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It's an Exciting World

The life and times of David Geisert

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Cliff House Hotel

Steph and I got to Cliff house late, and we walked into a really nice house.  The wifi wasn’t good enough to run the games, but we played the board games and card games that we brought.

Adam Amit/Tina, and I played a game of Tzolk’in.  Amit didn’t really care for it, but Adam and I had a good time.  It was nice to get 3 monuments, even though I would have done better to have done differently.  Adam still won with a really high score, and I think the biggest difference was me not getting many skulls.  It comes back again and again, that if you don’t go for skulls and gods you will lose.  I never have been able to get a full set of things that led to going for the god route.

We played some Cards Against Humanity, and I chose randomly.  I ended up winning with the random choosing.

The house was very nice, and I regret not being able to stay there another night.

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The Founder’s Dilemma

This was one of the best books about founding companies I’ve read.  It has all the basic high level things that one may need.  It covers a lot of the topics that I was unsure about, and I am recommending it to the rest of the team.  Steph is ready to start it, and I explained most of it to Candice.

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Catching Fire

This was a really nice book, and again I liked it more than the movie.  It was very nice to hear everything.  I was hoping for more information than it gave, but the book was still good.  It isn’t until the third book that things get really good, and the information comes out.

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The Hunger Games

This was really nice to go through the book after seeing the movies.  I liked the books better than the movies from the extra information they give.  The movies are certainly really good adaptations of the books.  I agree with all the changes they made.

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Small Gods

This was a hilarious book.  I really like how they make fun of the organized religion, and how it ends up.  The crazy planning for a retaliation before you plan for an attack is also great.  I like how the god ends up being a small turtle that is incredibly shallow.

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Thanksgiving Feast with the Lees

We got up in the morning to cook some food for Thanksgiving dinner.  We decided on Tom Yom and cheese, but the cheese didn’t turn out.  The Tom Yom was a big hit, and we got request to bring more of the soup.  I also donated my remaining abalone to the dinner, and Russel cooked it up nicely.  There was a lot of typical Chinese food like friend rice, mustard green, and spring rolls, but there was a turkey as well.  After dinner we played some of the games I have been making and that went over really well.

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The Great Ideas of Philosophy

This was a very nice listen, but I had to take it in chunks.  The fiction books that I listened too at the same time were very nice breaks from the depth and density of this lecture series.  The evolution of philosophy as described by this book seems to be full of reactionary thought, with the swings getting wider and wider.  I can identify most with the Aristotelian thought with everything being in the pursuit of Eudaimonia, which can be roughly thought of as happiness or well-being in a totally non-hedonistic sense.  I would put this as the basis of my thoughts in a utilitarian framework with a hierarchical anthropomorphic view of all life based on level of consciousness and sense.  I fully reject some of the later discussed views like reality being perception.  These views are wholly unusable for working life, and aren’t even practiced by the people that support them.  I very much hold that a philosophical position should be practiced by those that hold it and not just held in theory.  There is a funny story of an ancient Greek person (reality unknown) who believed and practiced in the thought being reality school, and his friends would have to constantly save him from being injured by these notions.  He would do things like believe that fire wasn’t hot and try to walk through it.  Even he didn’t fully follow this thought as he blamed his cook for making a bad meal; wouldn’t it only be bad because he thought it was so in his own philosophy?  I liked the thoughts presented here and can use the language to flush out my own ideas further, and discover what great people have thought before on the subjects.

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The Colour of Magic

This was a very enjoyable and incredibly silly book.  The absurdity of Diskworld will be a good reprieve whenever I get too into the long philosophical works.  The story was quite nice, with a lot of meta story to go along with it.  I will have to read a few more of his books on Diskworld.

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The Ringworld Throne

This book was very nice, and got a lot more into protectors.  I liked the plot of the second one better, but this one was still very nice.  There was a huge emphasis on sex again, but I was able to tease out what he was getting at with it.  Since all the hominids on the Ringworld practice sex, but in different ways, the species can use it as a bonding exercise without it being a competition for procreation.  All other activities will be some kind of competition, but the sex part of it isn’t.  This wasn’t clear in the previous two, as there wasn’t as strong a focus on why they shouldn’t mate with their own species.  The city builders mention it, but it wasn’t as much a focus.

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