For Grumbaki’s half-minotaur, maybe some sort of magic shenanigans without experimentation could work to lightly tweak the backstory? I’m thinking along the lines of the OG son of Minos minotaur, only sort of backwards?
I think way back when in the v. 3.5 days, there were rules for monster cults which involved a certain amount of transformation, and it’s definitely canon in Pathfinder that there are rituals for that sort of thing. Maybe Ghur’s father is a reformed ex-Baphomet cultist, who had, at one point, advanced an alarming degree in the mysteries and acquired horrifying profane blessings – but when he turned away from the demon lord, those were taken away from him, but not without leaving a mark. (Which would, meta-wise, account for why, even as a non-minotaur, Ghur’s non-orc parent can’t ease the family’s integration into ordinary society.) But, because demons are warped and evilly cunning things, when Ghur was in the womb, he was cursed/blessed with full (as it were) half-minotaur “ancestry,” so that every time his father looked upon his progeny he would be reminded of his shame or (as Baphomet might see it) all that he threw away. (With the potential for all sorts of toxicity stewing as a result.) And with an implicit promise that the child might have potential that his father lost…
Something like that? A fun bit of angst that retains a bunch of the grim, but lets Ghur’s parents be trying to be better? Especially, if we're setting this in the River Kingdoms, which I gather is in some ways Golarion's Island of Misfit Toys, where all sorts of odd outcasts can pop out of the rural woodwork, compared to all the weirdos that a large metropolis can explain just by sheer numbers.
Apparently, the biblical "land of milk and honey" is also more like "yogourt and fruit syrup," but accuracy on that point is rather low on the list of ongoing problems for exegesis to the laity, for scriptural scholars.
Gah! Right, I forgot which gods were included in Ultimate Campaign’s traits.
Taking a look, nymph-touched sounds really great for what I had in mind, so I’ll put something together using the 20-point rolls in my last post. Sketching it out, it will be something like:
Paladin (Sacred Servant) 1
Stats:
Rolls: Elf: Nymph-touched: Final
Str 15 +0 +0 = 15
Dex 10 +2 +2 = 14
Con 14 -2 +0 = 12
Int 13 +2 +0 = 15
Wis 10 +0 +2 = 12
Cha 14 +0 +2 = 16
On the elf side of things, I will avail myself of a couple of non-core racial traits: swapping out Elven Immunities for Perfect, and Keen Senses for Fey Magic.
For Traits-traits, let’s go with: Tireless Logic (Social), River Rat (Regional), Dangerously Curious (Magic)
If I've got that right, I'll start trying to put that all into an alias, and choose some skills and equipment.
Traditionally, beer was brewed with hops and ale wasn't, though I don't think that's the case any more. Back in t'day, people drank small beer as a kind of soft drink, which was far weaker than modern beers (around 2%, maybe?) - you'd get a buzz out of it if you were guzzling it down by the quart all day, but it wouldn't enliven your morning as much as LM's 6% plus Leffe would if you had some first thing.
Huh. I wondered if it might be something like that. And lighter brews to start the day make sense, much in the same way that how much wine the ancients drank is less alarming when one remembers that they didn't have it neat. One learns something every day!
I got to hear a fun presentation once, trying to pin down Greco-Roman prejudices against beer. If I remember correctly, part of if was that when the Greeks first encountered it, it was in cultures that used such unmanly devices as *straws* to avoids bits of chaff and whatnot that might be floating in less-than-ideally-filtered drinks.
Thanks! For some reason, my brain decided to overthink the feat thing.
The trait I was hoping for was Gemstone Collector - it wouldn't come online from the outset, but I'd like to think it has potential for steering my character in interesting directions.
In anticipation of seeing how nymph-touched might work out, I'll roll another set of stats, and decide tomorrow whether I'm feeling a template or not.
20 point rolls:
2d4 + 10 ⇒ (2, 3) + 10 = 15 1d8 + 10 ⇒ (4) + 10 = 14 1d6 - 1d3 + 10 ⇒ (5) - (2) + 10 = 13 1d6 - 1d6 + 10 ⇒ (4) - (4) + 10 = 10 1d6 - 1d6 + 10 ⇒ (5) - (6) + 10 = 9
So 6 points left over: last stat goes to 14, bump 9 back to 10?
Final array: 15, 14, 13, 10, 10, 14. Not bad.
Hi, Azure_Zero! I've got a character idea or two that might work with the character creation guidelines you've set.
Just a couple of quick questions:
Could I take a Faith trait and two others, instead of a Social?
