Fun little tidbit to tighten your trolling knickers: The finance minister of Israel said they intend to “entirely destroy” Gaza. They are doing this by raining fire upon it, from the White Phosphorus attacks going years before October 7th, to bombing hospitals and schools, and burning aid convoys and covering the ashes with sand so they don’t have to look at their crimes.

Did you know that we have a word in the English language (and most others with Greek roots) that means, literally, “to entirely destroy by fire”?

That’s right, the word is fucking “Holocaust”.

Oh, no, the only ones I haven’t read yet are ghostwritten and number9dream.

And I agree with the order notes. My very out-of-order sequence was Cloud Atlas (the movie introduced me to the book), then Slade House, Black Swan Green, Bone Clocks, Thousand Autumns, Utopia Avenue.

And I agree that reading the bone clocks before thousand autumns didn’t actually make Marinus and the Anchorites make less sense without Enomoto and Dejima for context.

However, if I had read Utopia Avenue without any of the others (except Slade House and Black Swan Green), I think I would have had no idea what was going on. As it stands, the main reason I want to read ghostwritten is because I feel like I’m missing out on the context of “the Mongolian” from Utopia Avenue. I think that, in the same way that Cloud Atlas acted as a bridge into his world, Utopia Avenue was almost a culmination of his works thus far. I think that, without them, Jasper de Zoet’s character and, for that matter, the whole story, would have been nigh-incomprehensible to me.

^This person has witnessed Arrakis

Absolutely. Since I’m not really into the music scene, I thought I wouldn’t enjoy Utopia avenue, but I honestly think it’s my second-favorite of his works. I am about to start Ghostwritten, though will probably stop there, because I really don’t think number9dream is for me. I’m really not a fan of unsatisfying stories or bildungsroman, and I’ve read that n9d is both. What’s your take?

I enjoyed Black Swan Green, in spite of its bildungsroman plot, but It wasn’t my favourite (though it wasn’t my least-favourite, because that dubious honour has to go to Slade House, which I read before the Bone Clocks, and which I expected to have a MUCH better puzzlebox feel. I felt betrayed when I realized that the alchemical symbology and map of the house on the inside cover of my first-edition copy was all meaningless, especially when the climax was just a deus-ex-horologia before I knew who Marinus was)

• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Cloud Atlas
• 1984

Especially after he explicitly tells Job that he is the progenitor of all evil and is proud of that fact.

HAHA, if nothing else, that’s certainly a justification.

Fair, I like that analogy. I realized that the way I phrased it sounded rather dismissive of the practices which, honestly, I am, but it seemed overly harsh, so I deleted it

deleted by creator

You forgot to defend the conservative ideal of the Roman empire as the supreme fascist state! You need to talk about how the romans allowed the free market (with the guiding hand of daddy imperator) to determine where the money should go! Tell them that the money was used to build roads, not for trade, but to march their very manly soldiers on against the commies and the libs!

I hear there’s a well-known company that started taking tourists down to it a few years back! They were all over the press! Sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Ah, essentially, the person said “this claim of 80 chemicals is meaningless, and can only be a scaremongering tactic!”

1. in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
2. they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of “steel”, and told you that it’s good, because it’s “recycled”, so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don’t know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said “hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!”, right? That’s because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the “recycling” process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it “close enough”.
3. I likened this person’s attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the “normal” amount of lead was the same as the “natural” amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn’t until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.

Be the change you don’t want to see in the world: sell him some “new clothes”.

Just people deciding that divorcing a statement from its context (plastics manufacturing) is sufficient to say that no alarm need be raised. As I said: Robert Kehoe.

After it’s been exposed to use and light for who knows how long, and after being melted together at high temperatures, inevitably higher than the decomposition temperatures of at least a few of the dyes and additives in there, because precisely zero effort has been put in to purify it before being slagged? Yes I will turn my nose up, and you should too. No self-respecting chemist sniffs chemical cocktails of unknown provenance.

ETA: Also, your clothing note is a completely false equivalence, because the chemical at issue here is polyethylene, which has a far greater range and prevalence of additives than those polymers you named for use in clothing.

Indeed, they make BOTH. If you haven’t tried their root beer, you need to. I can’t drink any other sarsaparilla/sassafras beverage now.

That’s almost fair. The difference is: a banana is a living organism, and very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them. This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic. If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

Brushing this off with some trite banana comparison is just making a Robert Kehoe out of yourself.

Thanks! Edited to account for “and other additives”

Sucrose and cellulose are different-length chains of sugars, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same. Also, all of the additives in the many different types of melted-together plastic would beg to differ with your assessment.

As a chemist, but without organics specialization (my specialty is rocks), I think that what we’re seeing here is a collection of three main things, aside from polyethylene:

1. decomposition byproducts: plastics break down under heat, stress and in light. It’s not surprising that some of their breakdown byproducts might be found in plastic that has been melted into a new shape.
2. dyes: plastic is dyed with different additives, and there are a LOT of different colors of plastic being recycled. They usually try to keep the colors generally consistent among batches for recycling, but the dyes that make a sprite bottle green are different from the ones that make a dasani bottle teal.
3. Plasticizers and other additives: the things the corporations add to their plastics just to eke out that 1 cent of savings from thinner, more durable plastic, or to get the texture just right, are insane. These are things like BPA. There are loads of them, and every plastic has different types. Some of them also have different heat tolerances, but it’s not like the recyclers are keeping track.

So, yeah, be afraid. There’s a metric fuckton of shit in there, and literally no one knows what it all is, let alone how much of it made it through the manufacturing, use, recycling and manufacturing process without becoming prone to leaching. Virtually all plastic recycling is a scam perpetrated by the corporations to get us to blithely ignore how they are destroying the planet to save money, all while convincing us to blame ourselves.