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Spectacular thunderstorm tonight.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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Henrik Carlsson posted this
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Spectacular thunderstorm tonight.
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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Well that turned out to be a much more interesting night than I had planned. Ebbe threw a tantrum and refused to go to sleep in the hotel room. Probably too many new things at ones. The only place he felt good was in the stroller so he and I went on a late night walk in downtown Gävle.
Just to be clear to international readers, in Sweden it’s extremely uncommon to walk around downtown with a child in a stroller at midnight. Uncommonly enough actually for a police car to stop next to us and chat to us for a while. They probably wanted to make sure I was not some kind of crazy person.
Anyway, once we had walked for a while he fell asleep and we are now back at the way too hot hotel room.
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Today we spent the day at Furuvik, a theme park an hours drive from our home. Tonight we’ll sleep at a hotel in Gävle.
I’d be lying if I said that it has been smooth sailing all day. Getting everybody ready on time in the morning is a pain, and traveling with picky eaters is never fun, but on the whole we had a great day. Ebbe and I spent a long time in the animal park part of Furuvik while Linn and Iris went on rides (carousels?) and then we all met up for more rides. Turns out both my children loves that.
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and tagged it with Andy Weir Reading Seveneves The Martian 
Earlier today I started listening to The Martian by Andy Weir. I wasn’t really sure what I was in for but so far I love it. I see a lot of similarities to Seveneves actually. Space, dire situation, people desperately trying to solve problems both big and small with whatever they’ve got at hand.
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and tagged it with Altan Deck Huset snapshots The House 
Henrik Carlsson posted this
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and tagged it with Children They say sharks must keep swimming to stay alive. I wonder if children believes the same applies to themselves and making sounds – talking, screaming, singing, clicking their tongues, anything – with their mouths?
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and tagged it with Reading The Stand TV shows I was just listening to the last few chapters of The Stand and thought about how the ending of the 2020 TV show was better than the novel because it didn’t drag on so much. It ended nice and clean after the stand in Vegas.
Boy was I wrong. There’s apparently an entire episode that we missed.
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and tagged it with Stephen King The Stand Tom Cullen’s brain grew three sizes that day…
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and tagged it with Rational thinking Seveneves The Stand It’s quite an interesting contrast to read Seveneves and The Stand directly after one another. How do we solve impending doom? Do we work hard and apply our best science and minds to the problem, or do we have faith in a god and blindly follow directions that we suppose are given by it?
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and tagged it with Adaptations The Stand TV shows I drove to pick up groceries today and listened more to The Stand and realized that I’d only written about things in the tv series favor yesterday and two things that are much better in the book came to mind.
First, Las Vegas. At least thus far in the book (Chapter 81) it’s far from the depraved sex party of the tv show. The shows depiction of the city of Flagg seems like ”bait” for the modern tv audience who expects som T&A in their shows. It’s more appealing, and frightening, when it’s more similar to Boulder.
Secondly, Larry Underwood. That character remains fairly undeveloped in the show, at least to my recollection. He is a much more interesting character in the novel.
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Replies and comments
V_
8 juli, 2021 15:38@MrHenko certainly an intriguing combination. But both of these books also have a lot in common, I think now. Both are slow starting behemoths and then take unexpected turns all along.
MrHenko
8 juli, 2021 16:02@V_ Yes indeed, they have a lot in common. Which makes the contrast in approach by their respective characters even more different.
Another thing they have in common is that I could make a compelling argument why both of them should be shortened to almost half their length, while I could make just as compelling an argument why both should be twice as long.
One more interesting difference between them is the authors approach to the science involved. If King were Stephenson, the parts about winding the coils at the power plant would include a lot of infodumps about the relation between the width of the coil, the length and gauge of the wire and the power they can pass. :)
V_
9 juli, 2021 16:37@MrHenko, I can follow your argument to shorten both books – whereas I would shorten the Stand more than Seveneves. The latter, I would actually like to have more of the last part. The new age felt quite rushed compared to the beginning.
And the part about the wire gauges and lengths is so true :-D
MrHenko
11 juli, 2021 00:52@V_ I agree, if I could add length to just one of them it would be Seveneves. I’d happily have read a ”Book 4: Another 1000 years later”.
And I just finished The Stand and realized that I’d missed an entire episode of the tv adaptation that I watched earlier this year but I liked how I thought the show ended, just after the big thing in Vegas. I don’t need to know about the rest, really, so the book could end there as well.
Still, I wouldn’t have minded it being another 200 pages longer and full of Stephenson-esque digressions.