vital functions
Jul. 26th, 2020 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. How to Be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi. Finished this week. Still chewing over my disagreements over strategic approach, and the extent to which I felt he was contradicting himself, especially in the last few chapters. I also kind of want to send him a copy of Sonntag's Illness as Metaphor because it's kind of a foundational text for some of the analogies he's drawing, but I recognise that wouldn't actually be kind or helpful or useful.
Summer in Orcus, T. Kingfisher. Very much read for comfort; I am deeply soothed by the wondrous things, and by our main character who perfectly well recognises that she shouldn't have to do something, but is resigned to choosing to do it anyway because she wants the outcomes and nobody else will (or even necessarily can). Is she a small child profoundly failed by her adults? Yes. Does the text acknowledge this explicitly? Yes. I loved this. (I have recently acquired a new-to-me e-reader, so while I've been recategorising books I've also been remembering what all I have and actually starting to dig in to some of it.)
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. Two reasons for this reread: firstly, to see if I like it any better on a second attempt (given that I'm fond of a lot of her other writing), and secondly, to compile the litany of WRONG GEOLOGY so that I don't just have a faint sense of irritation. LET'S GO.
On the upside, I did actually enjoy the book as a whole more when I was keeping a list of all the Wrong Geology, so that's good to know.
Clockwork Boys, T. Kingfisher. Started with this evening's horn practice; almost twenty percent of the way through it already, and decidedly cheerful about that.
Watching. The Old Guard (2020). We loved this. Can we! have a sequel yet! Yes there are some plot holes but who cares.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003). This was less an alpha version of Jupiter Ascending; we continue charmed by (1) the hi-tech special effects and (2) the hi-tech banks of CRT monitors. I had apparently done an autism about the big central fight scene, in that we ended up in the plaza and I was all "ah yes, those steps, I remember those steps!" And then, on the other hand, the entire thing is just so extremely Heterosexuals.
Playing. Horn-playing is going well!
Cooking. Lots of onion rings (two onions' worth is too many), and baby's first go at battered halloumi, half of which worked out pretty well.
I have also worked out how to cook allotment artichokes. Ish. More or less. (Chop off a centimetre or so of the tops, trim the base, stick upside down in the steamer, leave for 15-30 minutes depending on size.) I'm still pretty sure I'm doing something... suboptimally... though, in that there's a lot of scales and they are a lot off faff and on the one hand I'm aware of the general concept that Life's Too Short To Eat An Artichoke That Didn't Come Tinned and on the other I'm still puzzling, rather, over the very concept of preserving them myself. (This is true of all sizes, from golfball to huge, with the main advantage of huge seeming to be more tasty base; I'm trying to work out whether this is something that would be in any sense improved by doing the thing of separating out the plants, i.e. if this is what's meant by plants going "woody" after 2-3 years, but...)
Eating. Figs. FIGS from the FIG TREE. Two! Tiny! Figs! (Also the occasional blueberry.)
From the plot: Eating this week: a small lettuce, artichokes, the last few summer raspberries, Lots of blackberries, holy basil (inflorescences actually are purple!), a few tiny purple chilli, and TOMATOES. Two of them! Ripe, almost! I think I should probably have left them a little longer for More Flavour, but I was impatient, so we've had one each of Chadwick Cherry and Purple Ukraine.
Making & mending. Mm, less "mending" and more "tidying" but I have now catalogued all of the Kenwood parts and cleaned them as needed cleaning. For bonus points they're all tidied away excepting the three chassis, one food processor, and one blender as needs (...) fixing or disposing of.
I got started on replacing a tablet screen, and then was too gentle and broke something that way (also by missing that I was supposed to work backwards at one step, sigh), but A is acquiring a replacement wifi antenna and it's All A Learning Experience. (Still not worked out how to open up this kind of device without damaging the plastic bezel at least a little, though.) Progress!
Growing. Elsewise growing in the greenhouse: the peppers are starting to change colour; the tallest luffa is up to the roof; and I have a cucumber. I lifted up a leaf and it was just there! I hadn't even spotted it swelling! It's about the size of my thumb! I'm extremely excited about it! Also the lemon has put on about 10cm of growth on most of its branches and branchlets over the past couple of weeks: super proud of that, too.
