| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong.
;)
Search Posts
*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.)
Calistria wept. Or, probably (sorry, NobodysHome!), laughed, bitterly, and plotted vengeance. That I think I can imagine some of the dynamics in play to parse that summary is depressing enough, but to actually grow up through that? *Shudders.*
Sounds very neat! I hope you find a great bunch of players and have a lot of fun with it!
Redwall? “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? ;) )
Well, I wouldn’t think upper management is very punk rock, so … aspirational? *Thinks about it for a bit.* Oh. OH. *Realizes the error of her ways. Reminds herself:* Hey, we don’t hold with Senior Leadership Team-shaming here! ;)
I think according to CY you kill the fans with the utility poles then disrupt the network by destroying their utilities with Polish fans.Idk, visiting the Liberty Bell? Otherwise all I've heard about the place is that evidently their football fans climb utility poles or something. 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.
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. :( 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
Thanks to both lisamarlene and Drejk for humouring me about language notes! :)
That’s what it sounded like to me, so maybe there’s some hope yet for my ear. :) But then again…
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.)
Drejk potrzebuje ciasteczka.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). 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.
*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!
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. 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.
The only time I do it is when I'm hauling bags of weeds to the composting facility, because of my pollen allergies.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. 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.
I'm ...aliiiiiiiiive! 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!”
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.)
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. I am not a happy faerie right now. >:(
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. :/ "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.
Maybe someone's got a break enchantment in their back pocket?
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.
It's essentially that in a nutshell: The sugars. A 12-ounce beer contains no sugars at all. A 12-ounce soda contains 36 grams. Huh. Learn a little every day. The weirdness around why sugar is bad for us has crossed my radar, but since I’m not much of a drinker, I had never really considered how much goes into booze, or not. Although I’m appalled to learn that some of the stuff my dad will occasionally indulge in apparently contains corn syrup?!!!? That explains so much, and not in a good way. Meh. Beer. IPA or not, it belongs in the sink. Most heartily agreed! :) Sugar, though, is likely to be my culinary nemesis, unless I can get a handle on how stevia works. I have to admit a weakness for baking (both production and consumption), but I try to be reasonable about it, all things considered. It’s a rather grim joke in my family that one of the bakers whose recipes we like when we’re feeling indulgent has completely insane ideas about serving sizes and such. From one of hers that I whipped up a while ago, for example, I got 2.5 times as many cookies as the recipe as written, because any half-way reasonable person would take a look at it and say, “Ha ha, no.”
Dare I ask what goes into most soda and/or doesn't into beer? Setting aside the question of just what mechanism(s) make diet soda so terrible for one, per NobodysHome's link, in terms of unhealthy amounts of sugars, how do your common-or-garden beers stack up against soft drinks again? *Gestures vaguely to dimly-recalled factoids about the caloric values of old-timey brews in the ages of mass malnutrition.* Based on all the jokes I've heard about American beer, I gather the song is due a new verse or two about John Barleycorn being drowned, poor fellow?** I'm not a fan of either, by and large. I've had two beers in my life, and see no likelihood of that number increasing, and for bubbly things I'll mostly go through maybe a bottle or two of mineral water enlivened by some cordial or home-made fruit syrup in a year. I guess I'm a watery tart through and through, though I don't have swords to chuck at the people I might choose to lead various countries. :) **N.b.: Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. As a philhellene, I will sometimes water my wine - I'm not that much of a barbarian, not to.
Re: homonyms, given the messageboards we're on, one thing that I feel I've seen often enough in gaming contexts to find vexing is hoard vs. horde. I mean, sure, sometimes one's in a hurry and attention, typing errors, and autocorrect combine in an orthographically disastrous storm, but really. [/Elf_pedant] ;) I'm OK with people "caring less" because my family runs on an alarming amount of irony and sarcasm, probably.
