First nattering of September (cat footage, Alien: Romulus, Hodgson’s The Night Land, and metal drawer assembly observations)

Much unpacking, assembling, and moving stuff around has been done. Regrettably, much more unpacking, assembling, and moving stuff around yet remains to be done. There’s an excellent chance, for example, that tonight I will be marking and drilling holes into the square-tube-steel legs of a computer desk to attach u-shaped brackets to hold a computer and keep it off the floor. That assumes that both the screws and brackets will have been delivered today.

First, a video clip of one of our cats:

One of our felines, Marceline, nuzzling the floor and getting set to nap.

S. and I recently plunked ourselves down in a movie theater and watched Alien:Romulus, the latest installment in the Alien cinematic franchise (the sf/horror series that kicked off with 1979’s Alien, directed by Ridley Scott from on a script by Dan O’Bannon). The first thing that I will say is that I thought it was far superior to the last few movies set in that universe. But it’s a bit of a What if chavs decided to buck the system and went joyriding, but in SPAAAAACE, with MONSTARS? sort of story. I began writing a long paragraph describing the plot and characters and what irked me about the film (some obvious plot holes and some gratuitous current-thing-isms) and up and deleted the whole thing. According to Wikipedia, it has thus far earned $289.5M against production costs of $80M, so it’s a success from a business standpoint.

I’ve just polished off the original text of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. Instead of one of the abridged edition (e.g. the one brought out in 2023 by the Radium Age imprint of MIT Press or the 1977 illustrated book titled The Dream of X), I went with a paperback copy of The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances. The book’s full title is The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4) and it’s part of a series collecting all of Hodgson’s fiction put out by Night Shade Books, which was formerly an independent publisher but now (and for a few years preceding the publication of this book) seems to be an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

In my reading, I skipped and skimmed my way through, over, and around large chunks of the narrator’s journey to the Lesser Redoubt and a fair amount of the trip back to the Great Pyramid. Despite doing my best to selectively speed past only the humdrum bits — i.e. the umpteenth paragraph wherein he washes his undergarments in steamy sulphurous pools, munches on Jetsons-style victuals-in-a-pill and sips reconstituted-from-powder water, or cleaves already-encountered or boring-sounding varieties of Abhumans, monsters, and critters in two with his Diskos — to get to the next interesting passage, my suspicion is that I missed some parts I’d have wanted to read. The first mention I saw of giant slug monsters, for example, was part of the narrator’s return trek with his maiden but he mentions having seen them on the outward trek.

The overall story is great stuff and I’d love to see it made into a film with the same feel as, say, the original Lord of the Rings movies. The final chapters are very moving. Spoiler alert I’m thinking here of two sections in particular. One is the part of the story where the residents of the Great Pyramid (likely the final remnants of humanity) risk exhausting their own supply of energy from their tap into the Earth Current and thereby ending up slaughtered and damned like the erstwhile inhabitants of the Lesser Redoubt, to use unspecified ancient-but-powerful weapons that strike and scorch en masse the various ghouls and creatures attacking the narrator, like a beam of concentrated sunlight played across a mass of ants, to help him reach the safety of the pyramid’s encircling force field. The other is the seeming death of his beloved, the sole survivor of the Lesser Redoubt, and her resurrection at the very point where she was about to be subjected to the fictional Earth-Current-related equivalent of cremation.

One task that was ticked off the ol’ to-do list last week was the assembly of several sets of metal drawers — and the drilling of some holes in the top panels of the chests of drawers of one sort so that the chests of drawers of another (similar but slightly different) sort could be bolted atop them. It’s just one part of our bid to utilize all available space to the fullest extent possible.

In a couple of respects, the design of the drawer bodies of these sets of drawers was novel to me. I don’t buy and assemble inexpensive furniture frequently enough to know whether this is now or ever was fairly normal or whether these are steps of regular at-the-factory production processes for metal drawers that, in this case, were devolved to the end user.

Some drawer bodies, as delivered, before I bent them into shape.

The first surprise was that the drawer bodies were shipped as nearly-flat sheets

In the photo above, you can see a bunch of drawer bodies before I folded them into their c-shaped or u-shaped final forms. I flipped the topmost sheet on the stack inner-side up to show two details that give each drawer body a bit of additional thickness that prevents them from being perfectly flat. First, there are the half-oval ribs that run lengthwise at the far left and right edges of the sheet and constructed by mending over long tabs at the sides of the sheet. Ultimately, those ribs will run from front to back at the tops of the finished drawer’s sides to give it rigidity. Second, see the folded-over edge that runs across the bottom edge of the sheet, with some bits cut or stamped out beforehand? The drawer’s back panel is concave, like the lid of a shoe box, and that metal lip on the drawer body keeps the rear panel from falling off the back of the drawer. It’s fixed permanently in place by four fold-over tabs (described further on).

Here’s what the drawer bodies look like, once they’ve been bent at right-angles along the dashed lines cut into the metal:

Drawer bodies, folded along the dashed line. In this image, the one fully-visible drawer body is turned 180 degrees from the panel shown unfolded, oriented as it will be when installed in the chest of drawers. The front edge will have a front panel attached with four sheet metal screws and the back edge will hold the drawer’s rear panel with its metal lip and four tabs.

Here’s a version of the un-folded drawer body photo with some of the cut-outs labeled and their purposes explained:

Drawer-body cut-outs labelled: screw holes, mounting points for drawer slides, and fold-over tabs.

The next couple of images are a closer-up view of one of the fold-over tabs before and after the drawer’s rear panel has been slid into place.

One of the four fold-over tabs that hold the back panel of each drawer in place, before folding but with the rear panel (mostly) in place.

The same tab, bent over and through one of the matching holes stamped or cut into that backwards-pointing flap of a rear drawer panel.

As mentioned earlier, the front panel of each drawer is held on with four screws. The heads are exposed on the inside and the points protrude into empty space inside the lip of the front panel so as not to scrape anything. I could have dug into my partially-unpacked personal hardware stockpile and substituted stainless sheet metal screws with a less-strip-out-prone drive for the included Philips-head galvanized (?) screws included with the drawer kits, but I didn’t bother and just used what was provided.

Something that caught my attention was the presence of what I took to be swarf from the thread-cutting step of the screws’ production in the bag of screws that came with one of the chest-of-drawers kits. Here’s a photo of some of the screws at the edges and some clumps of the little corkscrew-seashell-shaped bits of metal in question towards the center, with one group of four actually somewhat in focus: