User Profile

Tilde Lowengrimm Locked account

tilde@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3Β years, 6Β months ago

I'm a nonbinary πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ trans 🌈 queer 🧠 disabled πŸ• Jewish 🌹 socialist 🏴🚩 anti-fascist πŸŒƒ urbanist on unceded Ohlone land in Berkeley, CA.

I enjoy reading fiction and I put in the effort to read non-fiction to expand my horizons and improve my abilities. Science fiction is where I'm most comfortable, but I can dive into almost any story depicting smart but flawed people trying to manage complex and uncertain situations.

🍡 While I read, I like to enjoy limitless (green) tea, and (lukewarm) coffee in moderation. πŸ₯Ÿ Dumplings and soup are my favorite food groups, which makes xiao long bao humanity's greatest achievement besides audiobooks. β˜” As well as lying in bed on a rainy day, reading with a warm mug in my hand, I also like to listen to books while sailing, hiking, camping, or really any other activity which lets me look at trees or find a cool bird or pretty flower. πŸ•

Find me at @tilde@infosec.town or tilde.lowengr.im.

Since I spend my day staring at glowing screens, I try to focus on audiobooks. Most books that I'm only going to read once I get from Overdrive & Libby. I prefer to buy new books from my favorite authors, and anything I find myself reading over and over.

For those audiobooks, I love Libro.fm. They're a social purpose corporation, care about DEI, and let you support your local book store when you shop there. Most importantly, all your audiobooks can be downloaded as DRM-free mp3 files so you can archive them on your own, and use any audiobook player you like. libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm299420

Either way, audiobooks go to my Plex server and I listen using the Prologue app on iOS (prologue.audio). Using my own server means I don't need to sync my three-thousand file terabyte-sized collection to my phone. I download the books on my reading list to use offline. If I don't think I'm going to re-read an audiobook, I remove the download when I'm done.

Friends: would you also like access to my Plex library? Send me a message on Signal and I'll get your account hooked up.

For a smaller audiobook collection, I strongly recommend BookPlayer (apps.apple.com/us/app/bookplayer/id1138219998). It works great, and has a ton of flexibility and convenience. But it chokes when synchronizing huge libraries, which is why I switched to Prologue.

I also used to hugely recommend the Voice Dream app, but it was recently bought by a new company and has been less reliable of late. Not every book has an audio edition β€” especially obscure material and non-fiction. Having a robot in my phone which can read me any PDF or ePub is magical. Custom voices and pronunciation, fully offline reading, it's really solid. But the sync has been on the fritz lately, which is extremely frustrating. voicedream.com

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Tilde Lowengrimm's books

No books found.

John Paul Stevens: Six Amendments (2014) 4 stars

Straightforward, reasonable, impossible

No rating

These six amendments are easy to understand and eminently reasonable. In fact, they are barely amendments β€” they mostly just clarify existing text which unreasonable judges have decided to deliberately misunderstand in order to achieve unpopular policy goals. Indeed, it is an indictment of the US and our legal system that we do not currently act as if these clarifying amendments are in place. Stevens provides plenty of context about the events and cases which demand these amendments. But a reasonably-informed person would probably get most of the context just from reading the proposed changes.

Micah Goodman, Eylon Levy: Wondering Jew (2021, Yale University Press) No rating

This was an absolutely fantastic read mixing positions which I think of as coming from very different ends of Judiasm. This was a quick first read, but there's so much in here to examine further. I might even need to read this one in text with a highlighter. What an interesting document with so much to think about. It's going right back on the end of my reading list.

Chris Broad: Abroad in Japan (2023, Transworld Publishers Limited) 4 stars

When Englishman Chris Broad landed in a rural village in northern Japan he wondered if …

Bland & unremarkable travel writing

1 star

A collection of anecdotes, but nothing that really spoke to me or showed me anything new or interesting. Very focused on the author's experience rather than the place he's in. Cover art & title much better than the writing. Not recommended.

Jonathan M. Metzl: Dying of Whiteness (Hardcover, 2019, Basic Books) 4 stars

Whiteness is politics of calculated harm, not ignorance of negative consequences

No rating

A difficult book to read, since it mostly talks about how people are harmed, and how society fails to protect & support them. The three main topics covered are gun ownership leading to (especially) suicide, opposition to government-provided healthcare leading to worse healthcare outcomes, and school funding cuts leading to many negative outcomes. Whiteness is a political doctrine which contains many jagged bits and pieces of ideology which don't necessarily fit together neatly. One of the things this book did for me was articulate that at least in the policy areas of guns and healthcare, white people aligned with the white political project are not ignorantly voting for harmful policies. The people interviewed know that widespread easy access to guns leads to more gun deaths, and they accept and acknowledge that as a reasonable cost of maintaining their rights. Likewise healthcare: there is no confusion about the fact that moving …