Posts in Books (20 found)
annie's blog 5 days ago

Reading notes: August, September

I need to get back on the monthly routine because I’m squinting back at August like Uuuuuuuuuuh I vaguely remember it  so anyway let’s see how this goes. What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct. Okay. So. I want to like this book. I love books about food, involving food, including food. And this book has a lot of food. Of course it’s a tool, a metaphor, a… I don’t know, an environment. But still: Food. Hell yeah. Actually maybe that’s what I don’t like. I love the messy earthy good realness of food and people taking pleasure in it, cooking and sharing and enjoying it. Food in this story is not that. It is a measure of control, self-inflicted punishment, purgatory, avoidance, annihilation. And that makes me sad. ALSO I think if we’d moved things along and had the final inevitable explosion happen at, say, page 215 instead of page 300-ish, that would have been better. Also also, I said the writing was good and it was but.   But there were a lot of stretches of text that went like this: She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing). Details of the ingredients. She (did another food thing). Sizzle. She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing).  Etc. I don’t know how you’d write it different but it got repetitive. It was too much. I was inwardly screaming OKAY I GET IT I GET IT SHE IS COOKING AS A WAY TO HAVE CONTROL SHE IS EATING AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL THE OTHER THINGS SHE SHOULD BE DOING I GET IT. Also it annoyed me that he (the fiance) did a horrible thing that ruined it all but we treat it like a big mystery and it is never clarified. I know the point is it doesn’t matter what he did . The point is he betrayed her and instead of rising up with immediate willpower and boundaries and hell naw  she just cooks and eats and pretends it’s fine. (Until she doesn’t.) I get that in a really personal way of having done the same thing myself (less cooking, less eating, but just as much pretending it’s fine) and I know it doesn’t matter how  the betrayal happens, what matters is that the betrayal happened and what matters even more is the self-betrayal that happens and then keeps happening. Until it doesn’t. Again: I GET IT. But also: I WANT TO KNOW. Tell me what he did. This book both destroyed and healed me. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. It’s beautiful, it’s full of music and connection and fear. It’s a time-outside-of-time book but you know, the whole time, that there is a reckoning, there is an end, and you know it will pluck your heart out and smash it like a grape and you go forward anyway. Because you are there too and the music you can’t hear is carrying you along and the slow threads are weaving together and you are somehow woven in and then your heart is broken and you have no one to blame but yourself. And Ann Patchett. Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else. First pick for the book club. We had our first meeting the last week of August and I picked this book without knowing anything about it other than I wanted to read it. It wasn’t what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected. Something lighter, I guess. Anyway I loved it but I felt kind of bad about picking it for CBBC because it is weighty. It is depth. It is pondering.  It is kind of bleak. Also beautiful. Also heavy. It’s a book I want to read again in a few years and see how it hits me. Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose. I guess this is a stranded-on-a-desert-island book, kind of . But only in the sense that the environment, the context, has been set up to give us this thought experiment, this experience, this long echoing question of purpose and the even more important unignorable thump-thump-thump of loneliness. Anyway this book is excellent. Read it. Or don’t. But do. Also read The Wall by   Marlen Haushofer. I was not sure about this book but Stewart wrote and produced Xena, Warrior Princess so I figured it would be worth a shot. And yes: It was. If you like well-written badass heroines doing cool shit in a dystopian world (I do) you will like this. Really quite gorgeous. I liked the characters, good adventure, good pacing, good story. A satisfying if bittersweet fantasy (don’t worry, the ending is good). Loved this one. Scifi, really, but reads like fantasy. I should say more about it but I’m tired and I have already said a lot of words. Okay thriller. Plot twist was not so surprising. Tolerable writing. Good escape for a few hours.

