Ask Lemmy

My mom refuses to watch anything remotely 'scary' so she hadn't seen Lord of the Rings. I managed to trick her into watching the first movie by watching a vlog of some people visiting the hobbit holes in New Zealand.

She loved it. She didn't like the orcs and the balrog, and the fighting, but she loved the story, all the beautiful nature, the lighthearted nature of the hobbits, all that good beautiful stuff. We saw each of the three movies on a different day and she was the one who asked to see each of the sequels. It was nice to share one of my favorite things with her.

My favorite new movie I saw this year was Dune. It was the first movie I've seen in a long while that made me go "Was that it? Where's the rest of it? That can't be all there is. I want more!" needless to say I'll be seeing the sequel in the cinema. I loved the books and I loved the movie too.

Probably the movie Perfect Blue. I love creatively told, dark stories, and I love good animation, that movie expertly delivered on both and resonated with me.

This might be an odd answer, but:

Open Intellectual Property Casebook by James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins.

A Canticle for Lebowitz. A post apocalyptic scifi written about earth after a nuclear holocaust written in the 1950s and is extremely fun and terrifying to read. The guy who wrote it was a WW2 bomber and only every wrote this one book and it is an amazing piece of literature.

The Origin on Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

Now that was a wild read.

The E-Myth. A classic for entrepreneurs, I had waited to read it as nd I think it was the right time. For me, it clicked that a business needs to become a machine, with defined processes. Of course, I chose a very innovative service to make, so getting there will be tough. But the book definitely helped me get more sense of direction.

Finnegans Wake. I read it across the year with an online group. It was always on the edge of incomprehensibility - often well over the edge - but it definitely had a impact.

This year's 'big read' will be the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms I'm just about to make a start.

Planet of exile by Ursula K. Le Guin

I watched the Evangelion rebuild movies, and having a positive ending to a depressing story like that was cathartic.

Started reading Hyperion, couldn't finish it because of the Sol Weintraub story, it's hard to read when you have kids

It's kind of been a shallow year for both books and movies in terms of impact on me. That's not to say it's been a bad year for them, but it's mostly been just 'enjoyable'.

That said, it was probably Radicalized by Cory Doctorow. It's a collection of four novellas that follow different characters pushed into different kinds of extremist action. The one where people start murdering health insurers was particularly heavy.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Read it this summer and it instantly became a keeper.

Mind change, and yoga mind are two books that really helped me work through my trauma. They aren't for everyone, but if you're struggling to figure your shit out its a place to start at least.

The law of 1 - the book of Ra. Book 1.

I'm open for comments on this. It is so far past the whoo whoo scale I'm not even sure how I started reading it without quitting.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb let me embrace progress and change

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley is an autobiography written by American tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez. The book likens Silicon Valley to the "chaos monkeys" of society. In the book, the author details his career experiences with launching a tech startup, selling it to Twitter, and working at Facebook from its pre-IPO stage.

It's actually 2016 book that I've missed. Great story, cool ending. Love the part about graffiti all over Facebook offices.