Reading

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

~~... has done so many things and is Going To Bed and will fill in this placeholder Tomorrow.~~

Reading. ( Descartes, Gouldercourt et al., Clifford )

Forgotten Fruits (Christopher Stocks) got auto-returned to the library for a second time while I was still, like, a third of the way into it. I am going to try to take the DNF with grace this time, but the Completionist Itch is still there...

Writing. Grumpy e-mails to HMPO. Grumpy e-mails to uk.bookshop.org (on the plus side, the book I bought from them now has a shiny wee DRM-free tag! on the downside, I can download it in neither of the browsers I've tried so far.) Mental drafting of context-setting on movement and sleep, which really need to get out of my head and onto the page.

Playing. Inkulinati! We have Completed All Three Journeys. In the second stage we achieved an absolutely bullshit strategy that made things astonishingly easy; the third stage (with SEAL) was much harder work.

Little bit more I Love Hue.

Cooking. Two things of particular note, of which the first was ridiculous parsnip risotto with thyme pesto from The Modern Vegetarian, extremely good, would very happily eat again but I'm more dubious about the prospect of cooking it again, though I will concede it would probably go faster now I know what I'm doing.

Item the second was THE MEDLAR STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING. I am not entirely convinced I can actually detect the, you know, medlar, but it is very tasty.

Elsewise I have two batches of medlar jelly on the go (first batch did not set properly, BAH, I have not made enough jam recently, so I'm going to need to redecant and reboil that before I move on to the spiced) and some ridiculous quince sorbet that needs forcing through the sieve before churning.

And I have still not touched the apples.

Eating. Saturday lunch at Holtwhites Bakery :)

Exploring. Stupid little walk on Sunday revealed unto us, among other things: a pair of cyclamen in a bit of the verge outside our house we don't normally walk past; a discarded fork; a local bush of Purple Metallic Berries; a secret holly hedge.

Growing. SEEDS arrived. Jalapeños (at least at home) turning red.

Entry tags:

food:medlar jelly

[food] medlar jelly recipe

Irritatingly, the medlar jelly recipe I used last time I made the stuff, over at the RHS, is no longer extant (web.archive.org link!). Herewith my own readily findable copy of the thing, plus my notes on what I'm actually doing this time around.

(For amusement: I apparently first found the medlar sticky toffee pudding recipe in 2023...)

( Recipe as written )

( Notes )

Alas, dryer

The washer saga ended a little while ago, with a brand repair tech who corrected something simple. Thursday night (the start of Friday wash day) the dryer gave up.

Since the dryer had been leaving unsightly rust streaks on all the lights, I have not been subtle in my campaign for a new one.

Delivery is scheduled for today, of a dryer with a steam cycle but without wifi.

Entry tags:

on pain of pain

[pain] today in Descartes: green is the best colour because it is most like an octave

... Nor shall I say what objects of vision must be agreeable or disagreeable to it; for from what I have already said about the other senses, it is easy to grasp that light that is too strong will injure the eyes and moderate light must refresh them; and that, amongst the colours, green, which consistss in the most moderate action (which by analogy one can speak of as the ratio 1:2), is like the octave among musical consonances, or like bread among the foods that one eats, that is, it is the most universally agreeable.⁴⁰

⁴⁰ What the basis of this remark is is unclear, and although various writers have made suggestions about the relations between colours and sounds, the attempt to quantify green on a par with an octave certainly cannot be sustained. It is worth noting that Descartes will later advice Elizabeth to rid her mind of sad thoughts by reflecting on the greenness of a wood (Descartes to Elizabeth, May/June 1645, AT iv. 220).

(trans. and footnote courtesy of Stephen Gaukroger.)

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[embodiment] still a terrible hobby

[cn time-restricted eating.]

