some good things

Jul. 16th, 2025 10:49 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
  2. First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
  3. Mulberries! [personal profile] ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
  4. I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
  5. My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
  6. And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
  7. AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
  8. We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
  9. I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
  10. Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)

July London meetup

Jul. 16th, 2025 03:10 pm
[syndicated profile] captainawkward_feed

Posted by katepreach

Announcement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this July one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably October.

26th July, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.

We will be on Level 2 (the upper levels are closed to non-ticket-holders), but I don’t know exactly where on the floor. It will depend on where we can find a table.

I have shoulder length brown hair, and will have my plush Chthulu which looks like this:



Please obey any rules posted in the venue.

The venue has lifts to all floors and accessible toilets. The accessibility map is here:

Click to access 21539-24-Access-Updated-Access-Map_Proof-2.pdf

The food market outside (side away from the river) is pretty good for all sorts of requirements, and you can also bring food from home, or there are lots of cafes on the riverfront.

Other things to bear in mind:

1. Please make sure you respect people’s personal space and their choices about distancing.

2. We have all had a terrible time for the last four years. Sharing your struggles is okay and is part of what the group is for, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm each other or have the conversation be entirely negative. Where I usually draw the line here is that personal struggles are fine to talk about but political rants are discouraged, but I may have to move this line on the day when I see how things go. Don’t worry, I will tell you!

3. Probably lots of us have forgotten how to be around people (most likely me as well), so here is permission to walk away if you need space. Also a reminder that we will all react differently, so be careful to give others space if they need.

Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.

kate DOT towner AT gmail DOT com

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Specifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is

something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response

and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...

(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)

vital functions

Jul. 13th, 2025 10:30 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. This week I have mostly but not entirely been reading more murdery bot: Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, Rapport, aaaand I've also immediately launched myself into yet another quick reread of All Systems Red because we finished watching the TV series and therefore I want The Murderbot Of My Heart Thank You.

However! I have also continued reading about nerves! I have now read the entire first chapter of Nerve and Muscle, supplemented by a bunch more Wikipedia, and I think I am starting to have a better mental picture of how all of this works? I am going into way more depth than required by The Project, really, I think, but I will be happier if I know what's going on at least to the extent that I understand a little more about what it means, physically, when it is explained that some migraine preventives target Type A nerve fibre and others target Type C (which in turn is why if you get partial relief from something that targets Type C it's worth at least experimenting with adding in something targeting Type A).

And I have also made a tiny bit more progress with The Age of Seeds, but... yeah, mostly Murderbot.

Watching. Murderbot! I will concede that "I need to check the perimeter" did indeed get me Right In The Feels. I still prefer my book-Murderbot but I am beginning to acquire a better understanding of why folk love this Murderbot too.

The fanvid Bohemian Like You, by [archiveofourown.org profile] kuwdora, via [personal profile] sholio, via [personal profile] recessional.

Cooking. Several new things! Aubergine larb with sticky rice and shallot salad, lavender & honey Welsh cakes out of the Welsh cakes tourist tat mini-book, coconut pancakes. Now officially over two thirds of the way through East (with another Several planned for this week coming).

Eating. TODAY WE WENT ON AN ADVENTURE TO SEE ONE OF MY UNIVERSITY FRIENDS. I don't understand how it has been somewhere in the vicinity of ten years since I last got my act together to see this friend in particular given the part where, you know, we live in the same city, BUT we sorted ourselves out to meet up at King's Cross today and in addition to talking solidly for the entire duration we had FOOD including:

  • Ruby Violet (maxi moo moo with hazelnut crunch & raspberry, rosewater and prosecco on the grass by the canal; hazelnut & hazelnut brittle, salted caramel & almond brittle, hot cross bun, raspberry ripple, and coffee mocha ripple brought home, those last two primarily for A)
  • for lunch I had a funghi ma po tofu from rice guys, and A had a veg biriyani from somewhere I'm not immediately managing to spot on the Canopy Market trader list
  • from Bread Ahead we brought home two doughnuts -- pistachio crème brûlée for me, and something involving honeycomb for A; I think this is quite possibly the first custard doughnut I have ever eaten and actually liked (though were I to buy from them again I'd skip the pistachios)

... and upon meeting up with said friend, they reached into their bag with an "oh before I forget--" and pulled out a jar of jam, which conveniently gave me an excuse to reach into my bag and pull out the jar of jam I'd brought to give them, so I have swapped one blood orange + cardamom for one cherry plum + vanilla, and I've not eaten it yet but I am very excited about doing so.

