Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

After two days of utter misery at work, I was amazed that I actually got to finish on time -- I had not been expecting to!

The unstoppable force of my executive dysfunction met the immovable object of a deadline to respond to the Government's call for evidence on Developing the automated vehicles regulatory framework.

Ugh. I am so disgusted by the whole concept of self-driving cars that it was...well, not the only reason it's difficult to write about, but it was definitely one of them.

In other car-related news, I'm always delighted to read that other people are noticing the same things I am: not only are car headlights too damn bright, but cars are too damn big.

...while bigger cars may be safer for their occupants, critics insist they are considerably less safe for other road users. "Whether you're in another car [or] a pedestrian, you're more likely to be seriously injured if there's a collision with one of these vehicles," argues Tim Dexter, vehicles policy manager at T&E. He is also concerned about the implications for cyclists.

Research carried out in 2023 by Belgium's Vias Institute, which aims to improve road safety, suggested that a 10cm (3.9in) increase in the height of a car bonnet could increase the risk of vulnerable road users being killed in a collision by 27%. T&E also highlights concerns that high bonnets can create blind spots.

This is also something I've read about in the U.S., thanks to Victoria Scott:

If, in the span of one year, 18 fully-loaded Boeing 747s crashed with no survivors, we’d reappraise airspace. We’d question how we build airplanes and how we train pilots. We would recognize this as a failure of the system, not as individual mistakes of 18 pilots. Our roads should be no different.

The good news is that we have sensible solutions in plain sight: lower speed limits, redesign intersections, build roads that prioritize pedestrians and cars equally, and most importantly, reward automakers for building smaller vehicles with better visibility. The bad news is these require some sacrifice from drivers. Safer roads have lower speed limits—likely enforced by ticketing in one form or another. These roads also require more concentration to drive on. SUVs and pickups would need to revert back to 90s sizing, and all of our cars would need to shrink. These are all a hard sell in America, admittedly, but until they happen, we keep losing lives needlessly.

I genuinely love cars, and I’ve owned some big trucks. I understand the appeal of high speeds and lifted rigs, and I’m loath to give them up. But even I can’t accept a future wherein 7,500 are killed each year, especially when the solutions are so tangible and the rewards so massive. I’d accept small sacrifices if thousands more could live decades longer. I hope the rest of America agrees.

Oh good: the problem with my Kobo not showing up in Calibre was as easy to fix as I hoped it would be: dodgy USB cable. Phew. (I still think of this kobo as new, but it is seven or eight years old now.)

So I have a lot of new-to-it books on there now, which is exciting. Good timing, since I'm off to London for three fucking days tomorrow.

And despite D's efforts at de-DRMing the ebook he got me for my birthday, the way for me to read it turns out to be to just log in as him on the Bookshop app. Stupid DRM! I've got a bunch of vouchers to spend on bookshop.org too, and it'll probably still be more worth my while to get ebooks than paper books, but it's not as sure a thing as the calculation would be otherwise.

Still, it's been nice to read the first 10% of my birthday present.

It was my turn to select a book club book, after the very good and very extensively researched literary fiction which was also very long so we didn't actually have a meeting to chat about it until well in to December.

And at said meeting, C and I got talking about Alexander Skarsgård for some reason, and she asked me if I'd seen the Murderbot TV show so I said I liked it okay but not as much as I liked the books. She said she hadn't read them, and I was like oh you really should try, I'd love to know what you think of them. And when S said she hadn't read them either, I said "Okay, that's it, I've got my book sorted, I'm gonna make you all read the first Murderbot book."

After the great but lengthy book we'd read (There are Rivers in the Sky; I really recommend it!), and over the break, I thought something quick and light would be good and the first "book," like the next few, is only about four hours long in audio form. So when someone asked if it was worth buying them all at once I explained this, and also emphasized that while I'm not the only audiobook-preferrer in our club, I'd recommend it for this because I think Kevin R. Free adds a lot to the stories -- having originally read them in audio myself, I can't imagine the books, or Murderbot, without him (I thought Mr. Skarsgård did a passable job at sounding right, for this reason).

