The Off Topic Topic

[Syt]

These open world games are getting crazy, way too much stuff on the world map now.

[Josquius]

So the whole south West, including reykjavík, is a no go zone?

[Valmy]

Iceland is about to get a bunch of new free real estate?

[Legbiter]

This is the extent of the magma tunnel/intrusion and it's only a about a mile from the surface at this point.



Grindavík has been completely evacuated, the Blue Lagoon and the power plant at Svartsengi are potentially sitting ducks depending on where the initial fissure opens up. Worst case scenario is an eruption starting right in the middle of the town. We'll know very soon.

[Jacob]

That's pretty wild.

[HVC]

Did they build a power plant on a fault line? Or is this area newly seismic, or is all of Iceland basically a fault line

[Admiral Yi]

Did they build a power plant on a fault line? Or is this area newly seismic, or is all of Iceland basically a fault line

Geothermal power, yeah?  Gotta go where the heat is.

[Legbiter]

or is all of Iceland basically a fault line

Yeah Iceland is a rift zone between 2 continental plates that are drifting apart. Add in the Iceland hotspot and voilá. 

[HVC]

Did they build a power plant on a fault line? Or is this area newly seismic, or is all of Iceland basically a fault line

Geothermal power, yeah?  Gotta go where the heat is.

D'oh, for some reason I was thinking coal or something.

[Sheilbh]

Not just Jos, the Georgists really are back
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/business/georgism-land-tax-housing.html

[Razgovory]

I have a friend who is a Georgist.  It seems naïve, but harmless.

[Josquius]

Saw this article this morning

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

It mentions Ulyses in it too. A far more famous Joyce book also infamous for difficulty.

Makes me wonder... If his writing is so obtuse just why the hell is Joyce so renowned?
Surely writing a overly complex book nobody can read is a key error of incompetent amateurs?

[Sheilbh]

I was in a Finnegans Wake book club. Though we did a chapter a month (I think). It was great.

Joyce is incredible, I love him. I'm not sure he's obtuse but sections of Ulysses are difficult. It might be fair to say Finnegans Wake is a bit obtuse

[Richard Hakluyt]

I assumed obtuse was a typo for abstruse. I haven't bothered with Joyce yet, I'll read all the easier stuff first 

[Savonarola]

Saw this article this morning

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/12/california-venice-book-club-finngeans-wake-28-years

It mentions Ulyses in it too. A far more famous Joyce book also infamous for difficulty.

Makes me wonder... If his writing is so obtuse just why the hell is Joyce so renowned?
Surely writing a overly complex book nobody can read is a key error of incompetent amateurs?

Joyce is a phenomenal craftsman, and is able to write well in a multitude of styles (he's very well aware of this fact and, at points, beats you over the head with it in Ulysses.)  He creates a cast of vivid characters in Ulysses and sharp images so that you can almost see Dublin in June of 1904.  Personally, I find the sheer weirdness of the second part of the novel fascinating.  Also I don't think the novel is that obtuse; there's a couple hard chapters (Proteus, the Wandering Rocks), but nothing more difficult than Faulkner.  A layman could read this book with only some basic explanatory notes.

Finnegan's Wake as Sheilbh says is a different level of obtuse.  I've been re-reading that now, and even with the Joseph Campbell and William Tindall York notes it's a slow and difficult process.  He didn't write it for the layman, he wrote it for scholars of his own literature (no one ever accused James Joyce of suffering from low self-esteem.  Still two of those scholars are Anthony Burgess and the aforementioned Joseph Campbell, so at least it's influential.)  As a communication engineer, I think it's interesting that he's able to get such a density of meaning into his prose; but even when the cross-linguistic puns come from Spanish or French I don't get them so I really don't have the right sort of mind to understand it on my own.