... also raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, jostaberries...

Exploring. We poked around Granary Square a bit to go with Meeting Friends; we came home with lots of stickers (I also got some washi tape from that first one...), a gorgeous bowl (which she was not charging that much for at the market, goodness), and a business card for Creature Crafts by Nat so I could send their details on to Interested Parties.

Growing. ... I spent a whole day at the plot mostly reading Murderbot? (And did also do some weeding, and some harvesting, and some watering, and some general pootling.)

Oh, cat

Jul. 11th, 2025 10:37 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Caught Yellface with her WHOLE HEAD inside the Fritos bag.

some good things

Jul. 11th, 2025 11:56 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. The fan. Got house down to Actually Matching Outside Air Temperature in finite time; set up to experiment with running it in the bedroom overnight. (It has been Too Warm For Cuddles, which is Bad.)
  2. Made the nonsense lavender-and-honey Welsh cakes for breakfast. I was sure I had picked way too much lavender but it actually fit in the measuring spoon pretty much perfectly, and wound up being noticeable but not Overwhelming.
  3. New Murderbot novelette! I have not launched right into reading it because I am just about a quarter of the way through a System Collapse reread (and fascinated by how little of it I remember, though I concede I've read it many fewer times than All Systems Red...) so I'm going to finish that first. Which I am not expecting to take me very long.
  4. Having spent a bunch of time poking around Wikipedia, I've gone back to Nerve and Muscle and, now almost two whole pages in, it is making significantly more sense than my previous attempt. (I have not yet started making myself notes on neuroanatomy but I am definitely considering it.)
  5. It is The Time Of Year when strawberries are relatively cheap, so after dinner we wandered down the hill in service of me getting my steps, and us getting some exposure to The Breeze, and acquiring me a giant box of strawberries, and also picking up Ice Lollies to consume on the way back up.
  6. Realised I could stick a jug of water in the fridge. This has made hydrating significantly easier. (I do not do well at drinking water that isn't Cold, and the magic ice dispenser on our freezer is currently out of action.)
  7. The online Oxfam shop. Shortly to be on their way to me: a pair of cargo shorts; two pairs of linen cargo trousers; a book I previously had out from the library but which I wanted to have a reference copy of at least briefly for writing purposes.

today's window into another world

Jul. 10th, 2025 10:39 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

a circular lamp embedded in a cracked paving stone, with green leaves visible beneath the glass

(I am continuing to think a lot about sensory systems; today I have mostly been discovering how many of the things I thought I half-remembered about nerves are wrong.)

today I have mostly been at the plot

Jul. 9th, 2025 11:58 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I had a first-thing physio appointment, so I dragged myself over to the hospital for that and then nestled down in my Surrounded By Green and... mostly read Murderbot, with occasional fruit harvest and weeding.

(I have also had lots of opportunities to practise self-compassion, both in re the number of things I did not manage to harvest before they went over and in terms of having realised within the last half hour or so that one of my pens has vanished from all of the bags it was nominally in; I hope that if I go and poke around the table etc tomorrow it will rematerialise...)

July has already been busy

Jul. 8th, 2025 02:58 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Susan visited!

Thorn didn't get carjacked by a Bigfoot.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Apparently I'm not writing up a detailed version of this, so in brief...

Bodily functions feature heavily. )

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.

vital functions

Jul. 6th, 2025 10:20 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster, Wells, Davies + Jones, Hwang Carrant, Keynes + Aidley )

... all of which adds up to more pain-related reading than I felt like I'd managed this week, huh, I thought I had tripped and fallen entirely into Murderbot and EatYourBooks indexing but apparently not!

