take your shoes off, dance in the rain

Adding two more Outer Wilds LPs that I am enjoying, though I haven't finished either, as I'm playing them in snippets in the background as I do other things.

WhimsyPsyche (youtube playlist)
Someone in her comments described her as Riebeck, which is true because she's a thorough player who enjoys the detail as she puts the story together, but she's also battling a fear of space (with some vertigo in there, it sounds like) as she plays, which is really brave IMO. She has pleasant commentary, recognizes Solanum really quick and gets invested in the story, but there are a handful of times where (and this is totally something I would do as a player) she panic-rushes a bit under the time crunch and misses important info, but she comes back to what she misses later, so it works out.

Cynthetic (youtube playlist)
I'm still very early in her playthrough but she's a thorough and observant player who figured out the existence of the Quantum Moon while checking out the map for the first time in the Observatory, and there's more where that came from. She also had a tremendously lucky run with the Tower of Quantum Knowledge, before she even knew it was a puzzle.

I'm almost halfway through H2O: Just Add Water's last season, and have finished four different Filipino mermaid-centric teleseryes, so I thought it's time to tentatively check out what Indonesian media has to offer. After browsing various wikis and doing a basic search for a starting point, I now have a list of fifteen (!!!!) pieces of Indonesian media about mermaids, of which three are films and eleven are TV shows.

Where to start, I thought. Maybe chronologically? I looked up the earliest show on youtube, which is 2001 TV show Putri Duyung. Which is a very slapstick, very cartoonish show that feels more like a series of skits made on a budget of 10 dollars than a show, and the main mermaid is a born-sexy-yesterday mermaid who gets to look innocent and do dumb things. Very not for me, and very much a style I would have to have grown up with to get, I would guess.

Fine, I thought. How about checking out the earliest film on the list instead, which is a 1985 film also titled Putri Duyung and ( cut for sexual violence in fiction. )

This is not a strong start, to put it mildly!

This was a fun and stressful read! I'm supposed to be alternating between books of my old unread pile and new unread pile, but after reading two books in a row I didn't enjoy, I decided to try something on the side of likelier to enjoy, which is from the new unread pile, and it is Lucy Inglis' Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium, and indeed it was an enjoyable read, phew.

Earlier this year I read a book about the Opium War and I totally did not realize I'd also gotten another book about opium. If I could go back I'dve read this one first for its overview look at the history of opium (and its derivatives) before focusing down on the Opium Wars, but this is still good.

Inglis' book is quite expansive but it feels satisfying, and not like it's just skimming the surface. (Which it still is, but it doesn't feel it, as it's painting enough of a picture.)

The early chapters go back through history through the early uses of poppy products as found through archeology or in the historical record, then going through the medieval era and the early modern era as medicinal knowledge changes hands and empirical studies start to be a thing, to the colonial era and laudanum and the industrial revolution that scaled up production and casual medicinal use (all those medicines for children!), through the movement of Chinese immigrants and the gold rush, Prohibition and understanding addiction, the world wars and other wars as new kinds of hypocrisies are found (eg. don't grow poppy! But we need morphine for combat medicine, so....) and wrapping up with Afghanistan as the biggest producer of opium, and modern day heroin use and addiction treatment.

In effect, this is really a history book about global medicine and global trade, but through the specific lens of opium. And fascinating for that, really, with interesting asides about the geographical distribution of the use opium derivatives (Japan prefers meth to heroin, as an example, apparently) and how different types of organized crime took form in response to war or economic opportunity or gaps that are turned a blind eye to by those in power (like due to post-WWII's of fear of communism), and the systems in place to promote or restrict or treat and how they succeed but also fail in unexpected ways.