Have you tried barkeeper's friend with a nylon scrubbie or steel wool? I've found that to be excellent, if labor-intensive, at returning stainless steel to like-new condition, even when dealing with oily residue that's been baked at 500 degrees.
Absolutely, many trees have evolutionary countermeasures to fires. Some trees are very well-suited to colonized disturbed ground - they will opportunistically surge into an area after a wildfire, as either more of their seeds will germinate, or more seedlings will sprout into favorable conditions. Other trees have adaptations that make it more likely to survive wildfire; both sequoia and douglas-fir have layers of insulating bark up to a foot thick.
Some trees have adaptations to ensure that their seeds only spread after a wildfire; sequoia cones are sealed shut by a resin that only melts in the intense heat of a wildfire. Some species can even be thought of as having adaptations that encourage wildfires in order to out-compete species that are less wildfire-resistant; grasslands require wildfire on the shoulders of foothills, where otherwise trees would gradually creep down the slopes. The dry foliage at the end of summer provides ideal conditions for wildfires.
I'd question that definition of "pristine". The old-growth temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, have only existed for about 10-12,000 years; that's about how long it's been since the entire area was covered by an ice sheet.
Here's an overview that has a timeline and some jumping off points if you're interested in learning more. What happened as the ice retreated varied by area and some of the valleys in particular have been studied to see what species arrived, in what order, and to investigate delays by some.
> In comparing the various palynological sources for Northwestern Washington and surrounding regions, it is clear that the vegetation history varies at least in its details from area to area. For example, Heusser (1978:1576) notes that treeless conditions persisted longer after glacial retreat in the Hoh Valley than in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula.
> ...the arrival of coniferous trees in this area was apparently delayed by aridity until sometime between 11,000 and 9,600 yr B.P.
> But how much chance is there that the user actually typed Revlon with a capital R? I think practically nil.
Uh.......
You might want to spend a second researching what "Revlon" is before speculating like this. I'm 100% positive that they actually typed Revlon with a capital R, because I know what Revlon is, and it's completely topical and contextual. It's very well known in certain circles, much like Chevron, Howey, and Brandenburg.
I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media. Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:
> Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by bloggers like Emma to “become a book person.” She’d read a few dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore through 390. By mid-May, she’d already made it to 200. She achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily — before work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. “I’m a binge reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I’ve replaced with books,” Weekman says.
> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).
> Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and tell no one.
Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit of using social media for performative reading, and ending by declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well, seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just skip writing the essay and just read a book.
I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel sympathethically icky.
And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.
> I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media.
I've a little exposure to gamified reading: Last year my girlfriend got sucked in to some reading app (from an ad on fb or ig), the gist being that it serves up chapters of (apparently) never ending romance novels, specifically crafted to drag the reader in and end each chapter on cliffhangers of one form or another to entice them to get the next chapter and continue. Naturally, it functions on in-app currency and gives you a certain number of tokens up front before you have to start paying in. And yes, she shoveled a good amount of money into it to gobble down chapter after chapter.
You can read for enjoyment and you can read for self-improvement; either is fine by me as long as you aren't deceiving yourself. Imbuing a recreational activity with moral heft can devalue both recreation and morality, and I think that's one component of the tension the author of the article is wrestling with.
> And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.
I've found myself paying for a good bit more media and media curators since reddit sort of went down - The Guardian, the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, and the sign language lesson system and YouTube channel Lifeprint.com. It's been really engaging and nice.
390 books in a year is an impressive figure. I have a hard time reading 12 books in a year. Somehow I think her definition of “reading” or “book” is different than mine.
I don’t imagine she’s reading Ulysses, Faust, or A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Point being, if you read lots of trash yes you can put away lots of books in a year, but what have you learned or gained from that effort? Other than social media “cred”?
I think it would be more beneficial to read five really really good books per year and try to understand, internalize, and recall them.
