Started this the other week, and figured I'd throw up some quick thoughts before I start with A to Z tomorrow.
I've always enjoyed these kinds of in universe guidebooks. I don't know how many times I read over the Essential Guide series as a kid, looking forward to covering those when I get to them in Star Wars Classics.
The "fantasy tour" pastiche works well here, giving just enough distance to mock, without just coming across annoyingly snarky. Sometimes, I think books like this lean too far in the "making fun of" direction. There's plenty of teasing here, but it's clear the author (who also wrote the original Howl's Moving Castle) is enjoying it.
Most of the jokes are fairly well trod (possibly not when the original was published in 1996) but they're very well honed here. Not too long, not to short. The most creative is probably a running gag about the ecology of Fantasyland. Basically, there's not enough of anything to maintain a reasonable food chain, ecosystem, etc. so people speculate things like "horses reproduce by pollination." I'm not sure it entirely makes sense (if Fantasyland is a curated tour, why couldn't they just reproduce behind the scenes?) but it's good to have something that hasn't been circulated since the Usenet days to keep the book interesting.
It's interesting to see some of the insistences that feel pretty dated now, but presumably weren't 30 years ago. The book is adamant that STEW is the only (or at least dramatically most common) form of meat, in Fantasyland. I think (thanks GRRM?) food-porn-fantasy has taken off enough now that that's pretty well debunked.
Besides being a reasonably entertaining book itself, this is a great example of how books can tie to particular memories for us. I've probably had this book for almost 15 years. I ordered it from the indie bookshop I worked at in college, after Nethack cribbed some quotes for flavor text. The woman who owned the store, who is probably the only reason I stayed sane in undergrad, mailed it on from the store to my parents' house over winter break as a gift. Even if it sucked, I'd still value it for that, but it helps that it's pretty funny too.
A couple choice bits:
"This is indeed a likely claim in the case of threesomes or pantheons: Fantasyland does have the air of having been made by a committee."
"JOKES are against the Rules, except for very bad cumbersome jokes cracked by [...] (It is believed that the management in fact thinks that these are very good jokes, and treasures them.)
Can you believe I've been blogging for over a year and never posted a cat pic? That's internet heresy! (It was a busy day, and I didn't have time to get all the blog stuff I wanted done. I fixed a door though.)
It closes now!
Pumpkin!
It's surprisingly hard to get her to sit still long enough for a pic.
There's a lot of bad writing out there across movies, video games, books, etc. That's no surprise, there's a lot of writing out there, some of it has to be bad.
But sometimes, writing is bad in an especially frustrating way. A sequel you've been waiting for forever not only doesn't live up to the original, but actively seems to set out to invalidate all the good things the first one did. Or a movie that's really great, until the last 10 minutes complete ruin it. When I read/watch/etc. one of these, I like to do an activity I call, "The Minimum Acceptable Fix". Basically, what's the smallest change(s) you can make to take something bad, and make it good?
Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery (that's a long title) is an easy and popular example of this. After spending most of the movie with KISS as space wizards:
Not just Sailor-Moon-Esque, some of these are flat out swipes.
Before switching to being a hallucination by Shaggy and Scooby in the last 5 minutes. (Or maybe not?)
It's a much better movie if you cut most of that last 5 minutes, and put it in the "this time, the monsters are real!" part of the Scooby continuity.
My wife is a big fan of the Glass Cannon Podcast/Network. Short version, they do a podcast playing TTRPGs, mostly Pathfinder. Their current main campaign is Gatewalkers which is infamously terrible. I decided to take a look at the actual books today to see how much of it is bad module writing vs bad podcasting.
I blame it like 90% on the modules. So, after sending my wife a Discord post that's longer than this blogpost (and thus wasting time I should've spent doing an actual post...) I decided to talk about MAF today, using Gatewalkers as an example. LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!
GW is made up of 3 books. The initial adventure hook is that, a few months ago, your characters lost time ("The Missing Moment"), went through not-a-stargate and woke up with mild superpowers without knowing what they did. They meet other people who had the same thing happen, including a professor who is trying to research things. The primary issues are everything lack of player agency, a disconnected plot, and inconsistent theme/tone. The campaign is billed as horror/mystery themed. The horror is inconsistent, and there's very little mystery (The Missing Moment is the only real mystery, is largely resolved by the midway point, and requires zero real mystery solving by the players.)
Book 1 deals with the players investigating the legally-distinct-Stargates, an ancient curse, and traveling first to a shadow-fey realm and then to an elf planet. The first 2/3 of the book lean into horror, primarily slasher/body style. The final third has minimal horror, and doesn't really fit the rest of the book, while attempting to establish a tenuous link between the previous events and the rest of the campaign. The characters eventually return to their home planet.
Book 2 is an extended escort quest with a seer, where 90% of the plot of the whole trilogy is handed to the players via narration/dream sequence. Horror content is fairly low, consisting of a ghost ship and some slightly Lovecraftian dream sequences.
Book 3 is Rhyleth Trail, with the players playing an idiotic navigation minigame to stop Whale-Cthulhu from awakening. Also, unsurprising betrayal of the professor from the opening scene who's been largely absent/disguised. Public domain Lovecraft goodies abound, and the writing attempts to pivot to Cosmic Horror with mixed results.
This post fixes mostly on fixing the story elements, but I'll touch on gameplay where it's relevant.
Book 1 is the best of the three, and allows an easy demonstration of one of the basic MAF techniques. Sometimes, a part of a story doesn't fit with the other parts, and can be easily pulled out. Book 1 is all about jumping between planets and dimensions, with a modest amount of squicky horror. That's a great adventure theme! It's also totally dissonant with the rest of the series. The best thing Paizo could do for Book 1 is to yank it from the trilogy entirely, and either make it stand alone (PCs investigate the gates/curse>PCs get transported to horror-fey-land>PCs beat the shadow king> PCs go home [cutting out The Missing Moment and the final third to beef up the other parts, possibly enhancing it with part of Book 3]) or the start of another, more thematically unified campaign. This could either lean into the body-horror, or go for a "horror of the week" theme, using the gates to fling the PCs into different subgenres every session or two. The final section on the elf planet could probably fit here by touching up the horror a bit, but is too out of place if it's standalone.
Book 2 is probably the worst of the bunch. The extended escort quest needs to go, obviously. The Missing Moment is mostly resolved here. During this time, the PCs were capturing a legally-distinct-yeti and dragging it to legally-distinct-Leng (which is public domain anyway) to free Whale-Cthulhu, who is mind controlling them. The full details won't come out until Book 3, but the broad strokes are there. There's an Inception-city that could possibly have been leveraged into a useful dungeon by better writers, and a ghost-ship sidequest with a small dungeon. While you could pull out some parts out, the best plan here is to axe 90% of the book, and keep the yeti-napping as the starting point for a campaign. The mystery isn't "what were we doing?" but "why/how are we here?" The PCs have vague memories of dragging the yeti and something big and scary being near them. They wake up in a blizzard a day's journey from the nearest settlement. They make it back, but no one can tell them why they're there or who they are. Random bands of crazy explorers pass through all the time, so none of the natives think a ton of it. The PCs have to do actual investigating (instead of getting everything handed to them via NPC/dreams) to figure out why they're here, which eventually leads them to the end of book 3, stopping the space-whale-monster they were brainwashed by.
Book 3 starts with a link back to Book 1 (the doctor was evil all along!) It's one of the better sequences in the adventure, even if it's fit awkwardly here between two trips to the North Pole. Again, this could be lifted as the final chunk of Book 1 (with levels adjusted). In the new Book 2-3 campaign, I don't think there's a ton of space for it. Maybe if the location was shifted to being in the Arctic, instead of halfway across the world, you could use it. Section 2 is 200+ skill checks (seriously, who writes this stuff?) as your characters trek to the pole. A much abbreviated version could be used to investigate how you wound up there (there's spots for encountering monsters, ruins, explorers, etc. this could much more satisfyingly be used to find clues instead of random encounters.) Section 3 is stopping whale from escaping from its prison under the Artic city watching the NPC you escorted in Book 2 stop the whale. Again, that's gotta go. Paizo sidesteps having you fistfight Cthulhu by using a corrupted yeti here, which is a decent idea. The professor should be the final boss here, and can be used with minimal modification. He was still part of the earlier expedition, he still tricks the PCs, etc. Beating him gives the PCs a chance to disrupt the ritual (not via skill checking to aid an NPC) and close out the adventure. Alternatively, the elaborate travel sub-game could maybe be used as part of a an Artic West March. It'd need to be redone, but random bullshit on your way to explore the lost city is very OSR.
