Recent Reading, Spring 2020

Hello hypothetical readers,

Life here is a notch or two up on the difficulty scale here at Broadhead Cottage. We’re safe and healthy overall but there’s certainly a weight over things, like a weighted blanket you’d love to get out from under. I’m going to put all that aside, as I said, we’re safe and healthy, we’ve still got jobs.

What have I been reading you ask?

Email, of course, some of it deeply good. I love Craig Mod’s newsletters. I already felt them to be a major balm for my life & mental health and lovely encouragement to walk more. Here’s a brief excerpt from his most recent edition of Ridgeline:

The route had almost nothing but the fields — no restaurants or places to stop aside from some sad wayward convenience stores. I made the mistake of eating the wrong convenience store thing, realizing I had done so twenty minutes later, and coming within seconds of fertilizing some unsuspecting farmer’s patty. Instead I saw yet another convenience store off in the distance, sprinted, and then realized I had also found the saddest toilet in all of Japan.

Ridgeline 070: Kodomo-no-hi

I’m also, slowly, reading both Moby Dick and 3 Musketeers.

I’m planning a writing retreat for myself in July & August, I have a block of twenty vacation days and I’m going to spend a couple of hours sitting at a computer, writing. (or, in a hammock in the shad of the hundred-year-old white pines that we share our yard with.) I got a copy of what looks to be a very good book on fiction writing, one that balances as it says in its introduction the analytical and creative requirements of fiction writing. I’m very much looking forward to it.

I’ve inevitably got 4 or 6 other creative projects of one kind or another I’m also working on, so I’ll reserve afternoons this summer for those pursuits as well. I’ve got a couple of websites I’d like to build and a publishing project or two I’d love to get off the ground this month.

Do anything, do something

Hello from my home office.

I’ve been walking outside more, never as much as I’d like. I’ve been drinking tea and sitting with a book for a few minutes in the afternoon. I’ve been working to be kind to myself, to set meaningful, attainable, goals. I’ve been doing yoga more consistently. I’ve started to take two minutes a few times a day, get up from my desk and do some exercises. I’ve been trying to learn to spell ‘exercise’ not ‘excercise.’

I hope you, hypothetical reader, are finding the things which help you manage and maybe even find some victories amid the ongoing chaos here in our Jackpot.

Lichen on White Pine (detail), taken with a GF1, March 30, 2020

I’m working on things in my job that I enjoy, most days, and have made space to do some self-taught programming stuff during the work day that I’ve been struggling to allow myself to do since it’s the sort of learning with a long-term payoff on the order of “do lots of things a bit better and faster while doing some things less now.” Working my way through this programming book over the next month or so.

I’ve always got three or six things I’m ‘working on’ that are small, creative things: craft projects for lack of a better word. Little software things that resemble games, micro-publishing projects, small electronics things or websites or little essays here. I am trying to make space for these things, accomplish a bit, do some novel cooking, make some bread.

This is the good bread I made for Feaster, we ate good food and I spent a lot of the day baking. It was as good as can be and it was nice to spend a lot of the day in the kitchen. (Which we’re in the process of renovating/paying a friend to help us with paint & carpentry.)

Chessie got me these little note pads above, a little daily affirmation for myself of ‘three things’ in my case ‘three things I want to do that I don’t have to do that will make me feel good and/or better. So, I think that fits in very well with what I’ve been describing here: do something, anything, that’ll help you through that’ll make you feel better, more equipped to help yourself, those your with and those you’re not. Remember the things you love to do and try to do them. Knit the sweater, play the video game, hem the skirt, make the bookshelf, weed the garden, take the long walk: make space to be kind to yourself.

Monday Night Risotto

A few weeks ago I read an article Chessie sent to me:
Cooking Complex, Time-Consuming Meals Taught Me to Be Patient With Myself 

This article is very good. A great reminder about doing things for their own sakes, that good things take time, and that your kitchen should always be filled with music.

I came across this recipe from Smitten Kitchen here for a risotto with leeks and bacon.

Cooking bacon, warming stock, chopping onions.

We replaced the light in the kitchen on Saturday, so there’s brighter, warmer light in our small kitchen. We’ve been doing a lot of work lately to build good habits and make the house as calm and relaxing a place as possible. Making the bed every day, making sure all the dishes are done and put away and wipe down the counters, clear the dining room table and make sure all the chairs are pushed in. A place for everything and everything in its right place.

In the spirit of the article above, I listened to some music while I prepped the ingredients and prepared myself to stand at the stove stirring for half an hour.
I listened to:

  • John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
  • John Coltrane – Giants Steps
  • Bill Evans – Everybody Digs Bill Evans

I made a spotify playlist here of those three records.

It was a good meal and a good way to spend an evening. I forget sometimes to play music and really listen to it and doing something like stirring a pot gives me a little bit more space to pay attention to the music.

Reading: January & February 2019

I’ve resolved to spend more time reading in 2019, with some more focus on short stories.

I resolved, in what is my only specific New Year’s resolution, to read 100 short stories in 2019, in addition to reading about the same amount, in total, of material as I did last year split among short fiction, novels and other things like non-fiction.

