Piaw's Blog

 The Magicians TV show is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. Boen blew through a couple of seasons and I started re-reading the book to remind myself of how different the book was.

The TV show is actually very different from the book, and in many ways the TV show is better. The stories from the first couple of books are twisted together, and the evil Martin Chatwin character shows up far earlier. Quentin also never goes through the sequence where he lives through the real world post graduation and decides despite all the magical power available to him to live it up through drugs and alcohol. In many ways, the TV show has the best of the books --- the casting of Eliot and Janet/Margo characters are near neigh perfect, and the TV show has many episodes (like the one with Queen's "Under Pressure") that are excellent with no counterpart in the book.

The novel itself is badly written. Lev Grossman doesn't quite develop his characters, and the plot is what makes the book work. There are plenty of reveals after the fact that fit together nicely that the TV show can't quite do justice to, but the writing is uneven.

Having said that, without the books there would be no TV show, and the book itself while not well written has a great plot and sets up a situation that's enjoyable to experience, as evidenced by the TV show going on way past the books' finish without ending up boring to watch.

 Looking for Alaska was John Green's first novel. After reading The Fault in Our Stars I was so impressed I went and looked for more novels by him. As his first novel this book isn't even close to being as good as The Fault in Our Stars.

First, the narrator, Miles Halter is perhaps a bit of a doofus. He's not terribly smart, and goes to boarding school in search of "the great perhaps." He does get a change, with a new roommate ("The Colonel") who's a scholarship student from a poor family, and who pulls him into his orbit with Alaska, who's described as a gorgeous co-ed with a boyfriend.

Perhaps I come from too Asian a background to fully appreciate this story. "The Colonel" strikes me as very false. Someone from a trailer park, for whom the only way out is a university scholarship, but then goes ahead and smokes, drinks, and engages in pranks that could get him expelled from a wealthy private school? No Asian I know in that situation would do any less than Jensen Huang.

Similarly, the protagonist moves to a new school and promptly starts smoking and drinking, despite not enjoying either. In fact, every high schooler depicted in this novel smokes and drinks, frequently to excess. My kids would probably think these guys are idiots, and they wouldn't be wrong.

Eventually, the inevitable happens and someone in the book dies from driving while drunk. There's some redemption as the individual characters blame themselves for not stopping their peer from driving (in fact, they all helped the drunkard by distracting the authorities while they speed off from campus). Then they go right back to drinking and smoking. 

The deluxe edition of this book comes with works-in-progress chapters of the novel. Earlier versions of the novel has Miles sounding like Holden Caulfield. I guess that's where this novel starts from. I don't know why this book won such acclaim as a young adult (YA) novel. I'm glad John Green evolved and grew over time and became capable of writing The Fault in Our Stars. He really did get much better over time.

 Last year, I read Everything is Tuberculosis and came away feeling dumber for having read the book. Of course, I'd forgotten that the year before that, I'd bought The Fault in Our Stars during a kindle sale, and had actually read a couple of chapters of it and really enjoyed the voice of the author, and so came back and finished it.

Oh wow. The Fault in Our Stars is sensitive, well-written, well plotted, and emotionally touching in every way Everything is Tuberculosis is not. The story revolves around a cancer victim, Hazel Grace, whose diagnosis was a death sentence partially stayed through a fictional miracle drug. At a support group, she meets Augustus Waters, and the two fall in love.

I don't want to say too much about the novel --- the dialogue is smart, funny, and very characteristic of young adult novels, with that wry sarcasm you hear a lot. That makes everything feel real. The characters rib each other and angst about first world problems --- but because they have cancer or have had cancer you're more than happy to forgive them their foibles. Even the one asshat character has had a member of his family die from cancer.

Finally, after reading this book, the rave reviews for Everything is Tuberculosis makes sense. Cancer for these fictional characters is incurable. People in the book die from cancer. But John Green keeps making the remark in Everything is Tuberculosis that it is curable, we just need to spend money, and it's the inequity in the world humans have set up for themselves that makes Tuberculosis victims die from it. Clearly the heaps of praise for his non fiction comes from people who read and remember The Fault in Our Stars.

I still think Green's non-fiction made me dumber for having read it, but I'm now willing to forgive him that book since this book was so good.

 At the end of September last year, the m5100 rear derailleur on my Carl Strong frame started making funny noises, and shifting performance deteriorated. I finally narrowed it down to the pulley wheels, and after taking the upper one apart saw immediately that the bushing had failed.

A pair of replacement pulley wheels were only $10, but would take a few days. I saw that there was an ebay offer where I could get a GRX 822 rear derailleur for $80, and decided I'd order that as well and install the first one that arrived.