History is more like fiction than science, because you have to create a world for it. That was the most interesting and controversial thing in this chapter. The rest is pretty rehashy.
These How to Read... chapters are all pretty receptive, but I did find something interesting near the back of this one. Adler talks for a bit about propaganda, and discusses how active reading, asking questions, etc. is an effective defense against it. We talk a lot about teaching kids media literacy and active reading, but I don't think I've ever read someone making the direct link like that. He also describes something called "sales resistance" which is an interesting term for not just accepting everything. He does warn against having too much of it (the "nothing ever happens problem") which can be an issue.
I think Adler could safely have cut about 2/3 of the previous chapter, squished it with the intro to this one (which is already partially repeated) and had a better single chapter. He includes specific recommendations for fiction, plays, and lyric poetry (and short notes about epics and tragedies). They're mostly good.
He repeats trying to suspend your disbelief and trying to get through fiction relatively quickly and as uninterrupted as possible. All good so far. He then says we want all great novels to be big (I like novellas!) and whines about fanfiction for a while. Truly, the GRRM of his time.
For plays: imagine staging them in your head (I'm glad it's not too hard to find staged videos now) and notes that the key problem of all tragedies is time (almost all tragedy problems could be resolved if the characters had more time to plan/talk). I think that goes to most fiction (the often mentioned "ticking clock" element of tension). Also, Shakespeare is hard, because the language has changed. I think the Shakespeare difficulty is generally overstated, and was kind of surprised to see if from Adler, who seems to think anyone can aspire to be an intellectual.
He says poetry is hard to define, and goes with basically a "you know it when you see it" test.
I love his suggestion to read all poems aloud. I learned that in undergrad, and it made a huge difference in my ability to understand poetry. I think if I had to make a list of the top 5 things I want to make sure my students learn it'd be on there.
Update on my previous whine/rant. I figured out a not-horrendously time/labor intensive way of sorting my reading options.
Step 1: I took the Synopticon Great Ideas List and cut it down to only the ones that I was interesting in. (Eliminating about 1/4 of the topics.)
Then, I created my own "Pseudopticon" by pulling out just the part of the Gateway introduction with the author/topic list. It's still ~200 pages and not well organized, but it's infinitely more searchable than full ~5K (or even the 300+ of volume 1). Shoutout to my wife for suggesting that I use the "Print to PDF" function to isolate those pages, instead of trying to wrangle all 5K pages in a PDF editor.
I can CTRL+F through that (remember, match case and complete word!) and I think the most hits I've gotten for any one Idea is ~15. Very manageable.
Those (after a minimal check for reasonable length, repeat from last year, etc.) go into this spreadsheet which is labeled with volume-page#. Surprisingly, a few of the words I picked aren't in the Gateway at all. Once I have them all compiled, I'll start checking for dupes (working first from the ones with the fewest entries so they can "keep" as many as possible) and picking the themes/entries to read. My goal is to go for a similar length to last year, which is ~10 pages a day (I think the contents of a page between the two collections are similarish). Some of the selections are only a page or two long, so I may wind up with a couple those days. Some are 50 or 60, so I'll be passing on those (for now, might go back if they looking interesting. This is partially a trail run to see how I like the GBWW selections in general.) I'm stretching to 20-25 if they looking interesting.
Commentary: I first heard about the Jefferson Bible years ago. Long story short, it's the Gospels with all the miracles cut out. As I was working on my Synopticon reading list, I wondered if the angels had made it through or not. (No angels appear, but some references survive.) Some of the cuts are kind of awkward (Luke 2, when Mary and Joseph lose him at the temple cuts Jesus explaining why he stayed, but keeps Mary asking him). He still whips people out of the temple. He travels around a lot (most paragraphs start with something like, "And then they went to X" or "And then it was Y". The Beatitudes (Blessed are the meek, etc.) survive more or less intact. It's all the Gospels together, so some of the repeats (The Lord's Prayer, various lost and found parables, divorce, etc.) are more obvious than they'd be in the regular Bible.
