[ADD] Blog post providing book review of Animal Farm.

_posts/2026-08-15-book-review-animal-farm.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Book review 'Animal Farm'"
+date: "2026-08-15 12:08:25 +0530"
+tags:
+  - books
+---
+
+
+![Street mural of a pig in a business suit, painted below the words Animal
+Farm]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/assets/images/animal_farm_bookreview/title.jpg)
+
+*I read Animal Farm in 2017 and started this post the same year, then never finished it. Nearly nine years later, I have
+finally found the time.*
+
+
+### Introduction
+
+Animal Farm is one of the best books I read in 2017. George Orwell published it in 1945, and it remains one of his best
+known and most influential works. He is a brilliant satirist, and his writing is easy to find relatable. In 2008 The
+Times ranked him second on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
+
+The sentences are short and plain, and that plainness is doing real work. The book never tells you what to feel about
+the farm. It reports what happens, calmly, until the reporting itself becomes the argument. It runs to fewer than 100
+pages and I finished it in two sittings.
+
+### Plot summary
+
+A group of animals lives on a farm under the rule of its owner. One night Old Major, an old pig, calls everyone to a
+meeting. He explains what freedom would mean and points out that the animals of that farm choose neither their work nor
+their food. He urges them to rebel, and names humans as the enemy. Old Major dies a few nights later, and that lecture
+becomes his last words. The animals unite against their master and succeed in driving him off his own farm.
+
+One group of pigs declares itself the educated class and asks to be allowed to make every decision for the farm. Under
+the leadership of two pigs the animals are happy, because for the first time they are working for fellow animals rather
+than for people. The owner returns with a group of men to take revenge, and it is a pleasure to read how the animals
+fight them off. They win the battle, and afterwards they add an amendment declaring humans their greatest enemy.
+
+The story takes many tragic turns from there. The pigs in leadership spend their effort on making their own lives more
+comfortable and pay no attention to anyone else. Because they read better than the rest, they can describe growth that
+never happened to animals who are barely literate or not literate at all, and that imaginary growth is enough to keep
+the others believing. Meanwhile, a small dispute between the two leaders grows. Fearing for his control, one of them
+drives the other off the farm with a pack of dogs he has raised in secret. The democracy turns into a dictatorship.
+
+The dictator announces that he will improve the farm, and convinces every animal to pour its effort into building a
+windmill — effort that used to go into growing the animals' own food. A few more battles with humans follow, and they
+wreck the mill and break the animals' morale. It is shocking to read how the leader sells off the best of the farm's
+animals to fund his own comforts, until the independent farm depends on humans again and then goes bankrupt. The animals
+keep faith that whatever their captain decides is in their favour. The struggle drags on, and in the end the humans
+simply buy him, with a large bribe, to supply whatever the farm produces.
+
+### Closing thoughts
+
+The book has left a deep impression on me. I am thankful to my
+guru [Xitij Shukla](https://www.linkedin.com/in/xitijshukla/), who encouraged me to read this book. Orwell's writing
+impressed me so much that I bought another of his books, [1984](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40961427-1984).
+
+
+### Links
+
+* [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/170448.Animal_Farm)
+
+* [Amazon worldwide](https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Farm-George-Orwell/dp/0451526341)
+
+* [Amazon India](https://www.amazon.in/Animal-Farm-George-Orwell/dp/8193387643)
+
+
+###### Proofreaders:
+* [jesusinadidas](https://github.com/jesusinadidas)
+* [AI - Anthropic's Opus 5](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5)

scripts/optimize-images

@@ -14,10 +14,17 @@ set -euo pipefail
 cd "$(dirname "$0")/.."
 
 # Budgets, in bytes. A photo is displayed at roughly 800px, so 1600px covers
-# high-density screens with room to spare; 300 KB is comfortably above the
-# largest photo once it has been through the pipeline below.
+# high-density screens with room to spare.
 readonly MAX_PHOTO_BYTES=307200      # 300 KB — jpg, png
-readonly MAX_PHOTO_EDGE=1600
+
+# 1600px is where photos start, not where they have to end up. A busy photo can
+# still miss the budget there: the Animal Farm mural lands at 403 KB, and no
+# amount of re-running helps because the result is stable. So the encoder walks
+# this ladder and keeps the widest size that fits. Narrowing beats lowering
+# quality — at the sizes that do fit, 1200px/q80 holds edges that 1600px/q65
+# smears, for about the same bytes.
+readonly PHOTO_EDGES="1600 1400 1200 1000"
+readonly PHOTO_QUALITY=80
 