The GRX rear derailleur would handle a 10-51 rear cassette but was designed for 12 speed. Of course, years of shifting with friction shifters have made me blase about using unmatched rear derailleurs. I figured since the job of the derailleur was just to move the chain from one sprocket to another, as long as it could handle the chain and the cassette's spread I should be good to go. It didn't hurt that the derailleur was a good 40g lighter than the m5100 derailleur that it replaced.

At first, I was actually quite pleased with the rear derailleur. It was a lighter action --- whether it was because the higher end derailleur had smoother bearings or pivots and just a lighter action spring, the shifts definitely felt smoother or faster.

The problem was that the shifts were not reliable. For instance, the 45t sprocket was easily one of my favorite sprocket on the m5100. However, it was no longer quiet, making a strange sort of noise whenever it was on that cassette. In fact, the rear derailleur was finicky about staying on that sprocket. Any sort of nudge on the shifter would knock it off that sprocket. Even stranger, once in a while the chain would slip off a sprocket and then rather than recovering to that sprocket the derailleur would shift all the way down the cassette.

I lived with this for awhile, thinking that it was just a matter of retraining my friction shifting muscle memory so that the shifts would be good. But 3 months later it still wasn't good and worse, the chain started falling off the chainring even when the clutch was on. I went so far as to check the chains for both pin wear and lateral wear, and nope. That wasn't my problem.

I finally pulled off the derailleur and put the m5100 back in with the new pulley wheels, and immediately the problems all went away. So somehow, Shimano managed to make their 12s rear derailleur incompatible with the 11s rear cassette even when you're using friction shifters. That's a level of incompatibility I'd never seen before. One possibility is that you really need 12s chains, but since those are expensive I guess I won't make that experiment. In the mean time I guess I have a relatively new GRX 822 rear derailleur for sale.

 The Age of Diagnosis is written by a neurologist/psychologist.  It starts with a discussion of Huntington's disease, which is a genetic disease with no known cure, and goes through case study after case study as to why even though there's a non invasive definitive test, people don't get diagnosed for it. Apparently, people show up at her office thinking that taking the test is the responsible thing but looking for permission to not test.

Then she launches into discussions of much more controversial topics, especially topics like autism, which has had increasingly broad ranging diagnostic criteria, to the point where almost anyone could self-diagnose as being on the spectrum. The author is british, and when she spells out the criteria for getting a diagnosis (one thing I learned in this book is that self diagnostic tests are not accurate, and as many as 50% of people who self-diganose are mistakenly thinking that they're on the spectrum when they're actually not!), I'm astonished that the rates of autism have been going up so much. And then she reveals that a lot of the increase in diagnostics come from a small number of physician groups who have an incentive to diagnose more people as being autistic! Even worse than that, the highest functioning autistic folks presume to speak for everyone on the autism spectrum, and of course, the ones most afflicted with autism have a hard time even getting dressed, let alone speak up for their positions, which leads to huge amounts of conflict both within and without the medical and patient communities. (She doesn't mention the elephant in the room, which is that by writing the criteria for autism so broadly, the medical community has inadvertently armed the anti-vaccine folks, who're using the increased number of diagnosis to turn public opinion against vaccines!)

There's a bunch of other diseases discussed in the book, including breast and ovarian cancers (certain genetic mutations vastly increase your chance of getting both, and one way to protect yourself against those cancers is to have those organs removed, but then you have to trade that off against when to have the procedure because you want to maintain maximum optionality for having offspring), down syndrome (testing there has sufficient false positives to make the decision a hard one), long covid, lyme disease, and probably one or more items that I've forgotten about because I read this book in paper format and not on the kindle.

The book ends with a discussion of pyschiatric syndromes and psycho somatic disorders (which the author takes pains to note that a psychosomatic disability is just as real and painful to live with as one with physical manifestations). One of her concerns is that the diagnosis of having one of those boxes you in, and if you believe in that diagnosis enough, it becomes an excuse to not work on getting better in those areas. You start to believe in that instead of your own ability to induce positive changes in yourself!

The book left me quite a lot to think about even though it's short and easily finished in a handful of hours. Definitely worth your time.

 Stephen King (and his son Joe Hill, who wrote King Sorrow) books all have the same plot structure: there's a problem which the protagonist solves through some supernatural means. It works and empowers the protagonist, who takes it further, and then the negative side effects show up and gets worse and worse until he/she loses control of the situation, upon which the protagonist has to deal with the situation in which the solution becomes much worse than the original problem.

It's a simple plot structure, but within that structure you can tell a large number of stories and the nature of the plot structure if handled well draws you in and keeps you reading, provided that the characters themselves are compelling.

King Sorrow works on that structure, with the protagonists being 6 friends, one of which got into trouble because he did a good deed one day while visiting his mom in prison. To solve this problem, the 6 friends summon a dragon to deal with the evil-doers. The deal with the titular dragon in the novel is that the friends take turns choosing some deserving evil-doer a painful death via dragon.

