#17401
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does anyone know if there are any marxist books about mesoamerica, i'd really like to read some crap about the political economy of blood sacrifices
#17402
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Not mesoamerica but from what i've learned the Incans had some sort of a planned economy.
#17403
[account deactivated]
#17404
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I'm reading John Smith's Imperialism.
#17405
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Also trying to finish John Smith's Imperialism after starting it as an ebook a few years back and being unable to finish because of being busy or what not or the format made my eyes hurt. I also stumbled across The Stalinist Command Economy by Timothy Dunmore, wondering if anyone here had heard of it/if it's useful at all? Underlying thesis seems to be that actually Stalin did not run the planned economy with an iron fist as propaganda claims but instead that managers and bureaucrats within the various sectors had the most outsized say, seems like it could have interesting insights viewed with a critical eye?
#17406
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What's helping me is that I'm going through it with some friends in a structured reading group, and not treating it as something that's just fun to read. It's not a fun read but it is readable. More just like "doing the homework" with the expectation that we've all done the reading and have notes to share, and I've been using a .pdf version and marking up sections with a highlighter tool. I'd like to do this more often and with other books, and keep at it in a focused way, because especially with books like this I'll find myself not finishing them or whatever. But this way, it's kind of like "oh man, this is complicated, but I can't let the boys down."
#17407
Post rating: ~

Acdtrux posted:

lo posted:


does anyone know if there are any marxist books about mesoamerica, i'd really like to read some crap about the political economy of blood sacrifices



not marxist but the anthropologist who made these kinds of analyses popular was claude levi-strauss. Freudian marxists are frequently influenced by him


i'm vaguely familiar with him but i thought he was more about analysis of symbols and rituals and so forth than economics

#17408
[account deactivated]
#17409
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I’d guess a lot of the work you’re looking for is in Spanish.
#17410
Post rating: +++++
I’m reading six or so books at once. I’ve decided to just formalize this and embrace it instead of worrying about it. I have three paper notebooks for notes and an instance of notepad++ on my laptop and pc. Here’s what I’m reading

- forest ecology
- proletarian Science (book on Lysenko)
- imperialism by John r r Smith
- unequal exchange and the prospects for socialism (cwg bank robbers)
- couple others
#17411
Post rating: +

stegosaurus posted:

I’m reading six or so books at once. I’ve decided to just formalize this and embrace it instead of worrying about it. I have three paper notebooks for notes and an instance of notepad++ on my laptop and pc. Here’s what I’m reading

- forest ecology
- proletarian Science (book on Lysenko)
- imperialism by John r r Smith
- unequal exchange and the prospects for socialism (cwg bank robbers)
- couple others


nice

#17412
Post rating: +
what are peoples approach to notetaking and interrelating knowledge?

i have way too many pdfs and txt files now with no consistent order, tagging or annotation system in place. i've looked into different options but i might lack discipline. i need something that flows well and preferably only requires txt files.

ideally whatever system i move towards next allows me to not feel like i have to start over meticulously formatting everything i already have.
#17413
Post rating: ~

Gssh posted:

what are peoples approach to notetaking and interrelating knowledge?

i have way too many pdfs and txt files now with no consistent order, tagging or annotation system in place. i've looked into different options but i might lack discipline. i need something that flows well and preferably only requires txt files.

ideally whatever system i move towards next allows me to not feel like i have to start over meticulously formatting everything i already have.



notebook + nice regular pen and some coloured pens, diagrams/graphs in pencil with a ruler and pictures printed using a cheap black and white laser printer then cut and stuck in using off brand pritt stick, date and title (underlined). Number tyhe notebook pages, leaving a couple of pages blank at the beginning for a contents page. thats my way and it seems to work quite well for me

#17414
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
are notes really worth collating and archiving? i take notes occasionally to help me understand a specific text while i'm reading it, but once i'm done reading i have no use for it. this gives me license to take almost illegible and half formed notes because i'm not worried about discovering them later. i think that note taking is most valuable as a mnemonic device because it's much easier to remember a phrase or paragraph that i took the time to isolate and remark on, and much easier to keep myself from slipping in and out of comprehension when my sharpie is active on the page
#17415
Post rating: +
depends what you want to get out of it. making notes will naturally make you engage more with what you are reading, the mnemonic use which you talk about. But there are other good reasons to make notes, such as:

• if you want to keep track of what is important across number of sources which you are then going to collate afterwards
• as a summary such as if you want to lay out a nice step by step walkthrough of a process
• to practice your understanding - this is why schools still have students working in notebooks
• as a resource for you to go back to later - this requires the ability to make good notes, but imo some of the most useful - I use my notes as an aid to teaching a topic all the time

good notebooks become an extension of your brain
#17416
Post rating: +
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

this is a pretty cool notetaking method, but it takes a couple years to really pay off. it's basically a systematic way of organizing scraps, random thoughts, or writings linked to each other by means of tags into a network. kinda like a wiki structure that grows over time. best used at 3 am when your brain spontaneously develops cool ideas

Edited by dimashq ()