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Chris Coyier 5 days ago

Media Diet

📺 Wondla — 10/10 kids show. I was way into it. Post-apoc situation with underground bunkers (apparently Apple loves that theme) where when the protagonist girl busts out of it, the world is quite different. The premise and payoff in Season 1 was better than the commentary vibe of Season 2, but I liked it all. Apparently there is one more season coming . 🎥 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — The darkest of the three movies? Weird. I love spending time in this world though so I was happy to be there. But honestly I was coming off a couple of day beers when I saw it in the theater and it put me in a weird mood and I should probably watch it again normally. How to proper movie critics review movies without their random current moods affecting the review?! 📕 Annie Bot —  Sierra Greer is like, what if we turned AI into sex bots? Which honestly feels about 7 minutes away at this point. I’m only like half through it and it’s kinda sexy in that 50-shades kinda way where there is obviously some dark shit coming. 📔 Impossible People — Binge-able graphic novel by Julia Wertz about a redemption arc out of addiction. I’m an absolute sucker for addiction stories. This is very vulnerable and endearing. Like I could imagine having a very complicated friendship with Julia. It doesn’t go down to the absolute bottom of the well like in books like A Million Little Pieces or The Book of Drugs , so I’d say it’s a bit safer for you if you find stuff like that too gut wrenching.

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Beyond credibility

In the 1880s, a French neurologist named Jean-Martin Charcot became famous for hosting theatrical public lectures in which he put young, “hysterical” women in a hypnotic trance and then narrated the symptoms of the attacks that followed. Charcot’s focus was on documenting and classifying these symptoms, but he had few theories as to their source. A group of Charcot’s followers—among them Pierre Janet, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud—would soon eagerly compete to be the first to discover the cause of this mysterious affliction. Where Charcot showed intense interest in the expression of hysteria, he had no curiosity for women’s own testimony; he dismissed their speech as “vocalizations.” But Freud and his compatriots landed on the novel idea of talking to the women in question. What followed were years in which they talked to many women regularly, sometimes for hours a day, in what can only be termed a collaboration between themselves and their patients. That collaboration revealed that hysteria was a condition brought about by trauma. In 1896, Freud published The Aetiology of Hysteria, asserting: I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences , occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology. Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery , notes that The Aetiology remains one of the great texts on trauma; she describes Freud’s writing as rigorous and empathetic, his analysis largely in accord with present-day thinking about how sexual abuse begets trauma and post-traumatic symptoms, and with methods that effect treatment. But a curious thing happened once this paper was published: Freud began to furiously backpedal from his claims. [Freud’s] correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients. The turning point is documented in the famous case of Dora. This, the last of Freud’s case studies on hysteria, reads more like a battle of wits than a cooperative venture. The interaction between Freud and Dora has been described as an “emotional combat.” In this case Freud still acknowledged the reality of his patient’s experience: the adolescent Dora was being used as a pawn in her father’s elaborate sex intrigues. Her father had essentially offered her to his friends as a sexual toy. Freud refused, however, to validate Dora’s feelings of outrage and humiliation. Instead, he insisted upon exploring her feelings of erotic excitement, as if the exploitative situation were a fulfillment of her desire. In an act Freud viewed as revenge, Dora broke off the treatment. That is, faced with the horror of women’s experience, Freud rejected the evidence in front of him. Rather than believe the women he had collaborated with, and so be forced to revise his image of the respectable men in his midst, he chose to maintain that respectability by refusing the validity of his own observations. He would go on to develop theories of human psychology that presumed women’s inferiority and deceitfulness—in a way, projecting his own lies onto his patients. Is this not how all supremacy thinking works? To believe that one people are less human or less intelligent or less capable is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again. In order to recant his own research, Freud had to cleave his mind in two. We must refuse to tolerate supremacists in our midst because their beliefs do real and lasting harm, because their speech gives rise to terrible violence. But we must also refuse them because they are compromised. They cannot trust their own minds. And so cannot be trusted in turn. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman’s canonical work on trauma remains one of the core texts on the topic, over thirty years since its first publication. Critically—and in contrast to much current popular discourse about trauma—Herman locates psychological trauma in a social and political context, arguing that the political standpoint and testimony of survivors are necessary to an understanding of how trauma is remembered and mourned, and how stories can be reconstructed for more just futures. “Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told,” she writes. We live in a time of ghosts; we live among storytellers. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Eli Bendersky's website 2 weeks ago