I could, unsurprisingly, fill a whole post with all the famous sayings in here.
It'd be interesting to see a reconstruction that marks what was kept and cut, although it's reordered to be chronological as well, which might make it a bit harder.
I spent a lot of time whining about how awful the Old Testament was next year. There's surprisingly little to object to here (the parable of the talents isn't great, but it's no almost making a guy kill his son).
This is the first part of two chapters on fiction. I figured it was good to look at them first since I'm most familiar with fiction before considering his guides to other genres/modes. It was basically the first couple chapters ("pidgeonhole the book", "understand the terms", etc.) but with argument swapped for experience. He does tell you to suspend your disbelief at least.
This chapter mostly deals with using books to help read other books. Adler lists four types of aids (paraphrased):
1. Experiences
2. Other books
3. Commentaries
4. References
The experiences section is kind of scattered. He spends about half a page giving examples to illustrate the difference between common and universal. It does have a helpful check for if you understand a book. Can you give an example of the point(s) not included in the text? Very clean and direct, I like it.
He talks a bit about other books and THE GREAT CONVERSATION, but not in a ton of detail. (I'm not sure if The Great Conversation is cool, or just puffery.)
Commentaries, etc. are okay but should not be relied upon. Always read the book yourself before turning to them. I think this is broadly helpful, and something I wish something I'd been taught in school. I feel like often we have students read handbooks directly alongside or even in place of original texts.
The meat of this chapter is mostly about encyclopedias and dictionaries. He calls dictionaries "a self-help book" which is a fun little bit of linguistic change since HtRAB was written. There's a good amount about how to use them effectively, what should and shouldn't be in them, etc. It's mostly valid, if a bit overwritten (like most of HtRaB). Something that's interesting is his repeated insistence that you shouldn't read a book "in one hand, with a dictionary in the other." I broadly agree (if you need to look up that much, you won't make much sense of it, as Adler points out), but it's funny that we can not hold the dictionary in the same hand as we read digitally. I definitely use the lookup function on my ereader more than I ever did a physical dictionary. Much quicker and less disruptive.
That ends the "general" section of HtRaB, and moves into more format/genre specific ones. Like I said, I'm going to skip around a bit here, and might not finish this whole section. I want to be done with this book before I dive into The Gateway... in April.
Back to this. I guess I need to make sure I finish it before April, when I hypothetically go look at Adler's other stuff. (Maybe, if I work out how I'm actually going to use the Synopticon or whatever.)
In any event, this was a pretty good chapter. He starts by laying out three rules for having a good debate, which I think are helpful today (especially in our modern era of flame war bullshit):
1. Acknowledge your feelings.
2. State your assumptions.
3. Try to be impartial.
I think most debates will be pretty productive if both people keep to these. If only one person does, you wind up in a chess with a pigeon/prisoner's dilemma scenario.
He also lists four reasons to disagree:
1. The other person is uniformed.
2. The other person is misinformed.
3. The other person is being illogical.
4. The other person's logic is incomplete.
I never really thought about it, but I guess that does pretty much sum up all the reasonable causes of disagreement. He also accepting someone's facts/logic and just not liking it, which I think is a much less passive aggressive way of saying "agree to disagree."
My wife and I went out to the local winery (where we got engaged) for their silent book club. The theme was female writers, so I went with The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones (who wrote Howl's Moving Castle!) It's fun, funny, a little light. I got it as a Christmas gift over a decade ago, and I decided I finally needed to read it. Had a fun time, met some nice people, had some good wine.
All in just under a minute. No pics, since I did it at work and left the rope there. Maybe tomorrow.
This was a fun little project. I wish I'd integrated it into the blog a little better, but there's always whatever the next arbitrary goal I set for myself is.
So, after a couple days of fighting with it, I think I finally have the Alpine Butterfly figured out. (Disclaimer: I might still be wrong. Please don't try to learn knots from me, then sue me if you fall off a mountain or something. Always learn from someone who actually knows what they'll doing.)
