Feineigle.com

Practice

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Literally keep practicing and you will get better at your craft as well as understanding what your audience wants to see.

The key (to anything really) is to stick with it and every day do something that advances your project specifically or your craft generally. Doing this should help to get you into a flow-like state where it becomes habit and you simply "do the work" every day without really thinking about it. The author argues that there is no such writer's block (but this could be applied to any creative endevour) and a lack of daily practice is what keeps people from getting things done; if you don't feel inspired, write anyway, write junk, throw it out, keep writing. "We don't write because we feel like it, we feel like it because we write." With all this practice every day taking up a large chunk of your life, one should recognize that if you are planning to become great at your craft, understand there will be a sacrifice - you can't do everything.

Creative Act

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many short chapters that offer theories and insights into creativity, how one approaches making art, and how one relates to the art they produce and consume.

Apparently Rick Rubin is a music producer, and while he certainly makes use of some art as music examples there are plenty of other media he explores with his examples and musings. Some of the advice given is quite literal in how you might go about whittling your work down or finding ways to see the works (or world) through a different lens. Other advice is more abstract, but useful none-the-less, and helps you find, start, or complete a project when you are stuck. I think his advice on treating every project as nothing more than an experiment, that you can discard at a moment's notice like a child dropping one toy for another, helps to alleviate stress about it being good enough and simultaneously allowing even failures to be seen as experimental stepping stones that will make the next project that much better. Finally another important take-away is the idea that you can train for anything - that obviously means the technical aspect of your craft, but it also means you can train yourself to quiet you mind, to focus on different aspects of whatever you are looking at, or even how you give and receive criticism.

Catching the Big Fish

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of seemingly stream of consciousness thoughts that are connected only by the fact that David Lynch wrote them.

Each of the damn near 100 'chapters' is little more than a couple pages that read more like a long form Twitter post than anything resembling an actual book chapter. It feels like it was written by someone who doesn't write for an audience of people that don't read. Overall I generally disliked the whole idea of all these 'random' chapters flowing in no particular order, but I must admit that there are a few gems, particularly on the topic of creativity and film making, hidden among the dross. Lynch's creative process can probably be summed up accurately as: meditate and be happy. With this, I can not disagree.

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An approachable, yet still scathing, indictment of how show business has hijacked our ability to differentiate between entertainment and information.

At its core the book lays out how the shift from a typographic centered communication society to a image centered communication society has redefined the very epistemology of civilization. Before radio, photography, the telegraph, and television (not to mention the internet), the only way people communicated, excluding orally, was via the written word. A book, as the piece de resistance of the typographic age, meant a number of things in and of itself that the modern telecommunications lack. A book, or more particularly the ideas a book holds, are wrestled into their final form over months or years as the author distills their thoughts, rearranges their arguments, and hones their presentation into a final lucid concept as they imagine how the future reader might react. Telecommunications holds no such claim and instead distills its ideas into an acceptable for, free of all context, to be enjoyed as entertainment for the lowest common denominator of public fool, culminating with the eventuality that entertainment not on usurps information, but that is *becomes* information itself.

Slow Productivity

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Much of the work you may do isn't actually productive and is more-or-less busy work and should be avoided as best it can be to make space for a more leisurely pace where you actually get things done to a high quality.

The book begins by drawing a distinction between the relatively newer "knowledge work" and the age-old physical work and noticing that productivity is measured completely differently between these two realms. Forcing the knowledge working into the physical box tends to create an office environment where appearing to be busy - the frantic busyness of endless meetings and pseudo-productivity - is more important than actually producing meaningful work. The author proposes that we slow down, do fewer things, but do them to a higher quality while measuring our output over years and decades instead of days and weeks. This, I think, isn't actually anything new and is contained in the proverb of "Rome wasn't built in a day" and encapsulated in the fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare." The book is flanked with a pair of stories that describe the slow thoughtful meandering when John McPhee is lying on a picnic table grappling with how to write his next piece and a second story where McPhee is fully engaged in typing up, organizing, and arranging his notes as the words start to hit the pages - what he calls putting little drops of water (work) day-by-day into the bucket until 365 days later you have quite a lot of water.

The Problem of Puer Aeternus

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first half or third of the book outlines in psychological terms the case of the puer aeternis and how then, as now, there is a growing number of people that fall into this archetype.

