Sam King's Verbose Letters

"The Blinding Knife" is the sequel to "The Dark Prism," which I read over the summer. I didn't know when "The Blinding Knife" came out, but one friend gave another friend "The Dark Prism" to read, I commented on it, and he responded that the sequel came out.

People often ask me what my favorite classes are. This article is for anyone who is looking for some good classes to take.

I don't like counterfactuals.

A counterfactual question is one that asks what would be happen if something that was false were true. What if the moon were made of cheese? What if Hitler never dropped out of art school? What if you had to give up either chocolate or cheese?

In case anyone was wondering what my numerical book ratings mean:
5: If this book has flaws, I'm not sure what they are. It is well written such that it is an engaging page turner, and reading it has given me insight into the human condition. I don't give out many 5 star reviews. Read these books.

In the context of socially responsible investing, a social screen is a set of criteria that an investor evaluates companies against. If a company doesn't meet those criteria, they don't get investment.

I haven't found a fund that meets my ethical criteria, so I'll probably make my own investments. Thus, I need to figure out what my social screen is.

I am an email power user. I would probably lose an hour every day if I couldn't use Gmail (and use it from my phone and use keyboard shortcuts and otherwise use it to its fullest extent). I am a paying customer of Gmail -- I use 18GB of storage right now. This is because I archive my emails (I don't delete them) and because I want to be able to search any of my emails from all time, so I can't just make a new account and exploit Google's free storage.

Normally, the primary issue that I have with books is that they are well written but not interesting. "Perdido Street Station," on the other hand, was very interesting, but the writing got in the way of the story.

Someone on Quora asked the question "What is best way to determine what the world needs?" in response to a question about why Silicon Valley often seems to focus on irrelevant trivia. The following is my answer:

Sarah Kay is an amazing spoken word artist. She begins with a beautiful poem (and also ends with one). In the middle, she has a description of her own reaction to spoken word, the importance of it, and how she teaches it. I highly recommend watching it (at least the poem at the start).

I had never read a Viking-noir saga before "Downfall," but I think I like it.

The book features Finn Styrrsson, a Viking with the strength of thirty men [sic] in each hand who travels the world slaying monsters with the hope of a glorious death that will see him to Valhalla.