This fucking knot(butterfly)
What's it for: Putting loop(s) in the middle of a line. Unlike the bowline (the most famous loop making knot) you can easily put as many as you want wherever you want in the rope. You could even make an absolute ton to make a whole ladder of hand and footholds. That's pretty cool.
Why is it such a pain? There are some pretty common issues with learning new knots. How symmetrical is it? What happens if you mess it up? How many ways to tie it are there?
For the Butterfly, the answers are pretty much universally, "whatever the worst answer is."
How symmetrical? Not even a little. Front to back, left to right, up to down. No matter how you tie it or look at it, any change in direction changes it. Sometimes it's only cosmetic, but sometimes it will ruin the knot. There's not even really a consensus on which side is the front and which is the back. This is made even worse by the fact that a lot of websites, books, etc. will do things like show you the correct way for one side to look and the incorrect for another. I shouldn't have to cludge together four images from three sources to figure out what a knot should look like!
What happens if you mess it up? You get a "false butterfly" which looks and works very similarly. It will fail under a sufficient load, and the visual differences are pretty minor. Compare that to some of the other knots that I worked on this month: if your bowline slides, it's not a bowline. If your reef knot doesn't interlock nice and symmetrically, it's a granny knot. The false butterfly requires careful inspection from both sides, or a heavy load test.
How many ways to tie? Most knots can be tied multiple ways, but usually there's one "main" way or the differences are very small. The butterfly has two completely different but equally popular ways, plus an almost as popular "hybrid" approach, along with assorted sub variants. That's fine, as long as you know which way you're tying it, but if you're trying to double check you have to make sure you're double checking against another set of instructions for the same variant.
Basically, trying to learn the butterfly almost felt like trying to learn 4 or 5 knots at once, until I figured out how to "align" them figure out what went with what. I'm pretty sure I was tying them mostly correctly much earlier, but couldn't tell since I'd look online and go, "nope, that's different" when I was looking at one tied the opposite direction or something and it was fine.
I'm trying all my own pics for this one. Partially just to have something different, and partially because of the aforementioned issues with finding good pics of the finished knot.
How to tie:
1. Put two twists in the rope. ALWAYS go from the same side over the opposite, eg left over right, left over right again. DO NOT always put the same end over eg left over right, right over left.
Step 1
2. Bend the top loop over the bottom loop, between the ends of the rope.
Step 2
3. Come up through the second loop from the back. Pull the ends to tighten.
Step 3
Like I said, there are two other popular methods of tying the Butterfly. I'm not covering them here, except to say why I'm not covering them. The first involves making loops over your hand and pulling them around and through each other. This one is often recommended for preventing "false butterflies." In my experience, I was just as likely to screw up the knot until I'd mastered it. Second, many of these variants require you to maintain pressure on the loop while tightening the ends. I saw people stick a pencil in, while others recommended holding it in your teeth. While that's great in an emergency I'm not telling people to bite the rope as the routine way to tie a knot. I also found the "figure eight" method to be more reliable across different lengths and sizes of rope. Of all the hand wrap versions, I found Animated Knots to be the best. There is also a "hybrid" method that uses some of both. I was never able to find a good guide for tying it, so that's a no go.
Finally, here's some pictures of the knot, with cues for how to tell if it's right or wrong.
Correct "Front"
For my purposes, this is the "front" of the knot. It has the "wings" of the butterfly mostly vertical, both wrapped the same way around the rope. The inner parts look parallel here, but this is NOT a requirement for a "correct" butterfly as far as I can tell.
Incorrect "Front"
This is the most common incorrect configuration I wound up with, caused by switching the front side when I made the figure eight. The right (tied this way, it could switch to the left) "wing" doesn't completely cover the horizontal "stripes"
Right "Back"
On the back side, the most important thing to look for is that little loop that I drew the arrow to. I call it the "collar" and it (visually, at least) holds the top horizontal loop from slipping. (The bottom one is held by the top one.)
