Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/04/no-time-to-read-this-app-lets.html
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Merdre!
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While I hate to paraphrase myself hating paraphrasing Woody Allen back when SumizeIt was being pushed by the boingboingStore in November…
I getAbstracts’ed War and Peace…
It involves Russia.
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I still remember when people used to cite the existence of CliffsNotes as evidence of how our society’s collective attention span for literature was growing dangerously short. There was even a whole episode of Momma’s Family about it (or so I gathered from the bits I didn’t fast-forward through).
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Ah, but it looks like these are all non-fiction, which means… no, I still don’t get it. Either a book has information significant enough to be worth reading… or it doesn’t.
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Just have one of your people prepare an executive summary which your PA then breaks down into the relevant bullet points, duh.
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Books by the foot or books in ten minutes.
Are we not doing page counts any more?
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I’ve noticed that some BBShop posts come with comments that are already closed and date from a few months ago. Preventing us from commenting further. Basically, it seems like someone reposts an old Shop post, giving it a new date but links to the old closed comments.
But more often we see the same old shit, or very similar shit, being posted, with comments open.
I simply can’t be arsed to do it myself - especially as it happens so often - so here’s a proposal: perhaps PP could provide us with a real service by posting things like this one, for example, with the first comment being a link to all the previous comments threads on the topic, where doughty BBers have already ridiculed, dissected, disproved and otherwise informed other readers of the reality behind the BBShop marketing bullshit. It might save us all a lot of time and energy.
Just a thought.
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Hmm. Boris Johnson’s aides have been told (by Dom?) to ensure all briefing documents that go in his red box or on his desk must be limited to 2 sides of A4. I guess his time available for reading is now too taken up by visiting flood-hit areas or dealing with virus outbreaks. Oh, wait…
He seems to have spent much of recent weeks ensconced in the grace and favour country piles at Chevening or Chequers. Frankly, I wish he’d take his self-isolation to greater extremes.
To be fair, I would pay for the opposite of this app. Something that took a book and made it longer.
If you don’t have time to read a whole book, may I humbly suggest that you’re spending too much time on pointless fripperies like ‘socialising’, ‘work’, ‘exercise’ or indeed ‘sleep’. Get your priorities in order people!
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Let me guess - triple-spaced, Comic Sans, at least 36p ?
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That would be true for Trump. But BJ is certainly literate - I just think he doesn’t want to do the hard work (and never has).
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So 24p, then.
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Nobody wants to get bogged down in the details. These days, there’s too much going on to get lost in the weeds of endless exposition and meandering digressions. We’re all in a hurry. We’re all racing the clock. Boil it down. Give me the bullet.
Or instead of buying this product, for absolutely free you can push back against the horrifying idea that we should all just be hyper-efficient machines so focused on cramming as much work as possible in to our days that we aren’t even permitted to take the time to read and enjoy a book.
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I chuckle at a lot of the bb store posts, but this one seems excessively souless. I feel sorry for anyone using the product.
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I used getAbstracts on your post:
FSogol chuckles. Use the product.
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Well played.
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