Could I combine Combat Reflexes with Iron Will with your BOGO feat scheme, or am I misunderstanding how that works?
In any case, let's roll stats! Ordered Chaos, for reasons that will soon become apparent. ;)
I'll try for an elf paladin, hybrid point-buy. I'm a bit intrigued by the fey-touched or nymph-touched templates. Should I re-roll for those, or just reduce from the results set by the 25 point roll?
For now: 25 PB
Roll 1:2d3 + 12 ⇒ (2, 2) + 12 = 16 Roll 2:1d8 + 10 ⇒ (5) + 10 = 15 Roll 3:1d6 - 1d3 + 10 ⇒ (4) - (3) + 10 = 11 Roll 4:1d6 - 1d3 + 10 ⇒ (6) - (3) + 10 = 13 Roll 5:1d6 - 1d6 + 10 ⇒ (2) - (2) + 10 = 10
I think that leaves me with 4 points? So that nets me another 13, and probably boosting that 11?
So 16, 15, 12, 13, 10, 13? A bit more evenly-balanced than I might like, but probably workable.
Just out of curiosity, though it's not a huge thing, given that it's a low-level one-shot, but given some of the character ideas I've got in the back of my head at the moment, would you be willing to consider opening up the classes to allow arcanists, GM?
No worries if not; Core+ as originally stipulated is plenty to work with.
Wait, is that how we got tea? Part of boiling water to make it safe?
Pretty much.
Tea, the original health food drink for the fashionable set! :)
The Oracle of Wiki collects a few fun factoids from various sources in their article on “Tea in the United Kingdom,” including a paper that argues for the importance of tea to help account for falling mortality rates in the mid-18th century, although in 1731 tea was still suspiciously foreign stuff. I'm not really surprised, but I know less about the earlier bit of the century than I ought to.
And about a hundred years earlier, apparently, a traveler living down to any stereotypes the Chinese might have been pleased to hold about far western barbarians called it “only water with a kind of herb boyled in it” – which, I’d like to think I’m not a snob about tea (though in my better moments I can be honest with myself), but really!*Feels the vapours coming on.* :)
The fact that it was called 'breakfast stout' should have been a warning sign, since nobody but the most abandoned rakehell actually drinks stout for breakfast, and Heaven hides its face in shame and anguish from someone who voluntarily drinks beer that tastes of jam - jam! - at any time. Revolting, but I shall still finish it, since it cost me £4.90.
I gather that in the days when water was a health risk people did drink beer at breakfast, so, out of morbid curiosity, what sort of beer should one drink for breakfast, if not stout? Ale? Or is "ale" synonymous with "beer" in the most generic sense?
(I have, with great reluctance, had two beers in my life: the first with some school friends because at the time I wasn't brave enough to try my luck ordering something I would actually care for, and then the second and last with my father, who had had his heart set on having one with his firstborn once I was of age for it.
The next time I had a drink with my father, I had come out, and a fantastic (and fabulous!) raspberry martini helped clarify what sort of daughter he had had all along. :) )
Gender is a mess; an interesting mess, to some of us, but another one of those things that really highlights how humans are a weird bunch of social primates, I guess.
To NobodysHome’s last:
Just to elaborate a bit on what Drejk and Orthos were saying, as I understood it, it strikes me, incidentally, that one thing that didn’t come up in your post is identity as such, as opposed to role. Given that you report all the things you do that fit in the gender box labelled “woman stuff,” and your suggestion that – and I appreciate that your glibness is tongue-in-cheek here – “if you don’t like your gender role, ignore it,” why don’t you consider yourself a woman? Especially since various formulations under the trans umbrella (and beyond) let folks find gender roles that better speak to their sense of themselves?
There’s a weird recursive thing to gender that I don’t think I’ve seen discussed much at all (except, for a bit, by Sophie Grace Chappell in her book Trans Figured), about how gender is as gender does, or what one does/feels, and which ideally gets accepted by society at large. She compares it – noting the limitations of the analogy but not working them out in detail – to how hard it is to separate at least some more or less prestigious jobs / social functions from the doing of them. Judges, I think, and possibly priests and legislators. It’s been a while since I read it.
“You doing you,” for gender, for most people, I think, is something that feeds into their sense of who they are, even if that is driven to an uncertain extent by how many societies have made gender such a big deal. I find it neat that you went from “if you don't like your gender role, ignore it,” to “if you don't like your gender, you do you.” There’s something there, I think, beyond just the delight of a bit of rhetorical variety. :) Culture’s a nasty piece of work. ;)
Could you elaborate on what you meant by the cooption of “transsexual?” I think I know what you mean, but… Anyway, for what it’s worth, I’ve seen a French writer try to float “transsexuation” in a way similar to how we might say something is “sexed,” and to distinguish between biology and “kicks below the waistline” (or above, let’s not dictate what anyone counts as sexy times), but it never took off.