A while ago, to try out a very old recipe for traditional northern holiday treats (Bonfire Night, actually, though I didn't end up trying it anywhere near the occasion), I bought some oat flour. The experience was, uh, more interesting than successful (not that I was expecting that the flavours would appeal to my debased modern palate), but I have just made a pan of brownies with oat flour instead of wheat, and they turned out fine. :) I'm still experimenting with raw stevia that I grew myself, so I haven't figured out the right way to substitute for the lost bulk from substituting for the sugar (maybe bananas, like in DeathQuaker's recipe, or the leftover mash next time I juice some berries), but some delightful sugar-free concoction should be possible. (With wheat flour, scones/biscuits are forgiving enough that one can mostly just adjust how much dry ingredients go into the mix rather than trying to adjust for the space otherwise taken up by sugar.) For your oat bread recipe, DQ, could one just add a bit more flax / egg substitute if one felt like skipping the eggs this time around? Since I'm a weird crone on my own, I'm quite pleased when I hear about a recipe that lets me use fleggs instead of having to divide eggs to scale a batch down. Dinner here tonight will be Olia Hercules' lazy varenyky, with added smashed potatoes and extra cheese, because varenyky without 'taters (unless they're sweet/fruity ones) is just doing it wrong. ;)
Dare I ask what your idea of a modest skirt is, or what you get up to that you’d be worried about, um, unnecessary … exposure? Not that I’m philosophically opposed to a bit of thigh-flashing, as Aristotle (iirc) infamously inveighed against in condemning the scandalous freedom of Spartan women, but it’s not really my style. Then again, having imbibed too much of the pre-Raphaelites and Anne of Green Gables at an impressionable age, I may not be a very representative young(-ish) lady. My kid brother giving me up as hopelessly schoolmarmish is one thing, but my minister mum thinking I might incline too much to old-fashioned or church picnic styles does sometimes give me pause. :) Anyway, I wouldn’t climb a tree in some of my favourite short-skirted dresses unless the weather permits of leggings underneath, but that’s about it. On a tangential note, I have a trip to Philadelphia to plan for early next year, and I'll have to see if I can work in a detour to the fashion museum at Shippensburg. They have some lovely pieces (that would make my brother roll his eyes at me).
A wacky (And as a tree-hugging hippie elf I feel guilty enough about flying in general that short of a grand tour style of itinerary, I don't think I could bring myself to it even if my purse wouldn't weep at the very thought.)
I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse, if it might be more of an admin issue? I know at my school the exam schedule is planned centrally, and I’m not sure which departments would have the clout and the willingness to spend it on kicking up a fuss, while weekend exams are a relatively recent innovation from when a fall term reading/study break was introduced, to avoid having to change term start/end dates, which I don't think most of my profs (or us students) would find too annoying to deal with. :/
There was a 3e version, I think maybe with a y? (Ragamuffyn, that is.) I think in the Monster Manual 2 from then. If that sort of thing tickles your fancy, for horror, I take it you might hold some of M.R. James' ghost stories dear? A couple of titles, but what sort of animated stuff is at work in which I won't mention here: There's "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (one of my favourites), and "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," which I thought of first.
Heck, wouldn’t the Babylonians have been able to do it, if they had had the geography to know which were the lands *over there*, past the scorpion-men? :) (I’m too lazy to look up the star catalogues right now.) I am looking forward to it, though! Fortunately, I’m in a place I could get a reasonable train ticket to somewhere I should get a decent view without needing to drive, and hopefully in a small enough town that I won’t need to wade through crowds. The nearest metropolis is just out of the path of totality, but hopefully most of the folks there will be content to go no further than one of the suitable suburbs. I am not a party girl. The plan is to maybe check out a local museum or two, but mainly camp out at the local library with some work until it’s time to hike out to a park where I can make myself comfortable. That said, I think I will miss the banging of brasses and all that, as is traditional. ~ “when the assistant bronze resounds in vain for the moon.” (More or less.)
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! Alas, I doubt that when I’ve gone to my final reward that anyone will ask, “Who now will know how to draw down the Moon with a Thessalian wheel?” (Martial 9.29.9)
Add me to the crowd patiently arriving early, book in hand. :) I have a shameful backlog of books to read, always, so if I’m going anywhere for any meaningful length of time, I’ll probably have at least one in my bag to keep me entertained and out of trouble. Also, one of my teachers is a living cautionary tale: my friends and I would see him fairly often racing frantically across campus to get wherever on time, and he’s managed to miss at least two flights in his life, that we know of, and for some of us it’s been hard to quash a censorious mental twitch of, You didn’t learn your lesson last time? I can only imagine it must be nice to live comfortably enough that making alternate arrangements very quickly and presumably at obnoxious expense doesn't induce an aneurysm.