( Read more... )

some good things make a post

( Read more... )

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fandom: quatermass

why I love Quatermass and the Pit

I’ve been rewatching Quatermass and the Pit for the last week, which is apparently something I do every few years and then never write anything about. It’s a black and white BBC serial from 1958, to our eyes science fiction horror though a massive leap beyond genre in its own time, and I love it very much. I honestly think it’s perfect. There isn’t anything I’d change except put more women in it and even so at least it does have one brave 1950s lady scientist academic trying her best. Could be worse if not by much.

So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.

There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.

But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. ( creep creep creep - rather than cut tag the most horrifying bit of the serial, I have simply not included it so this is cut for length not horrors )

I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.

some things make a post

I will grudgingly concede that the ridiculously overengineered parsnip risotto from The Modern Vegetarian is actually very tasty and it's very obvious that without the THREE DIFFERENT PREPARATIONS OF PARSNIP it would also be significantly less Parsnip. It is not, however, sufficient to convince me to update The Risotto Rule. But, as I say, it's very tasty and we have at least another day (possibly two?) of it, which I am cheerful about as a concept!
Blessedly my repeat prescription request had made it to the pharmacy by the time I swung by to pick up A's IOU and a new thing, so I won't need to make any more trips there ~~this week, at any rate~~.
Chillis in the greenhouse that I really need to bring home before I lose the gamble on frost are looking happy still despite a week+ of neglect.
Through hunting duvet covers (the one I bought for myself when I first moved out of the Den of Christians and into My Own Flat, in very early 2014, has tragically failed catastrophically) I have been reminded of the existence of incredibly gaudy (watercolours of) tulips, and I'm probably not going to spend slightly silly money on watercolour stripy tulips, but I'm very glad they exist.
We are continuing to Really Enjoy playing Inkulinati together, and I now definitely have enough grasp of the mechanics to collaborate on What We Wanna Do Next. One level fits quite neatly into some of the slightly awkward chunks of time in our week; I am looking forward to tomorrow's. <3

Entry tags:

dark souls,
games

"This fight is levelling you up before our eyes"

For anyone who's Dark Souls-curious and has a spare 30 mins, this is the best illustration I've seen of the process of figuring out a boss fight, and how you can go from dying in the first couple of seconds of a fight to methodical execution of it (and why it's so incredibly satisfying when you do):

Watch on YouTube

For context, this is the Stray Demon, an optional side boss who's a very beefed-up version (now with added magic, as well as vastly increased damage and HP!) of the Asylum Demon from the tutorial.

I have a theory that the Asylum Demon is so pear-shaped partly in order to encourage the novice player to think of getting behind him and stabbing him in the arse, thus learning a key component of DS1 strategy (positioning yourself where it's hardest for them to hit you, which frequently means getting behind them or in their crotch).

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

Celebrating. Anniversary. <3

Reading. ( Ravindran, Link, Stocks )

I have also: been skimming a variety of pain-related academic publications, and: printed out not one but TWO translations of Treatise on Man for the coming week's work reading.

Playing. Things!

Gently pootling along in I Love Hue.
Inkulinati! Delighted by having made it along the High Combat route on the second map page of my journey with... really minimal damage sustained; also very pleased that having worked through most of the Academy and now having made Progress on my Journey I now have enough of an understanding of mechanics that Proper Shared Activity is viable. (... had a Very satisfying Pushing A Helmeted Dog Off Its Level when it had considerately broken down a neutral gate for me.)
Fluxx! A particularly ridiculous game, that spent a whole bunch of time Draw 1 Play 1 and then suddenly exploded into Draw 3, Play All, Rich Bonus, Poor Bonus, Party Bonus, and Inflation, among others.

Cooking. Um. Three things from [the Roti King cookbook]9https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/466240/roti-king-by-sugen-gopal/9781837832118)! Surprised by how Very Into the beetroot thingy I was, and the pumpkin stew Grew On Me over the several days we spent eating it.

Also a tomato salad from East, which I was meh about -- but hey, that's one more thing crossed off that particular cookbook list!