Wrong "Back"
As indicated by the circle, there's no "collar" here. This is, for me, the easiest visual indicator for the most common "False Butterfly"
There's the Alpine Butterfly. I spend more time learning this knot than learning and relearning all the others put together. Not sure it was worth it, but it's always good to learn something new.
My wife and I were talking about blogging at dinner tonight, and she asked me about my plans for A to Z. That reminded me that I hadn't whined to her yet about a set back I had earlier this week. As I talked about the other day, the trademark of Great Books of the Western World is the Synopticon, which is an index of the appearances of 100-odd themes in the collection. Not wanted to spend another month trying to find random excerpts scattered across 50 books (and then trying to find copies online), I decided to limit myself to the more manageable Gateway to the Great Books this year, which is only 10 volumes, and mostly consists of shorter complete pieces (no excerpts, yay!) The first volume has a section called a Synoptical Guide, which I assumed would be like the Synopticon, but for the more limited contents of Gateway...
Nope. Instead, it's an alphabetical list of authors, then lists the great ideas they're linked with, and where to find more about them in the full Great Books. Clearly more of an attempt at advertising than a serious index. I can ctrl+f my way through it to find the stuff I need, but frustrated and annoyed with the whole thing. I might make a tweak to my A to Z theme. Still classics, but maybe a slightly different set or means of selecting them.
I do think I finally got the Alpine Butterfly down at least.
Sometimes, my wife and I will watch a movie, and I'll tell her I didn't really understand it. Shrek is the most recent example. I'm not really sure Shrek has what I'd conventionally consider a plot or character development or whatever. They just sort of stumble from one fart joke to another. She explained the whole thing to me, and I said, "Yeah, I knew all that, but it still doesn't really make sense." She said I was probably just expecting too much of it.
I wrote a bunch of fiction tonight, and it's late, and this is not a great blog entry. Toodles!
It's another late night, so another quickie (that I'll probably expand into a longer one later). What does it mean to know or understand something? Last night, I said to my friend that I didn't know how to play Checkers, but I'd play a game with him anyway. I won, because I know the rules of Checkers, but I said I didn't know the strategy or whatever. I think there's an interesting break between what people mean when they say they know or understand something. Some people would say you only know or understand something if you know all there is to know about it. I remember reading an article once that basically said that the best person in the world sets the bar for "good", the top 50 or so are "okay", and anyone below that is a clueless idiot. Other people say if you know how the checkers move, you know how to play Checkers.
My plan for today was to announce the final list of knots I was going to try to tie. It was going to start with:
1. Square Knot
2. Bowline
3. Two Half-Hitches
4. Taut-Line Hitch
5. Sheet Bend
6. Clove Hitch
These were almost universally listed on all the lists of "knots to know" or "knot challenges" and I feel like they'd cover you for most things.
I decided to add:
7. Figure Eight: It was on a fair number of the lists, is pretty easy, and was the first knot I'm pretty sure I didn't know how to tie as a kid.
I considered the Sheepshank, but I don't really enjoy tying it (it's not hard, just awkward) and never felt very practical. So I poked around for something to replace it. One knot I'd seen mentioned a lot the last week or so (including as a Sheepshank alternative in some places) was the Alpine Butterfly. Looked it over, seemed like a good one to know.
I spent over an hour trying to tie it. I never got it even close.
Blogsters, anyone know how to tie this thing? I don't even know where I'm going wrong. Usually when I screw up a knot I can at least tell "oh, I need to flip that loop" or something.
This chapter actually had some amount of new content! More about why critique is important than how to critique (have reasons. That's like 90% of the how). I like that Adler makes sure to emphasize that even great books aren't above criticism. He emphasizes that you need to make sure you understand a book before you critique it, otherwise you'll be inane and/or impudent.
Don't upset Mr. Garvey
He talks about how all critique and disagreement should be with the goal of reaching some kind of understanding and resolution. Don't just get into a reddit slap-fight with the author. Argue to better understand what's going on.
Finally, he emphasizes one of my favorite classics maxims: Anyone can learn enough to give good critiques if they put in the effort.
It's almost April again, and I've decided to do the A to Z challenge like I did last year.