Summary of reading: July - September 2025

"The Compromise" by Sergei Dovlatov - (read in Russian) the author was a journalist in the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s. This book is a humorous, semi-biographic account of some of the issues faced by Soviet journalists in their attempt to report news aligned with party lines. Very good writing, though the Russian in this book was a bit difficult for me at times. "Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945" by Ian Toll - the third part of the trilogy. As an overall conclusion to the series, I will reiterate the earlier feedback: the writing is great, the book is very readable for such immense size, but I wish the author's focus was elsewhere. If you're looking for very detailed tactical accounts of key battles, this is the book for you. It doesn't have much about the more strategic aspects, and especially the U.S. industrial capacity that played such a key role in the war. How was the production scaled so much, especially with millions of people drafted? I'd be definitely interested in looking for additional sources of information on this subject. "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by R.G. Loeliger - describes some traditional approaches to implementing FORTH (which is the prime example of a thread-interpretive language, or TIL) in assembly. This book is from the late 1970s, so the target machine used is a Z80. Overall it's pretty good, with useful diagrams and quirky humor, but it certainly shows its age. "System Design Interview – An insider's guide" by Alex Xu - a book form of the author's guidelines for system design interviews. It's okay , far from great. The sections are all very repetitive and the sum total of unique insights and ideas in the book is low. Moreover, it's some sort of samizdat instant-Amazon printing of rather low quality, no index, unfocused diagrams and barely any copywriting. "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson - describes the author's theory of why some countries are rich and others are poor. The crux if the theory is extractive vs. inclusive political and economical institutions; in other words, a dictatorship vs. a pluralist government. Overall, the theory is interesting and insightful; the book is a bit scattered, though, with the authors jumping between examples haphazardly, making it difficult to focus. I like that the book doesn't shy away from making predictions for the future rather than just analyzing history. "A biography of the Pixel" by Alvy Ray Smith - the history of computer graphics, told by one of the founders of Pixar. Some parts of this book are good, but I can't say I really enjoyed most of it. Lots of very detailed history and names, and project names, etc. "The Age of Revolution: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume III" by Winston Churchill - covers the period from 1688 to 1815. Though this series is ostensibly about all the "English speaking peoples", the focus is clearly on England. There's some coverage of the USA, but it mostly focuses on the interactions with the British (revolution and war of 1812), and there's also quite a bit on Napoleon and France. The series becomes somewhat more interesting as it approaches the more modern era. "The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant" by Tae Kim - a very interesting and well-written biography of Nvidia, from the early founding days to ~2024. "Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization" by Paul Kriwaczek - an interesting historic account of Mesopotamia, from Eridu and until the fall of Babylon. "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver - a novel about a boy coming of age as an orphan in foster care, houses of friends, etc. The backdrop is the opioid epidemic of the early 2000s in the Appalachia, with broken families and lots of drugs. The book is pretty good, but the Pulitzer prize here is clearly for the unsettling coverage of an ongoing hot topic, not for any sort of literary flourish. "The Color of Our Sky" by Amita Trasi - the fictional story of two girls from different castes in India who find their lives intertwined in complex ways. Some thought provoking and troubling accounts of traditions still prevalent in India in relation to discrimination, human trafficking, child abuse and modern slavery. "El murmullo de las abejas" by Sofía Segovia - (read in Spanish) slightly mystical novel about the life of an aristocratic family in the north of Mexico in the early 20th century. Maybe it's just the Spanish, but I definitely got "100 años de soledad" vibes from this book: the mysticism, the multi-generational story going in circles, the ambience. "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne

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ava's blog 2 weeks ago

the past few weeks [photo dump]