 # Animated screencasts cost far more because they carry hundreds of frames.
 # Resizing is the only lever that helps them: palette reduction and lossy LZW
@@ -79,14 +86,53 @@ require() {
   }
 }
 
+# Write "$1" into "$2" at the widest ladder size that fits "$3" bytes, falling
+# through to the narrowest if none do. Every attempt re-reads the untouched
+# original, so a narrow attempt never stacks its loss on top of a wider one.
+#
+# sips resizes well but writes bulky JPEGs — on a 2048px photo its encoder
+# produced 452 KB where cjpeg produces 262 KB from the same pixels. So sips only
+# resizes, and cjpeg does the encoding.
+encode_jpeg() {
+  local src=$1 dest=$2 budget=$3 edge base png
+  # sips picks its output format from the extension, so the scratch file needs
+  # one. mktemp owns the name without it; both get cleaned up below.
+  base=$(mktemp -t optimize-images)
+  png="$base.png"
+
+  for edge in $PHOTO_EDGES; do
+    sips -Z "$edge" -s format png "$src" --out "$png" >/dev/null
+    cjpeg -quality "$PHOTO_QUALITY" -optimize -progressive "$png" > "$dest"
+    if [ "$(file_size "$dest")" -le "$budget" ]; then
+      break
+    fi
+  done
+
+  rm -f "$base" "$png"
+}
+
+# Same ladder for PNGs, which sips resizes in place without a separate encoder.
+encode_png() {
+  local src=$1 dest=$2 budget=$3 edge
+
+  for edge in $PHOTO_EDGES; do
+    cp "$src" "$dest"
+    sips -Z "$edge" "$dest" >/dev/null
+    if [ "$(file_size "$dest")" -le "$budget" ]; then
+      break
+    fi
+  done
+}
+
 optimize() {
   require sips "It ships with macOS."
   require cjpeg "Install with: brew install jpeg-turbo"
   require gifsicle "Install with: brew install gifsicle"
 
-  local file size budget tmp before after
+  local file size budget tmp before after stubborn
   before=0
   after=0
+  stubborn=""
 
   while IFS= read -r file; do
     size=$(file_size "$file")
@@ -108,28 +154,44 @@ optimize() {
         mv "$tmp" "$file"
         ;;
       png|PNG)
-        sips -Z "$MAX_PHOTO_EDGE" "$file" >/dev/null
+        tmp=$(mktemp -t optimize-images)
+        encode_png "$file" "$tmp" "$budget"
+        mv "$tmp" "$file"
         ;;
       *)
-        # sips resizes well but writes bulky JPEGs — on a 2048px photo its
-        # encoder produced 452 KB where cjpeg produces 262 KB from the same
-        # pixels. So sips only resizes, and cjpeg does the encoding.
         tmp=$(mktemp -t optimize-images)
-        sips -Z "$MAX_PHOTO_EDGE" -s format png "$file" --out "$tmp.png" >/dev/null
-        cjpeg -quality 80 -optimize -progressive "$tmp.png" > "$tmp"
+        encode_jpeg "$file" "$tmp" "$budget"
         mv "$tmp" "$file"
-        rm -f "$tmp.png"
         ;;
     esac
 
     size=$(file_size "$file")
     after=$((after + size))
     printf '  %-58s -> %8s\n' "$file" "$(human "$size")"
+
+    if [ "$size" -gt "$budget" ]; then
+      stubborn="$stubborn  $file — $(human "$size") (budget $(human "$budget"))
+"
+    fi
   done < <(find "$IMAGE_DIR" -type f \
     \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' -o -iname '*.png' -o -iname '*.gif' \) \
     | sort)
 
   printf '\n%s -> %s\n' "$(human "$before")" "$(human "$after")"
+
+  # The ladder bottoms out, and some images will still not fit. Say so and fail.
+  # Exiting 0 here would be worse than useless: --check rejects the file anyway,
+  # and its advice is to run this script, which has already done all it can.
+  if [ -n "$stubborn" ]; then
+    cat >&2 <<EOF
+
+Still over budget after every size available:
+
+$stubborn
+Crop these, or replace them with a lighter image.
+EOF
+    return 1
+  fi
 }
 
 case "${1:-}" in