
It's nice to find there's still new ideas to explore within the time travel subgenre. The rules are established early on in this book, and they are never broken; instead, they are used to create some truly novel and exciting scenarios.
If you like sci-fi thrillers, you can't go wrong with Blake Crouch, and this is him at the top of his game. Loved it!
Thoroughly enjoyed this one. So many books about quantum mechanics take the Copenhagen approach, where the predictive power of theory is all that matters, with little regard to an understanding of what is actually happening. I understand that the foundations of quantum mechanics are mysterious by their very nature, but I still think science is (or at least should be) primarily driven by curiosity, not utility, so I have a deep respect to Carroll's commitment to understanding the underlying foundations of quantum physics.
It was this focus on the true underpinnings of quantum theory that made even retreading old ground so novel. Things like the Uncertainty Principle makes so much more sense in the Everettian interpretation of quantum physics. Commiting to explaining the universe as a universal wave function, and only referring to particles and matter as an explicit illusion really helped me visualize a deterministic quantum universe with a single wave function just being further subdivided with every probabilistic interaction. I was especially blown away by the theory that space and time are not fundamental elements of the universe, but emerge from quantum entanglement between degrees of freedom, and related static universal states. That one really blew my mind.
Does that mean I agree with the conclusions he comes to? A true multiverse which grows exponentially every moment is a hard pill to swallow. It goes against all intuition to imagine that I am being split into multiple versions of myself, along with the rest of the universe, every single moment... But historically intuition has been nothing but a hindrance to quantum theory, and the fact that avoiding this conclusion actually takes MORE unfounded assumptions does give it weight. I can't say I'm a full believer, but I also don't discount it. I'm no particle physicist, just an armchair enthusiast, but this book has definitely convinced me of the legitimacy of the theory, even if it hasn't outright converted me.
I've always strived to go beyond just not being racist, but to be anti-racist. I've been aware for some time now that as straight white male I enjoy certain privileges that many others are not so lucky to have. Nonetheless, this book really drove home just how much I don't consider, and how that itself is just another example of white privilege.
The concept of racial stamina was a new one to me, and I immediately recognized it as one of my largest failings. Today's news cycle can be exhausting, and it can be very tempting to just “take a break”. But that is not an option people of color have, it is their lived experience. My exhaustion after having to hear about it for only a few weeks is the ultimate in white privilege. This book taught me I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm committed to rising to the challenge.