Agreed, Roadside Picnic is great!

Here are some highlights from my reads of the past few months:

• The Thief by Claire North: Book 2 in a trilogy of stories framed by the Gameshouse, a mysterious club where gamblers can bet memories, abilities, years of their lives, health, etc. and participate in games that use places and people for their boards and pieces. Each story focuses on a single player in a single one of these games; this one was hide and seek in Thailand in the 1930s. I didn’t love the writing in this one, but I like the concept, and both this and the first book (The Serpent) have been interesting reads.
• The Crows by C.M. Rosens: This, if you can believe it, is eldritch horror crossed with 90s chick lit. I found it entertaining, despite some quibbles with the editing. The first sequel (Thirteenth) replaces the chick lit vibe with family drama (and some different PoVs), which I enjoyed less, but enough to put the third book on my TBR. It’s obviously not gonna be everyone’s thing, but if the genre mashup sounds fun to you, I recommend it.
• The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes: Picked this up because I liked Leech. The blurb for it, while accurate, is also super misleading; it’s much less one guy hunting a giant bug, and more a sweeping epic of change in a city with some fantastic/weird/horror elements, from two major points of view. It’s a little slow (for my taste), and a little long, but I enjoyed it.
• Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm: I’m not really a short story person, but I liked There Is No Antimemetics Division, so I gave this a shot. It was great! Most of the focus was on scifi concepts rather than characters or plot, which helped, I think. Recommended!

A lot of people use a pressure cooker to significantly reduce the cooking time and energy cost. However, that obviously requires a pressure cooker/instant pot, and being comfortable using one.

Kenji Lopez-Alt suggests a tablespoon of kosher per quart of soak water; I definitely end up using less than that (I also rinse/drain after soaking). But obviously, adjust to your own taste.

I do a quick soak when I haven’t planned ahead: bring the beans to a boil in salted water (you don’t have to measure; if it tastes like seawater after dissolving the salt, you’ve got the right ratio) and then immediately shut it off and let it sit for an hour.

One note: different kinds of beans take different lengths of time to cook, so check the package!

I wanted to see this thing in motion, so I tried to search up the youtube video, but no dice. Every article on it is just copy-pasted from the original on the Express site, and I can’t get the embedded video attached to it to work. I did find an article on NIWA’s site about a species of sea pig, which looks similar.

If it helps, I found books 5 and 6 of The Expanse less obnoxious than the show re: the whole family drama thing (if, like me, that’s where your biggest hangup is). I didn’t enjoy them as much as previous entries, but book 7 (imo) goes back to being pretty solid.