n9d was not very memorable for me so I think I probably agree with your taste overall. if you’re really only going to read one more then I would make sure not to skip The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I think Ghostwritten is one of his earliest books and I think it really shows.

It’s really really interesting to imagine a different order to read these stories when you think about which little overlaps you would or would not be able to appreciate.

One of my favorite things about his books is that all his gimmicks with the overlapping characters and the horologist stuff doesn’t really matter all that much if the story is just otherwise also extremely well-written. so the “gimmicks” really do feel like a bonus and not like the main point.

I have loved all of David Mitchell’s books but Cloud Atlas was the perfect one that I started with that made me want to see everything else he read. I just love the structure of it so so much.

OP seems to be Korean which makes me extra curious because Koreans have interesting ideas about AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

My understanding of hard water is just that there’s more calcium and magnesium ions than would otherwise be present in softer water. The varying degrees of hardness would just be the varying concentrations of these ions.

The way you experience as a human (as opposed to measuring this with a water probe) is that soap will form a complex with these ions and maybe precipitate out a little soap scum, and this reaction will happen at the same time as the reaction which complexes with any oils or dirt so it’ll effectively be wasting some of your soap and you will have to use more soap.

So you’ll be shampooing your hair and you’ll use the same amount as you used back in the soft water city and you’ll be thinking “I used the same amount of shampoo as I always do so why does my hair still feel oily?”

I have one of those articulated segmented hose things on my shower head so you can pick it up and move it around while it’s spraying and the whole thing gets all covered in limescale super fast because the hard water evaporates and precipates out the magnesium and calcium as calcite or aragonite crystals. I had never seen this happen so fast and it ruins the hose so often that I thought I was dealing with excessively hard water.

This doesn’t really fit with my understanding of what hard water is and I’m very concerned.

The place I live now has hard water that is way different from what I grew up with, but it just means that I have to use a lot more soap to clean any oils off my skin or hair, and every faucet gets a ton of lime buildup obnoxiously fast.

If you have a bunch of motorcycles going in a line and you ride another motorcycle on top of that line like a conveyor belt then you will be going twice as fast as the highest speed the single motorcycle could go.

This is my favorite one lol.

lol what the fuck this boomerhumor is watermarked with a Gmail address?

Life’s a fucking funny thing.

“I don’t know what the big deal with Hamlet is. It’s just one famous saying after another, strung together by a moldy old plot.”