Writing. A response to the EHRC consultation, which was... several thousand words. A very, very brief response to the Pathways to Work green paper consultation ("I am too disabled to manage doing this properly. These charities are speaking for me. Please fucking listen to them.")

Watching. The first half of Fantasia, with the toddler, with my hand held through all the scary bits to reassure me, apart from the bit that was SO scary that we had to get up and distract ourselves until it was over. Which had absolutely not been flagged as one of the scary bits, and which was the deep-sea-origins-of-life section.

(I had not watched the film since primary school, I don't think? And between then and now I have played a bunch of orchestral music, for most of that time on the violin but latterly as a French horn. It turns out that when I'm not distracted by playing a completely different part, I have incredibly intense sense-memories of several of the pizzicato sections early on...)

Another Murderbot episode. (I continue Indignant.)

Another Farscape episode, this one Taking the Stone (S02E03), which I think was firmly back to early season one levels of incoherence.

Tragically we have not managed The Old Guard 2, because I have had too much migraine and there have been SO many things Happening, but... maybe this week???

Cooking. Several new things! Four from East, leaving me at 41/120 recipes still to make (two of which are "probably won't happen" for reasons of "grapefruit" and "matcha"); of those this week's meal plan includes two (aubergine larb with sticky rice; Vietnamese coconut pancakes). I appreciated the reminder that fried new potatoes are tasty, and A is notably into the chargrilled summer vegetable salad, though I was not a fan of the faff and think I prefer smitten kitchen's charred corn succotash.

Approximately zero faff was salt lassi, and A is now aware that this Special Treat is available; low faff was a cherry clafoutis with fruit from the plot, which I overcooked a bit but, hey, I do in fact like caramelised crunchy bits.

Eating. FIRST BATCH OF DESSERT GOOSEBERRIES ARE RIPE. A tiny handful of Sugar Magnolia sugarsnap peas. Misc jostaberries. RASPBERRIES. And also supermarket strawberries, because we have hit the stage of the summer where they're down to £5 per kilo :)

Growing. I have been doing small bits of harvest and failing to get support structures in for the beans and tomatoes. The outdoor tomatoes have tomatoes on. The squash are coming along; I put more squash seeds in, on the grounds that they're super late but might still do anything; I have not managed to kill all of the chillis; the pepper has flowers.

Harvested lots of dried peas for sowing next year. Am attempting to develop Plans that might actually let me have a full bed of broad beans and a full bed of peas in the interests of getting Reasonable Quantities of them. If the council doesn't tell me I'm not allowed the abandoned plot next door--

I could get so much done if I could coax myself out there for even an hour a day but the agoraphobia is saying No, annoyingly. Gonna try to get A to chase me out more this week.

[pain, food] victory!

Jul. 5th, 2025 11:30 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I have finally successfully got my head around when the local supermarket reduces the prices on its pastries, which means that we are now well-supplied for doing a batch of pistachio croissant strata to get us most of the way through the coming week. It is not going to be a tomorrow (Sunday) morning breakfast, though, because we have half a cherry clafoutis from this morning, made using allotment cherries.

Read more... )

To-read pile, 2025, June

Jul. 5th, 2025 08:00 am
rmc28: (reading)
[personal profile] rmc28

Books on pre-order:

  1. Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)

Books acquired in June:

  • and read:
    1. Playing for Keeps by K A Findlay (Kim Findlay) [7]
    2. The Charlie Method (Campus Diaries 3) by Elle Kennedy
  • and unread:
    1. Dying to Meet You by Sarina Bowen
    2. Sort Your Head Out by Sam Delaney
    3. The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

Borrowed books read in June:

  1. Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
  2. The Domino Pattern (Quadrail 4) by Timothy Zahn [8]
  3. Judgment at Proteus (Quadrail 5) by Timothy Zahn [8]

Annoyingly, when I thought I'd cancelled my KU subscription in May, Amazon thought I'd suspended it for a month, so I got charged again in June. And as the above makes clear, I didn't really get my value for the month of it. The Timothy Zahn Quadrail series is really fun (Trains! In Space! And also galaxy-spanning conspiracy and action adventure with really interesting aliens!) and I'm glad I got to finish it, but I have now definitely and for real cancelled the subscription until further notice.