Now we're back at work, some people like S haven't finished that first one, but C is on to Book 6 -- which I haven't even read yet, heh. I'm delighted to have introduced her to something she loves. (She agrees with me about the narrator, saying he's "great -- I do find myself saying 'stupid humans' quite a lot at the moment.") She said

It has been great company, in particular listening to it during the early hours of Christmas morning, waiting for the perfect opportunity when both of my darling children were actually asleep so I could deliver their stockings, stop pretending to be Santa, and get some sleep myself!

This image made me grin so much.

Thanks for the nice comments on the previous entry. They, along with just writing it out in the first place and D holding me tight (normally I am the big spoon but he did a great job at it last night!) helped me have an okay night.

D had asked me, after we turned the lights off, if there was anything I wanted to do today -- the family had no real plans beyond making the homemade vegan wellington for my birthday dinner that D's sister had suggested and I'd gotten excited about before I remembered quite how much work it was last year, oops. But D and I helped and it felt a lot less of a production this year.

Anyway, before that we had no plans and I thought it might be nice to get out of the house and see something of Birmingham. We didn't actually make it as far as the city centre but the local high street allowed D to browse charity shops while I got a long-overdue haircut (I went from the longest hair I've had in quite a while to the highest skin fade I've maybe ever had, so it feels like a dramatic difference!), and we went for a very nice birthday lunch.

My birthday present from D might still be trapped in DRM hell but he told me what it is, and The Feminist Art of Walking by his old pal Morag goes very nicely with the birthday present I've already gotten from angelofthenorth, of short walks/hikes around Greater Manchester. I also got a bookshop.org voucher from D's mum, which can be added to the one that comprised the other part of my birthday present from Miriam, so I have to decide what to get there too, which is so fun.

Weirdly, my birthday also marks a year since Gary died. It feels so long ago but also I can still conjure him so clearly in my memory, and there probably hasn't been a day all year that I haven't thought of him. I still miss him so much.

I've had a much better day, and I'm looking forward to being home tomorrow.

I had one of those "leave for London at 6:30 am, get home at 10pm" work days today, so I'm too tired to say much tonight (which is a shame because I was actually there for something interesting this time!).

I will say that on the train to and from I read about half of a book called I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones and I'm enjoying it very much. It is gory, but as usual the real horrors for me are the emotional pain, which this book is describing very well. I just have to be careful about things with teenagers dying...especially in small towns.

According to this, and a new book I maybe have to read now, a gay pioneer in the UK was blind.

In 1960, seven years before the law in the UK changed to permit sex between men, he had written to the national press declaring himself to be gay. Roger believed that the only way to change public opinion about homosexuals was for them to take control of the gay rights movement – and this required them to unashamedly identify themselves on the national stage. But nobody else had been willing to do it.

It's because of his blindness that this person had to come in to his life: an Oxford student, also gay, who could be trusted to read his papers and write and generally be a kind of personal assistant.

To gay when it was illegal, and then to be blind, required a lot of access intimacy when everything was still on paper.

The article ends:

In the years since, it has often led me to wonder how many other quiet revolutionaries live among us, ready to share their stories, if only we knock on their doors.

So many. I'm sure of it.

I read every Cybertruck takedown I find, and this is easily the best.

Tesla’s baking sheet on wheels rides fast in the recall lane toward a dead end where dysfunctional men gather.

That's practically a Springsteen lyric level of vivid poetry.

But the article is really the best because it's written by an indigenous person.

Cybertrucks are sold on tribal land, but they are not in spaces that Native people, or any real truck people, go. They are simply taking our space.

My Indigenous upbringing taught me to give back to this land, which belongs to my ancestors. That value is real and spiritual for me; I remember where I came from. But these cyber-things are made of rare minerals extracted from the land. They give nothing back, only take.

