📚 The Bookshelf

Like many introverted folks, I grew up on books. Every day as a kid, I’d settle in on my favorite couch and read for hours each day.

Books are fascinating objects. Humans will sink years - sometimes their entire lives - into distilling their minds down to a finite string of characters, saying “this is my kernel. This is what I must pass on to the rest of humanity”.

I developed a peculiar habit over the years; whenever I’d first visit a friend’s house, I would gravitate straight towards their bookshelf and read every title of every book on every shelf. So many people think memories are stored exclusively in the soul, or only in the brain. They don’t realize how big their minds truly are.

Below are my most favorite objects of distilled knowledge. I don’t mean favorite as in “they were great!”. I mean favorite as in becoming an obsession, taking over my life for some number of months (sometimes years), and forever changing my pattern of thoughts.

📖 Books

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann

This book overhauled my entire understanding not just of computer systems, but any distributed system of data - including the human body. I’m not going to even try to summarize it. If you have any level of background in systems development, read this one.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Charles Petzold

Journey from Morse code to an Arithmetic Logic Unit and a functional computer. Blew Toby’s 14-year-old mind; if only I’d been on reddit to share 🤯

👾 Games

Metroid: Zero Mission

This is on my shelf for a very particular reason: for nearly a decade, I had a derelict save slot with a Hard 15% run that I was 98% through, but just couldn’t push into the end zone. It turned into a ritual of booting it up at some point every year, recalling where I was, melting head-first into Mecha Ridley a couple times, and telling myself “yep nope, that’s never going to happen”.

Turns out younger-me had factored a buffer into my item count; I recalculated my item total and landed at 14%, decided to double back for that signature Screw Attack, and realized that area was inaccessible. No dice. Figuring something was better than nothing, I picked up a spare Super Missile tank nearby (that’s a single extra missile in Hard mode, for those of you counting along at home), dug in for marathon, and proceeded to pop Ridley like a balloon after a handful of attempts.

It makes me laugh to even type this, but to this day, “find a Super Missile” is a rallying mantra that has knocked down more than a handful of obstacles I’ve encountered. Put another way: “Work smart. Not hard. And check your math”.

🎬 Movies & Shows

The Matrix Trilogy

No surprise for The Matrix, given my personality and interests. What always takes people for a spin is that I really like the 2nd and 3rd movies too. The Architect, the Source, the slipping allegory that just can’t quite figure out what it’s trying to represent, fill these movies full of intrigue, ambiguity, and debate.

In a way, it sheds light on what I find interesting about anything on this shelf; not just the finished work, but the creator(s) behind it, and the stories of how they got there. The act of creation is a messy process that no one seems to fully understand; it’s a miracle to me that the very atoms we’re all made of decided to come to work today. Maybe one day we’ll all understand why?