Elsewhere at the plot: the Tromboncini squash are starting to get to the point where I need to harvest and eat them. The Pattison Blanc still haven't managed to set any visible fruit, though they're growing away well. Sweet Magnolia peas are continuing to grow and put out flowers and fruit; Cosse Violette beans are growing at a rate of knots (I spotted the first tiny pods earlier this week, and several of them are now the length of my thumb, green with a dark purple stripe down one edge); the Greek Gigantes are gamely carrying on but haven't set pods yet, though several of them are at least managing to flower; some of the maize is thinking about flowering. The greenhouse tomatoes are starting to actually change colour (see above), and some of the outdoors ones are considering it; the Purple Ukraine plants have finally filled out enough for me to make sense of their being advertised as having attractive feathery foliage. Comedy onions are doing well; the lovage is struggling bravely on; I need to work out when to harvest the onion-onions, some of which have swelled up admirably. I'm worried about Doing It Wrong, though, so a little suspicious of the idea that I should be harvesting them now while their tops are still green, even if they have fallen over.
Observing. A Poplar Hawk-moth caterpillar! I'm pretty sure. I was DELIGHTED. I took a lot of terrible photos and could possibly even be induced to share them.
Summer in Orcus, T. Kingfisher. Very much read for comfort; I am deeply soothed by the wondrous things, and by our main character who perfectly well recognises that she shouldn't have to do something, but is resigned to choosing to do it anyway because she wants the outcomes and nobody else will (or even necessarily can). Is she a small child profoundly failed by her adults? Yes. Does the text acknowledge this explicitly? Yes. I loved this. (I have recently acquired a new-to-me e-reader, so while I've been recategorising books I've also been remembering what all I have and actually starting to dig in to some of it.)
The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. Two reasons for this reread: firstly, to see if I like it any better on a second attempt (given that I'm fond of a lot of her other writing), and secondly, to compile the litany of WRONG GEOLOGY so that I don't just have a faint sense of irritation. LET'S GO.
- For starters, a single massive rift as described through Yumenes will do you some melting, but it'll do you melting via passive upwelling, mantle melting as pressure is removed faster than the rock can cool: think the Mid-Atlantic Ridge or the Afar Triangle and the East African Rift Valley as direct analogues. Even if it's being actively dragged apart (by subduction zones), you simply won't get enough output of gas and ash to cause the results described; for anything like that, anything like The Event That Wiped Out The Dinosaurs, you'd need (as best we currently understand it) initiation of a new mantle plume, a head rising significantly hotter than surrounding mantle that actually forces the crust above it to bulge, forming a new large igneous province on the scale of the Deccan Traps. The amount of power that would take -- the amount of heat, the sheer amount of moving rock -- is mind-boggling, on the stunningly short time-scale required. But you need that temperature difference to sustain the kind of eruptions being talked about, and, well, once you've got that, why bother with a rift? (Yes yes yes, obelisks and lack of Moon, but honestly as best we can tell the Moon is pretty much irrelevant to the development and maintenance of plate tectonics.)
- Obsidian knive don't work like that.
- The naming schema makes NO SENSE. NONE. We're told that Fulcrum-born orogenes are given rogga names, where ferals choose them when they get their first ring. It's implied that names (like horse names or, by my understanding, Hollywood stage names) are required to be unique, though it's not made unambiguous. And yet we get people in the modern, contemporaneous era with names taken from classes of rock, classes of mineral, individual minerals, and jewellers' terminology, with very little clarification as to what on earth is which. Definitely gem-terms: hessonite, a form of grossular garnet. Ambiguous: alabaster; marcasite; Maxixe; carnelian (mostly known to geologists as iron-rich chalcedony). Definitely geologist terminology: a class of mineral massively abundant in the Earth's crust, feldspar; corundum (known in gem terms as ruby and sapphire); galena. Type of igneous rock: syenite, which is composed principally of... feldspars. And like. Feldspar is one of the first mineral groups you learn to recognise as someone investigating rocks. It is completely implausible that this would be the first person who ever wanted it as a name. How is the registry of names organised.