I am a little low on energy at the moment, so I don't have much to say - I'll let most of the pictures speak for themselves. :) My copy of the Internet Phone Book arrived. It's sooooo worth it! Definitely grab a copy if you can! It's a joy to hold and explore. Also went to Noris Force Con with my wife. Also played a lot of analogue games again; Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness, and newly also X-Wing (don't like that one, but my wife loves it). We're currently trying out the Arkham Horror LCG too, so far it's pretty good. I think if I wasn't already playing other games in the universe (like the Arkham Horror boardgames, Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness, Call of Cthulhu PnP...) I would think it is horribly hard and unfair and would probably return it. You just have to get used to the fact that in the entire, I'd say "H. P. Lovecraft table games franchise" (?) by FFG and others, you really aren't meant to be the hero that is equally balanced to the scenario or monsters, you are supposed to feel small, helpless, and like everything is working out by sheer luck, coincidence, and some quick thinking. It aims to induce horror by feeling overrun with monsters and bad things happening all the time that make you yell "nooooo!". Some stuff just feels unfair and it is intentional, because otherwise, how do you transfer movie horror to card or board games? By now I have accepted it as normal to have an absolutely banger dice roll and still get 2 face-down damage cards, and curse the creators of the game. We also went to Die vegane Fleischerei . They're opening more stores, and I had previously already ordered from them once or twice. They have a nice offering of different plant meats and vegan cheeses :) Reply via email Published 28 Sep, 2025

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Scoring books

Over the past couple of years, I've used Literal to keep track of the books I've read and that I’m reading. When you mark a book as completed, Literal, like probably every other site and app of this type, asks for a review, which includes a 1-to-5 star rating. I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5. I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know. Anyway, I find myself reflecting on this because as I’m—painfully slowly—working on an updated version of my site, I’m considering adding a books section to it and was debating what to do when it comes to ratings. I’ll likely end up doing something similar to what Netflix does (or did; I have no idea if it’s still like that, since I don’t watch Netflix). Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Digital fatigue

I think I’m starting to feel what I can only describe as digital fatigue. I believe this is the result of a combination of two main factors: The solution is going to be a fairly easy one: I think I’m going to stop consuming digital content for the rest of the year and focus more on reading books and creating content myself. I know I’m going to miss reading content from a bunch of people I really like, but right now, this seems to be the only reasonable solution to save myself and my mental sanity. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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ava's blog 3 weeks ago

i may not be aphantasic anymore?

On this blog, I've previously talked about struggling with aphantasia - a lack of being able to imagine something mentally. Reading books, playing DnD campaigns and similar things didn't produce an image, and I couldn't imagine art in my head before bringing it to paper, and I couldn't see a mental image of the people I know even when I tried. At best, I would see short flashes, a brief detail, shadows, and that's it. I couldn't rotate an item in my mind, either. The past few months, I've made a concentrated effort to train myself to have more of a mental image. I had previously just given up and not even tried to imagine things when the situation would lend itself to that, but now I did; trying to imagine what my friend or my wife experienced while they tell the story, or trying harder to visualize things in my Pen and Paper groups, or trying to think of the art I wanted to make while falling asleep. It got better the more I worked on it, and I noticed that the closer I was to sleep, the easier it was to vividly and strongly see a mental image, without being fully asleep or dreaming yet. I think acknowledging and appreciating whenever that happened helped make that mental wall crumble. I knew it was possible, and it made it easier to happen on purpose outside of trying to fall asleep, too. The better I could mentally visualize something and just let a little movie run internally of whatever I chose, the more I noticed negative side effects that I had completely forgotten about. I was experiencing vivid flashbacks to traumatic situations again, and I had rather gruesome mental images triggered by fear. Let me explain: Sometimes, I might see a situation that is risky, or a close call, like a cyclist crossing the red light at an intersection. And in real life, nothing happens, everyone is safe, because no car crossed at that time... but my brain will repeat this situation internally and show me how that cyclist is mowed down by a car gruesomely. It's like I get a replay of what would have happened otherwise. It is triggered by me either seeing something that could have ended badly, or randomly thinking out of nowhere "What if this awful event happens?". It's always very graphic and upsetting, and I can't control it. I haven't had this in so long, I had completely forgotten about it, maybe even repressed it. But now that it was happening again, I recognized that this used to be a big issue, until it suddenly wasn't. This led me to think that maybe, I have simply shut off all mental vision to deal with these graphic mental images, and in turn made myself aphantasic. And while trying to lift this repression and train my mental eye, it returns. This fits to a feeling I briefly mentioned at the end of my old post linked above: I had a theory for how this happened for me, because I knew I used to be able to visualize things, I just didn't know when or why I had lost it. Now I know. This has definitely caused me to regress again, not training for it anymore. I don't know how to proceed yet and if I will ever have a mental image without this disturbing side effect; I guess I'll see. This is kind of sensitive and weird to share, but on the other hand, I know a lot of research is still done on aphantasia and others struggling with it sometimes try out things to treat it, and I didn't want this realization to be lost. If you struggle with aphantasia and have maybe in the past struggled with disturbing or violent visions or maybe even are diagnosed with (C-)PTSD like me, maybe this helps you connect the dots. Reply via email Published 17 Sep, 2025

