vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. V excited that I can read physical books at the moment without my hands yelling at me (hurrah for ring splints). Head On (John Scalzi) and record of a spaceborn few (Becky Chambers) in hard copy; I'm now making substantial progress through The Collapsing Empire (also John Scalzi) in ebook, because I got to the top of the library queue. (For reference, also on hold: Feel Free, being collected essays by Zadie Smith; Daring Greatly, Brené Brown, having failed to get together the brain to read it when I got it out the library in hard copy a while back; The Consuming Fire, John Scalzi, sequel to TCE; Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney. There's a fair chance that I'll suspend the holds on both the Smith and the Brown just because they are likely to be fairly heavy going and, as discussed in therapy a few weeks back, it is actually okay for me to read for fun at the moment.)

Head On I got around to reading, finally, because it was Right There on the library bookshelf when I was dithering over something else; I did very much enjoy Lock In, not least because disabled! gender-neutral! protagonist!, but I think I've managed a slightly better round of gender diversity in my reading since that was published and in consequence was a bit less basking-in-the-character, and also Chris' voice ~felt~ more masculine to me this time around -- though this might be because it employs a brand of snark often found in Scalzi's blog, and it turns out that The Collapsing Empire has a character I'm parsing similarly who is very definitely female, so I'm probably doing it an injustice. Anyway: sportsball! More worldbuilding! I'm not... entirely convinced by all the Very Professional Very Wealthy Professionals (and their competence), but it was a quick and pleasant read and it's always nice to spend time with characters who Actually Get It about mobility impairment.

record of a spaceborn few I (1) had a lot of quibbles with, and (2) loved A Lot, like, I started crying within the first couple of chapters and then just... kept periodically bursting into tears.

Here are some things I love about it: gardening. Closed systems and recycling and composting. Welcome rites and death rites. Tension between new and old, old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. How you build a society and keep it functioning (because this is one that's not exactly post-scarcity but is functional in terms of providing universal basic income, with a barter economy on top), and how you integrate it with other societies running on very different systems, and how you conceptualise those interactions. Record-keeping, and the storing of stories.

Here are some things that I found vexing: I'm slightly suspicious of the ability to actually fully compost a human corpse, including the bones, in 40 days, even with hot composting (though I've looked up the company Chambers was drawing on). I'm a bit dubious about the amount of attention paid to balancing carbon and nitrogen in a hot-composting set-up. I was very exasperated with the framing conceit that This Species Has A Gestural Language That We Cannot Possibly Translate Literally Because No Other Written Language In The Entire Galactic Commons Features Gestures, What Do, because. like. Sutton SignWriting, Stokoe notation, BSL variants of same, UK baby's legal name is signed, etc etc etc. And! For bonus points! In this entirely closed system, where everything is recycled, we are... somehow supposed to believe... that bamboo fibre is the most viable fabric they have. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH PROCESSING, etc.

All of which is to say, in summary, that having also really loved the second book (while being exasperated by aspects of that, too), I think I begin to see why anyone actually liked the first one, which did absolutely nothing for me other than irritate me. Specifically: I absolutely did not care about any of the characters in the first book, in that I found them all to be unlikeable at best but mostly unbelievable cardboard cutouts, and the framing story also failed to get my attention. But: my annoyance with the details in the second and third books have been largely outweighed by how iddy they are for me, how much they are A Story I Care About, and while I don't actually Get It about the first one I do now have a sense of How It Might Have Worked for people.

(Amusingly, a friend with whom I have significantly overlapping taste hated the long way to a small, angry planet... and also didn't care for a closed and common orbit, though we had a good chat about that while she was gearing up to read record of a spaceborn few.)

Film/TV. Leverage. It is Leverage. I am still kind of fascinated by it but, like, I cannot quite deal with Eliot, last episode, having... decided that Parker was incompetent? For reasons of plot convenience? Obviously she wasn't, but. Oh children.

Growth. AHAHAHA SO MUCH. Headlines:

• I've repotted the lemon!
  
• I've provided some timelapse photography of the plot!
  
• I've borrowed a cordless drill and made significant progress with building my raised bed edging! (This also counts as a Skill Acquisition, especially as I was doing so without more competent supervision.)
  
• I've fixed the broken autovent on the roof of the greenhouse! (Ish. It's possible I need to get a new wax cylinder; it's not opening as much as I really feel it ought.)
  
• ............ I found the carpet.
  
• It is, you see, The Rule that every allotment plot is absolutely chock-full of fundamentally made-of-plastic carpet.
  
• I thought I'd got away with it.
  
• I tried to dig a hole to put the legs of the raised bed into.
  
• ... I hit carpet.
  
• I have found at least two layers.
  
• I... I think they extend underneath all the raised beds.
  
• The raised beds in which I am growing spinach, and fennel, and allium various.
  
• The raised beds I weeded thoroughly last year and then manured and then left to get themselves set up with decent soil structure and generally getting going with a no-dig philosophy.
  
• That I'm now going to have to dig up.
  
• To get out the carpet.

Notable Pokémon. Another (!) shiny Eevee. Hatched a Really Rather Good Beldum. No event-specific shinies yet, of course, but there we go.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

*eyes convo with azurelunatic & silveradept*

...just how suspiciously short is that forty days, exactly

[kaberett]

tl;dr it depends a bit on What Exactly You're Doing, but generally if you want bones to compost in a reasonable timeframe you want to boil them up or burn them or grind them or at least chop them up a bit first, which... I do not get the impression that Recompose is intending to put corpses through a mulcher, and certainly that's not how it worked in the book! I would be fascinated to know more details about how exactly they are achieving this, because on the face of it I'm very much at ???!

[kaberett]

AHA YES: it's drawing on research that shows that livestock bones have started decomposing after two months. This is based on a somewhat different design so mi-i-i-i-ight do better at handling bones, but I have yet to find any evidence that they'd really be entirely Dealt With in forty days.

[alexseanchai]

*nodnod*

(one does not eat apex predators, you understand)