Straight off the bat, this book is really short. Especially for its genre. It’s completely packed with tips and info, all nicely chopped into only 241 pages. The author is very well equipped to teach us how to pass exams since he is the 8-times world memory champion, says he was terrible at school when he was younger too, and he is able to memorise an entire deck of cards in under a minute. There are only 20 chapters, each covering a very specific technique to help with memorising names, numbers, places, how to take notes, and how to use your memory in the way that it was designed.
He says multiple times that your brain evolved to remember images in a spacial way, so if your place crazy images in an actual place you know, you’ll never forget something again. At the start of the book I made a route in my head of a bunch of random words and by following that route and seeing the images I made, I won’t forget it soon. I think I might permanently have the memory of bacon on stairs, a bell in my doorframe, and a net in the middle of the road. This book is the real thing, and it has really effective methods. If you have exams, its self destructive not to get this book, and if you don’t it’ll still very much come in handy to memorise the day to day things in your life, so I reccomend this book to everyone.
For some strange reason, I am obsessed with death. Any book whose main concept is death is instantly pulling to me, so when I read the tagline of this book, ‘If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?’, I was instantly intrigued. It starts with four pretty much indistinguishable children finding out the date of their deaths. Then the book splits out, each of the four parts of the story outlining each of the kids lives. First with Simon, who is a closeted gay teen who escapes to San Francisco with his sister Klara, and lives out his short life in the most hedonistic way possible, with very graphic descriptions of how being a gay man in a city with a high gay population would play out. I liked Simon’s section, though he’s not nearly as complex a character as some of the others. Then is his sister Klara, who goes to San Fransisco to become a female magician. Prior to this book, I didn’t realise how rare they are. She succeeds then reunites with a police officer who earlier assaulted Simon for being gay, and has now fallen in love with Klara. She avoids him, meets a man who ends up being extremely controlling and moves her and their unplanned kid Ruby to Florida, the one place she never wanted to end up in, where she ends up committing suicide to reunite with the souls of her brother and father who she believes she can hear. Despite how convoluted her section might sound, its actually fairly forgettable, but extremely important to the overarching story of the book.
Carrots and Sticks is a science and physiology book, with a general focus on commitment contracts, and it was written by the founder of a website built for the purpose of creating commitment contracts, Stikk. As is very obvious, there is kind of conflict of interest here, and the author recognises this by saying the book won’t be an extended ad for Stikk, but that turned out to be a lie. The author shows restraint in mentioning Stikk in some of the chapters, but towards the end of the book entire chapters are dedicated to explaining how they made Stikk, and it is quite interesting. The book, to be frank, is an inconsistent rollercoaster going over whatever the author wants to cover, with the faintest coherency of each chapter having at least a tiny little thing to do with commitment contracts. Despite the horrible lack of structure, the book is still really interesting and talks about all sorts of subjects in behavioural psychology, and it featured a lot of experiments. The author has a lot of perspectives when talking about his product, and makes sure to talk about its shortcomings as well. All in all, and very interesting though unstructured read with a lot of good info, and to be honest, it definitely convinced me to try out Stikk, so it worked in one regard.
As you probably already know, Chrome Extensions are the mini-in-browser-apps which can tweak how the browser behaves just for you, which can go on any good browser, including my browser Brave. You can get them (the vast majority which are free) from the Chrome Web Store. Once you know how they work, they can be incredibly useful, so here are the top six ones which you should definitely have.
The pinned tabs system on chrome is pretty terrible. I think how it’s meant to work is that your tabs are smaller so you can fit more tabs, and they’re meant to stay each time you open a new window. But they do so rarely. It’s pretty clear not a lot of work has gone into pinned tabs. Save Pinned Tabs lets you set up what tabs you always want (for me it’s Evernote and Spotify) and you just have to click two buttons to get those tabs opened and pinned if chrome has decided it doesn’t want to do it this time. I have it set on auto, so Spotify and Evernote are always open for me.
