Books on Tom Guernier's Blog

My attempt to explain Infinite Jest

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:09:04 +0000

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Infinite Jest again after reading the Matt Lakeman post about it, having somehow made my way through it¹ some time during high school. Like most other things involved with the author David Foster Wallace, the book is deeply insight laden but also at times incomprehensible, puerile or just plain distasteful. But somehow it has stuck with me through the decade since I’ve read it, and despite, or perhaps because of its density and fractal detail it has become a foundational text for me. And with time its deepest ideas have not merely stuck with me but have started to feel even more prescient each time I come across them again.

End of Year Media Roundup Review Thing

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:50:00 +0000

Port Waikato beach, New Zealand. The rainclouds weren’t looming over us the whole time, thankfully.

It’s the last day of the summer break for me, and I’ve been actually doing appropriately New Zealand-ish summer stuff! (a.k.a. going to the beach and drinking alcohol). This has somewhat impinged on my blogging time, so this is why the blog post is a little later this week. If you want to see when my next post will be you can check my about page.

Beeminder & Bibliographies

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 05:14:00 +0000

I’m writing this blog post a little earlier this week because I’m out of town for the weekend and Beeminder demands (well, politely but firmly requests) I get this done by Saturday evening. Speaking of Beeminder, last weekend I pushed something to my public GitHub for the first time since university, and it’s something to do with it too (it’s a Python script to count up the words I’m typing for these posts as well as my general notes). Turns out I do like seeing the pretty graphs go up!

On Frame Messages

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:53:00 +0000

So I’ve been reading everyone’s favourite discrete maths textbook/metatextual paean to a Baroque composer Gödel, Escher, Bach for the first time actually, despite how influential it has been in the last 40 or so years since it was published and its relevance to the dorky subjects I’m interested in¹.

In chapter 6 there’s a discussion of the concept of ‘Frame Messages’, which exist on three nested levels: the inner message, the intentional message transmitted by the writer; the outer message, the environment which provides context to ‘decode’ the inner message; and the frame message, the message that there is in fact a message to decode.