I don't expect to read much this month either, with the women's football Euros running most of the month. Farocation is running again and I didn't yet get through all the books from last summer, so I'm being even pickier about which ones I decide to pick up this summer.

[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited

rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)

ten good things

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:49 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Freegle has both provided (a 4'x8' piece of 6mm plywood, which I am intending to press into service as A SHED FLOOR) and taken away (a bag of used Jiffy Green padded envelopes).
  2. I have discovered to my delight that I do not have to wait for a submitted indexed recipe book to actually be approved before I can ask for (and be assigned) the next one. My submitted queue is currently two deep; I'm working on another of the very short books now, and will be entertained if I manage to get it three deep. I am finding this data entry very soothing. (Though I am also having an entire moment over the vegan cookie recipe entitled "Rrraw", developed in collaboration with the Rrraw Cacao Factory, featuring raw chocolate and raw cocoa powder and raw cacao nibs, that is then baked at 160°C.)
  3. ........... the internet just Provided someone's photo of a pet rabbit with googly eyes along its side. This is so perfectly engineered to A's interests that I'm kind of surprised it showed up in my feed because someone I actually know, who is not A, shared it.
  4. I think I had somehow not previously ever spent a significant amount of time removing dried peas from their pods? But one of this evening's distractions jobs (while A was removing the ratchets from the plywood in service of removing the plywood from the roof bars) was removing the pods from all the extremely dried-out peas for the purposes of being able to sow more of them next year, and... they go ping and twirl themselves up into neat little curls for broadcasting purposes? if you just look at them a bit funny? I somehow had NO IDEA about this and it's GREAT. (Somehow: all my attempts at growing significant quantities of drying peas have thus far failed dramatically.)
  5. While double-checking the series-internal order for Murderbot because I needed to remind myself which novella came next, I discovered the existence of another short story I had inexplicably been entirely unaware of... because apparently it's being published on the 11th (and possibly in Reactor Magazine on the 10th? According to at least one misc website...).
  6. A, eating tonight's curry, suddenly went "... oh :( I meant to stop off at the supermarket opposite the pharmacy and get some lassi :(" (the last several places they have expected to be able to get salt lassi from having Not Provided). I, who had been aware of the Why Will Nobody Sell Me This problem, had been vaguely intending to get around to just making some and, up until this sad oh-ing, had been singularly failing to actually, you know, do so. But five minutes later A had acceptable salt lassi, and it was really nice to be able to Just Produce a Treet.
  7. First couple of really good blackberries, and lots more raspberries, while at the plot. (There have been blackberries for a week or so now provided you didn't mind that despite the fact they were black they weren't actually quite done ripening... but apparently Just Enough more time has now elapsed!)
  8. Facebook showing me the Mayor of London emphatically posting, as a caption to a photo containing at least 44 Progress Pride flags, "In our city you are free to be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love. We must take a stand against those seeking to roll back hard-won rights."
  9. Tomorrow morning's elaborate breakfast plans are cherry clafoutis, with allotment cherries. (And then while the oven's on I'll bake the bread.)
  10. We are doing a pretty good job this week of remembering that mutual social grooming is good for us, and therefore actually managing brushing each other's hair first thing in the morning. Which for bonus points I am attempting to actively engage with as somatosensory rehabilitation, because I am having Thoughts about my constant background headache, and doing science on myself is my idea of a good time.

Bonuses (oh hey this practice is working): pink gooseberries -- plus yoghurt and hazelnuts, but also by themselves. tomatoes setting fruit. Murderbot novellas. fiddling with pens as fidget. The Fan made this afternoon's 28°C (or at least the bits of it I was awake for) much less unpleasant. A has just set the bat detector up and it's Detected A Bat!

Page generated Jul. 17th, 2025 12:35 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios