A Bit on Reading

Today's a Friday, and the end of the first week of May.

The time passed on by pretty quickly as I indulged in more reading, this time of a less structured sort---I mean that I was just reading things that were linked on reddit. I also watched some Futurama, and played a bit of Cyberpunk 2077.

I think I'll not play Feudal Alloy, and had it uninstalled from my Steam. I mean, a game is supposed to be fun, if it is not fun any more, perhaps it is not a good idea to sink even more time into it.

I ought to say the same about books, but the reality is a little different there. Even if the book is not ``fun'', as long as it is a work of non-fiction, I tend to want to read it through, the chief reason being I never know when the information that is contained within can prove useful. After all, all the so-called different disciplines that are defined for human knowledge are really just artificial partitions to ensure that a certain amount of structure can be instituted to ensure that sufficient amount of specialisation and depth from the specialisation can be achieved by a single person within a life-time. It is a stop-gap measure to manage the vast amount of knowledge that exists, since the days where a single person can be a high-performing polymath is over thanks to the massive knowledge increase from exponential growth.

Fiction though... the more I read them, the more I tend to want to be a bit more careful with my choices. There are some fiction that are purely for entertainment---see the Animorphs series that I am chewing through. There are also some fiction that are really social commentaries in disguise---see the award-winning ones for examples. I believe that we have reached the point where most stories follow some established narrative pattern, and thus if one's goal of reading a work of fiction is to discover ``new'' narrative patterns, it might not actually be worth it if the story itself is unappealing.

That is why I am still ``slogging'' through the really long works of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (20th Edition).

Well, back to Act 3 of Cyberpunk 2077. I think I won't be greedy---just achieving a single ending would be good enough for me, sort of like how I completed The Witcher series of games. I might want to try out more of the first-person shooters that I have lying around in my game library, or some of the role-playing ones. It seems that I am still actively avoiding anything that uses controllers.

Till the next update then.