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Book Review: A Memory Called Empire

The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

— Page 128, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

I first found out about this book in May of 2019 from Andrew Liptak’s review of it for The Verge. The premise of the book caught my attention and I immediately placed a hold for it in my city’s library system. I was finally able to get my hands on a copy in September of 2019. This book is popular and after having reading it, I can see why.

I cannot recall the last time I wrote a book review and I certainly do not remember if there are any formal structures defined for this sort of writing. So I will make the structure up as I see fit for this review.

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Build them small and they will stay

This post was inspired by a essay by Darius Kazemi titled “How to run a small social network for your friends” which I highly encourage you read before you read this.

I will be talking about my own experience in being part of and creating online communities and a lot of Darius’ thoughts on the matter closely reflect how I have grown to think about online communities and their dynamics.

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Pause and Focus

Going forward, I am putting a pause to the weekly “Things I have read” and the monthly Bandcamp picks posts.

For the first one, I feel like it works out better to share things I’ve read as I read them on my micro-blog instead of collecting them in a list to post at the end of each week. That format sometimes also leads to me reading things just so I can put them on the list instead of something I genuinely enjoyed reading.

As for the second one, I underestimated just how much time and energy it requires to actually do music discovery on Bandcamp on a regular basis. These days, I simply don’t have the requisite time and mental energy to go through music and pick out things I like every month.

So going forward, this blog is going to focus more on longer form posts that are way too long for my micro-blog.