It's actually a really interesting read -- I've never seen that site before, but the short version of the famous quote's history ("The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco") is:
James Quin, London, attributed to him in 1789 even though he died in 1766(When asked about a cold winter) Yes, just such an one last summer!"
Huh. Neat!
Coincidentally, last night I was just revisiting where I first encountered the quip, in the elliptical reference in Sleater-Kinney's "Jumpers." :/ (Love the song, but it's a bit grim.)
Yeah, yeah, I know. "Griping about what once was" and all that, but seriously?
As of Windows 11 I noticed that my Word documents are now always opening in 2-page, side-by-side format. I hate it. So I Googled how to fix it. And learned that Microsoft removed that functionality from Word: You can no longer save your preferred view, adding two extra button clicks to every doc I ever open.
Hate you so much, Microsoft!
This is why I still use 10.
Which is no longer being supported in October.
Yeah, I'm probably going to get a new computer early this fall. My current is nearing the end of its natural life anyway, but I'm not happy about it. :/
If I knew more about Linux ... but I'm not sure I have the time right now to get a good enough grip on it not to drive myself bonkers.
"Tragic. If they were a little bit more organized and supported each other, they could work together to get out."
Kudos to Elan for actually using tragic properly (in the classic sense).
Ah, an optimist. ;)
It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled in Aristotle, but wouldn’t it depend on their original capacity to cooperate? If they’re the sorts of jerks whose first instinct was always to pull down anyone who got ahead, and not folks who’ve had some faint glimmer of altruism, fellow-feeling, and imagination crushed out of them, does it really count? To paraphrase the Stagirite, “Bad stuff happening to bad people isn’t really all that tragic, is it?”
… I may be feeling a bit more misanthropic than usual today. Sorry, occupational hazard with cantankerous Calistrian crones. :)
Quite. How anyone thought that was reasonable is mind-boggling. Then again, this is the country that doesn't let environmental protesters mention climate crises in their defense in court, so not expecting anything better in relation to other subjects conservatives freak out about is probably the deeply distressing right call.
As I understand it, there's a great deal of cross-fertilization between anti-trans groups on either side of the pond and various far-right nutjobs both singly and organizationally, and I'm not sure what we can do to amplify and support the good but - I can only imagine - heart-breaking work folks do tracking and revealing those links.
Going to try to hold on to the spaces I know that are enthusiastically trans-friendly, and see what I can do to encourage them.
Oh, I know. I was/am trying to cling desperately to a shred of silver lining, because it was driving me frantic all day. I wasn't seeing anything in the usual spaces I hang out online calling out this - words to describe this obscene parody fail me. Some of us are shell-shocked, and our supporters and allies, that we rely on for a bit of breathing room and space to be heard...?
As to the bloody court, like I said, "naive" is putting it much too kindly: mealy-mouthed, rank cowardice and capitulation to hateful nonsense is closer to it, and hardly exhausts my reserve of invective.
At least I see that Autostraddle's got a short essay by Morgan M. Page now, working through her feelings on being declared, de facto, "Illegally Female," that hits way too close to home.
I wish I had something happier to share with the thread.
Digging just a tiny bit deeper, it looks like it was a narrow ruling and poorly worded for its stated intentions - which are, arguably, frightfully naive even if one were inclined to read them more generously than I am.
Nought to do but keep an eye open and not let it take up too much room in my thoughts.
Goddesses dammit, I hardly needed more bad news from the world these days. >:(
If I could find a way to retreat to a cottage in the woods with a Maleficent-style wall of thorns, I would, but that's sadly not a realistic option for my foreseeable. Gah!
*Take breath, tries to set shoulders back, chin up.* The struggle continues; stay safe out there, everyone.
I think I'd love to visit China at some point, but I have no idea when I'll make the time to even think about learning a relevant language, and I'm far too much of a weird barbarian to ever think of settling there.
I suspect they would take one look at me and conclude, "OK, so she's not a Mongol, but (her people are) from the far western steppes on the other side - but still. Steppe nomads. Didn't we build a wall about these people?" XD
*Penny drops, years after the fact, thanks to the Referotron.* (In one of my old play-by-post games, I now understand the GM was making an allusion, it seems.)
