#infinitejest — Public Fediverse posts

Update from my partner (who you should totally follow)

Reblog via joelle

I’m just going to type out a quick update here for the sheer hell of it. There has been a lot going on in my personal and professional life at the moment, and I am deep in the process of Getting My Shit Together. Because of this, it is difficult to have the spoons for things like blog posts and writing of my own. My job is in the category of social work and social services. It is emotionally demanding and requires a lot of physical work as well. I go in at 3pm and get back home anywhere from 10 to 11 pm. Sometimes I collapse in a heap on the bed. Other times I have enough energy to play some video games.

I really enjoy playing Final Fantasy XIV, the MMORPG one. It provides me with enough escapism to last a whole week if I can fit in a hefty play session. Lately, I have even had a few people to play with – including my beloved partner. I have also been playing a bit of Palworld and The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (second chapter). I believe Palworld will have enough longevity to justify the purchase (it’s a meaty game). I know I will get my money’s worth from The Legend of Heroes series as a whole. Pokemon is a series I have largely grown out of though. It is interesting to hear how so many adults around me continue to find joy in it, Gamefreak must be doing something right. But for me I would rather be playing something like FFXIV or Palworld (or the open world Zelda games) which feel like there are less barriers to having a chill time. Being a working adult has changed my gaming habits over time. It is a death by a thousand cuts situation which has killed off my interest in most video games that I used to enjoy.

To fill the void left by Total Devotion to Gaming, I have picked up some books and magazines again. I also go to a weekly film club type thing at a local theater. I am (finally) working my way through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and have progressed to about the halfway point. I have also subscribed to Harper’s and invested in a membership at Barnes & Noble which gives me access to other magazines. Today I picked up the newest issue of The Atlantic and a special magazine that covers the history of Goth/post punk music and the subculture around it(surprising no one who knows me). I look forward to diving into these this weekend. This maturation into a “Magazine Adult” feels uncomfortable to me, as someone who always cast aspersions at such people when I was younger. Nonetheless I have accepted that I am a cultured and reading person who needs to keep that part of my brain fed and happy or it will become unruly and difficult to manage.

This is my current lifestyle. My partner and I just finished watching through all of The Wire, which is still my favorite TV show of all time. After a rewatch, I have some nitpicks but it manages to balance a lot of spinning plates at once. The landing at the end of the series is rocky, but it’s fitting for a show that covers early 21st century American life. It goes hand in hand with Infinite Jest quite well too, I recommend experiencing both alongside each other.

I am off to work but should have more to say soon. Until then, don’t neglect your media diet. Consuming blindly leads to disappointment. Just because you played the last six Resident Evil games the year they came out, doesn’t mean you have to plunk down $70 out of obligation in 2026. Question your hobbies and interests, spending the time the way you really want to.

That’s what I tell myself these days.

🧩 Ah yes, because clearly the world was desperately in need of *yet another* dissertation on Sierpinski gaskets, now with the added twist of Infinite Jest references. 🙄 If you're looking for a way to procrastinate on rereading a book you pretended to understand, this is your ticket! 📚✨
https://www.chiply.dev/post-ij-sierpinski #SierpinskiGaskets #InfiniteJest #Procrastination #BookRecommendations #DissertationHumor #AcademicSatire #HackerNews #ngated

Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

https://www.chiply.dev/post-ij-sierpinski

#HackerNews #InfiniteJest #Sierpinski #Gasket #Art #MathFractals #CreativeCoding

New post on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest!

"Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket"

https://www.chiply.dev/post-ij-sierpinski

#literature #infinitejest #math #blog #writing

The book club I'm in is doing a poll on what to read next. What does the fediverse think?

#books #reading #dungeoncrawlercarl #mistborn #infinitejest #bookclub #poll #audiobook #eBook

"It’s a massive and impossible assignment to turn around the cruise ship that is David Foster Wallace’s legacy. Amy could simply recede, as many family members of famous artists do after a tragic and untimely end." —Lindsey Adler for The Small Bow https://www.thesmallbow.com/p/consider-the-sister-2b94?src=longreads #dfw #davidfosterwallace #infinitejest #books #writers #family #grief #longreads

The Addiction as a Civilizational Metaphor in Infinite Jest paulopinto.xyz/wiki/literat... #david-foster-wallace #infinite-jest #literature

#InfiniteJest: A Postmodern Saga of Damnation and Salvation (1996) #DavidFosterWallace

via @wallabag

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/the-alchemists-retort/376533/

This 👏 book 👏 is 👏 trashed 👏.

