een recensie van Mens blijven aan het front van Andrii Kobaliia en Gilles van der Loo

Dit boek is geschreven door Gilles van der Loo op basis van zijn videogesprekken met Andrii Kobaliia. Het bestaat uit hoofdstukken waarin Kobaliia's ervaringen vanuit zijn perspectief worden beschreven, en uit stukken van Van der Loos gedachten.

De Kobaliia-hoofdstukken zijn waar je het boek voor leest; daarin wordt beschreven hoe het leven er aan het front in Oekraïne uitziet. In het begin in veel detail, maar in de loop van het boek steeds minder en wordt het een waas van overplaatsingen. Dit geeft reflecteert waarschijnlijk Kobaliia's gewenning aan het front en aan de groeiende ongevoeligheid waarmee hij gedurende het boek kampt. Daarnaast zal het wel herhaling tegengaan – kou blijft immers kou en modder blijft modder. Misschien speelt ook nog mee dat het leven van infanterie aan een frontlinie die sinds begin 2022 drastisch is verschoven minder gevoelig is dan informatie over drone-eenheden die in 2023 aan ongeveer hetzelfde front vochten als in 2024. Hoe dan ook waren het juist de details waarin ik geïnteresseerd was, en die miste ik een beetje tegen het eind.

De Van der Loo-hoofdstukken zijn in mijn mening compleet onnodig. Heel, héél af en toe zit er een klein stukje zinvolle analyse in, maar vaak dragen deze stukken tekst werkelijk niets bij. Een samenvatting/herhaling van de vorige zes bladzijden, een anekdote uit Van der Loos leven die niets met Kobaliia's verhaal te maken heeft, of gewoon woorden waarmee niks wordt gezegd. In het begin is Van der Loo  bezig met hoe iemand ervoor kiest om te vechten, wat ik op zich wel een interessante vraag vind, maar ook dat verdwijnt een beetje. (In het dankwoord dankt Van der Loo Kobaliia "van wie ik geleerd heb dat ook ik zou blijven om te vechten voor het behoud van mijn stad en land", maar deze conclusie volgt niet uit de tekst.) Van der Loo neemt te veel ruimte in in Kobaliia's verhaal zonder er wat aan bij te dragen, en het komt over als pure paginavullerij.

De stekelige zijden van een egel
Omzeil je enkel als ze je vertrouwt.
Geduld en zachtheid brengt je in de regel
Ook nader tot de mens van wie je houdt.

i'm really looking forward to Minecraft's "Copper Age" update. the main reason is copper tools and armour! it'll be wonderful for the early game. currently, since iron is scarce and iron tools don't last much longer than stone ones, it's generally not worth it to me to make them, and i go more or less straight from stone to diamond. but since copper is so much more plentiful, it'll be worth it to craft tools that are a bit better than stone but still cheap! i won't feel a need to rush up the tech tree so fast.

i think the aged variants of the lightning rod are a good addition too, they're great detailing blocks. and while i do think iron chains look better than any of the copper chain variants, i like the exposed copper chains enough that i'll be happy to use them as an affordable alternative to iron chains.

i almost forgot about the copper chests and copper automata/statues. i don't really care for them, i don't expect i'll ever use them.

mes bibliothèques sont pleines et les nouveaux livres s'empilent au sol. je suis très contenxe de la valeur esthéthique des piles de livres, mais je lamentais qu'elles ne suivent pas le système d'organisation de ma bibliothèque personnelle dont je suis si fièr. ma partenaire m'a dit qu'alors je pourrais les organiser, elles aussi.

ce qui a entraîné une grande réorganisation de ma biblithèque. la section non-fiction s'est élargie et tous les livres de non-fiction vont de nouveau dans l'étagère ; j'ai fait plus de place aux recueils de poésie aussi.

la fiction en anglais (sauf science-fiction et fantasy) et la fiction en néerlandais sont sorties de l'étagère intégralement pour être entassées en piles séparées. à vrai dire, ça fait un peu plus désordonné maintenant – sans doute parce que les piles de livres sont à présent plus nombreyx et de tailles hétéroclites. (la solution est évidente : obtenir davantage de livres pour les augmenter...)

combat mods

she lives 100 years ago in the future

abandoned galaxy

moominous

kriebelbeesten

feestleegte

verdwaalbaarheid

ja nee dit dat

want er is sprake.