A classic ad blocker. I know ad blocking can be considered unethical, but they are just so annoying. And Ublock is probably the purest ad blocker. The original AdBlocker was swayed over to the dark side and started allowing ads, but Ublock Origin knows what it’s for and keeps it simple. Buuut, Brave Browser does autoblock ads.
Over time, the Grammarly ads have grown on me. Like all products though, they advertise they’re premium features and make them seem like they’re free, which can get annoying. But once you’re accustomed to the pretty simple spelling and grammar corrections it gives, you’ll appreciate how grammar and spelling mitsakes you don’t have to catch (or not catch) anymore.
Ok, here’s a secret. There are actually ways of making money online. Ways that don’t require much work. They’re called surveys, and if you want some good links to survey platforms send a message in the contact me section. And here’s another secret. Some surveys have huge walls of boxes you have to select, and who has time for that. So Form Filler just auto fills all of them. Neat!
This is maybe the greatest extension that has ever been made. It gets rid of all the annoying attention fraying garbage on the side of Youtube, so you can watch what you came to watch in peace and solitude. We all know the Youtube comments are made out of what comes out the backside of dogs, cows, and even humans, yet for some reason we can’t stop scrolling down to see what they’re saying even when we’re enjoying the video! It’s not worth it! Don’t do it. Come back. Get Distraction Free.
I’ve had home new tab page for so long I can hardly remember what the default google home page is. But who can deny that home new tab page is so sexy. I have it on rotating background image, and I’ve never had a bad one. It’s super customisable, you can get to all your tabs incredibly fast, there’s a notes page for stuff you have to get down quickly, there’s your email inbox straight to your homepage. Its so beatiful. You can store notes for later usage likes its nothing. And best of all, it automatically backups everything you have, so if you’re on a new computer or account, so if you’re on a new computer you can port all that good stuff back in like it was never gone, it’s amazing!
What chrome extensions do you use? Leave a comment and tell me.
The Bubble Boy is a type of book that I’ve come to find out is called medical fiction, since the majority of the story is set in a hospital and there is a lot of medical talk. The story follows Joe, a boy who was diagnosed with a deadly allergic reaction to everything. So he lives his life in a single room sterilised room that towers over the London skyline. His only friend is a fourteen-year-old boy living across the Atlantic who he skypes with often. Joe is a really likeable character. Sometimes all he wants is for people to talk to him, since he lives in a bubble and there’s not really anything new happening in his life, but his social troubles eventually make the person leave and it just about makes me die of sadness. So often in the book, all he wants is for people to stay with him. Whether it’s the crazy nurse Amir who sincerely believes in aliens, or his sister whose the only family he has left since both his parents died soon after he was born, or his regular nurse Greg. And he’s so self-aware and understanding of the burden he places on them. He always says to his sister that she should go and do whatever she needs to do in the real world, despite the fact we know he desperately wants her to stay in his internal monologue. This book is a master at creating sympathy for a character, because by the end of the book I just love Joe so much and sincerely wish the best for him.
Gingerjumble is my longest project to date. My two favourite hobbies are programming and writing, and really the programming came first. Eventually, I had the idea of programming a whole website from scratch, which I managed to do, but couldn’t actually upload any websites without dishing out some shiny ones, which I wasn’t willing to do. So while I waited for a way to do that, I started reviewing books, which I guess came from a while ago when I used to have to write a review from every book I read in school. I guess the desire to do so never faded, so I wrote maybe a hundred reviews on paper, starting from January 2018, and ending when I got Gingerjumble online. I remember how long it took to type up every single review, and how I’d wake up super early and do like two a day or something. When I finally found WordPress (I swear this isn’t an ad), I began copypasting my reviews onto it, and I finally had a website, giving it the completely random name Gingerjumble, on August 18th 2018.