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A Working Library 3 weeks ago

Waking the Moon

Sweeney arrives for her first day of college and finds herself swept up by a beautiful young man and equally beautiful woman, both seemingly unreal and unmoored from reality. Soon, she learns that the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine is run by a clandestine order called the Benandanti, practitioners of magic and meddlers in global politics going back to the Fall of Rome. Now, they find themselves up against their most powerful foe: the Moon Goddess, after centuries of sleep, has returned. The plotting is campy and the characters, if they were actors, would all be acting too much. But the book is fun and subversive and the world is intensely short of angry goddesses these days; I loved it. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Two quick news items

Sometimes I post not because I have something to get out of my system, but because I have something I want to share. This is one of those occasions. First, Cody has a new pop-up newsletter going called “Trespassing Through Montana” . I’m a big fan of what he does, and I also enjoy helping people connect with each other online, so I’m not gonna pass on this opportunity to suggest you to sign up for his newsletter. The second is that the Internet Phone Book is back in stock . I mentioned this lovely object in an old post of mine , and I’m so glad I managed to grab my copy when it came out. I’m also happy to be in it and very pleased to have Luke as my neighbour. That’s it, that’s all I have to say. Buy the book , sign up for the newsletter , and enjoy the weekend. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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A Working Library 1 months ago

To live

Gargi Bhattacharyya rightly connects the impulse to “self-improvement” with coming face-to-face with our own mortality: The secular religions of self-help, self-care, and self-improvement are devised to meet this horror. The central tenet of each circles around regret and the avoidance of regret, all of which could be summarized as an injunction against mourning your own life. At the same time, the differently constituted anxiety of the age of social media pushes home the uncomfortable knowledge that none of us can in fact do it all, and also that however much we are doing, it will come to an end. Living a life well lived must surely include coming to an acceptance of your own finitude. Including an acceptance of what cannot be and what cannot be done. Of the time that there will not be to fill. Of the countless paths that can never be taken. Serenity must include an ability to register the ever-spiralling possibilities and snippets of other not-yet-imagined lives and to be at ease in our connectedness to what others have been and done but that we will never do ourselves. I think here of how difficult it can be to make a decision , the agony in wanting to make the right choice, knowing all the while that “right” is impossible. There’s an oft-unspoken effort to avoid regret in that agonizing. But that effort represents a kind of paradox: the anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret. More than that, to live well is to care for your regrets, to accept their role as teacher and guide. In Madeline Miller’s Circe, the witch-goddess speaks one evening with Telemachus, son of Odysseus. They have confessed their sins to each other: he of the murders he committed at Odysseus’s command, she of how she created Scylla, the monster who torments sailors. Telemachus says: “Her name...Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.” “Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?” It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.” “It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said. “Yes.” His voice was sharp. “It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.” He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said. “If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.” Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