#17417
Post rating: ~
^^ spatial organising best organising
#17418
lies half the time
Post rating: ~

dimashq posted:

it's basically a systematic way of organizing scraps, random thoughts, or writings linked to each other by means of tags into a network. kinda like a wiki structure that grows over time. best used at 3 am when your brain spontaneously develops cool ideas


https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/

#17419
Post rating: +
I think notes are important to make it so you actually remember something and can refer back to it quickly if you need to. I make short paraphrases of most stuff in a book, almost never use quotes, and gather sources that I might want to investigate later. I also write down questions or comments on the text in my notes. When I read and took notes on capital I had it down to 10-15 pages of text per page of notes. On average. I’m trying to set up something called a ‘zettelkasten’ that has a system for organizing notes and research ideas that come out of the notes on books that I take. But I haven’t gotten that going yet.

Edit: fuck, beaten.
#17420
[account deactivated]
#17421
Post rating: +
this is how i take notes:

#17422
[account deactivated]
#17423
Post rating: ~
one thing that holds me back from quality notes is not having very legible or fast handwriting. That's why I am practicing my handwriting and learning a shorthand system. It's the same system used by secretaries and stenographers before audio recording and digital steno machines.

Look into 'Gregg' shorthand in America, it was massively popular at a time so the old textbooks are cheap.
#17424
Post rating: +

Belphegor posted:

Look into 'Gregg' shorthand in America, it was massively popular at a time so the old textbooks are cheap.


Oh yeah my grandfather partially wrote in this style after he lost his voice and would write on a pad. Kinda made it difficult to understand what he was saying but I was also around nine years old. The Zettelkasten thing seems neat.

#17425
Post rating: +

lo posted:

does anyone know if there are any marxist books about mesoamerica, i'd really like to read some crap about the political economy of blood sacrifices


Very not marxist but Accursed Share by Bataille is a cool 'economics' book which isn't necessarily historically focused but which puts the notion of sacrifice front and center for an economic analysis.
I think it has the most validity in bringing attention to the fact that military excess and the imperialist bacchanalia of the past century serves an important role for capitalist functioning outside of purely globalist capitalist expansion.

Edited by ribaraca ()

#17426
[account deactivated]
#17427
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i have OK recall of stuff ive read that i was interested in which combines with some type of attention or learning thing i have which makes it difficult to set up a reliable note taking system. the best i end up with is taking screenshots of whatever im reading and posting them to twitter with whatever note i would have made. its a very bad system and i should try to work up something better, the zettelkasten thing seems cool but i dont know if i have the mental organizational capacity to pull it off and maintain it
#17428
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also its hard for me to imagine a situation where it would matter to anyone else that i can recall some thoughts i had about something i was reading a while ago anyway
#17429
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c_man posted:

also its hard for me to imagine a situation where it would matter to anyone else that i can recall some thoughts i had about something i was reading a while ago anyway


what about when you make your post about it on the rhizzone?

#17430
Post rating: +
I just post to have fun
#17431
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c_man posted:

i have OK recall of stuff ive read that i was interested in which combines with some type of attention or learning thing i have which makes it difficult to set up a reliable note taking system. the best i end up with is taking screenshots of whatever im reading and posting them to twitter with whatever note i would have made. its a very bad system and i should try to work up something better, the zettelkasten thing seems cool but i dont know if i have the mental organizational capacity to pull it off and maintain it


i have terrible recall. that was one of the reasons for doing notes. i feel like i might as well have not read a book if it was a year or so ago

#17432
Post rating: +
the thing for me is that my recall gets better if i take a nominal amount of notes, or talk about things in it briefly, or write a review afterwards or something, so theres a weird sort of negative feedback where i end up doing just enough to remember certain bits but i know a lot is getting lost, while at the same time its hard to motivate and organize myself to keep all the notes i might want?
#17433
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Reading the sexual politics of meat, a good book on the patriarchy/speciesism connection and how feminization and animalization is weaponized to support both
#17434
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#17435
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toyot posted:



building a table where all four legs contact the floor seems pretty easy i don't think you need all those ball bearings and wire.

#17436
[account deactivated]
#17437
Post rating: +

toyot posted:

weight sags the legs into place.


same

#17438
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: ~

toyot posted:

blinkandwheeze posted:

toyot posted:
building a table where all four legs contact the floor seems pretty easy i don't think you need all those ball bearings and wire.

it's not kinematically possible to put even pressure in each leg of a 4-legged table... in a solid table, you'd have to shim it to the angstrom... the way eg ikea gets around this is to make it out of vertical cardboard, so the table's weight sags the legs into place.

you get it close and then put felt pads on the feet which deform to the good thickness

#17439
[account deactivated]
#17440
Post rating: +
Im reading Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal (Ian Christe, 2004). its so so, there are real touches of interest but sometimes it just falls flat. I am going to push on as there are interesting notes on things i am interested in, like the nu-metal phenomenon, and obviously like everyone i am interested in the origins of christian metalcore which mostly post-dates this book but its a handy primer on what metalcore grew from. i will try and write a proper review once i have finished, but no promises