Tidying up several cluttered rooms with nowhere to put overflow clutter. (In the dark.)

We told the realtor last week we could clean out MIL's summer cottage last week so that he could take photos of the downstairs.

The inventory of the estate is done, which is good, so now Wax and her brothers have the means to legally access accounts and things like that. But we haven't started trying to evaluate the things we have to sell, apart from contacting these realtors. They took photos of the outside already, and we'd quite like to sell the cottage as soon as possible, because as mentioned before, there's a desperate need for some money here.

Well, MIL was living at the cottage at the time of her death and all of her stuff was crammed into it (and into the boatshed here...), so a) none of it is really findable, because of the lack of time and space with which it was packed into there; and b) the place was kind of bursting at the seams.

Yesterday I got her bedroom photographable, but there's still multiple carloads of stuff one would ideally like to take out of the kitchen, as well as so much stuff filling up the unheated veranda (also no electric lights, so it's both cold AND dark for these cleaning activities!!!) that it's quite difficult to walk from one end of it to the other.

Fortunately he hasn't gotten shirty about us missing the deadline, but unfortunately we only have a couple more days where Wax isn't working in which we could potentially still accomplish this... and we have negative space here at Knypplinge to put things in which we have to move out of there. (The bags and suitcases and boxes from yesterday are just, like, on the floor, and I had to pick my way over them in the middle of the night on the way to feeding Snookums the four times he woke me up to be fed. Because he is still doing that. Every single night.)

trope search: a person with multiple bodies (multiple 'people' with one mind?)

There's a character in this new show who is incredibly cool. They're such an amazing and intriguing idea that they blow the rest of the show out of the water.

The Rook is a Starz tv show from 2019 based on a modern fantasy book about a secret UK government agency staffed by people with superhuman abilities (all the reviewers on GoodReads want to call this characteristic 'X-Men'). The opening conceit is that a woman wakes up on a bridge, on the ground, in the rain, with total amnesia and surrounded by dead bodies, and goes on the run, which is undeniably a dynamite beginning.

But apart from this beginning, most of the concept and plot of the story is just pretty good. Parts of it were rather exciting, parts of it were cool, the execution was mostly fine but one could easily find things to criticize... but there's a supporting character called Gestalt who is a set of quadruplets who share one mind.

Gestalt isn't quadruplets who are telepathically linked; they're one person with four bodies. They have the ability to multitask - that is, for all four of their bodies to do different things - but they have one consciousness unaffected by physical distance. We learn that in infancy their four bodies did everything in unison, but in a secret government facility they were trained to simulate four distinct personalities for subterfuge, and they are now the top field agent for this fictional MI-X-Men agency. (In the presence of coworkers and friends who know their true nature, they sometimes say 'we' and sometimes 'I'.)

They deserve another season, or a whole other show, or really just for this concept to be a trope that is explored through other literature and media. But we don't know of anywhere where it is!

I mentioned this on Twitter and jacquez mentioned More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, but having read a bunch of the reviews here, it sounds like the concept leans more towards Sense8: these characters are strangers who have separate existences until they meet each other.

A friend says they've encountered a similar idea in fanfiction and that the story named Mass Effect (video game) and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice as influences. I haven't read the latter, although it's on my list, but looking through reviews and Wikipedia, it seems that 1. there are way more bodies involved in each consciousness and 2. the execution involves artificial intelligence. Given that it seems likely these beings aren't born, or created, that way, but I guess I'll find out specifics when I read it.

Also, someone in the reviews claimed that the gestalt entity in More Than Human is "just a Voltron", but based on Wikipedia it sounds like a Voltron is just like when the Power Rangers combine their robots into one big robot? There's no mention in the summaries of even a telepathic contact - which I guess could upgrade it to more of a Pacific Rim or Sense8 scenario. It seems there is a gestalt consciousness character named "Legion" in Mass Effect, which is referred to as "he" although it is a robot animated by more than one thousand AIs, and that there are other gestalt consciousnesses in this universe? Maybe? It's a video game so I already know I'm not going to encounter it directly, so I didn't spend too much time reading wikis.

Any other leads, anybody?