Some people are just incredibly fast at reading. I know people that can read a book in a day and lend it to me. When I'm finished a week later we can have a conversation about it. I think it's just about finding time.
That's some pretentious bullshit. Sneering at others because their cultural tastes don't match yours does nothing but help you feel superior to others for a few moments. And I say this as someone who reads a lot of fiction, subscribes to a literary review, and treasures my library of printed books.
>Sneering at others because their cultural tastes don't match yours does nothing but help you feel superior to others for a few moments.
Taste is something one develops, not something one is born with. Taste on its own, is like an asshole: everybody has one. Just like "personal opinion".
>And I say this as someone who reads a lot of fiction, subscribes to a literary review, and treasures my library of printed books.
But who also treasures the unintellectual idea of every cultural taste being just as good as any other, and anything to the contrary being "pretentious".
Trading insults back and forth isn't going to be very conducive to a productive discussion. Why don't you tell me a little about your theory of moral values in cultural expression and consumption and I'll tell you a little about mine?
My instinctual position is that one's character (moral, aesthetic, civil, political, emotional, etec) is strongly influenced by the cultural media one encounters. I think encountering the wide range of human emotions and contexts available in fictional literature makes one more resilient when faced with adversity, and better able to make an informed decision that will lead constructively towards one's desired outcome. I also don't think literature is the only way to be exposed to that range of emotions and contexts.
I think the shift from interacting with a predominantly printed media to an interactive/hypertextual media has been a net negative for society, although I'd struggle to define the exact metric on which it's a net negative. I think the impact on attention span would be one of those negative impacts, but I'm aware of no hard evidence of such an impact, and would ask citations if someone made such a claim in debate. I've witnessed friends and loved ones, through their habits of interaction with online media, end up in a worse place than they would were it not for online media.
I have a handful of friends with whom I exchange books and book recommendations, and I've noticed and been saddened by noticing that most of what I get recommended is somewhat pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, and while I recommend my share of that I also recommend a lot of books with, for lack of a better phrase, more "aesthetic value". Some of the books I've been pushing on people in the past few years, with varying success, include: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, The Great Gatsby, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, (v.) by Anastacia-Renee, and Winter Mythologies and Abbots by Pierre Michon. They're all excellent books!
But you're right, I am somewhat of a moral relativist. I think it's very hard to objectively compare different cultural values or cultural habits of media interaction. I think it's easy to fool oneself that one's personal preferences are morally superior to one's personal dislikes, and I'm fairly hesitant to listen to someone propound on that topic without seeing evidence of some fairly rigorous introspection and attempts to overcome those inherent, inevitable biases.
This is something I didn't fully understand until I was hired into a position of a formal role model - principal engineer on a new team of fairly junior engineers. My manager had several conversations with me to drill into me that I now had to keep in mind the power of my example in behavior for the team. It's not that I was a bad role model, just that it wasn't always front-of-mind for me.
I think it's easy-ish to get promoted to Senior based on your personality and inclinations that lend themselves to being a "natural" role model; moderate deficiencies can easily be glossed over as long as there's enough compensatory strengths, and you aren't expected to be perfect. But once you start to become a role model - formal or informal - you gain a new job responsibility: consistently demonstrate the culture of professionalism and courtesy the company wishes to inculcate. Because your actions will be emulated, for better or worse.
HST once gave his press badge on the Muskie campaign train in Florida to a random miscreant he met while out drinking[0], who then the next day went on to terrorize everyone on the train, ordering things at the press bar like a "triple Gin Buck without the Buck", manhandling reporters and the campaign cheerleader girls. At a whistle-stop speech, he stood in the front, heckled Muskie, grabbing his leg and yelling for more gin. He did a lot more than just "go to places and let people talk.". I think a lot of his genius for reporting came from how he involved himself in the lives of those he wrote about, combined with a rare knack for words and dedication to the craft of writing.
[0] Described by HST as "I listened for a moment and recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap - a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener... so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us... he had that rare weird electricity about him - that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving 'normally'."
