I usually read sci-fi / fantasy, but I’ve come to recognize that certain authors are dense, and Tolkien is one of them. Trying to read too much of Tolkien at once is like trying to eat too much rich food; you’ve got to take a break from time to time. All the annotations in the above book make the text even more dense, but it’s still interesting stuff, like the mythological origins of Gandalf, or the tiny changes Tolkien made from early editions of the book. So I want to read this, it’s not like I’m forcing myself to read some godawful textbook, but I think when I’m reading it at night, my brain gets to a point where it just goes “Ah fuck it,” and I start to nod off.

Also pretty good for this: Isaac Asimov, or Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

If it’s a wormhole or Niven-style teleporter, it’s unarguably you coming through the process. Star Trek… I’ll grant that the conversation gets a little more complicated.

This right here

was my drug-free go to sleep solution for a few months. Just barely interesting enough to want to read it, but also tedious enough that I’d get maybe a page or two in before I’d be nodding off.

Here’s the video.

It’s been a while since I watched it, so judge for yourself.

I recall a Richard Feynman video where the interviewer asks him to explain how magnets work.

His answer amounts to “I can’t explain that to you because if I gave you an accurate answer it would be too technical for it to make sense to you, and if I simplified it to the extent that you could understand, it would no longer be a meaningful answer.”