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salt marsh

mouse@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 5 months ago

it's me, I'm the creator and admin of BookWyrm

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Eight Flavors (2016, Simon & Schuster) No rating

“Very cool…a breezy American culinary history that you didn’t know you wanted” (Bon Appetit …

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, recipes for making soy sauce at home appeared in English and American cookbooks. Since soybeans were not widely available, these recipes used local ingredients such as mushrooms, walnuts, and fish...

Tomato was another popular ingredient for making American "soy" sauce... The names for these varying sauces were "ketchups," or "catch-ups," or "catsups," derived from the Indonesian word for soy sauce: ketjap.

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ketchup is soy sauce????????????????

Blockchain Chicken Farm (2020, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 4 stars

Note about the author: The author is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns in English.

"A …

The logic is striking. A demand for pork drives industrialized farming of pigs, which increases disease transmission. The constant emergence of diseases drives the implementation of new technologies like AI pork farming. These technologies go on to make pork cheap, driving even more availability and demand, as people start to believe pork is a necessary part of their diet. AI is not the balm to any problem -- it is just one piece of the every-hungry quest for scale.

Blockchain Chicken Farm by 

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018, Holt & Company, Henry) 1 star

Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of …

Disappointing and poorly defended

1 star

This was such a frustrating read because I agree with so many of the problems he identifies with social media, but I found his reasoning deeply flawed.

To the extent that this is a diatribe about how unpleasant social media is in his personal experience, I was mostly onboard, but the difference, I think, between a rant and a book is rigor.

His citations were mostly news articles and wikipedia entries, and he relies heavily on a superficial understanding of popular, flawed studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment. He makes bold, sweeping, and imprecise statements about the a number of things, particularly the nature of addiction and how addicts behave, without any backup or indication that he is speaking in any way besides entirely off the cuff.

I was disappointed as well in how stuck his reasoning is within the frame of capitalism and tech solutionism.

Nearly Roadkill (Paperback, 1996, High Risk Books) 5 stars

"A novel written in cyberspace, Nearly Roadkill is an Infobahn erotic thriller without any boundaries …

like Hackers (1995) but with GENDER

5 stars

This book has the energy of Hackers (1995) but with an incredibly interesting and thoughtful exploration of gender, loads of sex, and a prescient read of corporate influence on internet culture.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020, Tor Books) 4 stars

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in …

I didn't ship it

3 stars

This book was fine, I can see why people really liked it. It's well written and the plot is solid, but I found the picture perfect artsy Brooklyn courtship tedious, I didn't find either of the main characters all that compelling, and the tropes it relies on a little uninteresting. I was disappointed by how lacking in oddness or eccentricity it was, how credible but unremarkable the characters are.