cherith

I wanted to spend the afternoon lying in bed, reading, as the raindrops splashed against the window, but the weather didn't play ball, and I'd already finished my book before the rain arrived. Nevertheless, it's been a cosy couple of days, aided by a day off on Friday in which I did very little besides go swimming, chat on FaceTime with my sister and then my mum in quick succession, and sit out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar with Matthias for a pre-dinner drink.

Yesterday, I was in Cambridge during the morning to get my hair cut, and also took the opportunity to refill all my spice jars at the health food shop that does refills. We do have a zero waste shop in Ely, but it only does refills of oils and vinegars, legumes, grains, nuts and dried fruit, and toiletries and cleaning products.

Matthias and I watched The Ballad of Wallis Island as our Saturday film last night. We'd meant to see this at the community cinema a few weeks ago, but ended up being sick with a cold, and we had to abandon those plans; thankfully it was available to rent on streaming fairly swiftly. It's a film that starts off being hilariously awkward, and awkwardly hilarious — an eccentric fan hires the two halves of his favourite (disbanded) folk duo for a private concert on a remote island, and all the artistic, professional, and romantic tensions that caused the pair to break up a decade ago come bubbling to the surface — and ends up sweet and emotionally affecting, without ever feeling saccharine.

This morning Matthias and I woke unprompted at about 6am, which I actually don't mind on the weekends — there's something nice about being awake at a time most people are asleep, watching the sunlight spread across the garden, lingering over breakfast and coffee, wandering around the cathedral and along the river, looking at smoke curling out of the houseboat chimneys, as the town slowly wakes up. We were back home by midmorning, and I baked an apple cake — an experiment that turned out successfully. I'm not a very good baker, and I'm worried that if I put more effort into it, I'll start treating it as I do cooking. I had to restrain myself from buying a stand mixer there and then (which would definitely do the job better than the whisk attachment on my handheld blender — which sent butter and sugar flying around the room — but which would also only enable me in this insanity).

I was a bit burnt out by reading, and therefore only finished a single book this week — Those Beyond the Wall (Micaiah Jonhson) — which I read essentially in an entire sitting this afternoon. It's a follow up to Johnson's incredible dystopian multiverse extractive capitalism critique, The Space Between Worlds, involving many of the same characters, but focusing not on the privileged elitist tech company town, but rather on the Mad Max-esque community eking out an existence on its periphery, sustained both by an incredibly codified violent honour culture, and an incredibly intense sense of community cohesion (residents may be terrified by the violence of their existence, but they would prefer that at least their own people are the ones inflicting it). As with The Space Between Worlds, it's both a plausible future endpoint of, and an incredibly unsubtle metaphor for, the history and contemporary politics of the United States (in this case colonisation and the genocidal displacement of the land's original inhabitants), but written with such exquisite worldbuilding and interpersonal dynamics between the characters that I can definitely forgive a lack of subtlety. I find the ending a bit too tidy and convenient, but hey, if Johnson wants to indulge the fantasy that it's possible to reveal a society's injustices to its citizens in a way that will inspire them to react en masse, who am I to stop her?

ETA: Updating with a second book — Sunbringer (Hannah Kaner), the second in her epic fantasy Fallen Gods trilogy. As with many second books in epic fantasy trilogies, this one sees our ragtag band of misfit heroes artificially separated for most of the book, so we miss out on the fun character dynamics that come from throwing together a bunch of mismatching individuals and seeing sparks fly, but it's still a lot of fun. My favourite part of this series is the way it conceptualises gods and deities, and how people understand and practice religion in a world where the divine is tangible and present (and terrifying). The double crossing, shocking reveals, and twisty political machinations come thick and fast, setting things up for what should hopefully be a satisfying concluding third book in the series.

The rain has started in earnest, and the sky is a mass of white. The house smells of cooked apples and brown sugar, and things couldn't be more cosy if they tried.

Happy Friday, everyone! I'm on Day 1 of a four-day weekend (to use up some annual leave that needed to be claimed by the end of September), and life is good.

Today's prompt is inspired by the fact that I'm on the final day of contributing to a long-running (presumably) market research project by Ipsos. I first ended up involved with this due to answering the door to some Ipsos recruiters many years ago when we still lived in the rental place in Cambridge, and I've been contributing to this project on an annual basis ever since. It involves logging media/internet usage and other activities every half-hour for a week, and then filling in a big survey about media and internet usage, leisure and consumer activities and so on, and I assume is used for market research around demographics, internet usage, and consumer behaviour, based on the kinds of questions being asked. It's very little work for the incentive — £40 in shopping vouchers (which this year was increased to £50) — so I'm always happy to keep doing this, since responses are anonymised.

So my prompt is as follows: have you ever been the subject of research (whether market research like this, or academic research at a university)? What was involved?

In addition to this Ipsos thing, I used to sign up for linguistics and psychology research projects back when I was a postgraduate student, although I always felt the amount of effort involved wasn't worth whatever they paid you at the end, which was usually £10, or a £10 Amazon voucher or similar. Once I had to lie in an MRI machine for close to an hour, and respond to images being shown to me. It's hard enough being in an MRI machine when it's for a medical reason, but I swore never again to put myself through that kind of unpleasantness for a research project.

What about you?