Eating. This weekend we have had Many Avocadoes (which are a Special Treat), and also A made me blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning.

OH and a variety of Things To Share from The Artful Duke in Bromley: macaroni cheese not particularly exciting but also very definitely not Cold Sad Soup, and therefore very welcome; sweetcorn "ribs"; three bean chilli nacho Situation; halloumi fries with hot honey. This occasioned the realisation on my part that "hot honey" is upselling for "sweet chilli sauce", which I find very amusing.

And a big pile of tomatoes my mother sent us home with, along with a chunk of Schwarzbrot :)

Exploring. Bromley "zoo"!

Making & mending. ... I got one of A's mildly problematic fountain pens writing earlier today and then promptly made it stop again. Gonna keep poking at the nib. (Tines were misaligned. Fixed that but/and they are now also a bit too splayed for capillary action to work properly; I think this predated my starting to mess around with it...)

Growing. The Mystery Habanero fruit are getting bigger. I am extremely impatient about how much bigger I need to wait for them to get before I can taste one to see how bad an idea eating it neat was.

All the various patio saffron are coming up, but the trough do not seem to have any interest in flowering this year, so I am going to need to Have A Think about what to do to make them happier. Honestly the answer is probably "buy another bag of bulb compost and bury 'em deeper".

Entry tags:

PSA: this is a good year to get a flu jab

BBC: New flu virus mutation could see 'worst season in a decade'

Entry tags:

Non-stop

I haven't updated properly in ages. Basically, my life is: work, ice hockey, occasionally seeing my spouse and children, indoor cricket, more ice hockey, weight training. I am thoroughly in my jock era.

I now have on-ice training three times a week: Mondays with Huskies (mixed uni), Tue/Wed on alternating weeks with Kodiaks (women), Fridays with Warbirds (mixed rec). Plus games at the weekends, and the aforementioned weights and cricket for a little variety. Oh, and one of my hockey buddies pointed me at free Modern Irish lessons for staff and students of the university (funded by the Irish government). Tá sé iontach ag stáidear arís.

An anecdote from last week. I had a game with Warbirds on Saturday afternoon, but discovered as I was changing that I had failed to pack my skates! Disaster! I called Tony and ordered him an Uber, and got changed with the team while watching the cab's progress across Cambridge on the app. It arrived just as the warmup started, and I went out to meet it fully kitted up apart from my socked feet. The cab arrived, I got my skates from wonderful spouse, and jogged back in and around the rink to the bench just as warmup was finishing. I was third line so I just about had enough time to lace up my skates and get my gloves back on ready for my line change. I went over the boards with my line - and promptly discovered I had one skate guard still on, when I went sprawling on the ice. I sat up, pulled the guard off, threw it onto the bench (narrowly missing a teammate), got up and hared across the ice and managed to do something vaguely useful with the rest of my shift.

(We lost the game quite badly but apart from that dramatic start I didn't do anything too terrible, and I'm always happy to be playing.)

PSA which I keep forgetting to post

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/01/online-platform-independent-bookshops-ebooks-uk

Bookshop.org is now selling ebooks in the UK as well, with profits (as with paper books sold through them) going to indie bookshops; you can either pick a specific shop you love to benefit (in my case, Juno Books), or have the money go into a collective pool.

Entry tags:

my least favourite hobbies: embodiment

[embodiment] notes various

( mild anaemia )

The other topic is Physio, and specifically a bunch of the stuff I've been doing courtesy of the (NHS) Lower Limbs Class I've been intermittently going to since the summer; I am finally managing to add Doing This Stuff Once A Week (Not At Class) into my routine, and in addition to just getting better at the exercises themselves I have noticed repeatedly this week that I'm finding getting up from e.g. being sat on the beanbag much easier.

( a little more on exercise )

Entry tags:

on pain of pain

[pain] huh

Published 9^th October: clinical practice recommendations for mixed pain. Apparently This Idea's Time Has Come, at least when it comes to, you know, starting to get shit published in Frontiers In.