- The relationship between seismic and volcanic activity is not... brilliantly understood. It doesn't make sense to talk about how "deep" a hotspot is.
- There are, presently, no subduction zones coincident with mantle plumes (or "hotspots"), and given how both of these things work it's difficult to imagine how they could coincide: subduction zones arise where oceanic crust has got cold and dense enough to sink, whereas mantle plumes are identified in part by the ginormous thermal swells that accompany them. Oceanic crust above a hotspot to first approximate can't be cold enough to subduct.
- That is not how tsunamis work. Specifically, the book asserts that tsunamis are even bigger and scarier out in the deep open ocean; in fact, "A tsunami may be less than a foot (30 centimeters) in height on the surface of the open ocean, which is why they are not noticed by sailors": they only gain height in shallow waters.
On the upside, I did actually enjoy the book as a whole more when I was keeping a list of all the Wrong Geology, so that's good to know.
Clockwork Boys, T. Kingfisher. Started with this evening's horn practice; almost twenty percent of the way through it already, and decidedly cheerful about that.
Watching. The Old Guard (2020). We loved this. Can we! have a sequel yet! Yes there are some plot holes but who cares.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003). This was less an alpha version of Jupiter Ascending; we continue charmed by (1) the hi-tech special effects and (2) the hi-tech banks of CRT monitors. I had apparently done an autism about the big central fight scene, in that we ended up in the plaza and I was all "ah yes, those steps, I remember those steps!" And then, on the other hand, the entire thing is just so extremely Heterosexuals.
Playing. Horn-playing is going well!
Cooking. Lots of onion rings (two onions' worth is too many), and baby's first go at battered halloumi, half of which worked out pretty well.
I have also worked out how to cook allotment artichokes. Ish. More or less. (Chop off a centimetre or so of the tops, trim the base, stick upside down in the steamer, leave for 15-30 minutes depending on size.) I'm still pretty sure I'm doing something... suboptimally... though, in that there's a lot of scales and they are a lot off faff and on the one hand I'm aware of the general concept that Life's Too Short To Eat An Artichoke That Didn't Come Tinned and on the other I'm still puzzling, rather, over the very concept of preserving them myself. (This is true of all sizes, from golfball to huge, with the main advantage of huge seeming to be more tasty base; I'm trying to work out whether this is something that would be in any sense improved by doing the thing of separating out the plants, i.e. if this is what's meant by plants going "woody" after 2-3 years, but...)
Eating. Figs. FIGS from the FIG TREE. Two! Tiny! Figs! (Also the occasional blueberry.)
From the plot: Eating this week: a small lettuce, artichokes, the last few summer raspberries, Lots of blackberries, holy basil (inflorescences actually are purple!), a few tiny purple chilli, and TOMATOES. Two of them! Ripe, almost! I think I should probably have left them a little longer for More Flavour, but I was impatient, so we've had one each of Chadwick Cherry and Purple Ukraine.
Making & mending. Mm, less "mending" and more "tidying" but I have now catalogued all of the Kenwood parts and cleaned them as needed cleaning. For bonus points they're all tidied away excepting the three chassis, one food processor, and one blender as needs (...) fixing or disposing of.
I got started on replacing a tablet screen, and then was too gentle and broke something that way (also by missing that I was supposed to work backwards at one step, sigh), but A is acquiring a replacement wifi antenna and it's All A Learning Experience. (Still not worked out how to open up this kind of device without damaging the plastic bezel at least a little, though.) Progress!
Growing. Elsewise growing in the greenhouse: the peppers are starting to change colour; the tallest luffa is up to the roof; and I have a cucumber. I lifted up a leaf and it was just there! I hadn't even spotted it swelling! It's about the size of my thumb! I'm extremely excited about it! Also the lemon has put on about 10cm of growth on most of its branches and branchlets over the past couple of weeks: super proud of that, too.
