I like this one. I mean, I’m a filthy little pawn grabber who will throw away any positional advantage in favour of clinging grimly to cold hard material, but I do aspire to this level of restraint.

+1. I’ll make a post about maxims like this actually.

I mean obviously Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale if you liked BNW and 1984!

Personally I enjoyed a lot of HG Wells’ work for similar reasons — War of The Worlds, for example, is an obvious allegory for colonialism, (with the aliens as the empire builders). The original book is excellent. I binged a tonne of his works, including the Time Machine, the invisible man, the sleeper wakes and the island of dr Moreau. They’re quite short books. Easily read in a day (though I am a fast reader).

Otherwise I quite enjoyed for whom the bell tolls (Hemingway; set during the Spanish civil war, in which he fought, as well as Orwell funnily enough).

Yes, Aman is good. The gold standard is of course Daniel Naroditsky, who sadly passed away last year. His speedruns are very good, but tough for me to watch now.

In terms of general resources, I’d also recommend lichess.org/practice. These introduce a lot of the basic skills (e.g. simple checkmates and tactical motifs like pins and skewers). These help a lot with getting the piece coordination instilled in your brain :)

Personally I find that improvement follows the conscious/subconscious competence cycle.

I’ll be exploring a new concept — maybe a new opening, integrating a new middle game concept, learning about a new pawn structure — and my rating will drop a bit as I’m not as smooth in using it and it’s not well oiled. Then I get better at it, and it slowly beds in as something I don’t have to think about, and my rating goes up to more than it was before.

I’d recommend not playing to destruction, however. If you want to improve, I’d recommend having a look at a few videos of GMs playing and explaining concepts. It’s like science — you wouldn’t expect to reach an understanding of relativity using the scientific method from scratch in one lifetime; you attend a few lectures to get the grounding you need to then build on. Happy to recommend specific resources if you’d like.

Marigold is a flower — e.g. marsh marigolds :)

Yeah — on the rare occasion that I have a night out, when I get home I drink more water than I need to not feel thirsty (about two glasses). Alcohol makes you dehydrated and when you wake up in the morning that makes a hangover massively worse.

Personally I find hangovers worse than the enjoyment of getting drunk, so typically won’t have more than 2/3 drinks anyway \o/

Stilton and port. Woof.

I think this is quite a pessimistic view of what a school system could/should provide. The learning environment isn’t just what is taught in a classroom (though this should of course be a decent curriculum), but the comprehensive system should ‘force’ socialisation with people whose backgrounds don’t match your own.

The danger — to my mind — of losing a school system, is that you end up with an increasingly stratified society, where there is no reason for mixing between groups, and there is at once no mechanism for social mobility, and no driver for the development of empathy for ‘out’ groups.

I’m talking from a UK perspective and would say our school system is FAR from perfect, but I’m also very wary of home schooling etc., as I’d argue that would drive inequality in education up massively.

I used this when I was a kid; I loved the penguin game!