Month: June 2025

Summer Reading List 2025: First

And here we go. The first of the three this year was a total slog, and…well, you’ll see why. It’s not only because the last five weeks have been downright hectic.

Philosophy

Title: Republic
Author: Plato (tr. Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee)
Genre: Philosophy/Political Science
Year: c. 360 BC

Consider essentially the founding document of political thought in general, Plato’s Republic has been considered a classic for centuries, and it is now the oldest book I’ve read. (I never actually finished anything of Homer, and even the Old Testament technically wasn’t written down until around the 2nd century BC.) Although it’s not on the official "Great Books" list, most people would probably assume it was. I did.

This is, in a way, the origin story of a lot of philosophy we simply see as background noise today. The allegory of the cave, which has become popularized in meme format the past few years, derives from Plato, and specifically Book VIII of this work. Many of the concepts of the Platonic ideal also find their genesis in Republic, or they are simply spelled out best here.

That’s really all there is to the work as a whole. It’s crafted as a conversation between Socrates and some of his pupils, patrons, and general audience members, with the idea that the master philosopher is, in effect, debating Thrasymachus, who serves as a kind of foil to get the action started. The subject of the debate? Who has the better life: a just man or an unjust one.

Simply looking at the world around us would lead us to assume that Thrasymachus has a point when he says that the unjust man is richer and more well-off. Name a billionaire whose money isn’t at least a little dirty.

Socrates, serving as the author’s insert—prose wasn’t as fully developed 2400 years ago—counters by saying that, while the unjust man may seem to have it all, he’s actually poorer in his spirit, and thus he will never truly be happy. From there commences a long and sometimes tedious dive into philosophy as Socrates converses with Adeimantus and Glaucon, two of his host’s sons; their purpose is sycophantic for the most part, offering little in the way of argument but much mumbled agreement with their illustrious guest.

You might be thinking, "Isn’t this book called the Republic? So where does the republic part come in?"

Well, I wondered the same thing. Part of the roundabout course Socrates takes to make his point is a digression into the forms of government, and a thought experiment of making a "perfect" state. His—rather, Plato’s—ideal is a monarchy run by a philosopher king. (You’ve probably heard that phrase bandied about lately, too.) In the Platonic ideal of State, everyone knows his place, no one is grasping or cheating, and it’s a very communal atmosphere.

It’s also joyless, as Plato explicitly ejects any worldly pleasures from his state, all the way down to the simple joy of familial love. In a way, Plato depicts a dystopia, then tries to sell it as a utopia.

That should be enough to disgust you, but bear with me. The part that people, including a lot of modern philosophers, don’t get is that it’s an allegory, the same as the cave. The ideal state represents the Platonic man. Not a system of government, but conceptualization of the perfect man. It’s at odds with the Aristotelian ideal of eudaemonia, and it’s very…call it proto-Stoic, because I see a lot of parallels from when I read Meditations a few years ago. There’s that same emphasis on eschewing the worldly for some nebulous "perfect" source of wisdom.

I can get behind that part a little bit, to be honest. But the language it’s couched in is opaque at best, and it shows how underdeveloped philosophy was in those early days. Plato has first-mover advantage, and that’s why his works are given a higher dose of respect than we would probably allow if they were more modern.

I’m not saying Republic isn’t worth reading. It is, if only because it’s a justifiable classic. You’ll learn from it, because you’ll see where so many concepts we almost take for granted originally came from. The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the ultimate source work of everything from the Gospel of Thomas to The Matrix. The Myth of Er, which rounds out the book, served as inspiration for Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, among many others.

Republic is not, however, political science. It doesn’t describe how to achieve a perfect state, but a state of perfection. While that’s as unattainable as any Platonic ideal, it won’t stop us from trying.

What’s in the pipeline – June 2025

As usual, I have a ton of different things I’m working on in my spare time, but I’m prioritizing some of them. I really do think these few are "big" enough to deserve being called out now, so here goes.