I'd like to thank the Blog-cademy
The official them is Gratitude, which seems like a good thing to focus on for a month, if not super related to this blog. Therefore, I'll be supplementing it with the Great Ideas from Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon to give me daily themes. That'll serve me pretty well until U, when he started slacking off. All the other letters (even weird ones like Q!) got at least two ideas. It's a little hit and miss from there (he gave up on X,Y, and Z, 'cause he's basic), but I think it'll be fun to round out the remaining letters with the alphabet with my ideas for what should've been included at the end of the alphabet. I'll include a bit on why I'm thankful for whatever the day's Great Idea was.
So, if you were here last year, no big changes. I'll be working from a different reading list (probably Gateway to The Greatbooks) and only making up a few of the letters instead of all of them.
If you haven't been here before, this blog started out as a reading journal for "The Harvard Classics 15 Minutes a Day Reading Guide." Long story short: read ten pages or so a night of a bunch of classics, and you'll get the beginning of a classic liberal arts education. I enjoyed it, felt like a learned a lot (it was surprisingly good for my mental health), and managed to keep it up every day for the whole year (and I think every day this year. I got less careful though.)
I also did a series on The Odyssey, started a somewhat sporadically updated Star Wars novelsblog, and wrote about knives and knots some. (I briefly considered doing Star Wars or "survival" or something as my theme). But, I miss doing the classics stuff, so I'm going to hop back on that train. See you all in April!
The Sheepshank was on one of the knot lists I looked at, so I figured I'd try it.
Baaa
Not super impressed. It's a kind of awkward knot, and it doesn't seem like it'd hold very well when it's not under load. The internet suggests it doesn't tie well with modern, slicker rope, which also isn't great. The internet has some other variants that look more usable. I was a little proud that I was able to tie it today after working on it yesterday without looking at directions. It's the first knot I wasn't super comfortable with years ago that I can say I really learned. (I guess the figure eight, technically, but that feels so simple.)
It's a weird one to describe. Lay out your rope in a Z shape. Make a loop, at one end, and pass the bend through (over then under). I found it helped if you slid the loop up the length a little and partially tightened it. Then repeat at the other end and pull the ends to snug the whole thing.
The Figure Eight was on a few of the knot lists I looked at, and I decided I might as well learn to tie it (I have to do some logistics stuff before I start trying to tie for time). It's mostly used as a stopper to keep rope from sliding. It's pretty simple.
Looks more like an 8 than my title does.
Make a loop, bring the back end over and in front, then back through, pull tight. Unlike a lot of knots, the trick is to go the "opposite" way instead of the same way. In front for the first part of the eight, and behind for the second.
This is an entire chapter of "figure out what the main ideas are", which isn't that different from what he's written gotten before.
Not a lot new here, and not a lot of new comments. I still like the idea of this book, but I still think the execution either needs to be much more developed to justify a full book or could be chopped to well under half the length.
My main quibble here is going to be his choices of examples.
1. There's a lot of Pascal. Just why? I guess everyone (in the hoity-toity classically educated world) read Pascal back then, but it just feels goofily fringe and specific.
2. He dissects things like punctuation and phrasing in The Prince. It's not like those things change in translation (I checked, the semi-colon he talks about isn't even in some translations!) Why not pick an English example?
Current plan is to finish this section (~50 more pages), and then jump to the fiction chapter of the next section. I think I'm reasonably qualified to judge someone's fiction prescriptions, so if I'm still struggling with it there, I'll probably stop and save myself the remaining pages to get to something better. I miss reading the actual classics, as opposed to stuff adjacent to them.
The Timber Hitch is (as the name implies) used for hauling logs and log-like objects. Tie it around a tree trunk, drag it through the woods, cut it up (or burn it), etc.
I need a bigger prop budget.
The Timber Hitch is pretty simple to tie. Make a loop. Wrap around the loop. Then wrap around at least two more times. Pull tight.
Credit:theknotsmanual.com
4/5. I should practice a bit more, since I haven't done this one in years. But it's pretty easy.
Someone, somewhere, dubbed The Bowline THE KING OF KNOTS. I don't know who/where, the internet just accepts it as fact. It makes a loop. The loop doesn't slip. You can tie it "one handed." You have to keep tension on it though, so something is holding the other end, and you use your back also. "One hand, some other guy's hand, and one assed" just didn't have the same ring to it.
