Reading, Listening, Watching

[purplecat]

Reading: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein recommended to me many times by many people. I am mostly a bit bemused. Heinlein is Heinlein and his writing in 1966 is, frankly, a lot less eye-rolly than much else from the era. What puzzles me somewhat is that the book seems to consist mostly of the narrator, or his friend the Prof, explaining How the World Works. This is fair enough, a lot of SF, and a lot of Heilein is in part a political manifesto, it's just that there doesn't seem to be a lot more to this and, given one aspect of How the World Works is an assumption that humanity placed in a sufficiently harsh environment with sufficiently few actual laws will naturally develop into a terribly polite society in which people respect each other, each other's property and person and, assuming there are few enough women, treat said women particularly well seems, well, not quite as elder statesman imparting wisdom as the author intends. In fact, Heinlein's Luna colony makes me think mostly of Tolkien's shire only without the nostalgic focus, the vague assumption of sufficient resource to go around, and the implicit classism to provide some kind of legal structure.

Listening: Miscellaneous podcasts as usual - though I have started to listen to series of public lectures hosted by the LSE. It admirably oscillates between left and right wing speakers but so far I have found speakers from both sides rather irritatingly inclined to construct straw men, prefer a bon mot over an actual point, and to argue somewhat from conclusion back to evidence rather than vice versa.

Watching: B. has discovered a genre of Japanese amine which mostly involves someone cooking a dish, someone else eating it and experiencing the joy of the wonderful flavours and... well that's about it. It is remarkably relaxing to watch.

Comments

[conuly]

I think it's one of Heinlein books* that manages to remain readable even today. There aren't that many that do that. So since he's a Big Name, if you want to rec something of his... that's gotta be it.

* For adults, I'm not thinking about the juveniles

[purplecat]

Maybe - I felt people were pretty enthusiastic about it, whereas from my perspective it was difficult to see the excitement - though perhaps from the perspective of 2018 naive libertarianism and intelligent computers don't seem that way out as idea.

Cooking/Eating/Watching Anime

[a_cubed]

That anime genre was one of the things that Youkai Watch (now succeeded by Youkai Watch Shadowside) parodied for a while, using an element of the school lunch as the "watching" part only. I found it utterly bizarre and irritating. Perhaps the parody element and not having seen the original meant it passed me by, but I can't really envisage the original being particularly compelling.

Re: Cooking/Eating/Watching Anime

[purplecat]

The last episode we watched (from a show in which a Tokyo restaurant has discovered that its front door opens into medieval Germany (because animal spirits)) was quite eventful - a spy from a nearby city state came to down determined to assess their wealth by the quality of their salad and he left overwhelmed not only by the quality of the salad but also by the fact they served fresh fish far inland and sprinkled pepper and gold leaf on the dishes and thus resolved that this was not a city to be tangled with.

I mean, you need to get into a frame of mind where you're not expecting much to happen beyond someone being served food and liking it.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I wasn't over-keen on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress either. Is the stuff about probability theory correct? It's the main thing that sticks in my mind.

[purplecat]

There isn't really an probability theory as such in it. Mike states probabilities but the mechanism for computing them is computer magic...

[liadt]

Is the anime 'Food Wars'? It sounds like a fictionalized Bake Off.

[purplecat]

I won't watch Food Wars - I may be judging it harshly but the first couple of episodes seemed to involve mostly women enjoying the food and when they did their breasts bounced and their skirts flew upwards and it just made my eyes roll.

I like Isekai Izakaya ~Koto Aitheria no Izakaya Nobu and Restaurant to Another World - both of which feature modern day restaurants with doors to other worlds (medieval Germany in the first and random fantasy worlds in the second). B. is also in the process of persuading me to watch Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi in which, I gather, more actually happens but the resolution always involves cooking - in that a young girl who happens to be a good cook finds herself a hostage in the other world because of debts her grandfather ran up.

[liadt]

I don't think I'll be watching 'Food Wars' either by the sounds of it!