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Education and Certificates

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Music

Consumer Goods

• AccuCheck Digital Body Weight Scale (Measure daily to avoid surprises.)
• Alera High Performance Task Chair (My spine’s best friend.)
• Asus VS228H-P 21.5” 1080p Monitor (Ideal resolution and size for extended use.)
• Bowflex SelectTech Adjustable Dumbbells (Doubles as a conversation starter.)
• Gun Oil H2O Lubricant (Important part of a healthy life.)
• iBUYPOWER Pre-Built Gaming PC (For work and play.)
• Redify Jump Rope (Rainy-day cardio.)
• StriveZen 2-Month View Wall Calendar (Never again ask - “That was today?”)
• TeamMe Computer Desk (Maximum productivity.)
• Vive Wrist Brace (Type for ten hours a day.)
• Wihool External Blu-ray Drive (Allows Blu-ray use on PC.)
• YouTen Adjustable Weight Bench (Who needs a gym membership?)

Desktop Software

• “AnyDVD HD” by RedFox (Strips DVDs and Blu-rays of encryption for PC use.)
• “LibreOffice” by The Document Foundation (Open-source Microsoft Office replacement.)
• “NoVote” by Dan Lovelace (Makes Reddit usable.)
• “OBS Studio” by Hugh Bailey (Screen recording tool.)
• “Scoop” by Luke Sampson (Windows command-line installer.)
• “ScreenToGif” by Nicke Manarin (Animated screenshots.)
• “Video Screenshot” by Martin Strauss (Generate desktop wallpapers from streaming sites.)
• “Vimium” by Phil Crosby (Mouse-less browsing.)
• “youtube-dl” by Ricardo García (Download YouTube videos.)

Blog Posts

• “The Gervais Principle” by Venkatesh Rao (Organizational politics demystified.)
• “How to Send and Reply to Email” by Matt Might (Professional etiquette.)
• “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (All children should read this.)
• “The Stack Overflow Age” by Joel Spolsky (Recollections of the Internet gold rush.)
• “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” by Steve Yegge (Amazon’s secret to world domination.)
• “Story Structure 101” by Dan Harmon (Narrative-writing for humans.)
• “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” by Peter Norvig (No royal road to geometry.)
• “What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?” by Ben Carlson (Slow and steady.)

Programming Books

• Coders at Work by Peter Seibel (Giants to walk in the footsteps of.)
• Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom (Notes on building maintainable software.)
• Learn OpenGL by Joey de Vries (Graphics from scratch.)
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (Understand working programmers.)

(For more fun, check out this list by the Free Ebook Foundation.)

Hobbyist Books

• The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing by Mel Lindauer (You are not smarter than the market.)
• Logical Chess by Irving Chenev (Teaches the consequences of small changes.)
• The Photographer’s Eye by Michael Freeman (Our civilization is starving for new images.)
• Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe (Diet is half the battle.)
• Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe (Form is the other half. Pair with the DVD for best results.)

Economics Books

• The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell (Are men obsolete?)
• The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (We waste a third of our lives social signaling.)
• The India Way by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (Moving up in the world as a middle power.)
• Open Borders by Bryan Caplan (Immigration restrictions make no economic sense.)
• River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins (Suffering and scarcity are built into the system.)
• Untrue: Women, Lust, and Infidelity by Wednesday Martin (Primate sexual market dynamics.)

Philosophy Books

• The Analects of Confucius by Kong Fuzi (Building a society that works starts from the bottom.)
• The Complete Works by Arthur Schopenhauer (Ancient wisdom in a modern context.)
• Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by B.K.S. Iyengar (Exerting control over the mind.)
• Straw Dogs by John Gray (Breaking free of monotheistic orthodoxy.)

History Books

• The Book of Islamic Dynasties by Luqman Nagy (Eurasia’s past, present, and future.)
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (How we got here.)
• Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (50 million forgotten murders.)
• A Most Holy War by Mark Pegg (Western civilization’s roots.)
• Reconstruction by Eric Foner (Ongoing ripples of Lincoln’s murder.)
• Settlers by J. Sakai (Actual American history.)
• Stalin by Domenico Losurdo (Perhaps the 20th century’s most influential person.)
• Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft by Allen Lynch (From failed state to superpower.)

(For more, check out the World History Association’s list of Bentley Book Prize winners.)

Historical Documents

• “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization” by Samuel Alito (Throes of a dying empire.)
• “From a China Traveler” by David Rockefeller (Neoliberal honeymoon.)
• “Modernize and Never Seek Hegemony” by Deng Xiaoping (Father of globalization.)
• “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” by Vladimir Putin (Tsardom reborn.)
• “The Social Responsibility of Business” by Milton Friedman (Death knell for the welfare state.)
• “Why I’m Leading a Congressional Delegation to Taiwan” by Nancy Pelosi (Why, indeed.)

Autobiographies

• Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Hollywood at its zenith.)
• Championship Fighting by Jack Dempsey (Learning to throw a punch takes a lifetime.)
• Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Thriving in the white-collar workplace.)
• Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007 by Roger Ebert (Forty years at the movies.)
• Live Young Forever by Jack LaLanne (Maintained vehicles last twice as long.)
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (Poverty is expensive.)
• Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton (Effective activists are doomed men.)

Novels

• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (Living history is written in blood.)
• The Long Walk by Stephen King (Masculinity in a nutshell.)
• Pet Sematary by Stephen King (Death makes a mockery of everything.)
• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (Excellent satire of the “end of history”.)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Surreal reflections on Western imperialism.)
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (Required reading for the Indian diaspora.)

Short Stories

• “Coding Machines” by Lawrence Kesteloot (Debugging meets cosmic horror.)
• “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin (To deny reality is to court death.)
• “Frost and Fire” by Ray Bradbury (Man that is born of a woman is of few days.)
• “A Full Life” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Enjoy it while you can.)
• “Golden” by Nick Bostrom (Animals are trapped in a real-life horror movie.)
• “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka (The best gifts find the fewest admirers.)

Movies

• Get Out by Jordan Peele (Every non-white can relate.)
• The Green Knight by David Lowery (Treats history on its own terms without modern bias.)
• Ikiru by Kurosawa Akira (The world is a museum of passion projects.)
• Kaze Tachinu by Miyazaki Hayao (You can do everything right and still fail.)
• Nope by Jordan Peele (Resurrects and deconstructs the classic blockbuster.)
• Oldboy by Park Chan-wook (Probably my favorite film.)
• Squid Game by Hwang Dong-hyuk (Thinly-veiled allegory for corporate life.)
• Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman (Your life, and mine, and everybody’s.)
• Turning Red by Domee Shi (Written by women for women.)
• The White Tiger by Ramin Bahrani (Required viewing for the Indian diaspora.)
• Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell by Casper Kelly (Masterclass in budget film-making.)
• Zhang Jin Hu by Wu Jing (Counter-propaganda done right.)

Comic Books

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