Kent Parson fans

(Last week's also now exists and is no longer a placeholder!)

Reading. Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. I want to be very, very clear: unless you are specifically researching attitudes and beliefs in pain clinics in early 2020s England, or similar, do not read this book. There are bad history and no references, appalling opinions on patients (), quite possibly the worst hyphenation choice I have ever seen, stunning omissions and misrepresentations of pain science, and It's Weird That It Happened Twice soup metaphors. Fuller review (or at least annotated bibliography entry) to follow, maybe.

Some further progress on Florencia Clifford's Feeding Orchids to the Slugs ("Tales from a Zen kitchen"), which I acquired from Oxfam in a moment of weakness primarily for EYB purposes at a point when it was extremely discounted. It is primarily a somewhat disjointed memoir for which I am not the target audience, but hey, Books To Go Back In The Charity Shop Pile but that I wouldn't actually hate reading were exactly the goal, so that's a victory. Mostly. I'm a little over halfway through it, sticking book darts on pages that contain recipes for easier reference when I go back through on the actual indexing pass.

I absolutely needed something that was not going to make me furious and furthermore that was not going to be demanding, and there's a new one in the series, so I have now reread several Scalzi: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades completed, The Lost Colony in progress.

I've also had a very quick flick through the mentions of Descartes in Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain, which is my next Pain Book. She does better than everyone else I've read, but I still think she's misinterpreting Treatise on Man. (Why do I have strongly-held opinions on Descartes now. CAN I NOT.)

Playing. ( Inkulinati, Monument Valley )

Cooking. SOUP.

smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto, two batches thereof, because I had promised A burrata to go with and then (1) the supermarket was out of it and (2) the opened part-pack of feta wound up doing two days quite comfortably, so the second batch was required For Burrata Purposes.

I have also established that the pistachio croissant strata works very well in one of the loaf tins if you scale it down to 50% quantities because there were only 3 discount croissants at the supermarket (... because you had to wait and watch the person who got there JUST ahead of you taking Most Of Them...), which also conveniently used up the dregs of the cream that I had in the fridge.

Eating. Tagine out the freezer (thank you past Alex). Relatively fresh dried apple. A very plain lunch at Teras in Seydikemer, which was apparently the magic my digestive system needed to settle itself down! And I am very much enjoying my dark chocolate raspberry stars. :)

Previously: uk.bookshop.org were selling a Tor ebook with DRM applied, which I only noticed after I had bought it, because all? Tor ebooks? are DRM-free? at the request of the publisher? Like, Hive applies DRM to them, but given that bookshop.org lets you filter for DRM-free, this... was surprising.

My initial support request for (1) an explanation and (2) any chance of a refund, realise this is totally on me though, ... got me an almost-immediate refund, which I was not expecting, and a very entry-level explanation of What DRM Is, which I sort of was. So I wrote back saying thank you very much, and also, Tor went famously DRM-free in about 2012, and they're definitely supplying this specific ebook to other retailers without DRM applied.

There was A Pause.

A day or two later I received a response from someone with "Senior" in their signature, thanking me for my patience and saying they were Investigating.

A few days after that I noticed that the ebook in question was now marked DRM-free: hurrah! ... but when I bought it, and clicked on the "yes please download my DRM-free ebook" button, nothing happened.

I did not write back in because I have been. preoccupied.

But a few days after that I tried again and this time the download did work! So hurrah for bookshop.org needing me to do much less assertive escalation than I'd been expecting, and also for noticing that something was still broken and Fixing It without me needing to get around to e-mailing in about it.

... the quick part of this note was going to be: I know there were Questions on my first post about Hey They're Doing Ebooks Now, about how you actually filter for DRM-free. As far as I can tell this isn't actually possible from the ebooks landing page, which seems A Pity, BUT when you search for something (which can absolutely be as vague as "science fiction"), the FORMAT dropdown lets you filter for DRM-free ebooks only. Obviously this is Not Ideal, in that one might actually like to browse All DRM-Free Ebooks, but it does exist as an option, where as far as I can tell it doesn't, at all, on e.g. Kobo. Hopefully this knowledge is helpful! And certainly The Above Saga has caused me to think sufficiently positively of them that I'm likely to default to them for my ebooks in future.

... to be expanded on tomorrow. <3 ("Tomorrow" was a lie; travel apparently took it out of me more than somewhat! So here I am instead on Sunday the 7^th of December...)

Reading. Treatise on Man, Descartes trans. Stephen Gaukroger. Very helpful, in that I now have a lot of opinions about what Descartes said that seem to be... decidedly in conflict with Received Wisdom about What Descartes Said. But, like, in such a way that I can see how they got there (by focussing on one paragraph in isolation) and can meaningfully argue that they're all wrong (based on the rest of the text). (Frustratingly many of the key passages supporting my interpretation are omitted from the other translation I have ready access to -- Cottingham -- and while my academic French is up to 1860s chemistry, I am not going to try reading the original text. In either language.)

Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. See next week for details.

Watching. We were visiting some of A's folk and their habit involves much more film watching than we normally get around to! Consequently I have rewatched Knives Out and The Glass Onion (which latter I think I actually liked more on rewatch than on my first go through, even if I do have ongoing quibbles with fiction that doesn't give you enough information that you can reasonably put clues together yourself before The Reveal Sequence), Kinky Boots (never seen it before and LOVED IT), and The Intouchables (also never seen it before, mildly impressed at what a solid go it made at being ~heartwarming~ despite all the workplace sexual harassment and, of course, the fundamental "millionaire pays immigrant to perform personal care work" of it all).

Playing. Inkulinati! Lots more thereof.

Also new-to-me games Rummikub (note "In Turkey, the game is known as [Okey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okey^{[citation needed]}") and Five Crowns. Extremely impressed with myself for picking both of these up via verbal instructions only without any panic attacks.

Eating. POMEGRANATES and ORANGES from the GARDEN.

( Read more... )

Exploring. Şehit Fehti Bey Parkı (SNAIL SCULPTURES (); local-to-that Tuesday Market feat. PERSIMMONS and ROSE BUDS FOR TEA and YOGHURT SERVED BY THE HALF KILO, and also many good ducks, and also so many quince and tiny medlar and many many other things; Babadağ Teleferik up to the 1200m station, where there was an utter lack of the kind of Walks For Tourists that I expected BUT we nonetheless met Some Very Good Dogs and also so many Quercus ilex; and the ancient city of Tlos, which I would very much like to visit again in future with a slightly more cooperative body. And of course the agricultural museum at Yalçin!

Observing. WE FOUND A BAT on an evening Stupid Little Walk to Get My Stupid Steps. Also GOATS and SQUASH and infinite cats and so on and so forth, but we were definitely most excited about the BAT.

Spotted in today's book, with just as much of a medical theme as you might reasonably expect:

... biopsy-
chosocial...