Elsewhere at the plot: the Tromboncini squash are starting to get to the point where I need to harvest and eat them. The Pattison Blanc still haven't managed to set any visible fruit, though they're growing away well. Sweet Magnolia peas are continuing to grow and put out flowers and fruit; Cosse Violette beans are growing at a rate of knots (I spotted the first tiny pods earlier this week, and several of them are now the length of my thumb, green with a dark purple stripe down one edge); the Greek Gigantes are gamely carrying on but haven't set pods yet, though several of them are at least managing to flower; some of the maize is thinking about flowering. The greenhouse tomatoes are starting to actually change colour (see above), and some of the outdoors ones are considering it; the Purple Ukraine plants have finally filled out enough for me to make sense of their being advertised as having attractive feathery foliage. Comedy onions are doing well; the lovage is struggling bravely on; I need to work out when to harvest the onion-onions, some of which have swelled up admirably. I'm worried about Doing It Wrong, though, so a little suspicious of the idea that I should be harvesting them now while their tops are still green, even if they have fallen over.
Observing. A Poplar Hawk-moth caterpillar! I'm pretty sure. I was DELIGHTED. I took a lot of terrible photos and could possibly even be induced to share them.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-27 11:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:28 pm (UTC)....ok how can one not know how tsunamis work in this day and age. How.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:51 pm (UTC)(I was sort of grudgingly willing to accept that it was All Fantasy Anyway and I was Just Having An Autism and then I reached the acknowledgments about the book's origins at Launch Pad and I had to stare into space some more, and that really IS unfair of me because I have actual publications in Moon Science but EVEN SO.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:52 pm (UTC)IT DOES NOT IF ANYTHING THE RECENT TSUNSMIS WERE MORE PROMINENT THEN.
/potentially unfair also autism.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 09:54 pm (UTC)the geology
is so very precisely my special interest
and so WRONG
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-28 09:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-26 10:33 pm (UTC)FIGS! Hooray for fresh figs.
Have you read any other Xendi? I'm listlessly collected books for a white woman's anti-racist discussion and there's also his STAMPED, a huge history tome, as well as STAMPED remixed for teenagers. I love the latter idea.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-27 03:52 am (UTC)It's implied that names (like horse names or, by my understanding, Hollywood stage names) are required to be unique, though it's not made unambiguous. And yet we get people in the modern, contemporaneous era with names taken from classes of rock, classes of mineral, individual minerals, and jewellers' terminology, with very little clarification as to what on earth is which.
Okay, that comparison actually makes this less baffling to me rather than more. I mean, with Hollywood stage names, if there's already a John Public then you're not allowed to be John Public professionally, but you can be John Q. Public. or Juan Publico. Or Jehan Publique.
And if one racehorse is named Lightning, another would be allowed to be called Electricity or Fire or Anvil Crawler or Coulomb, even though lightning is a type of electricity or fire, and anvil crawler is a type of lightning, and Coulomb is a unit of measurement. (Or maybe they wouldn't, but because of restrictions in number of letters or words, not because they're too similar or mismatched categories.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-27 06:48 am (UTC)Is she a small child profoundly failed by her adults?
It strikes me that this is a Theme in both Minor Mage and A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking too (if you haven't read them yet, I recommend)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-27 06:50 am (UTC)I love that you're keeping a list of Wrong Geology.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-28 09:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-28 12:42 pm (UTC)Summer in Orcus, T. Kingfisher. Very much read for comfort; I am deeply soothed by the wondrous things, and by our main character who perfectly well recognises that she shouldn't have to do something, but is resigned to choosing to do it anyway because she wants the outcomes and nobody else will (or even necessarily can). Is she a small child profoundly failed by her adults? Yes. Does the text acknowledge this explicitly? Yes. I loved this. (I have recently acquired a new-to-me e-reader, so while I've been recategorising books I've also been remembering what all I have and actually starting to dig in to some of it.)
I am very interested in this dynamic "the small child profoundly failed by her adults, the text that acknowledges this", how fucked up in this book and what kind of trigger warnings should I expect? I've heard T Kingfisher can be intensely dark and I'm not quite sure what that means.