I’m so glad for all of you who are reading this now. Especially rosiholinbeck, my most loyal reader. Go check out her brilliant website, there are so many free book giveaways and in-depth reviews. Here’s to a year of Gingerjumble. I absolutely love writing and I’m so glad I get to do it in a way other’s can see it. May it go on for (at the extreme bear minimum) a whole year more.
The Science of Fear combines everything I love about non-fiction. The book roughly has one main issue per chapter, ranging from peoples fears of cancer, car crashes, terrorism, plains, paedophilia and such. And each chapter discusses how the brain reacts to it. Using a topic that I’ve recently been really interested in, which is cognitive biases, errors in our brains logic. He goes over the optimism bias, the availability heuristic, the halo effect, and others, giving each of them simple names like the example rule (things seem more likely if its easier to remember an example of it) and the good bad rule (if something is bad the risks of it are much higher, but if something is good the risks are lower). He explains each of the cognitive biases he mentions well, with plenty of examples and studies to back him up. He also frequently quotes Daniel Kahneman, the author of another very respected science author, so you know its reliable. This book was extremely informative, and after reading it you will think twice about overestimating fears.
It’s no secret here that I love podcasts. The three posts on podcasts I did were maybe some of the most emotive stuff on this whole site. But after CGP Grey, a podcast and Youtube star, decided to take a break from listening to podcasts for about 4 months, I started to have doubts about how amazing listening to podcasts is. So, like the sheep I am, about a month ago I deleted my podcast app off my phone, and only relistened to a podcast yesterday, and this is how it went.
One Sided Relationships
At first, I was constantly desperate for stimuli. Discord had previously been an idle app on my phone that I only opened when one of the five people I talk to who don’t have WhatsApp decided to message me, but it then became my slot machine app. As in, I was constantly checking the Steven Universe and College Info Geek servers to see if anyone had messaged anything. Justifying the addiction by saying its good for me socially. Then I started to compulsively check Snapchat, which I begrudgingly have downloaded and usually have no problem with, but I would justify it by saying ‘It’s important to know what your friends are up to’. But I began checking it so much I had to ask my Snapchat friend to block me from seeing their stuff, and had to leave ALL my discord servers.
The Fear of Missing out had never struck me so badly. I’d gotten used to hearing Grey and Brady or Thomas and Martin talking to each other for hours and hours on end, I had grossly misattributed them as friends, despite the fact that they are in no way shape or form aware of my existence. So when I was forced away from this incredibly one sided relationship, I clinged onto human reaction wherever I could find it, in the shape of social media.
The Devil and His Boy is a historical fiction book, about a boy who becomes an aspiring actor and finds himself in a mysterious conspiracy, all set in the year 1593. The plot, in general, is very similar to Oliver Twist, and apart from his desire to be an actor and his split-second risky decision at the end, our protagonist Tom has no character. The plot is fairly simple, and mostly consists of our character meeting and interacting with real-life historical figures, which Horowitz wanted to feature in the book. This is an example for a book that was written for a purpose other than to tell an interesting story, or to have compelling characters, so it makes a rather uninteresting read. Horowitz’s skill at describing the scenes still shines through with some beautiful sentences littered through the book, but unfortunately, it doesn’t redeem it. If you have a particular interest in Tudor times, maybe give it a try, otherwise skip it.
Payoff: The hidden forces behind our motivations by Dan Ariely
So far, Ariely hasn’t missed a beat in dowsing me with new information in his books, and his book Payoff (which is about motivations even though the title doesn’t suggest it) is short and to the point, and though he does go into a much more storytelling tone when he’s telling an anecdote he wants us to remember, he is good at it. The book is a series of questions about motivations, answered through the form of experiments he is able to carry out at the university he works at. The questions lead on from one another, and give the book a coherent feeling. A lot of the things that he discusses are present in his earlier books, and one point he just takes an entire paragraph from Predictably Irrational and quotes it in this book, which some might consider as cheating, but I really liked the links between them. All in all, a solid book that reinforces a lot about how humans work, and introduces some clever new ideas too.
Gingerjumble 