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Bouncepaw asks:
How do book characters look in your head?
This is an interesting question. I don't really have a clear insight into how this works in my mind, in general, but strangely enough there are a few really concrete cases which I can recall:
In William Gibson's "Virtual Light", the character Lucius Warbaby (what a name!) looks like Morpheus from the Matrix film.
In Neal Stephenson's "REAMDE" and "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", the character Dodge Forthrast looks like Neal Stephenson himself.
Bouncepaw mentions having no mental image of Raskolnikov and Ivan Denisovich. I have read both character's books, but only once and over a decade ago so I couldn't say if I had images. But I have read Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" many times, and most recently only about 3 years ago. This is a strange one: I don't have the clear mental image now, and I'm not even sure *when* I had it, but at some point in the past I definitely had a clear mental image of what the character Lev Rubin looked like. It's strange that I can remember this witout remembering the image itself. Perhaps one of the times I read it, his description reminded me of somebody I knew at the time...
Rmgr asks:
99% of the time:
The knife stays home when I am, e.g., flying. In order to not be totally helpless without it I have a little CNCed steel widget on my keychain. It's made by the Chinese brand San Ren Mu, more famous for cheap knives. It's in vaguely the same category as the better known Gerber shard, but has a few more features. The only time I have ever came close to losing it was at the airport in Minsk, but I stood my ground and eventually they relented.
In the past I have routinely carried a AAA-powered LED torch (one of the nice ones, with a machined aluminium body, and finely knurledy twisty head) and/or a small pen (once a Kaweco "Sport", another time something by Zebra) in my coin pocket, but I found these things too prone to loss and/or battery corrosion. Now I have a USB-rechargable torch on my keychain (a Nitecore Thumb) and live without the pen.