Because what I really needed this morning was a reminder of how detached I am from much of pop culture. :)
Major premise: Round, flat, bready things – e.g., laganes, naan, parantha – are easy, fun, and tasty.
Minor premise: Tortillas are also round, flat, bready things.
Conclusion: Therefore, preparing tortillas like any other round flat breads should be fine. >:)
If there isn’t already a Demon Lord of Wilfully Flawed Syllogisms, there should be one. :)
And now I’ll need to add paranthas to my grocery list this week, for some deliberately uber-floofy bread goodness.
I’m sorry to hear that your tortillas have been corrupted. Could you salvage some amusement by trying to style it out as some sort of fusion experiment? I’ve always found that culinary disappointments sting a bit less if I pretend I meant to do it that way all along. (Memorably, once, with a rather unorthodox take on lobster thermidor when substitutions proved necessary.)
*FugitiveJedi™ thousand-yard stare.* “Now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in … a very long time.” :)
Either the tides of pop culture have eddied with some weird currents lately, or a bunch of the FAWTLies here are likely to be part of a particular generation, I guess? (Not that that’s remotely surprising.)
Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m keen enough on anthropomorphized fuzzy critters (even if I have recently seen some really cute embroidery patterns that are very RedwallXSword&SorceryRPG) or at all likely to have the bandwidth for the foreseeable future, but I am interested in how you might end up adapting and re-skinning Pathfinder rules for the setting.
No badgers, I’m guessing, unless heavily re-balanced for ease of group play? (So much fun barbarian/skald potential, I can’t help but think.) :D
A very long time ago, the first Redwall book that found its way to me was Mossflower, I think? With the quest to Salamandastron by river? I'm not too proud to admit I was mainly swayed by the very leafy UK cover. (So sue me, I'm a tree-hugging elf hippie. What did you expect? ;) )
So, I'm desperately putting off making some travel plans partly because I'm feeling under the weather after getting my seasonal illness shots, but on the off-chance that the good folks of FAWTtL-dom can inspire me, does anyone know about anything absolutely thrilling that should encourage me to visit Philadelphia?
A conference for work is going to be held there, but it's at least half hybrid and I can get away with Zooming in, and it's happening just at the start of the new year, the first weekend of January.
I would be more excited about it if I wasn't a bit out of it and at the end of a very busy couple of weeks. It doesn't help that I'm enough of a goody-two-shoes that I'm not likely to blow off early to explore before the evenings, if I attend my conference in person.
Idk, visiting the Liberty Bell? Otherwise all I've heard about the place is that evidently their football fans climb utility poles or something.
I think according to CY you kill the fans with the utility poles then disrupt the network by destroying their utilities with Polish fans.
Yes, the Philadelphia sports scene is truly a magical sight to see! One of the few cities where you can go to a game and watch the fans of a team beat the s++% out of other fans of the same team.
In Philadelphia you ain't family unless you're throwing hands at each other.
o.O “The minstrel’s uncertainty increased,” as The Thirteen Clocks puts it. Good to know, I guess?
I gather the art museum is pretty neat, so if I end up going in person, there’s probably that. And wandering around the old town. *Shrugs.* I’m not really much of a traveller, so I probably should go, just because.
So, I'm desperately putting off making some travel plans partly because I'm feeling under the weather after getting my seasonal illness shots, but on the off-chance that the good folks of FAWTtL-dom can inspire me, does anyone know about anything absolutely thrilling that should encourage me to visit Philadelphia?
A conference for work is going to be held there, but it's at least half hybrid and I can get away with Zooming in, and it's happening just at the start of the new year, the first weekend of January.
I would be more excited about it if I wasn't a bit out of it and at the end of a very busy couple of weeks. It doesn't help that I'm enough of a goody-two-shoes that I'm not likely to blow off early to explore before the evenings, if I attend my conference in person.
I need to read more Mesopotamian stuff, but there's always too many things to read, and the list (and the stacks) just keep on growing.
A recent entry is Irving Finkel's The First Ghosts, about those from that part of the world. He gave a fun talk about them online recently, which is probably up on YouTube. If I recall correctly, the difference between ghosts and demons in Assyrian(?), as far as the cuneiform goes, is that both are built around the sign for ishtar (in the generic sense of feminine divinity, rather than Ishtar the specific goddess), but with the addition of the sign for 1/3 for ghosts, and 2/3 for demons. :)
Other things that I'm already splitting my time between now, rather than consigning to the purgatory of the list, are Aston's Blessed Thessaly (history through to about when Rome shows up and starts making a mess of things) and Faraone's The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times, which is a nice introductory archaeological survey for someone who's normally more of a text person.