Dang, the disrespect to the Appalachians... The Appalachians are really pretty! If I weren’t a spoiled city princess, I wouldn’t mind hiking the IAT one day, but I don’t think I’ll ever be enough of a camping person to develop the skills for it. Never say never, but I’m not putting it on my bucket list. Fair play to them, they’ve also got the highest point in Québec that pretty much any of us southern folk is likely to be anywhere near in our lifetimes, at 1 268 m, so NY has us beat there. Wiki suggests Nunavik just gets over the line to western respectability at 1 652 m, but if I ever end up that far northeast, something has gone terribly wrong, unless I ever visit Scandinavian parts overseas.
There are mountains in NEW YORK?!While I understand that Americans' understanding of geography is a constant source of ridicule, and those on opposite coasts frequently get things ludicrously wrong (when GothBard was a child she accused a friend of lying because he claimed he was going to drive across three states in a matter of hours), I expect the New York Times to do better.I once got into an argument with a native Iowan who flatly refused to believe that there are mountains in New York State. Seconded. :) Mind you, I'm from a bit further north, and the ice age did a good job scraping most things pretty level around here. There are some neat craggy bits, but lofty peaks they ain't. Though my mother's side of the family is on the west coast, so I was brought up to believe that things smaller than the Rockies don't really count, which probably skews my perspective. Not that I actually have any sense for the interior of BC, and the Prairies are a mystery to me.
Are we talking about qubits, or are there astonishing developments that I wouldn’t have heard about, as a non-techy person? Last I heard, scaling things up to be practical was a vicious limiting factor, but I would never rule out the clever boffins working on these things. It’s been years since I’ve hung around any scientists or engineers, sadly, but the ones I have tended to be bracingly “Well, let’s see what happens?” and “It will be an adventure!” about things. I’m still waiting for them to build (at last) the ITER, dammit! In the meantime, Derek Lowe’s columns about undesirable chemicals (with a shout-out to his entry about chlorine trifluoride, which is also a classic) are always fun. Hmm. I’ve never been a huge fan of the PF alchemist, but now the idea of one inspired by the evidently colourful careers of the Strengs is growing on me.
I lost all respect for unions when the state had a budget surplus so it gave an extra 15% permanently to schools and our union's "negotiations" resulted in a 17% raise for administrators and a 6% raise for teachers. If you can't even break even, you're not negotiating worth a darn. Wow, yikes. I've been lucky here, but that's veering off-topic. Off-off-topic? Getting back to less wicked problems than the state of the world in general, much as I'm always pleasantly bemused to see what folks are playing on their computers, since I've never kept my machines up assiduously enough to run the big studios' things remotely near when they come out, the usual suspects are doing their best to tempt me to open my purse (belatedly), despite having a shameful library to work through. Trying to decide if there's a realistic chance that I'll get around to playing either Expeditions: Rome or Assassin's Creed: Odyssey if I give in, since I have a soft spot for (ancient) historical fantasy. One of these days I'll have to sit down with a notebook and revisit Hellenica to confirm some of the Easter eggs, because there were a lot for a nerd of my ilk even at a casual glance. It's a silly place, but I can't not have a soft spot for anything that manages to work in a reference to Erinna's Distaff. 11/10, because I'm predictable that way. :)
It might well be. I'm in the unwelcome position of waiting to see how the negotiations between my union and the powers that be for renewing our collective agreement go, and it's always been unpleasant. (Insert, since that would be getting too political here, subversive pinko leftist whispers here.) Might be a question too of degree of readiness for labour action? The thought of ( Um. So much for whispers. At the risk of having said the quiet part too loudly, I'll leave it at that. I miss that Anklebiter goblin comrade. :)
I hadn't heard anything about it. I'll have to do some research on it. I'm very confused about what's happening. Ugh, I hope it may just have hit me particularly hard. I'm not seeing it anywhere else yet, and hopefully that can stay that way. There was a bizarre editorial at The Guardian; I've put a link in the spoiler below. Link to the article here:
It's deeply unpleasant stuff, so if anyone decides to brave it, be ready to - I don't know - touch grass? put on some really angry music? responsibly self-medicate? call a holy crusade in the name of the Syrian Goddess / Inanna? Or, I guess, vent? With me, if you like, either here or by PM? ♀️ On the bright side again, let's see... Oh, I've started listening to audiobooks while I do a bit of embroidery. Recent listens that get the Qunnessaa stamp of approval, for something light while plying a needle, include Casey McQuiston's I Kissed Shara Wheeler and Ami McKay's The Witches of New York. (The latter wraps up its main plot but dangles plot hooks for more volumes quite shamelessly, one of which is a loose end from an unexpected but very welcome sapphic subplot.)
