Recent reading:

[luzula]

Gratislunchen by Therese Uddenfeldt [The Free Lunch; not available in English]
About energy, peak oil and related problems; and how society will not survive in its present form. I guess I knew the outlines of this, but it had some stuff I didn't know and was very well written in general.

Ett sekel av syndikalism by various people [A Century of Syndicalism]
A history of Swedish syndicalism. What it says on the tin.

I also skipped out on Melissa Scott's The Kindly Ones. I'd taken a break at 30% and then when I started again it just felt slow and like a chore to read. Oh well. ETA: Also it struck me that this book was SF, but in the part I read it could just as well have been fantasy? Nothing in the plot or worldbuilding depended on it having spaceships instead of actual ships, as far as I could tell. Hmm. But I've only read 30%, after all, so I can't judge the whole book.

Comments

[brigantine]

Re: Gratislunchen, oddly enough I was entertaining thoughts related to this notion just this morning, on the bus ride to work. Particularly I was thinking about Stuff.

Early this spring I’d got some more of my unnecessary stuff boxed up and ready to ship off to one of the local charity thrift shops, but when I called for them to send around their truck for a pick-up the lady apologized that they couldn’t just then, because they were overloaded with donations. They had too much stuff! Six months on, and they still do! My give-away boxes are still sitting tucked into corners of my apartment. I took a look around town, and realized that all of the local charity shops are bulging with donated stuff.

Yet we have acres of land paved over and built up with storage rentals for people to keep all their Stuff that won’t fit into their house. I understand some of this may be a fishing boat or large luggage they take on holiday, things like that, but really it’s mostly Stuff. What are we going to do with all this Stuff? And the people whose livelihoods rely on manufacturing even more Stuff, day after day?

At that point my brain sort of shorted out, and I made myself think about breakfast, because Ow, and I was starting to depress myself. :P

[luzula]

Yeah, it's easy to depress oneself with thoughts like these. : /

Personally I don't have that much Stuff, which is a relief. I think more about how the food that I eat is dependent on fossil fuels, and how the world will be fed when we are twice as many and sea levels have risen and we have less easily accessible energy and less biodiversity. Cheering things like that.

I find that the best way to keep the depression at bay is to be outdoors, to engage in environmental organizations, and to do stuff with other people instead of sitting at the computer. Ah well.

[brigantine]

I find that the best way to keep the depression at bay is to be outdoors,

*g* After I'd finished commenting here this morning I took off for the edge of campus and watched a couple of herons catching little fish in the lagoon. Much better!

[luzula]

\o/

I had lots of stuff I felt I should do tonight (when do I not have things I feel I should be doing?), but instead I looked at mosses and lichens collected in the summer. Very calming and satisfying, and I found several new-to-me species!