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Cake day: August 12th, 2023

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  • My namesake - Rottcodd.

    Rottcodd is a minor character in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. He’s the caretaker of the Hall of Bright Carvings - a gallery of statues high up in a far distant corner of the castle Gormenghast. He lives there contentedly and peacefully by himself and rarely sees anyone, but through a window at one end of the gallery, he can see the castle spread out below him, and can barely make out tiny-with-distance people scurrying around doing… whatever it is that they’re doing.

    And yeah - for better or worse, I identify with him so much that I swiped his name.










  • The Tell Me Why books by Arkady Leokum - Goodreads link Those probably had more to do with shaping me than anything else I’ve read.

    When I was about eight or nine, I went through a period of reading lots of (juvenile) non-fiction - mostly biographies, history and myths. I don’t remember the specific titles, but I particularly remember reading biographies of James Cook and John Paul Jones, histories of ancient Egypt and medieval Europe, the myths of Perseus and Jason, and especially the history/myths surrounding the Trojan War.

    And of course I went through a dinosaur phase, but the dinosaur book I remember most clearly was heavy on pictures and light on text.

    Then when I was about ten, I switched pretty much entirely to reading fiction.


  • Yes.

    I have a friend who is extremely intelligent, endlessly curious and was raised in a locally well-established and notoriously generous and civic-minded family. So he was raised in that milieu of sincere kindness and generosity, and whenever he’s come across anything that interests him (which is seemingly something new every week) he seriously researches it until he understands it.

    So it pretty much doesnt matter what the topic is - he knows something about it, but his personality has been shaped so that he’s attentive and considerate rather than pedantic and self-absorbed. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen him engage in obviously mutually enjoyable conversations with complete strangers over… pretty much anything.

    I vacillate between thinking that it’s remarkable that he’s the way he is and that it’s remarkable, in a different sense, that that’s so uncommon.


  • I stopped trying to contribute to battles between reductionists many years ago, since they’re not coincidentally also binarists, so each just takes the fact that I’m not 100% in agreement with them to mean that I’m on the falsely dichotomous other side.

    That’s an awful lot of why they’re so exhausting and discouraging - because I know from bitter experience that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’m constantly tempted to respond - just, if nothing else, to for instance point out that something as enormously complex as the US Civil War cannot possibly rightly be said to have been about one specific thing - but I’ve learned that that can’t possibly accomplish anything.

    Should I then have just kept my mouth shut? Probably, in much the same way as I’d likely just keep walking if I saw two drunks brawling in an alley.

    But I didn’t, and so be it.

    And who knows? Maybe somebody somewhere will read this and think, “You know… it really is kind of dumb to reduce a complex issue to just one single idea, then get into shouting matches with people who have reduced it to some other single idea.”

    Or not. And again, so be it.



  • Rottcodd@literature.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.worldGoogle search is over
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    1 year ago

    I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven’t used google for ages, so I first had to search “google” in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.

    But no - there it was, right at the top - “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound.”

    And with that, I’ll contentedly go back to not using google.