The first part of the book deals in a more descriptive manner in what is the puer aeternis archetype and how the puer presents himself to the world and himself. Next, parallels with The Little Prince are made to the puer and a connection to Saint-Exupery being a puer himself - mother complex, addicted to flying, driven and creative only when the mood struck. After this there are more parallels of the puer made with the book The Kingdom Without Space; this book sounds very interesting, but the connections between it and the puer are more difficult (but not impossible) to see without the more detailed reasoning given in much of the earlier chapters dealing with The Little Prince. I really enjoyed the first, more concrete, part of the book where the mannerisms and reasoning why someone might follow the puer aeternis path. The latter half of the book was interesting, but also long winded and more of a book review where Jung's psychology was projected (or interpreted) into the two books.

A Book of Five Rings

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Similar to the Art of War, this book's literal message is that of sword fighting and combat, but the ideas can be in many instances applied to other, more peaceful, aspects of life.

While the actual combat advice is likely outdated, if for no other reason than modern guns usurping swords, many of the positions advocated for can be reapplied to other areas of life. The ground ring teaches that you should build your life on a solid foundation made up of focus, practice, intent, and lacking distractions. The water ring teaches that you should be fluid in your life, adjusting yourself to your environment, but still remain strong as even the slowest trickle of water can still carve out the deepest canyon. The fire ring is the least useful in modern context since it is heavily focused on actual combat, but you might draw inspiration to maintain your focus and practice in a diligent manner. The wind ring teaches that you should not be set in your ways and that you can always learn from alternate methods - know thy enemy - while the void ring reminds you that the way (learning, living) is not the means but the end.

12 Rules for Life - An Antidote to Chaos

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A long-winded list of 'rules' that for the most part seem likely to produce better rather than worse outcomes if followed.

Peterson uses meandering stories and exceedingly disconnected examples to make cases for his rules. He doesn't hide his literary slant and it feels like he is writing to show off his vocabulary and force his voice through the pages. That said, the rules are reasonable and would almost certainly provide a good starting point for anyone, but particularly young men, that might feel unmoored in today's social and political world. On one hand he makes a lot of calls back to biblical references, which in my bias opinion is a good foundation for rules for life, but on the other he regularly uses the trope of 'Hitler bad' (to his credit he also points out Lenin, Stalin, and Mao as well) which feels exceedingly weak in modern arguments. Overall I would say that while you might find the book useful it is quite a slog to get through if you are looking to get right to the point, but that might be a benefit to others that want to take their time and read some subjectively interesting stories while slowly absorbing the 12 rules.

The 12 Week Year

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Essentially a plan to focus more on quarters than years with weekly reviews of your progress.

There isn't anything groundbreaking here and is little more than a way to focus on quarterly progress (their 12 week 'years') instead of annual progress. While nothing new, the system is good for keeping on track since you can reasonably plan 12 weeks whereas trying to plan 52 would be all but impossible. By having weekly and quarterly feedback of the (sub) goals you are striving to accomplish you get more and faster feedback. The authors make use of, but not as strictly, the time boxing or time blocking system I read about in Indistractable. Overall I think the 12 week year concept is little more than a gimmick, but the idea of shorter 'goal periods' that can produce feedback and be easier to forecast are solid strategies for accomplishing your goals.

Indistractable

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Using timeboxing as a scheduling technique to allow you to remain focused on what is important to you instead of constantly getting sidetracked.

The idea of timeboxing sounds very appealing to me and though I have tried to use it several times (and am trying again now), I always end up back in my basic monthly tasks I keep in a spreadsheet. Beyond timeboxing, the book has a lot of useful tips on identifying and understanding internal and external triggers that evoke some kind of emotion in you that ultimately leads to you getting distracted. Once you have a decent grasp of what your triggers are - and how you are likely avoiding pain instead of chasing pleasure - you can start to restructure your life to block out certain things at certain times. There is a lot of talk about technology and the author makes a solid case that it isn't the tech that is distracting us, it is the content delivered by said tech (and this has existed for generations - tv, radio, and even books were once blamed as distractions). Towards the end it feels a little repetitive, but in this part the author shows that the techniques learned can be reapplied to children in a bid to give them more agency, more motivation, and less distraction in their lives as well.

Traction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An overall strategy on how to identify channels that could be used to grow your business and then a chapter dedicated to each of them.

The first 5 chapters lay out the idea of how there are different channels that can be used to grow your business. There are 19 different channels put forth and a then you are presented with a plan for how to choose which to pursue and how you should be able to quickly and cheaply determine if a given channel is right for your business. The bulk of the book is going into detail, with each chapter deep diving into a given channel and also containing some interview-like nuggets of wisdom from someone who has successfully used said channel. As of my reading the book is 10 years old and can show its age in some places, but the overall and especially the offline strategies are still viable today even if you might need to massage them here and there to make them work. For my business, a few strategies jumped out and a few looked outright terrible, but the knowledge of what is out there for future possibilities is still valuable even if I don't intend to use those channels today.

