User Profile

Fionnáin

fionnain@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 2 months ago

I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.

I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.

Also on Mastodon.

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Fionnáin's books

Currently Reading (View all 13)

Samantha Harvey: Orbital (2023, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

Above the pale blue dot

5 stars

Orbital is a novel that seems to go nowhere except round and round, and yet it grows into a cacophony of story during its brief and deceptive simplicity.

On the surface, it is a well researched, character-driven fiction about four astronauts and two cosmonauts orbiting the earth in a vessel for scientific observation. However, this container becomes a device for Samantha Harvey to collapse progress, poverty, climate change, ambition, grief and hope into a tiny vessel. All too often we are reminded that only a few inches of metal protect [us?] from complete doom, such is the fragility of life. Beautifully written and concise, this book was a terrific surprise.

Samantha Harvey: Orbital (2023, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

We're windblown leaves. We think we're the wind, but we're just the leaf. And isn't it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren't we so insecure a species that we're forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what's different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing.

Orbital by  (Page 106)

One of the story's astronauts, Shawn, musing on a question he has been asked to answer: How are we writing the future of humanity?

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Samantha Harvey: Orbital (2023, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It's the desire - no, the need (fuelled by fervour) - to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre lowliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with each other? With the earth? It's not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which their lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they've lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They are humans with a godly view and that's the blessing and also the curse.

Orbital by  (Page 73)

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quoted Persons by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Kinship: Belonging In A World Of Relations, #4)

Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffer: Persons (Paperback, 2021) No rating

Volume 4 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of interpersonal relations: Which experiences …

"Thinking" may or may not be unique to humans. What does seem to be our speciality is the belief that thinking is the only trusted form of knowing. What have we sacrificed by limiting our knowledge to what we can think?

Persons by , , (Kinship: Belonging In A World Of Relations, #4) (Page 66)

In the essay Four Turtles by Brooke Williams.

quoted Persons by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Kinship: Belonging In A World Of Relations, #4)

Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffer: Persons (Paperback, 2021) No rating

Volume 4 of the Kinship series revolves around the question of interpersonal relations: Which experiences …

Time is there because things happen, because atoms meet, because stones breathe one another. Matter is social. Time arises because this cosmos cannot sit still. It needs to share and connect.

Persons by , , (Kinship: Belonging In A World Of Relations, #4) (Page 49)

From the wonderful essay on making kin with lichen, Skincentric Ecology by Andreas Weber.