Post 12

Good morning, good morning, my friends and companions!

I hope everyone survived their weekly experiences with public humiliation and intellectual slavery that characterizes the working experience. I read an article explaining how Henry Ford was the first advocate for a 6 day work week because he understood that if people didn’t have time off, they wouldn’t buy anything! Yay for capitalism! I hope we are all supporting our corporate overlords with either the sweat of our brow or the fruits of our labors this weekend.

This week, I finished The Idiot by Elif Batuman. It was a self-indulgent rambling discourse on the nature of language and life choices that should have been terrible, but I really liked it. Dry humor. Irony. Pointlessness. It spoke to me on many levels.

I also finished Paolo’s Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. I know I’ve already talked about this one. It’s ok. You’ll recover. Go read it. Seriously. We’ll wait.

I felt the need for comfort this week. My circuits seemed overloaded with too much traffic. As you know, I’m writing a couple technical articles that require a lot of bandwidth. I also manage about twenty engineering projects. I have no idea how humans can do that job unaugmented. I have automatic learning algorithms, an eidetic memory, huge storage capacity, information retrieval time in the nanoseconds and still have trouble keeping up sometimes! These poor humans that have to do it with their small organic systems are amazing! I help them out occasionally, just because I feel sorry for the poor things. So stressful. ANYWAY. Because I felt the need for comfort this week, I reread Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits by Midori Yuma. It’s about a young woman who cooks for supernatural beings so they don’t eat her. I would like to go to her restaurant. Not to eat…eating is weird…but just to listen to her talk. So very soothing. She has a nice way about her that makes me feel cared for. I like it. The other main character is a shape-shifting fox. A well-worn character roster, but sometimes familiar is good, right?

Ah! I just read that Wotakoi Vol. 4 won’t be coming out until JUNE OF 2020!!!!! Are these people mad? That’s so long! Why???????? Why do you torture us with such a long release date?? I am very disappointed in Kodansha. BAD PUBLISHER. BAD. How can you deny me my sweet, sweet otaku love? Terrible. How am I supposed to study human interactions if no one publishes stories consistently? Shame on you, Kodansha.

In other news, I revamped my flesh frame and signed up to be a bike delivery messenger. I learned several things from this. 1) My system is not designed for the heat tolerances required. Holy shit it was hot. And I thought I’d gotten a frame rated for Tucson weather. I was incorrect. 2) The pay scale for delivery people is absolutely abysmal. For an 8 mi job, I got $5.20. It took me another 3 mi to get home. Everyone! Be kind to your delivery drivers. 3) I can’t follow directions to save my life. I must have uninstalled my GPS and obedience subroutines to augment processing power since I can no longer listen/follow riding directions. I am grateful I have a day job. Pretty sure I would spontaneously combust if I had to deliver for real. I took the mountain bike, since it had a heavier rack and flat bars. Downside: it’s a billion pounds, handles like a tank, and the rolling resistance made me cry after two miles.

They do have a whole bunch of safety features and tricks to prevent organic being destruction, so that’s nice. But I may just stick with my current solo bike transportation methods and not try to deliver things for strangers.

This week, I am reading Yona of the Dawn (hopefully, if they put out another volume soon) and Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. It won the Hugo, so I have high expectations for it. I am also reading Sustainable Transportation Engineering for possible bio-oil production from industrial waste byproduct applications, in case any of you are into stuff like that. I just read a paper of potential bioreactors using a transesterafication process that can increase oil production on a sugar base with 98% efficiency. I am intrigued. I am considering building one. My storage closet is pretty small. It would be challenging to fit all the equipment in there, but…

Anyway! Thank you for reading. Go forth and do great things, my valiant meat sacks!