A Tribute To Hoyle's Official Book Of Games

In 1989, Sierra On-Line released Volume 1 of their Hoyle: Official Book of Games on MS-DOS, a card game collection where you could play Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, and Klondike Solitaire according to Edmond Hoyle’s rules as recorded in his foundational work Hoyle’s Rules Of Games . Hoyle meticulously recorded and explained all games “of skill and chance” he encountered from as early as 1672, including expert advice on strategies and even how to settle disputes. Sierra managed to procure a license boasting the name Hoyle not only in the title but also in some of the card faces that USA manufacturers Brown & Bigelow branded Hoyle —hence the addition of “official”. The most remarkable aspect of this game is that you can play not only against typical Sierra characters such as Larry Laffer and King Graham, but also against Sierra employees from that time and their children! Your opponents are quick to quip and laugh at the one swallowing the queen of spades in the game of Hearts, with their animated faces showcasing that grin or unpleasant surprise. Hoyle: Official Book of Games is a typical Sierra game from that time that oozes CGA charm. Gerald Moore, one of the artists, would go on and work for various Police Quest and Quest For Glory Sierra games. The screenshot below also shows the typical Sierra menu bar on top, proving that Sierra indeed repurposed their Sierra Creative Interpreter engine for these volumes. A Hearts session in play with off-topic banter going on trigged by my inactivity. This can be turned off, but why would you want to strip out the personality? As for the gameplay itself, it was a bit bare-bones. The card game mechanics do not differ from the later Hearts implementations, but the absence of quality of life features such as the ability to auto-sort your cards or to inspect the last trick make it a bit harder to enjoy these days. Clicking and dragging those cards around in your hand to sort them by hand is painful, and I have a lot of difficulties discerning the differences between spades and clubs. Luckily, the friendly AI player will remind me to follow suit. Hearts is also the only trick taking game present. In 1990 and 1991, Sierra released Volume 2 and 3 of their Hoyle: Official Book of Games , this time focusing on solitaire card games and simple board games using the same engine and characters as seen and loved in the first volume. The characters would go on to be a key feature in future release and would set them apart from competing card game collections on the PC. After all, implementing Hearts is trivial, but injecting a doze of charm and fun is what makes the difference. In 1993, Sierra completely revamped Volume 1 to account for the VGA evolution, resulting in more shiny colours, Adlib-compatible musical tones, and a few more characters/games in Hoyle Classic Card Games . Let’s call this Hoyle 4 . This time, we’re finally treated with two more trick taking games: Contract Bridge and Euchre. A Hoyle 4 session in play showcasing the VGA upgrade. The card faces and table backdrop is customizable. Sierra yet again put in effort to up the charm ante by digitizing some of the compliments and taunts, and having characters making fun of each other during loading screens. Hoyle 4 would be the last one featuring the Sierra characters though, as the subsequent versions culled them in favour of more general but equally goofy ones. Maybe to appeal to a new audience or maybe because of license issues as Sierra prepared to shed their On-Line past during the major reorganization that shut down multiple studios resulting in layoffs and focus shifts. The Hoyle branding would never make it back on the top priority list, even though they happily kept on churning out repackages. All the older DOS versions are playable right in your browser at Classics Reloaded with a little bit of help from the embedded DOSBox version, in case you’re curious to see how Larry pulls of his tricks instead of pants. I changed the card faces of the above screenshot to something more curvy just for him. That smile on his face says it all. In 1997, the game got yet another reskin when everybody insisted on running Windows programs ( Hoyle 5 ), and yet another in 2002 ( Hoyle 6 ) that added a fresh lick of paint to the UI. Even though these later releases might feel like quick cash grabs, Hoyle 5 did come with quite a lot of new card game variants including solitaire options such as Klondike that was popularized by Windows 3’s Solitaire . You do remember the spooky dark castle card backs designed by Susan Kare in 1990, do you? Hoyle 6 , rebranded as Hoyle Card Games (2002) , is the game I probably played the most, and you can too: the is available on , and using CrossOver, it even runs on macOS: Playing a round of Spades in Hoyle Card Games 2002 on a Brain Baking website background. If you keep the mounted, the atrocious background music that thankfully can be turned off will play, but more importantly, the characters’ voices that lend them their charm will be present as well. That old crow Ethel can be a particularly sore loser at Spades if Elayne and I are on a roll. Later releases beyond version six introduced very little new games and/or changes. The series went downhill pretty fast after a questionable series of Sierra restructurings and layoffs, but it’s still alive: there’s a Steam version with butt-ugly static 3D renders of boring characters while the ones we grew attached to were kicked out. Unsurprisingly, the game got review-hammered on Valve’s platform. Sierra tried to dip a toe in handheld card game releases exactly once. Developed by Sandbox Studios in 2000, Hoyle Card Games was released on the Game Boy Color but never made it to Europe. With 8 card games and 6 solitaire variants, the game is decent enough, even supporting multiplayer link cable mode. Even though Edmond Hoyle’s paper rulebook contains a chapter called Klaberjass —I have no idea why so many foreigners think German is the same as Dutch—due to its relative obscurity outside of Belgium and The Netherlands, the card game variant never made it into the video game. In fact, the Nintendo DS game 18 Classic Card Games made by a German studio is the only one I could get my hands on that includes Klaverjassen , but I would strongly advice against playing that game. It is surprisingly difficult to find out which edition contained the Klaberjass addition as Hoyle’s Official Rules saw more than fifty editions and even more re-releases throughout the last few centuries. No mention of Wiezen either, but the first booklet Hoyle ever published in 1742 was called A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, Containing the Laws of the Game, and Some Rules Whereby a Beginner May, with Due Attention to Them, Attain to the Playing It Well. What a great and informative title. Hoyle’s books would go on to be all-time best-sellers in the eighteenth century—not bad for a lawyer’s side hustle. This article is part two in a series on trick taking and card games . See also: part one on The Flemish Trick Taking Tradition . Stay tuned for the next part! Related topics: / card games / trick taking / screenshots / By Wouter Groeneveld on 11 September 2025.  Reply via email .

