Kathleen > Recent Status Updates

Ah! I can’t take the plot twists now! Is Irratino alive or dead? Is it all Dame Obsidian’s fault or President Midnight’s? On the upside I finally have a method down to testing false statements, presuming I don’t myself make an error in recording the clues 😆

A curious child emboldened by parents willing to quietly rebel against convention becomes a world-leading human-centered AI expert. Interested to learn how Li’s budding passion for physics turns to the digital world

Reanimation and medical cannibalism… NOPE. Not for me. Perhaps the only silver lining is we meet saintly Chinese translator Sandy Won, who helps Roach ask insulting questions and investigate Chinese cannibalism rumors while traveling in Southwest China

Chapter on brain-dead, « beating-heart » cadavers is probably Roach’s best so far. The ethical line here does feel more murky and subjective than other cases assembled

I’m getting irritated by how often Roach inserts herself into this reporting. Every chapter seems to be a reflection on the degree of humanity of cadavers, a theme explicitly pushed by the journalist rather than emerging from the way people in industries involving dead bodies interact with them

Yep. The line where my curiosity ends is maggots. Can imagine why no one else has written an authoritative book on this yet. Looks like we’ll be cataloguing all the things you could use cadavers for… like anatomy labs and CSI research

Aiy this topic may even be too gnarly for me. But I’ve laughed out loud a few times already: « this is a book about notable achievements made while dead. » And Yvonne the anatomy lab manager / The Beheader! Still unsure about the audiobook narrator

C’est un grande changement pour Adjoua, de l’élève à maman et marchande. Je me demande combien de temps Aya voudrait faire la nounou. Y Bintou es sur le point de répéter la même erreur avec son gars parisien 😬

Oh wow, Beard references her own rape to posit that we need to know more about how men self-justify their sexual exploitation of women. So it can be deconstructed as Beard has done for why silencing women’s speech and excluding women from power is tacitly accepted. I suppose Gisèle Pelicot’s choice of a public trial for her rapists as the fulfillment of that wish…

Interesting idea: “Decoupling power from public prestige… thinking of power as an attribute or verb rather than a possession: the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually.”

Women’s speech is not, according to the Classical tradition, public speech. Men get violent when women attempt to participate in serious discourse, presumably emasculating them by taking their place. Exceptions can be made when speaking as a victim or when speaking as a representative of women collectively, thereby not displacing a man. Jokes about the shrill tone of women’s voices are 1000s of years old

Getting into a good rhythm solidifying facts, ruling out impossibilities, and testing the lies. The time to stop is when I realize I’m just reading the clues wrong 😵‍💫

Yep I’d forgotten about the previous faked death. Guess the author had run out of murder material 😉 Reflecting on the new meta-mystery to untie

I cry every time that Ressa holds the line and every time someone shows up for her, despite the risks. So needless to say I am crying a lot 🥹

Okay, nice, she synthesized it: « Facebook didn’t just provide a platform for or enable hate speech, it gave it preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s profit machine… Violence has made Facebook rich. » Also notably is Rezza’s humility looking back and admitting she didn’t understand what was happening as her credibility was being destroyed

Well this turned hard down the « academic treatise against Facebook » lane. I respect the dedicated approach to data collection. Then why does the critique still come off as abstract… 🤔

Ressa is the mood booster I needed. She is definitive, observant, and definitely not adrift in a life other people define for her

It’s refreshing to see even Poirot double-crossed in succession. Gets your brain turning to avoid the past mistake while anticipating the next fake-out

Haha, I love how predictably and totally wrong Hastings’ judgement is. Poirot deliberately employs him as an assistant to throw his enemies off the scent 😂

Agatha Christie palate cleanser. Though apparently these serially published short stories were later reworked to fit more cohesively into a novel. No matter. I just want to listen to Poirot’s outrageously narrated accent

Hypocritical, aimless, obsessed with their own feelings more than a sense of purpose. If that’s not a dystopian youth vision what is

For those of you who have also made it 25 hours of listening into this book: the mosquitos finally make sense

Good riddance Lionel Banda. And when you find out who Isabella’s hit-and-run victim was, you can agree it was justified.

Hats off to narrator Andoh: her ability to code-switch between South African / Zim, American, and British-educated Zambian accents is bang on and so funny 🤣🤩

Talking to myself greatly improves my ability to translate logical deductions across the puzzle grid matrix 😆

Things no one asked for: personified mosquitos

And there goes Troy. Much slaying of everyone in myriad ways. It was good day to be Antenor and be able to call in the favor of having put up the Greek princes last they were in town. Not a good day to be Hector’s baby Astyanax

Cassandra and Laocoön the only ones who see it coming… is Odysseus embarrassed waiting inside the house that they guessed the plot so precisely? Perhaps thematically what’s important is that Troy falls not (really) by Greek scheme but by intimation and their own ignorance

Talk about emotional whiplash, Oenone. 🙄

Neoptolemus kicking ass and taking names, despite quality smack-talk from the Trojan princes. Zeus finally agrees to let this war end, though it will be four more chapters of death beforehand