Why We Should Gatekeep Linux

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 06:00:00 -0400

Curved Leg Oak Shelf

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:29:12 -0400

Media Shelf

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:29:12 -0400

Scientific Advertising

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting historical look at advertising that seems to be the foundation of most of the modern, post-Ogilvy, understanding of sales.

This was published in 1923 and Propaganda was published in 1928; it is extremely interesting to juxtapose these two works to see how they fit together. This 'above board' advertising versus the manipulative tactics seen in Bernay's works show an almost idealistic versus real interpretation of how people act, what they want, and what tactics work on them. Most of what is presented is almost naive versus modern standards; information and honesty are portrayed as foundational aspects of advertising whereas we see the total opposite in modern advertising. Much of what is revealed here is better said in Ogilvy's works, although this is interesting for anyone that wants a historical look at how Ogilvy came to his conclusions. Overall I would say that this book could be skipped if you've read Ogilvy and probably some Kennedy as well, but for the curious it is still worthwhile (and it is super short and easy to read at that).

Why People Buy

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The use of the scientific method of testing products, logos, slogans, and similar is regarded as the superior way for making marketing decisions as opposed to the old way of going with your gut and hunches.

This book generally outlines how and why you would go about collecting data to test if a product will be accepted by the audience, or sometimes even who the audience is for a potential product. When conducting this research, you can't outright ask people what they think of a product because they will tell you what they think you want to hear. They will tell you they buy a car because it is safe and dependable, but research shows that they buy the car because it is a status symbol. The same product can be placed in different packaging and receive wildly different acceptance. The simplest things like colors and shapes on a products' packaging and marketing can have large effects on the success or failure of the product.

E-Myth Revisited, The

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best business books I have ever read; simple and clear yet packed with insight.

It took me a few chapters to get into it, but eventually I started to actually care about the dialectic that was used to reinforce the concepts presented. The framing of the ways to look at a business - technician, manager, and entrepreneur - mapped closely to my previous understanding, but in a new and useful way. By following the franchise model, even if you aren't ever planning to franchise, hammers home the idea of systematizing your business. Onne you accept this way of thinking you can then work "on" your business instead of "in" your business; this is also the difference between the technician and the entrepreneur. Finally, there are some useful nuggets of general life advice sprinkled throughout that signals to me the author is more than a businessman or teacher, but a true student of life.

Ogilvy on Advertising

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting read on every facet of advertising that is more general overview, commentary, and history than nuts and bolts technique.

If you are looking for a book on advertising techniques this is probably not what you want to read. This book is a pleasant meandering through all aspects of the advertising industry circa 1940-1980. While there are a few chapters chock-a-block full of tips, there is ten times as much "filler". I use quotes around filler because if you are looking for general commentary, some history, and maybe some information on what the advertising industry (of the era, probably reasonably applicable today) then it is well worth your time. I found the book interesting enough in its own regard, well written and a breeze to read, and was also happy with the relatively little pure technique that was presented (though I am on the lookout for a more technique oriented book).

As A Man Thinketh

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A quick read that focuses on recognizing that your thoughts have enormous influence in shaping your life.

While many people blame their circumstances on environment, James Allen argues that it is more accurate to say your circumstances are shaped by your thoughts, leaving only yourself to blame. My interpretation of this quite empowering because if the fault of your circumstance lies with you, the solution also lies with you. (Since I was a teenager I have said "if you don't like something, change it" in regards to life.) Some of the book is couched in an almost religious good/bad dichotomy and even has a ting of positive thinking or manifesting vibe to it. That said, you can easily ignore the language that might be off putting while still accepting the general premises; right thought (to borrow from the Greeks and the Buddhists) is more likely to lead to right action that is more likely to lead to desirable outcomes. While positive thinking is not enough to achieve your goals, it should bias you toward action that moves you closer to accomplishing your goals, whereas negative thinking will likely bias you toward inaction and languishing.

Docker Book, The

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The go-to docker book that provides the basics (for people like me) as well as a good introduction to the more advanced features available.

The first ~40% is what I wanted, an introduction to Docker and its basic uses. The last ~60% of the book is more advanced, containing information about swarm, compose, clustering, building more complex multi-container applications, the API, and development. Overall I think docker (having barely used it) is a reasonable tool, but the fracturing of (too) many applications into "micro-services" I think leads to overall fragility within software development. In my case I am simply interesting in running docker on a small (NUC-like) server that can provide me with a simpler way to get up and running with SeaFile and maybe an internal website. For what I want, the first half of the book provided me with an understanding that allowed me to do everything I wanted to do.