In January, I mostly started reading books I didn’t finish reading that same month. I started reading Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, a volume of Richard Matheson’s short fiction, a graphic novel, On a Sunbeam which Chessie got me for Christmas.

Books I finished reading in January were all ones I’m counting toward my goal of reading 100 stories in 2019. I enjoyed the ebook I read of Ursula K. Le Guin: The Stars Below. That story did an astounding job of making you feel close to the main character and to feel his loss and how he grows to replace that loss with some substitute that amounts to either passion or madness.

In thinking about the short stories and novellas I’ve been reading so far this year and at the tail end of last year, I think reading them in one sitting is critical. I read a Zelazny story, He Who Shapes but did so over the course of an entire week and I think that sapped it of its impact.

The other side of the Tor double novel was Kate Wilhelm’s The Infinity Box a story which I hated intensely for its main character who thinks about his conscience without allowing it to stir him and who is rendered vaguely except in his increasing disregard for anything but ongoing, total control of another person’s body. The character’s actions were disgusting and I finished it only to see if the story would see him punished or his victim overcome his domination but which ended with the narrator questioning the reality of their entire experience as possibly unreal. This seems a tremendous copout that pulls the rug out from any moral stand the story might be making. It’s possible I am just a poor reader of the story but I have to roll my eyes at the decision to reprint, let alone publish in the first place a story which ends on a rhetorical question worthy of a stoned creative writing student and destroyed what was in places a very good short story. That hamstringing of an ending is a big part of why I’m so angry about this story and it’s failure to deliver a meaningful, profound or even satisfying conclusion.

Being able to sit quietly and consume an entire book is always a great pleasure and the short story and novella allow you to do so more often. Tor and Subterranean Press often publish the perfect little books at 80 or 100 pages which perfectly scratch that itch. One late afternoon I sat down and read Warren Ellis’s novella Dead Pig Collector in a single sitting and have done that a few times with a story or two from the little Penguin volume of Matheson stories I’ve also been reading.

Those stories are all, as with the Twilight Zone adaptations little master classes in getting precisely to the point. They’re sparse little mechanisms that spring the terrifying or surprising little trap on you. In fact, them seem to work best when they’re simplest as in Counterfeit Bills, Shipshape Home, and Button, Button and less so when there’s more scene setting and world-building crammed into so small a space.

I haven’t made much time for reading lately and have felt either overwhelmed or unfocused at work, when I might normally read over my lunch break and too busy at home to carve out much time except my bedside reading of The Odyssey.

Cubesat Catalog

There appears to have been a lot of work in the last few years around the “small launch” segment of the spaceflight industry. Lots of companies are designing, building or flying rockets to compete for the market in getting small payloads into LEO, which has previously been done with extra space inside second-stage fairings in larger rockets.

So I’ve been wondering, how many of these have flown to date and what exactly have they been designed to do? Is there more going on in these small satellites than minor technical feasibility demonstrations? Do they all have low and quickly degrading orbits that don’t even allow them to do much useful work? How do they compare to early satellites from the first decades of spaceflight?

Via the wikipedia page on Cuebsats, I came across this astoundingly detailed website / database of cubesats which appears to be comprehensive: http://www.nanosats.eu/  

2 Cubesats in orbit
Image via NASA’s
CubeSat Launch Initiative Overview Page

The below chart of companies with constellation of small satellites is a little bit staggering, even if you only look at those companies which have already managed constellations of some size.

So, you can see that most of the satellites were launched by Planet and they’ve been doing so for years. They seem to have built a business on small, short lived 3U cubesats and selling access to the remote sensing data they collect. They offer some free access to their data for educators and students here.

The example here from Planet’s page for academics shows “Reef Atoll Damage” in the South China Sea, which is an interesting way to describe what could just as well be Chinese Naval base construction in one of the most hotly contested bodies of water in the world, in a clear nod to the ongoing and obvious important of remote sensing in all sorts of intelligence work. (Especially as one of their products allows you to request imaging of a particular area on demand. Why be a superpower with billions of dollars in clandestine remote sensing operations when you can just subcontract the whole thing out to these guys?)

Most of the orbits are fairly quick decaying, as you’d expect, but there have recently been two Deep Space cube-sats that were used as relays in the recent landing of NASA’s Mars Insight Lander. (As seen in this rendering below, via Wikipedia.)

NASA's
NASA’s MarCO CubeSats

The graphs below from Nanosats.eu gives a great idea of just how long any of these satellites can expect to stay up for given their orbits.

Most of those SSO (Sun Synchronous Orbit) satellites at 500km do various kinds of Earth-Observing work in roughly polar orbits, such as Spire, which appears to do weather and ship tracking in a slightly different remote sensing vein from Planet. Spire has a much more cyberpunk website and I approve of their aesthetic choices.

As new launch vehicles come online and the number of launches likely grow, I look forward to seeing more and more companies like Planet and Spire, ideally with a name like Wintermute.

Space Launch Report’s Worldwide Space Launch Box Score put 2018 at 114 launches, the first time since 1990 that there have been more than 100 launches in a year. I hope 2019 sees a similar worldwide cadence of 2 launches a week.