I was curious since I know California has deer hunting seasons but we never hear about them at work, but I was surprised to learn we also allow black bear hunting. Which makes me wonder how we can possibly have such a huge population of them. Materials for creepy folk costumes? *Gathers flowers, assembles masks, starts constructing wicker man.* :) This is the part of me that would be playing a Sensate in a Planescape game asking, but, uh, for the unenlightened, dare I inquire what's so unpleasant about bear meat? My branch of the family has been urban for a few generations now, mercifully, but occasionally someone will break out a story about their great-granddad or whoever and the old homestead (now being stubbornly looked after by a couple of my great-uncles who really maybe oughtn't to), so we spoiled young'uns can sometimes be distracted by stories calculated for our horrible fascination.
It's been a while since I've checked in on this thread (it's been a long few years, and I'm a belle grognarde who still hasn't dabbled her toes in PF2, so my forum time tends to focus on my play-by-post games, but I thought folks here might have some insight on current affairs? It's not happy news, so I'll put the lurid details in spoilers, but what's up with the WPATH stuff?
Spoiler:
Apparently some unsavory characters have collected and circulated private discussions among WPATH members as part of the ongoing backlash against, y'know, trans folks basically continuing to dare to exist. :(
A lot of the usual nonsense about "won't someone think of the AFAB children" and so-called "early-onset gender dysphoria" and all that. Came across it in, predictably, the reliably reactionary British media - apparently I'm one of the radical far left types some worry about - but mercifully I haven't seen it cut through on other platforms I follow, though that's cold comfort. Anyone know if this is getting traction anywhere else? Wondering if this is something we should brace for in my part of the world, where this past autumn we had to mobilize the community to counter-protest a punch of lunatics up in arms against efforts to acknowledge gender and sexual diversity at all levels of education. Wondering, too, if it's too (uncharacteristically) optimistic to hope this will fizzle out quietly or go the way "Climategate" eventually did? :( :( :( Trying to find a happier note, the student insurance provider at my school has recently broadened its coverage for gender-affirming care, so I need to look into that for some last odds-and-ends that would be helpful for me. I hope everyone's staying safe out there, as best as they can. <3
I’ve never braved trying to track down author guidelines from, say, the pot-boiler romance market, just out of lurid curiosity, and I’d like to think that I avoid the tackiest end of things, but even a comparative snob like me wonders if there’s a certain formula that unduly influences the sorts of trashy thing I might toss into my bag to waste time while stuck in a noisy laundromat that is not conducive to more challenging fare. And I’ve been flabbergasted to see that even avowedly mad-libbed / name-swapped nonsense gets even negligible but non-zero hits among fanfiction readers. I mean, there’s wasting time, and then there’s a basic level of self-respect. Convenient! Pretty soon we won't have to do anything at all to game. Generative AI will write the modules, create the characters, then run the characters through the modules. This is going to be a big time saver! I have to admit I can imagine a sort of gruesome fascination with the idea, like watching a train wreck. Or something like this, only worse? Or the schadenfreude of having a really terrible paper to grade, only without the guilt and frustration of having to actually mark the damn thing? In the case of "AI" "content," one could simply sit back and marvel, “Wow, somebody thought it was worth releasing something that could produce this?” Except that would only encourage them, I’m sure.
I’m bad at math – at least, at anywhere near where things start getting interesting – and there’s always so much other stuff going on, but I wish I could make some time to look over my old notes. For old times’ sake. :( Completely unrelated, except for, I guess, numbers:
Who is Number One? :D My sister-in-law collects Portmeirion ware, though she inexplicably favours the more minimalist stuff. My kid brother was horrified when I told him that, of course, Portmeirion is The Village from The Prisoner. I may have inspired a certain low-level paranoia in him. What are sisters for, after all? :)
Yep! My mom's originally from BC, and my aunt spent quite a few years in the interior, and both are very glad now that they don't have to face the Coquihalla (or worse, the old highway) in winter. Even in our neck of the woods, which is mostly flat, there are valleys in our hills that even 4WD won't help you get out of after a decent snowfall, let alone a shabby job clearing the roads that leaves, as you say, a gloating sheet of ice. :) Made all the worse because my mom doesn't even like to drive. Although when her job started to take her out into the boonies, she did have the pleasure of taking refresher winter driving lessons with a moonlighting F1 racer, who would constantly encourage her to go faster!, and test her ability to regain control in a pinch by slamming the emergency brake for her on icy patches.
|