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Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Impressions

Not quite reviews, I talk about books I read and enjoyed.

I’m an East Coast woman, living on land colonized three hundred years ago. I know nothing of the Navajo, nothing of the desert, and my only experience with a mesa was a family trip decades ago.

In other words, everything about the world of Trail of Lightning‘s protagonist, Maggie Hoskie, should feel absolutely foreign to me.

Well, I mean, some of it is certainly supposed to be foreign to anyone. The book takes place in a post-apocalyptic (for White people) Sixth World, where the Navajo gods, heroes, and monsters have resurfaced and started their unnatural lives anew. Don’t get much of that here in the suburbs. (Not really hoping to have Coyote swing by the house either, gotta say.)

I can feel the desert dust on the library shelves, smell the ozone in the air, see the greenish tinge of a nightmare sky, and certainly hear the rez dogs barking.

Rebecca Roanhorse’s characterizations, her world building, her storytelling, captured me in all the right ways. Her characters have complex and shifting motivations. The action is fast-paced and brutally violent, while simultaneously filled with heartbroken love. The supernatural is extremely supernatural.

And at the same time, the stories, the Navajo language, the culture that Rebecca describes, they are all (as much as any fiction story is) real.

Frankly, if I’m going to read kick-ass women kicking ass (and yes, I’m going to read lots of it) I’d much rather be doing it with a culture of real people with a real language and a real history than a fully made-up culture of elves speaking elvish. (And I love elves.)

There are many people and many cultures in this world, and often they’re intermingled and next-door-neighbors with my white colonial upbringing, that I’d never see if writers like Rebecca Roanhorse weren’t bringing them to the forefront. These stories should be heard. They need to be heard. And damn we would be worse off if we didn’t get a chance to hear them.

I loved it.

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Day 347: taking a bit slower today

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 347: I’m still looking for diamonds but after yesterday’s digestive fiasco I’m kind of taking it slow.

Which is to say I’m hauling some of what I’ve collected the past few weeks back to my main headquarters so I’m in safe areas should there be more digestive malfunctions.

One does not want to have the green-apple two-step when one is surrounded by zombies is what I’m saying.

Now I’m just hoping I don’t have parasites.

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Day 346: ugh

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 346: Under absolutely no circumstances eat raw ducken.

Bad decisions were made, much washing of pants followed.

Excrement is difficult to remove from armor.

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Swearing is Good for You by Emma Byrne

Impressions

Not quite reviews, I talk about books I read and enjoyed.

Okay so first you need to know that I read anything I can get my hands on about how swearing works in the brain. So even though I didn’t know about Swearing Is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language before I got it for Christmas it was a perfect fit for me.

Second, I learned a lot of things in this book that other reading on the topic hadn’t taught me. For example, there’s an entire chapter on Tourette’s, how it works, and why it really doesn’t fit with the rest of the content of this book because cursing as part of a tic doesn’t behave like any other kind of cursing. Going into this book I had no knowledge of how Tourette’s works. Coming out, I am still a novice, but at least one with hopefully more insight and patience for my fellow humans.

I also learned a ton about how fluency in secondary languages doesn’t necessarily translate to emotional impact — unless you were learning some other aspect of emotional impact (such as the angst of being an adolescent) at the same time you were immersed in your second language. This directly impacts how and in what language you swear.

The book is barely 200 pages and covered neuroscience, pain management, Tourette’s, workplace swearing, chimpanzee swearing, gender and swearing, and swearing in other languages. It does not cover any particular case or topic in depth but rather serves as a well-written and intriguing survey of modern knowledge about the field. Considering that in most cultures the taboos around swearing extend to studying the taboos around swearing, the very presence of the book indicates both shifting cultural norms and the fact that we still have a lot to learn.

I fucking loved this book and recommend it to anyone with interests in linguistics or neuroscience or both.

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Day 345: electric rock

One Among the Dead

Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”. 

Day 345:

One of the forms of stone down here is this red ore-like substance that shatters into a powder when I hit it.

And then it tries to electrocute me.

No seriously, it’s like the whole rock is filled with static electricity. Like it’s some kind of naturally-occurring battery. The shocks aren’t big but they’re definitely there.

The only reason I haven’t gotten electrocuted on a regular basis is because I’m wearing leather gloves and using wooden handles on my tools.

(I probably have enough iron ore at this point to make pickaxes out of solid iron, but since I go through pickaxes pretty quickly to begin with, so my iron stores are always in jeopardy,  and now the rocks are trying to electrocute me, I’m sticking with wood.)

I might be able to do something useful with this stuff though, even if it’s a small engine that takes a long time to turn. Or maybe just see if it zaps the zombies for me. More to come when I’m out of the lava lake sauna.