What you can do with a "new" out of the box tool and what you can do with something that is actually sharp looks like witchcraft if you've never seen something actually sharp. (VERY few tools and knives come sharp out of the box)
(The other half is angled cuts. You have to go in V shaped. Some people just keep hitting the same spot, which is actually kinda impressive but not how blades work on thick things) and the other other half is brute force.
It was really bad in mauritania. For some reason all the knives were chunks of badly tempered metal (I wish forged in fire had been a thing before I went) I sharpened the families knives with a pocket stone and had to spend a week bandaiding people before they got used to it. I'm not even very good at sharpening.
Where/how would someone who lives on her own learn how to sharpen things properly without (excessive) risk to her fingers? To the best of my knowledge, all of my friends are spoiled office types, so while we (I) might appreciate the idea of properly sharp things, none of us are trained in getting there on our own. My granddad was a butcher, but he’s no longer with us, and my dad wasn’t brought up to follow in his footsteps, so there’s no generational transmission of that skill here. :(
Freehold DM wrote:
Scintillae wrote:
I have apparently hit on true horror for Halloween: forcing sophomore boys to watch a musical.
YoU MoNsTeR!
I’m not a huge musical girl (light opera, maybe, but that’s probably an even harder sell to teenage guys, I imagine), but surely there must be some musicals out there that wouldn’t send boys screaming in terror? Granted, we were forced through a bit of Rodgers & Hammerstein in my music classes in high school, but where I grew up was – although a stone’s throw from the metropolis – decidedly neither a cultural nor a pedagogical hotspot. I would hope that things have improved since then, but then I’m not quite that naïve.
On a related note, I’ve been enjoying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of The Warriors, but that is a concept album rather than a musical as such, and the protagonists are genderflipped and… OK, so maybe I have no idea what boys want, after all. ;)
I’m half tempted to bring in some spooky(ish) music for my class tomorrow, but my tastes run horrifically nerdy, so it’s probably for the best if I don’t.
Signs of being old: ... Being tired after walking a few kilometers.
Hush, you! :)
I'm going to console lie to myself that it's because we're creeping ever closer to the dark of the year, so even a brisk, shortish walk in the afternoon leaves one in softer, cool-ish light that encourages the worst tendencies of one's lizard brain.
... Belatedly realizes that's an awkward choice of words when speaking with a dragon. :)
Thanks to both lisamarlene and Drejk for humouring me about language notes! :)
lisamarlene wrote:
Chee-ah-STECH-ka, so closer to the чи
(I studied Russian and German in college, French in high school, and I haven't heard Polish spoken frequently since my grandmother died forty years ago, so my pronunciation is a hot mess, but I =think= that's correct.
Yes! *Pumps fists in joy.* That’s what it sounded like to me, so maybe there’s some hope yet for my ear. :) But then again…
Drejk wrote:
c alone, is a sort of tz sound (tsar, or car in Polish... Ukrainian might have the same sound, not sure or )
cz is equivalent to English ch
ci or ć (it's complicated) is a softer sound, resembling Japanese ch.
Godsdammit. OK, I’d need to hear a lot more Polish spoken to pick up the nuance between ci/ć and cz regularly: I think I can hear it a bit in the examples on the Wiki page for Polish phonology, but in continuous speech in a language I don’t understand? Ha, good luck, me!
I don’t think Ukrainian has the ci/ć – at least not to any significant extent, but as I said, I’m a bumpkin, and certainly not enough of a linguist to parse serious phonology. If I’m reading Wiki correctly it’s a question of palatalization, and Ukrainian doesn’t natively do that for that consonant (family) strongly enough for it to register as a “separate phoneme,” and when it does (especially in speech), it’s mostly considered incorrect.
We do have the equivalent of the Polish c, for a “tz” –ish sound – that’s our ц. (Keeping on the theme of sweets, Ukrainian цукерки (or цукорки, which might be rustic, but that’s how everyone I know pronounces it) would be Polish cukierki, I think.)
Do I need it? No. Do I want it... Yes! Yes, well, for later. For now I have a last piece of Black Forest to finish after my dinner (Bolognese sauce with minced meat on completely wrong type of pasta).
This is a reflection on the limited list
of Polish verbs I can conjugate and spell from memory, without reaching for the "500 Polish Verbs" book on the shelf, because I am lazy.
EDIT: Alright, I looked it up.
Drejk dostaje ciasteczka.
"Cookies" was one of the first nouns I learned. Not on purpose. I didn't learn "cookie" (singular) until months later.