Een kastje met uh... (bluh) (blägh) inhoud

You are more of an accident of nature than other people

herbts

I don't want to alarm anybody, but I think it's detail time.

some heavenly occurrence

recursive hedgehog

it's all happening at the speed of life

kattendistributiesysteem

met een beetje beleid en gevoel

a review of Bloodywood's second album Nu Delhi

i was very excited for a new album from my favourite band, after a number of covers and singles and a spectacular first album! however, the second album Nu Delhi is a bit disappointing. it's not bad; it's... fine. it's all okay, good music, but nothing stands out. i feel like the debut album Rakshak had a lot more variation in moods and styles and levels of heaviness, with some very memorable flute melodies ("Jee Veerey", "Endurant") and haunting choruses ("Zanjeero Se", "Jee Veerey").
Nu Delhi sounds like they blended "Gaddaar", "Machi Bhasad" and "Chakh Le" from Rakshak and made seven variations on the theme. also, with 8 tracks and a runtime of 33 minutes, Nu Delhi a bit shorter than Rakshak's 47 minutes over 10 tracks.

there are some nice riffs (see below), but i miss Jayant Bhadula's clean vocals. i've read a review of Rakshak that called Raoul Kerr's English rap lyrics "rote posturing", which i agree with, but somehow the English rap lyrics manage to be even duller on Nu Delhi. all that said, i still enjoy the new album and i'm happily listening to it on repeat. it's just the comparison with the mind-blowing debut where everything stands out that's causing the disappointment.

( track by track thoughts: )

Спросите: Не знал ли никто?
— Всё понимали большинство.
Затем спросите: Чья вина?
И только слышно тишина.
Мы позволяли сгорать свету.
Предупреждали столько раз,
А как случилось — действий нету.
Потомки, не прощайте нас.

i love* how John Flanagan's Ranger series gets less and less subtle about how Araluen meddles in international affairs, and the eponymous rangers of Araluen are the fantasy!CIA. the interventionism is not really condemned, but not portrayed as beneficial to those at the receiving end either: the text is pretty clear on the fact that it serves the interests of Araluen's ruling family, and not necessarily anyone else.

they've previously propped up a friendly regime in a foreign country's internal power struggle. now they're supporting a weak ruler in a neighbouring country just enough that he remains in power, so that the state remains too unstable to grow into a threat to Araluen.

* i'm not being sarcastic, by the way. i genuinely think it's genuinely an interesting dynamic and it entertains me greatly.

a review of Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Toward Eternity has a lot going for it that should really be my shit: poetry; AI; AIs reading poetry; exploration of the meaning and import of language(s); of what makes humanity (especially in a world where there are sentient beings that are not (biologically) similar to H. sapiens as we know it today. But I found it just okay. It didn't really focus enough on language(s) and I felt it also forgot about poetry for a while.

It also cared deeply about capital-M Music (especially classical European music – Bach and Mozart in particular), and that is an effective trick for making me lose interest. I simply feel "an intense, burning indifference" to it as a major component in fiction. I cannot relate, I anti-relate, it's just not for me. (To be clear, I haven nothing against music, I just don't care for it in fiction.) At least one of the points of view contrasted Music with poetry (which in the rest of the book are cast as an eternal, essential part of the universe, something that transcends humanity and keeps existing even if no one is around to read or recite or remember it anymore), and considered it even more pure and sublime(?) and so on than language – and then it wasn't really brought up again.

The book was maybe also too short for what it wanted to do (or at least for what I felt it was setting up). There was not enough page time for each character, and the book ended in a kind of awkward place of not enough mystery to leave me intrigued after finishing it, yet not enough revelation to leave me satisfied either. I would also have liked the eternal essence of poetry to be supported a bit more.
(Also, the poetry featured in this book is primarily 19th century English and American poetry, which one of the viewpoints states early on was a tool of imperialist violence. And while the same character states that these poems have merit nonetheless, I do find it awkward that the only examples of eternal and universal poetry we get are from this hegemonic Anglo-American canon.)

Speaking of characters and viewpoints – the story is told through a single notebook in which a chain of roughly a dozen characters each write their own story, or part of their story, or their part of the story. The first three or so characters have somewhat distinct voices, but the later ones all sound/feel the same, and I found myself asking when and how they had the opportunity to write in the notebook, which broke my suspension of disbelief a little.

That said, Toward Eternity still manages to do a bunch of interesting stuff, and it's easy to keep turning the pages (or keep listening), and I did enjoy the musings about poetry, such as they were. It may be interesting to people who enjoyed Anjet Daanje's Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris. It's not the same, of course (nothing can be), but the structure and red thread of the respective books are similar in some ways, as well as the poetry/literature and music themes.