I must say this, because I am known to be a patternist, a word I just used in place of “someone who recognizes patterns.” Then I looked it up, and it turns out it’s a series of books by Octavia Butler. Which is a great way to start off this post. I have a method to my hunting and pecking for ebooks out in the wild. I’ve collected thousands. And I have noticed this pattern. Whenever I search for ebooks in the wild, I get a surprising number of results in Italian. At first I thought, “wow, the Italians are really into their occult literature,” but then I realized I was projecting, because that happened to be what I was searching for at the time. When I just searched for Octavia Butler ebooks, I came across a bunch of results in Italian there as well. What secret story lies behind this phenomena? Is it a simple extension of Italians being big readers? Or is it a measure of tech-savvy capabilities, trends in piracy, lax enforcement? I’m genuinely confused. Here’s why: In a ranking of languages by number of speakers, Italian ranks 29th. English ranks first. Counting both first- and second-language speakers, Italian accounts for 67 million, while English accounts for nearly a billion and a half, most of which are second-languagers. Even if you remove languages that might not show up due to non-Latin characters, such as many Asian languages, it still doesn’t explain why Italian results show up so much in search results. If anyone has any clues, I’m genuinely curious.

Complicated topic no matter how you approach it, but someone had the courage to at least open it up for discussion.

I set out to to learn about the Akashic Records, having heard about them from numerous sources and wanting to get my mind clear on their alleged contents and uses. Being in the middle of reading too many things, I didn’t want to take on another reading journey, but had time to spare for an audio book, so I set out on Libro.FM to see what was available to me. There seemed to be a few options, and the most cost-effective seemed to be a two-parter from Richard Davis, “How to Read the Akashic Records. Discover Your Soul’s Path and Accessing the Archive of Its Journey – Book 1 and 2.” I guess my thinking was two books for one low price. I fear this is where I went wrong. There are two aspects of this book that I’m going to discuss in order to completely tear it apart and make sure I do my part to prevent other fellow planet-dwellers from wasting their hard or soft resources on obtaining or consuming this book. First, and least important I guess, is presentation. This book is narrated by “DMS.” Whether DMS is a pseudonym for an actual person who didn’t want to own up to having narrated this, or a glitchy new AI the machine elves are trying out on us unsuspecting Earth-dwellers, I may never know. I almost feel like you should go check out a sample just so that someone else can hear this and validate my conclusions. It is as if it was read by a grade school student or non-native English speaker, from a book report that he didn’t write, about a book that he didn’t read, but if the grade school student was a grown-ass Texan man with a smoking habit. There is no natural flow to the words whatsoever. There are pauses in nonsensical places. There are incomplete sentence fragments that don’t flow together. If life wasn’t so short, I would go buy the actual written book and compare it to the narration, write all of my critiques on a long piece of rope, and then use that rope to strangle both the author and the narrator. Second, and more important, this goddamn book has nothing to do with accessing the Akashic records. It briefly, oh so briefly, defines the Akashic Records in a way that I could have gleaned simply from context. The rest of the entire book is basic, and I mean very basic, self-help. How to improve your social skills, apparently written by and for people on the spectrum — examples: maintaining eye contact for 60% of a conversation to show interest but not appear creepy; posture for confidence; how to make small talk. Honestly, what the fuck does any of that have to do with Akashic records? And that’s the BULK of the audiobook! If one person benefits from reading this review, my work on this website will have served its purpose. To close out, I will mention that the author

…more…Akashic Records and how to confuse yourself