Apparently my aunties are in charge of lesson planning at Duolingo.
Funny thing is that in the first sentence you wrote - ciasteczka is actually singular.
*checks the case declension*
After "potrzebuje" goes... Eeee... Genitive? I think it is genitive, and in that particular case "ciasteczko" becomes "ciasteczka".
** spoiler omitted **
In the second sentence ciasteczka is in... accusative, I think... So there, ciasteczka is plural.
OK, if you’ll forgive a Ukrainian-Canadian too lazy to look up Polish phonemics and too tone-deaf to be sure she can hear generated audio correctly, would either of you be so kind to confirm for inquiring minds how the “ci-” in “ciasteczka” is pronounced?
I’m hearing it as more or less the same as the “cz,” but I am all too aware that I could be crazy. (Not least because, as a barbarian easterner, I might have guessed that it was a hard c, so as if it were ki-steczka, which would sound kind of like “(little) bones” in Ukrainian!)
Coincidentally, I also need cookies (Мені треба тісточки! or, closer to the verb you two were using, Тісточки мені потрібно.*) for a trip back home for the long weekend, so I baked a batch of peanut butter cookies this evening.
(Also: Cyrillic, my friends. It just makes spelling easier. That applies to all y'all Romanizing folks. ;) )
*N.b.: I’m 3.5th generation, or so, depending on how one splits the difference between my parents’ sides of the family, and quite apart from assimilatory pressures, descended from a bunch of hicks, at least from the point of view of the toffs in Lviv or Kyiv, so I apologize for the inelegant phrasing and/or solecisms. I'm blanking on how else my family would say it in a remotely ordinary way, without putting on airs. Well, apart from a couple of other auxiliary verbs.
Dinner tonight (with planned-overs for the next few days, as regularly, as a spinster in her bedsit) was vegetarian (but with real/dairy cheese) nachos, with my favourite yuppie-hippie black/beluga lentils for the pulse/protein. In my neck of the woods, only organic grocers carry them, but they’re my favourite variety of lentil, so living down to my princess-iness it is. For the rest, though, it was just unremarkable taco seasoning from the supermarket, tinned tomatoes, and frozen mixed veg. Oh, and because I'm weird and not living with anyone to complain about it anymore, unsalted nacho chips - I'm really not a huge salt fan, and heart disease runs in my family, so reducing sodium is probably the right move anyway.
Once I make some time to figure out what I need for some proper recipes or to spice up prepared sauces, I have a vague plan of trying my hand at Caribbean pepperpot, and then browsing the local East Asian grocers for inspiration. On that note…
I’m sorry to hear you didn't find your aloo gobi particularly rewarding, DeathQuaker!
It sounds to me like the recipe you found was quite fussy, which I can easily imagine would make the whole thing more frustrating, and then served over rice… I mean, as a Ukrainian, I’m basically culturally and probably genetically predisposed to frankly unnecessary combinations of carbs, but still. When my family makes aloo gobi, we tend to just have it on its own, which may make it easier to balance the spices.
We also just cook everything in the same pot: fry a bit of cumin seeds in oil until they pop, stir in some cauliflower and potato to coat, add a bit of water, cook for ~7 min, add some peas and the rest of the spices, cover and cook over medium heat for ~ 5 min longer until everything’s tender, stirring occasionally. It’s not particularly thrilling, but the main reason I don’t make it more often is because I find it too easy to overdo the oil and make the stuff heavier than it needs to be.
... And now I'm wondering what distance an average person drives in a day. My father, bless his heart, insisted on spending hours in gridlock commuting to work downtown before he retired, even though we lived in the suburbs just over the bridge, so he didn't actually go that far. Which is to wonder, indirectly, if folks that mask up even when driving alone don't expect to be driving for long...
Wow... I think that is so dependent on location and circumstance that I don't think there's a rational concept of "average distance" or even "average time" here. ...
We like irrational and imaginary numbers here! Or, yeah, even as I posted I thought to myself, “This is an ill-posed question, as the mathematicians would say.” :p
I am half-curious, though, despite how much variance there is. I’m guessing that how much time people are willing to spend on the road is the main limit, while how far an hour or so on the road gets you varies drastically based on particular routes and areas. Does her best to assume the posture of a wide-eyed ingénue: Isn’t sorting, filtering, and organizing that kind of complicated but sort of useful data what fancy machine learning / “AI” is supposed to be for, as opposed to, say, generating cruddy “art” to clog up the intertubes? XD
The lunatic mayor of the nearest metropolis to my part of the world has come up with an idea to improve traffic there by, um, digging a ~55 km tunnel under the existing downtown freeway, so commutes and such have been in the back of my mind lately.