(Today's work has included poking at both Pain Toolkit and Live Well With Pain, neither of which say The Thing. And also a third person, but they are a charlatan and I refuse even to link to them.)

Oh, and look, PainScience.com is being extremely relevant to my interests again, this time on the question of whether pain can become a conditioned response.

today, for reasons, we went to Bromley

For reasons this also revealed that the hair stick that went missing after E4, that I was convinced that field had also eaten, to the point that I'd almost resigned myself to just fucking buying another one, had been lurking in (one of) the bag(s) I'd already checked like three times.

And. Upon leaving the carpark. We were greeted by this:

[a municipal garden bed drifted with autumn leaves, behind which a wall, behind which some trees, behind which a house]

Which, when you look a little closer, contains signs:

[zoomed in on the wall. there are two painted signs, A-road style, white on green, pointing left. the top one reads "POLAR BEARS/PENGUINS/GORILLAS". the bottom reads "GIRAFFE/HOUSE".]

( +5 )

Entry tags:

To-read pile, 2025, October

Books on pre-order:

Platform Decay (Murderbot 8) by Martha Wells (5 May 2025)

Books acquired in October:

and read:
1. The Mirror & The Maze (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
2. The Crown & The Arrow (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
3. The Moth & The Flame (Wrath & the Dawn) by Renée Ahdieh
4. On The Fly (Portland Storm 2) by Catherine Gayle
5. Taking A Shot (Portland Storm 3) by Catherine Gayle
6. Light The Lamp (Portland Storm 4) by Catherine Gayle
7. The O Zone by Kelly Jamieson [7]
8. Hockey Halloween: A Charity Anthology
and unread:
1. Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells [1]

Books acquired previously and read in October:

The Element of Fire by Martha Wells [Sep]
The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells [Sep]

Borrowed books read in October:

The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown (Baby Ganesha 2) by Vaseem Khan [3]
The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star (Baby Ganesha 3) by Vaseem Khan [3]

Much of the month's reading has been alternating between hockey romance and Mumbai private detective stories, along with a complete failure to read my long-awaited pre-order of the latest Martha Wells. (but I did read different new-to-me Martha Wells, so yay?)

[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

Current Mood: exhausted

Entry tags:

maybe this will be the last time i have to cry about this

Longtime readers may remember that my father died 13 years ago (in fact I lit his yahrzeit candle last night ❤️) and that my mother took up with a widowed family friend not long afterward and told us, my brother and me, about it in a manner so astoundingly insensitive that our relationship never really recovered. (The description at that link says he, the um-friend, invited her on the European river cruise, but in fact I learned some time later that inviting her hadn't been his intention; he'd mentioned it in a way of saying it would have been nice to have been able to plan something like that with company and she went ahead and invited herself to join him, because it turns out this woman may never have seen a boundary worth respecting in her entire life.) I'm not going to go hunting for the exact email at this time, but I have a pretty clear memory that it included the assurance "I would never do anything to hurt you" and that in the conversation the three of us had in which the two of us said we were unhappy about the suddenness of the seriousness of their relationship, the message we got from her was you're going to need to deal with those feelings. It wasn't exactly "I would never hurt you" / "This hurts us" / "I'm going to do it anyway" but it wasn't a million miles off.

( Aftermarket cut to hide 950-odd words of illustration )

Anyway. The old man passed away peacefully yesterday afternoon. He was a nice guy. He saved my mother's life at least twice. He was a product of a time and a place that may have been responsible for his having some attitudes that I didn't always care for, but you know, what can you do. Mainly, he was important to my mother, which was fine, but I was never able to forget that he'd been more important to her than our feelings were, which was not. I'm very sorry for his children and grandchildren. I myself will not miss him. I'm not going to pretend there was never any such person or anything, but a small selfish still-hurt place inside me hopes that now that he's gone, my mother will think about him less and less.