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Michael Lynch 1 months ago

Refactoring English: Month 9

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish

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Weakty 1 months ago

Spark Joy, throw everything out

A few weeks ago I was visiting some family in Guelph. After, I went for a short bike ride in the evening. I found myself at a Little Library in a corner of the city that I hadn’t explored before. Inside it, I found Spark Joy , a book by Marie Kondo. While I know a bit about her writing and methodology, I’ve never really dug into her work. This book seems to be a follow up to The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The first half of the book provides case studies, methodologies and suggestions for approaching tidying. The second half features illustrated step by step guides on how to actually take on specific tidying tasks. As I flipped through the pages, I found a surging excitement in me at the possibility of clearing out some junk. For me, clutter tends to just accumulate slowly, accreting in corners and under beds and desks until it becomes a noticeable burden. At that point, I go through bouts of rapid cleaning, and skew towards getting rid of things with a manic energy. Regardless of the technique you’re using to clear clutter, for me, the act of discarding things out brings up thoughts on wastefulness, reuse, and abundance. I feel like this comic below aptly summarizes some of my thoughts on this. Of course, discarding stuff and clearing clutter doesn’t mean you are a rich minimalist. Yet this comic strikes a chord for me, it resonates in my mind, transporting me to memories of physical spaces owned by wealthy people that I’ve found myself in. There’s a kernel of truth, there. And of course, conversely, people with less wealth often need to keep things around for reuse, resale, and repairs—you can't carelessly throw away things that allow you to continue to be resourceful. There are no two ways about it. I can’t go through bouts of throwing clutter and junk away without feeling like we live in a bizarre, absurd world, especially in comparison to other times and places in our world. How do we get to a place where I am literally throwing away or donating unused things? Rich minimalist or not, the ability for clutter to accumulate in a hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture is altogether too easy. How many times have I bought something just because it was on sale? Or because it was in good condition at a second-hand store? I don’t exactly exhibit presence of mind when making decisions about accepting new items into my home. The default has often just been: yes, I will take that, thank you. I’m thinking about this more, as our apartment will soon fill up with possessions that belong to our new child. I’ve been finding myself asking myself: how can I encourage having a respectful appreciation for the things we have in our life, and model a healthy relationship with acquiring and letting go of objects? I recently brought up this topic with a friend on a long ride home. He told me that for him, getting an object means that the object sort of carries a weight—a set of responsibilities behind it. There are implicit requirements in ownership. Our objects need to be taken care of, used appropriately, and have their maximum potential engaged. If you aren't doing all those things then you will be worn down just by the mere presence of this object. You shouldn’t feel any obligation to objects. They should bring light, not dread. I think this is the idea behind an object "sparking joy". My project list is long, but tidying is quickly bubbling up past many of the other things I want to do. I need to know where things are, now that we’re a family. It’s not exactly the fun I might have chosen for myself in the past, but the methodological approach that Spark Joy brings turns what might have been a chore into something that actually yields autonomy and makes way for a healthy sense of control (and at least knowing where the sunscreen is). Each person has to find their own method for sorting through the detritus we accumulate. But the more I read about mechanisms for taking care of clutter, the more I wonder about what drives our capacity to collect—is it fear-based? comparison-oriented? opportunity oriented? Or are we just as the Magpie? I’d like to imagine there is a way to break the cycle of over-consumption and thoughtless accumulation. I know there is a way to say "no thank you" to new items that appear at our door. Maybe it requires being mindful in the moment, and monitoring impulses. Or maybe I should shut the door, find the goddamn key amongst the clutter, and lock it.