Apparently I had unfulfilled quota of annoying morons for this year. Let's hope today caps it.
** spoiler omitted **
I've always worried about running into such morons when traveling to certain parts of the country, but I have yet to encounter one. You have my sympathy.
I'll be honest, the only one I don't understand are people that wear a mask when they're driving alone.
Not that I'd say anything to them, it's just weird.
The only time I do it is when I'm hauling bags of weeds to the composting facility, because of my pollen allergies.
Wasn't/isn't the guidance from thems that know to fiddle with one's mask as little as possible? I'm guessing folks might just figure they might as well keep it on while they go from point A to B?
... And now I'm wondering what distance an average person drives in a day. My father, bless his heart, insisted on spending hours in gridlock commuting to work downtown before he retired, even though we lived in the suburbs just over the bridge, so he didn't actually go that far. Which is to wonder, indirectly, if folks that mask up even when driving alone don't expect to be driving for long.
Wow, that was not fun. I lost my sense of taste and everything! I'm finally feeling better, and starting to catch up on what I missed while I was out of it.
Oh, I have an old Bacchus toga and grapevine lying around, and I'll read up on druidism vs. wicca and be a right PITA about the whole thihg.
Terrible cultural history nerd tangent: for extra spite, I would be tempted to try to recreate some of the more, er, let’s say, imaginative reconstructions of what druids were like from earlier periods of Celtomania.
Ron Hutton (who’s a lot of fun!) mentions – I think in Blood and Mistletoe – a visionary fellow who lectured Victorian(?) audiences about the ‘wisdom of the Druids’ or the like, in his apparently earnest attempt at authentic costume. IIRC, it was marked with supposed druidic runes, but to paraphrase the good professor, the audiences were more interested in why he was addressing them in his (rather peculiarly decorated) underwear. If one had an old-fashioned combination / union suit / onesie that wouldn’t be missed, or some impermanent / washable markers…
“What do you mean? I’m obviously a druid!” *Makes sure to look up chapter and verse.*
…
I may be a terrible person. And, unfortunately, I was absolutely the sort of kid that asked her Mum for weird costumes based on whatever books she was reading at the time. At least it led to some fun conversations while trick-or-treating!
Ugh. Preach it! I try to make my clothes last and seek out natural fibres wherever I can, so fast fashion (or worse) and I don’t get along at all. That reminds me that I should put my crank hat on and write a series of letters to my MP with radical ideas to bring the industry to heel.
I love Hallowe’en immensely, even if I’m not sociable or energetic enough to have much occasion to dress up, so bearing my social and environmental concerns around textiles in mind, when I have dressed up recently, it’s been in costumes that aren’t too out there to reuse as mostly regular clothing.
My overall aesthetic probably skews to granola witch, generally, so that helps. In contrast to that, one of my most costume-y costumes in recent years, compared to my usual outfits, was some low-key cosplay of Max Caulfield from Life is Strange (in her mean girl / hipster incarnation from that one alternate universe episode), so bits and pieces of that will resurface when I want to wear something that is a bit less, “I spent my morning foraging in the woods.” :)
Anyway, absolutely: no disposable tat destined for landfill extracted mercilessly from the poor sods making it!
(I am still looking for a proper pointy hat made of responsible material, I must confess, but then, as I said, the line between “Qunnessaa dressed up for Hallowe’en and/or to be accused before the village elders” and “Tuesday” is probably all but invisible at this point.)
I suspect I may have just caught a bug from one of the absurdly few students in the tiny class I'm teaching this term, just at the start of it. I guess I'm going to bundle up this weekend with cold meds and a stack of work and hope for the best in shaking it off. Oh, and see if I can unearth a COVID test, just in case.
I am not a happy faerie right now. >:(
So, after a long day moping around feeling sorry for myself, I have just tested positive for COVID, after all. I am not particularly surprised, because my symptoms aren't the regular flu, and wow, losing most of one's sense of taste is not fun. Brings home the myth of Erysichthon and the feast of ashes spell, though.
My students will probably appreciate Zoom classes in which they can put their feet up, so.
I suspect I may have just caught a bug from one of the absurdly few students in the tiny class I'm teaching this term, just at the start of it. I guess I'm going to bundle up this weekend with cold meds and a stack of work and hope for the best in shaking it off. Oh, and see if I can unearth a COVID test, just in case.
But then, Canada's population density is a couple of orders of magnitude below my area's, so a "crowded" Ottawa festival is pretty much a nearly-empty street around here...
