Readings and er... Goodbye, Patreon

[razielim]

I've charted out an ambitious sequence of reading for the next few months. Who knows if I'll stick to it, what with all my love for switching priorities after a few weeks, but I love the idea of this particular reading list. After finishing The Brothers Karamazov today or tomorrow, it's:

• Black Against Empire (Bloom, Martin)
• The End of Policing (Vitale)
• Discipline & Punish (Foucault)
• Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

AND THEN, The first two books I own and the next are all in my Amazon cart, but I'm telling myself that I'll only buy them if I clear everything else in the queue out of the way:

• Viking Economics (Lakey) [Owned]
• Saving Capitalism: For the Many, From the Few (Reich) [Owned]
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty)
• Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality (Tanzi)
• The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (Stiglitz)
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Acemoglu)
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)

It would be nice to get through all of these. And then take a break and read just Terry Pratchett or Harry Potter or something for a few months, feeling like I've fulfilled my learning duties and simultaneously digesting all I've read like a python, photo-bashing ideas together to see what happens. Maybe I'll throw in Black Swan (Taleb) after Termites? Might be an interesting partnership of ideas.

Anyway, so update on splitting up art motivations:

I went a whole other direction and closed my Patreon entirely. I don't want to make money off of art anymore. I just don't want to. You can't make me. I've eased off studying for a little while too, bc I'm spending too much time studying something else entirely and doing both at once was turning my head to kasha. Instead, I've decided to take this "popular fandom demotivation" period as a time to work on stuff for ancient almost-dead fandoms that I always want to do stuff for, but am ultimately undermined by my desire for validation and friendship.

Aka, I somehow abandoned my Legacy of Kain painting projects I started last year ;_; 

First for a Voltron zine and then a Harry Potter one, and... I hate myself for it. I know any LoK undertakings are 50x harder for me because I have such HIGH expectations for how beautiful Raziel and Kain should look to match my mental images of them, and unlike Voltron, the canon-ref isn't good enough, and unlike HP, there's no fanon-ref that matches my vision, but... I want to really break through that barrier. 

I think I believe, almost in a religious sense, that if I manage to capture Raziel's face beautifully, for several paintings in a row, that I'll have achieved a pinnacle of being able to communicate my vision of beauty. That there'll be no face too beautiful for me to be able to convey. So what might look like putting about with a random fandom is, to me... a white goddamn whale. That I keep sailing away from bc I'm a fucking weenie afraid of failure.

Hopefully I'll stay the course this time. No other fandoms to use as an excuse, or to just plain be enticed by.

I can't imagine anything more rewarding or validating than finally, after so many years, after giving up on art entirely several times, and coming back to study my ass off, after making LoK friends and growing apart from them, finally being able to capture Raziel.

Comments

[second_evtales]

I've read Stieglitz's book and while it is good, I found it really repetitive. As in, he repeats the same exact concepts for multiple chapters. I found it slightly annoying.

About Piketty, I was at a panel talk last week where Yanis Varoufakis, Georges Monbiot and Kharma Nabulsi were discussing the crisis of the EU. At some point a student mentioned Piketty and Varoufakis and Monbiot let loose and basically said Piketty has his formulas all wrong. I was dying. Jsyk.

[razielim]

LMAO! Guess I now know where to turn to after Piketty for counterweights...

The thing I've learned since starting to read a lot of nonfiction books in post-college life... is that half of them grow incredibly, mind-numbingly repetitive, even if the topic is the most fascinating in the world. And at least 10% of these otherwise interesting books will drop everything they're doing in the last few chapters and start energetically preaching to the choir. WHY. STOP.

[second_evtales]

Stieglitz is exactly like that. Like, OMNTRW.

Varoufakis' book "Adults in the Room" makes the exact same points in 1/4 of the space and in the meantime also manages to lash out at the EU establishment and describe funny and moving anecdotes from the Greek Crisis.

And did I mention Varoufakis is also hot AF?

[razielim]

Ooo, that's very helpful, thanks! I love recs.

ALSO........ I MEAN. Just looking at pics... I'm not sure that I agree, but if this is a warning that I might think he's hot after reading what he has to say, then I'm 99.9% certain that's exactly what'll happen.

[second_evtales]

TBH I found him slightly hot already in 2015 when he was on TV day in day out because of the news on the Greek debt crisis, but I have to say that the feeling intensified 100x after reading the book.
Last week I want to a political meeting he was also attending and I was having serious issues of embarrassment. It helps that he has a really, really nice voice.

Yes, I thin that the book might make everything worse.