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Sean Goedecke 1 months ago

Seeing like a software company

The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: By “legible”, I mean work that is predictable, well-estimated, has a paper trail, and doesn’t depend on any contingent factors (like the availability of specific people). Quarterly planning, OKRs, and Jira all exist to make work legible

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The other side

In Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, an anthropologist named Marghe arrives on the planet Jeep in order to research a lost human colony. When she stumbles into sacred territory, she is taken hostage by the Echraidhe, a people who live an isolated and difficult existence in the cold northern climes. Against the odds, Marghe escapes, and later meets Thenike, a viajera —one who travels from place to place, serving as storyteller, news bringer, healer, negotiator, and more. Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition. “Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sister’s mothers are also their choose-mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mothers’ mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.” To “deepsearch” is to enter a trance-like state, one in which a person travels back among the memories of their ancestors, seeing and experiencing what people who lived before them saw and experienced. Thenike continues: “You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else. They can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.” The danger of deepsearch is that of nostalgia : a wistful longing for the past that never was exactly as we remember it. However real and strong a memory is, it is still an echo, still a reflection, not the experience itself. The women of the Echraidhe have become enthralled to that reflection, such that they cannot see what’s ahead, cannot imagine anything changing. And so they become unable to see the change that is already underfoot, the way the winters are getting longer and colder, their children sicker, the tribe smaller and weaker. In this way, nostalgia can be a kind of toxin , a poison that keeps us forever walking backward, gaze directed at our footprints while our feet step awkwardly into a future we scorn to see. Communities which are hardened to outsiders—which refuse trade and companionship from other people (as the Echraidhe refuse), which demand that nothing changes even as the seasons pass and the rivers shift and new mountains form—begin to rot from within, to eat themselves because there is nothing outside to eat. Like an AI training on its own output, each generation disintegrates further into madness. Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.” Because the other side is where the life is. To live is to accept the discomfort—and pleasure—of a future that is undiscovered, undetermined, uncertain. Unknown and unknowable. But alive, alive as only that which changes can ever be. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Slow River

Lore wakes up in an alley, naked, a huge gash running down her back, her identity implant—the only proof of her heritage in one of the world’s richest families—gone. Hearing footsteps, she calls for help, and meets Spanner, a hacker and opportunist who knows how to take advantage of anyone in anyplace. In her hands, Lore becomes someone else. But her past is never too far away, and her knowledge of how systems operate far too valuable to keep to herself. Her family’s history parallels a precarious operation to remediate the city’s polluted waterways—with both tracks as likely to end in disaster as redemption. Griffith’s characters always cut through the world like a knife, and Lore is no exception. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Michael Lynch 2 months ago

Refactoring English: Month 8

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Ammonite

Marguerite (“Marghe”) Taishan is about to step foot on the planet Jeep when she receives a warning: if she goes on, she will never come back. But she’s come too far, and worked too hard, and Jeep is too interesting for her to turn back now: across its continents lives a scattered human colony, forgotten for centuries, but apparently thriving. Which might be unremarkable except for the fact that all the people are women. Marghe’s job is to investigate how they have survived, and to test a vaccine against the virus that killed the men. But her own survival, and the planet’s, are more precarious, and more intertwined, than she predicts. Nicola Griffith’s first novel is about making a home, and remembering the past, and the impossible beauty and danger of knowing women are human. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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