we will be remembered as wives

after a lively thread about sandworm abuse on work Slack, i decided i was overdue for a Dune reread.

i zipped through it in a few days. damn, i love that book. one of the things i find particularly striking is how many details i retain from it. (there are many books that are more of a 'warm feeling' in memory than an accurate set of details - in a bad non-plague year i read a minimum of a book a week so i can't expect to devote too much permanent storage to them.) it also says something about the power of fiction that i actively hate desert climates, get physically ill in that level of dryness, and two of my all-time favorites feature desert life.* for rereaders, i enjoyed putting on Weapon of Choice while reading the sequence where they're crossing the open sand.

for folks who haven't tried it - if you enjoyed watching Game of Thrones, this has all the politics and adventure with less tits and more ecology. you can skip reading the sequels and prequels, Dune is nicely self-contained. (in a fit of optimism i decided to try reading Dune Messiah for the first time since my first trip, where i got through four before sputtering out on the fifth one. nope nope, just read the first one. knowing the future of Arrakis is not worth seeing the sausage made.)

i am cautiously optimistic about the new movie; many choices i've seen in pictures look good but it's still not crystal-clear that they will do stillsuits correctly (only the eyes are exposed). i'm fine with making Liet a black woman instead of a blond (presumably white) man (although it may reinforce the white savior narrative rather than increasing the natural diversity of the cast in the way it should). fingers crossed. who knows when we'll ever see it anyway :/


*yes, yes, The Blue Sword has white savior problems too.

he sewed his pockets closed to keep out drafts

i volunteered to do the last dog walk of the day and let C finish watching his soccer match, which means podcast time.

tonight it was Fiber Nation, on Gunnister Man (there's plenty of text and links on the landing page if you don't feel inclined to listen). basically a beautifully preserved set of wool clothes were found in an isolated peat bog in the Shetland Islands in the 50s; the person who had worn the clothes had rotted away, but the clothes remained. the podcast is the story of the painstaking effort to recreate the clothing for display in a local museum, and what the clothing and its composition can tell us about where this unknown person came from and why they might have been in the middle of nowhere in the first place.