Where the book rings false is that I have no problem in real life dealing with the kind of power Joe Hill portrays. In this case the side effect is innocent people dying but the reality is that when you look at the scale of damage certain folks like Vladimir Putin cause the kind of collateral damage described in the book wouldn't bother me whatsoever. Yet, Joe Hill makes this a central dilemma of the book, and the only person in the group of 6 for whom that doesn't bother is of course the villain.

The actual fantasy of the book is well done. I enjoyed the urban fantasy aspects, the references to the Arthurian mythos, the tie-in to the internet and trolling. I also admire how Joe Hill started the narrative of the book in the 1970s, and then advancing the narrative by decades to 2022 over time, allowing the protagonists to age and dealing with contemporary events and technological advancements. This integrates the novel with your know.

While this is unlikely to be close to the best novel you've read this year, it was good enough for me to keep reading it (though to be honest I had to take several breaks) and finish it within the library's 3 week return period.

 Notes on Being a Man is Scott Galloway's open letter to his two teenage sons. It falls into the same genre of self-help books as Succeeding, and since they're both written by rich white guys who won the birth lottery, have the same attitude of excessive confidence and insufficient exposure to different lifestyles and alternative approaches to life.

Nevertheless, both are highly opinionated, and not afraid to call on BS, which means that they're worth reading, and entertaining while reading. In particular, Scott Galloway is one of the few faculty members willing to berate and publicly call out Universities as completely failing to serve their mission by turning themselves into exclusive clubs and aiming for a high rejection rate rather than attempting to educate as many deserving kids as possible.

As smart, talented, and hardworking as their parents were at their age, young people can’t get into the same-quality colleges, higher education having figured out a way to extract more money by artificially constraining supply, thereby forcing these kids to attend lesser places that are—wait for it—exponentially more expensive. (kindle loc 1600)

The top twenty universities could expand their supply—seats for incoming freshmen—50 percent within the decade. But they won’t, as the prestige that stems from scarcity is the ointment for irrelevance that most academics thirst for. (kindle loc 3189)

Rich people who got rich and get to pontificate a lot get to tell their life story. Galloway tells his with an unusual amount of humility --- he got into UCLA on appeal because his mom was a single mother despite having awful grades. He got hired as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley because he was a rower and the interviewer hired anyone who was a rower. As a selfish person he divorced his first wife for no good reason other than that he wanted to move to New York, having become a wealthy successful guy. Basically, his big skill was being able to give great talks, which shows that you can be successful as long as you can talk your way into other people giving you money.

Nevetheless, the book is full of great aphorisms that are told well, and as someone who's a parent, would do well to heed:

The kid you have this summer is leaving… forever. The skinny boy with the lion’s mane who tiptoed into our room and, on first evidence of me stirring, would say, “Dad, let’s make a plan for the day,” is gone. It’s incredibly sad. A relative of his will be back next summer, but different. The compensation is that there will be new attributes you find hilarious and endearing. But still, sad. I put, mentally, a big sign above my boys’ heads: LIMITED EDITION, YOUR ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, ONE SUMMER ONLY. (kindle loc 3200)

 Central to the prosperity and survival of our species is mothers and fathers who have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being. To fill this role for people who aren’t your offspring is generosity toward the planet and species. I’ve never understood the idolatry of Steve Jobs. The world needs more engaged fathers, not a better fucking phone. (kindle loc 3764)

Of course, I'm biased. Whenever I read an author, I largely judge them by whether I agree with them. 

the United States is the best place to make money; Europe is the best place to spend it. (kindle loc 1582)

(The preceding sentences prior to my quote, however, I completely disagree with).

One of the criticisms I read of this book is that many of the issues Galloway talks about apply also to young women, or even non-white men. I agree. On the other hand, I think that criticism ignores the purpose of the book, which is for a well-intentioned father to leave notes for his son so that if they ever decide his stuff is worth reading (which seems unlikely if his sons are anything like mine), they will have something to refer to. (And they will have no excuse that their Dad didn't say anything or provide decent advice)

If there's any criticism I have about this book, it seems to me that Galloway has pretty low standards for being a father. He admits that he spent most of his kids' childhood traveling for work and focusing work rather than being there for them. He seems to think that the extent of a father's job is to show up for the kids' soccer games and providing lots of money (he flies his kids business class). I guess for a lot of people just becoming super wealthy is the big attribute that most people would want in a father.

The book  is worth reading because it's entertaining. I'm not sure I'd agree with Galloway, but hey, one person can only live one life, as as Pengtoh says, the best way to get to live multiple lives is to read a lot.