EDIT: I was curious so here's the math:
Canada: Population 38.93 million (2022), area 3.8 million square miles. Population density roughly 10 people per square mile.
San Francisco Bay Area: Population 7.76 million (2020), area 7,000 square miles. Population density roughly 1100 people per square mile.
So that "a couple of orders of magnitude" throwaway was spot-on. I'm impressed. Though ask 10 locals about what it means to be in the San Francisco Bay Area and you'll get 10 different answers. Officials have given up and declared that the "Bay Area" is anywhere in the 7 counties that actually touch the bay, even though some of those counties extend across the coastal range and into the Central Valley, they're still considered the "Bay Area". And Napa isn't, even though it's basically our rich people's playground.
EDIT 2: This got me curious about Ottawa in comparison. Population 994,837 (2017), area 1072.63 square miles. Population density roughly 927 people per square mile. So at least it's closer to the Bay Area...
Now you’ve got me curious. There are so many of all y’all that I’m not sure how I’d model where most Americans live (everyone in California and New England?), but using the factoid that 90% of us live within 100 km of the border, a back-of-the-envelope estimate for where most of us live gives me a pop. density of about 100 Canucks/sq. mile, on average, I think.
Which feels about right? Choose a random Canadian town and it’s likely to feel about an order of magnitude less exciting (in terms of people hanging around) to a spoiled big-city princess like me, but not actually desolate, unless chance lands you out in the actual woods or prairie.
Uh-oh. Is this math-y enough to summon a raging Freehold? :)
It's a terrible indictment of the downtown in my part of the world that I kind of like the street festivals here, since it's otherwise dead as a door-nail.
It's appalling, because the thought of the same-ish sort of thing in the metropolis where I grew up makes my skin crawl - but then again, there's always something going on there. Or at least a half-way to interesting window display to press one's nose against.
In all fairness, out here in the provinces, some of the booths are at least run by enthusiastic local shops and community organizations, rather than legions of grim merchants merely resigned to a weekend street closure, so. And it's not just mediocre cover bands here - that's what the community / conference hall is for! :/
I have rarely been happy about my lack of musical ability, but the past few posts have made me perversely grateful that my brain balks at imagining what most of those would sound like. :/
lisamarlene wrote:
quibblemuch wrote:
See this scar here, right under my hairline? Got that when someone tried to argue you could sing any Emily Dickinson poem to 'The Yellow Rose of Texas'.
Man's gotta have a code. And gotta enforce that code, even if it disrupts a new graduate student/faculty introduction tea event.
"Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me" is my favorite to sing this way.
That said, this^ I can imagine, because I've heard this test case! Since sharing is caring, I pulled that one in my first year poetry course. Fortunately (for me at least), my prof tolerated it, and I got away without a scar. :p
"The Yellow Rose of Texas" also features in "The Mixed-Up Medley" by Betty and the Bobs, which is a pretty neat trick even in the short version which is the easiest to find online. I was lucky enough to hear them perform it live, a very long time ago, and was immensely jealous. I would probably be tempted to slip into the "right" tunes all over the place, if I were to attempt such a thing.
1/4 inch scales to 10 feet. That’s actually pretty easy to work with.
Agreed, to a point-- the math is pretty easy, but you run into problems when you need X and Y to be installed at a width of, say, 2'.
Yeah. I can, theoretically, imagine real-life (as opposed to dungeon maps :) ) uses for plans scaled for 10-foot (sub-)units, but as a starving student in a big(gish) city, it is a purely hypothetical vision, at least from my bedsit.
The weirdo in me kind of likes the idea of a work-around to move between scales that results in things like plants spaced at 3'9" intervals, but there's that other side that would worry that it would provoke the landscapers into lobbing said plants at the architect's head during a site visit.
The worst issue we've been running into on a lot of projects (our current commercial job is a particularly strong example) is wildly inappropriate scale on the blueprint. The current prints are at 1"=40', and a lot of the actual things that we have to install have dimensions and spacing at distances that don't break down to round numbers at that scale.
This has been bothering me since I read it. For a Canadian, I have a weird amount of imperial in my head, thanks to my parents and generation, but am I missing something, or is that just either really weird (I thought crazyland inches and stuff were in twelfths and sixteenths and such?) or some sort of differently weird kludge to try to force metric onto an imperial grid? I know 1 m ≈ 40 inches takes up way too much of my mental headspace, but 1 [anything] = 40 feet is threatening to liquefy what passes for my brain. Need more sleep and/or caffeine.