Hail to the king, baby!
The stereotypical use for the bowline is hauling someone out of a hole they fell into, but you can also use it to tie up a boat (or plane!), as a climbing knot, or any other time you want a reasonably sturdy loop.
The standard direction is: The rabbit goes up the hole, around the tree, and back down.
I've never found this terribly helpful, since it doesn't tell you which was to make the loops, etc. Here's a less catch, but more detailed, explanation:
1. Make a loop so that the end at the top (the standing end) is in the back (there has to be a better way to phrase this).
2. Bring the other (working) end through the hole from behind and underneath.
3. Wrap behind the standing end.
4. Back through the loop alongside itself.
5. Pull standing end and "both" working ends.
Thanks, Buz11 from Wikipedia!
I rate my knowledge here 4/5. I have to remember how to do the initial loop (I'm starting to get it into muscle memory), but other than that it's good.
You need to make sure you understand the words the author uses (i.e. jargon/technical language), and the way they're used (i.e. words with multiple meanings). That's it, that's the whole chapter. This book would be a lot better if it was about 1/10th as long.
Adler uses newspapers as an example of something that's easy to read. I feel like I see this example a lot in older texts, and I always find it an odd one. Based on what I've read, newspapers in the first half the twentieth century (when this book was written) were often written at a college level. This dropped into the second half, but it's still often floating around high school (and seems to be slowly creeping back up in many cases). Compared to best selling books, which generally hit middle school. Weird.
This one wasn't on the original list, but it's my blog and I can change it if I want. The Sheet Bend is the gold standard for joining two different ropes, even if they're different sizes, slippery, wet, etc. It's knot number one in Ashley's Book of Knots, the knot "Bible".
Synthetic rope (most rope today) is notoriously slippery, and any knot involving ropes of substantially different sizes is liable to have some issues. If this was a heist blog, the knot below would involve a lot of yelling about it shouldn't hold:
IT'LL NEVER HOLD!
I usually double my sheet bends. You can double a lot of knots, which just means you redo one or more steps. It takes about an extra second, and it makes it hold much better.
from: 101knots.com
It's a pretty straightforward knot. Make a loop with the thicker rope, come into the loop from underneath/behind, go behind the "double" end of the loop, and back through the wrap you just made. If you're doubling, go around the back and through the wrap again. Pull tight. 5/5, easier to tie than a lot of knots that don't work as well anyway.
After much frustration, I realized yesterday that I was tying THH correctly (at least most of the time). My confusion stemmed from forgetting that, like the taut-line, THH will slide (despite some pithy rhymes on Wikipedia to the contrary). I think part of the problem also comes from the fact that, when I learned it as a kid, we learned THH w/ a round turn, which was just different enough to scramble my brain. The general consensus online (I clearly need to make some good knotting friends) seems to be that the taut-line is more cooperative to adjust, but THH is more secure and easier.
I'm 90% sure this is right.
It's pretty simple to tie. Make a loop, pass through the loop, then make another pass outside the loop the same way. If you went up and over, go up and over, in to out, do in to out. It doesn't particularly matter, just make sure you match.
Trying 101knots.com for this one
I'm rating my personal knowledge of this one 3/5. I think I can tie it pretty well, but I'm not 100% comfortable with it, and I don't really understand what its used for.
I figured I should do Two Half Hitches next, because it's used as a part of a lot of other knots. No clue how to tie it. Looked at about 10 different guides, including videos, and tied it wrong (but like three different ways) every time. I think I spent more time trying to figure this "simple" knot out than the other three I did this week put together. I don't even think everyone in the videos is trying to tie the same knot (and not in the "is it a midshipman or a taut-line" minor variant kind of way).
I don't remember ever actually needing it for anything when I went camping regularly (I'm not even entirely sure what it would do. It's just wrapping the rope around a pole?) Will have to ask someone about it, I guess. No picture today, since I can't tie it, and no directions, since if I can't learn from it, why would I sent it to you?
(EDIT, ~9 HOURS LATER: I did it right, for some reason I thought it wasn't supposed to slide, but it does. Will update tomorrow.)