Front and back covers completely severed; stains from god know how many muddy university coffees; and lots of chicken-scratch hand writing, a good portion of which I can't even decipher anymore. Also many rogue question marks 😅.

I did think about giving this to the local library, but it's likely a biohazard at this point. Curious if anyone else has a more egregiously blown out copy than mine! #infinitejest #davidfosterwallace #literature #reading #entertainment

Wrote a passion piece about 2 of my favourite books.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, Wallace: the "o's, d's and p's" in Infinite Jest

"the [typographic encoding] becomes the smoking gun in the case against Avril Incandenza when you appreciate Wallace's intellectual debt to Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach – a debt the essay documents in detail below."

https://www.chiply.dev/post-reperspectivizing-orin

#infinitejest #davidfosterwallace #typography #geb #literature

RE: https://janvandenberg.blog/eindeloos-vertieren-i-de-bibliotheek-en-vol-gas/

Geen tijd of zin om Eindeloos Vertier zelf te lezen, dan mag je ook meelezen met mij.

#eindeloosvertier #infinitejest #davidfosterwallace

Eindeloos Vertieren deel 1. Notities tijdens het lezen. Wat spreekt me aan? Hoe ziet ETA eruit volgens AI? Ik heb het gevraagd.

Michael Silverblatt van het programma Bookworm is de beste literaire interviewer die ooit heb gehoord.

Talking To A. Natasha Joukovsky About Men, Myths, And March Madness

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/talking-to-a-natasha-joukovsky-about-men-myths-and-march-madness

Reading Infinite Jest after two false starts and I've never had to reach for a dictionary this number of time across a page before.
This is thick like treacle.

#reading #InfiniteJest

I'm an #AI hater but I'm interested in what one of these video creator apps would do with the full text (including the end notes) of #InfiniteJest. I hate myself for thinking of it.

A one-man pandemic book club

The past six months have given me exponentially more time at home than I would have thought possible before this pandemic-afflicted year. Normal people would have occupied those hours by catching up on deferred household maintenance or learning a new language, but instead I’ve whiled away many of them by reading two of the denser novels written in English: James Joyce’s Ulysses and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

That was not a quick process. Both doorstop-thick tomes feature their authors free-styling their way through prose as they get lost in the inner worlds of a complex set of characters without any strict reference to time or place, which is a longwinded way of saying they can be intimidating to read.

I tackled Ulysses first, since I’ve had a vintage hardcover copy silently taunting me from a bookshelf for the past 20 years or so. There are deeply poetic moments in Joyce’s Dublin-steeped novel–“history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” resonates too well this year–and parts that suggest the author’s profound conviction that he would get paid by the word for every word. Also, I’m impressed that the censors of the 1920s made it all the way through to the really naughty bits towards the end.

After I tweeted out my victory over Joyce’s title and asked “What famously dense novel should I read next?”, one of the first replies suggested Infinite Jest. I finally accepted that logic and put myself on the Arlington library’s waiting list for an e-book copy, but before I could claim that I saw a paperback copy available for all of $2 at a library used-book sale. Buying in print instead of borrowing in pixels meant I’d have all the time I’d need to digest Wallace’s 1,079 words of prose, endnotes, and footnotes to said endnotes.

(Seriously: Wallace’s endnotes eat up almost 100 pages, and a couple count as chapter-length in their own right. I realized early on I’d need to keep two bookmarks in my copy, one to mark my progress in the text itself and the other to preserve my place in the bits at the end–then saw that this book may be best read with three bookmarks. This may be the most hypertext thing I’ve ever read in print.)

Infinite Jest is even more of an atom-smasher of plotlines than Ulysses–it touches on growing up, tennis, drugs, Boston, digital media, addiction, people’s capacity for needless cruelty, crime, more drugs, pop culture, cinematography, Québeçois separatism, and even a smidgen of tech and media policy. And it does so without the standard narrative scaffolding of chapters. I kept having to flip forward to see when the next break in the story might happen, solely to know how late I’d have to stay up before putting the book down at a point that would not leave me too confused the next morning.

I could not help reading Wallace’s tales of Boston types battling depression and inner demons of various kinds without considering how Wallace himself succumbed to his own, because depression lies. Which made me think also of my late, literary-minded friend Mike Musgrove, who I’m sure read this book a long time ago and would have offered some smart or at least smart-aleck commentary about it.