It's also just a love letter to trucks in general (as a friend said, "fuck I have never seen my deep-seated 'little girl in pigtails and a tutu who wants to drive their grandparents' giant F150 that brings back incredible antiques from auctions' articulated so well...." For me, so many chores were done with my dad's and grandpa's pickups, and my first time steering a car was my grandpa putting me on his lap and letting me take the steering wheel when I'd have otherwise been too small to reach it).

I walked [my niece] in her stroller to take in the colors and sounds of classic rides. These trucks are an inheritance for people; they are works of art. Nevaeh, now 9 months old, grins when I seat her behind a white leather steering wheel in a finely crafted truck assembled 50 years earlier. “That’s something you’ve never seen before!” Marco, the truck’s owner, says, smiling at Nevaeh’s focus as a smooth bass drops on the radio.

When we leave and I return her to the car seat, I tell her that she can have her own truck one day to drive and haul things and bond with people she loves.

The survey also found that most Britons (53%) don’t consider listening to an audiobook to be equivalent to having read that same book. Just 29% said that they think of listening to audiobooks to be the same as reading...

Okay.

I don't think it's a very well-worded question.

I don't think audiobooks are "the same" because I prefer to read some kinds of books as audio and others as ebooks.

I think a good narrator can add a lot to a book. (I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration.

I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me.I can't imagine the Murderbot series without Kevin R. Free's amazing narration. I also love Scott Brick as an audiobook reader, he's a big reason that a book about salt has become a comfort re-read for me. Both Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs make Terry Pratchett books better.)

But I don't think that's what people mean here.

I think at least some of those people are saying that audiobooks aren't as good as reading. They're not "real" reading.

And I think that because people regularly say that audiobooks "don't count."

Some of this is the same kind of snobbishness that doesn't even "count" ebooks as "real."

But some of it is specifically ableism.

The article keeps referring to books "read or listened to." The implication is that these aren't the same. Listening isn't reading.

I actually wonder what would happen if braille was explicitly included. Like we don't say that braille users touched a book, we still say they read it.

I'm not in Brussels this weekend, like I was last year.

Last year, D and I did not attend FOSDEM but were in the city that same weekend, went to a "fringe" event at the hackspace, met up with people who were attending.

D didn't attend (I might not have anyway, let's be real) specifically because of its poor policies around covid mitigation, and it seems that this year there's been enough of a sea change or critical mass of people put off by how much FOSDEM has outgrown its venue: insufficient public health provisions, talks being overfull before people have a chance of getting in the room, and what sounds like overcrowding to the extent of actual safety concerns around fire or people just getting crushed. I guess it's been described as physically difficult to move around amid all the people.

Someone who was there who we didn't get to hang out with as planned was an online pal of mine, Anna e só. They were a keynote speaker at FOSDEM last year. And while they had a free day at the end of the conference where we'd intended to meet up, they found thsmelf so exhausted by that point that they had to stay in their room and rest that day.

They have contributed to something called #FluConf this year, and I hope their piece gets the huge audience deserves. It's about their experience at FOSDEM last year, and the necessity of moving away from "FOSDEM as the only important conference or the only significant way we can cross paths and find each other."

What they describe in the volunteers being interested in their blindness and their individual experiences when they want to talk about systemic issues is so familiar to me too.

I think their thinking and their writing are so clear, I really admire it. I hope they get what they're calling for.

(Me this morning: never heard of Crowdstrike

Me until this afternoon: assumed Crowdstrike was a video game)

I'm 3/4 of the way through Deb Chachra's excellent How Infrastructure Works, so having a day of people talking about all these systems that are usually so transparent (in that we don't see it) and opaque (in that we don't understand it) just feels like a continuation of the book!

Stories about 999 using paper and pens, and passengers unable to get on planes but empty planes have to fly to get to where they're expected to be next, make a lot more sense in the mindset this book has gotten me in to!