Boal

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Boal
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Droidian devices
Webpage for devices running droidian
 lists the #Oneplus3 as a #Droidian community-supported device. I spent hours downloading and going through the steps for a Droidian install. I tried both the rootfs image installed via recovery, and the alternate image which I flashed manually with #fastboot. Neither one boots. And after all that, I can find no formal place to report that it does not work / don't waste your time. No e-mail list, no issue list on github, just (what I regard as) a hand-wave to go complain on Telegram. This Brave New World of ephemeral forums and chat groups does not work. I feel like I am wasting my time even trying to interact with a community that operates in this manner, and am probably near the end of my rope with respect to #Linux on Mobile, as this sad frustrating state seems to be the norm here.
Book Review: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard This is mainly the story of the deeply ethnic and amazingly persistent roots of the various waves of immigration and settlement across N.America. Most of these threads are still alive and well today, despite centuries of evolution and some very large events such as the Civil War along the way. In addition to all the bits of interesting knowledge gained from any good history book, there is also here much useful context for certain patterns in recent events in N.America. The author's very strong Yankee bias comes out later in the book, and that is the only place where my progress bogged down. Outside of that short section, this is a history book that does not want to be set aside. There is also some comfort to be found here, as apparently indigenous cultures are really not easily dislodged even by massive immigration. #review #bookreview #history #Americana
#bookreview: The War of the Worlds (WoW) by #hgwells I had read some of Wells' novels many years ago, before I learned about his reputation as a very famous #eugenicist (very common at the end of the 19th Century) and misanthrope. I got a very similar vibe with all the Wells' novels I have read, this one included: very well and gracefully written, but also very dark and somewhat forgettable. The "main" characters are cardboard figures just marching through the story. Wells never even gave us a name for the main character / narrator of WoW, as a matter of fact I am remembering now most people met along the way in the story do not get names either. Decades later, now I can put my finger on what is wrong with Wells writing: he is actually not a novelist at all. He is a pure #propagandist. He has decided in advance the talking points he wants to make (that humans are actually just animals, etc.) and he uses the text of the book to drive those points home, over and over again, reworded in a dozen different ways. The story is just a vehicle, and the every-man characters in the story, beyond their utility as educational tools, are literally unimportant and disposable in the eyes of the writer. Great read if you want to study at the feet of a master propagandist. Otherwise, I would say don't bother. #review #sf #sciencefiction
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow In a continuing trend on my bookshelf, this is yet another astonishing piece of non-fiction that shreds the modern #Scientism paradigm. Again, we are going after #anthropology and #archaeology, and particularly the idea that human social organization has evolved smoothly from simple hunter-gatherer / anarchism, through agriculture / feudalism, to the current industrial / nation state mandatory repression situation. From freedom and simplicity to increasingly complex, restrictive, and hierarchical social structures. The authors dismantle this belief system with a multitude of examples, from deep prehistory to the recent past, of human social organization not only experimenting with ideas that are "inappropriate" for the time and place, but sometimes even oscillating between radically different social arrangements in winter and summer, or neighboring societies that seem to consciously organize themselves to NOT be like their neighbors, going in opposite directions. This picture is one of variety and a deep willingness (seemingly lost in modern times) to experiment. Particularly noteworthy for anarchists are the examples throughout history and all over the world of very large communities / cities that seem to do just fine with little or no hierarchical structure. This was a very good and engaging scholarly read, the last third of the book consumed entirely by citations. #review #bookreview