Altidisk

Altidisk is my latest and now greatest conlang project. In about a year and a half, it’s grown to a lexicon of almost 6000 words and a corpus of nearly 15,000, which makes it far bigger than Suvile, Virisai, or any other language I’ve created. And this is the first one I’ve seriously constructed for other people to speak, which is one reason why I’m able to be so productive with it. I have incentive.

I also have the relative ease of Altidisk being derived from Proto-Germanic in a lot of ways, and thus more of a cousin to English than something completely a priori. That means a great amount of overlap in grammar and vocabulary, although there are some "false friends" in there, owing to linguistic evolution over the past couple of millennia. (As an example, quick in Altidisk is pronounced the same as in English, but doesn’t mean "fast" so much as "alive". This is, in fact, the original connotation of the English word, too.)

At the moment, I’m about 75% of the way through a personal translation of The Little Prince, thanks to seeing someone on the old mailing list doing that. It’s the biggest translation project I’ve ever done by a wide margin, clocking in at nearly 12,000 words already. I probably won’t release it publicly, but I may post snippets and use extracts for the grammar sketch that I want to get out by the end of this year.

Pixeme

I’ve talked about Pixeme before, and it’s something I’ve been kicking around for years now. The basic idea is similar to Tatoeba, in that it’s a crowdsourced translation site. But Pixeme is different because it’s image-based. Instead of a simple word or phrase or sentence, you’ll see translations of a sentence with an image associated.

The more I think about the concept, the more I’d like to develop it. One important aspect is the "topic" of the image, and that’s something I’m not quite sure how to convey. For example, if you see a picture with a woman walking a dog through a park on a sunny afternoon, which part of that are you highlighting? Yes, "all of them" is an acceptable answer, but it complicates the structure, and it can lead to ambiguity.

But the basic principle is one I’ve tested on myself. Granted, I don’t learn in the same way as most people, but I’m also old enough that I can’t properly learn a new language, so I’d say that evens out.

What I still haven’t decided—and this is the reason Pixeme has never really gotten going—is which tech stack I want to use. I’m tired of Python and FastAPI. I deal with them at work all the time, and I want to try something different. Unfortunately, most of the other good options are equally flawed, whether it’s from being shackled to a horrible server-side language (Nest.js, Phoenix) or developed by people who promote the genocide of my race (Django Ninja).

Board With It

Out in the real world, I don’t do much, but that’s something I’d like to change. Over the past couple of years, I’ve considered an idea that…well, it’s out there. I’m calling it "Board With It", because I like puns, and it’s a fairly simple concept. Basically, it’s a nonprofit that helps children and teens (and possibly young adults later on) to learn critical thinking and social skills through playing board games.

Okay, not just board games. Since I initially thought of it, I’ve expanded the scope of Board With It to include RPGs and card games. Tabletop, in general, though definitely not a TCG or CCG like Magic: the Gathering. I want to teach kids how to socialize, not get addicted.

It’s not a bad idea. It just takes a lot to make it work. Time, mostly, which is something I’m perpetually short on. Space, preferably a public or semi-private space. (I’ve even considered looking for a church around here that would offer a classroom or something!) Oh, and volunteers: the beta test I’ve envisioned is a four-week trial run consisting of eight sessions, each about 1-2 hours long. The first few sessions would introduce the kids (ages 8-12) to tabletop gaming in general, as something more than just playing Monopoly or Risk with your family. Then would come the emphasis on gaming as a social hobby that also trains your brain. Simple.

Microcosm

Last, and most recent, is Microcosm. This is kind of an umbrella project, and isn’t yet well-defined. My hope for it is that it becomes a community project for retro computing, low-level programming, microcontroller-focused maker work, and things like that. Basically anything running on the really, really low end. Think 6502s, or tiny MCUs that cost a buck apiece. There would be tutorials, dev tools, links to articles, and so on.

Really, because this one is so vast and nebulous, there’s not much I can say about it yet. On the other hand, it feels like the one that’s the most fun, and fun is something I desperately need these days. So keep watching microcosm.works for that…once I put something up, that is.