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Watching Books and Reading TV: Entropy Bombs in Action

So, we’ve talked about this before, but it’s one of those things that’s always worth bringing up again, if for no other reason than my own explanations rarely make sense to even me, their author, months and years later.

YouTube is TV now. YouTube is the TV of our age. Let’s stop pretending it isn’t: it is. It even beats out Netflix in this regard (Netflix’s interface is clunky and the buffering is too slow for true casual viewing). As I’ve mentioned in passing many times before, I’m always impressed by the readiness with which I seem to watch even crappy  YouTube videos, and the reluctance with which I crack open books that I genuinely love (and spent real money on). But I know that this is a function of YouTube’s structure, not it’s content.

So the idea is simple:

  1. Give up on the idea of long, unbroken reading sessions, instead
  2. Make your reading intense, bursty and episodic
  3. Turn your reading into “episodes” by using entropy bombs
  4. Within the “blast radius” (timespan) of one entropy bomb, you read the living crap out of whatever you’ve chosen to read, and then
  5. You drop another bomb or you stop the bombing. Totally up to you.

The title of this post is not an accident. I watch books and read TV (or try to). I aim to be critical in my viewing of TV/YouTube and snacky, intense, fun and episodic in my “watching” of books. I want to approach books with the same fun, frequency and lightheartedness that we do watching YouTube or eating, I dunno, Pringles.

So that’s the idea. Give it a whirl!

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