Reading

Work

I made a positive contribution to work by proposing a sign for the perennially-blocked door 10 that warning people that door is an emergency door and not to be blocked. Door 10 is in a short corridor next to a change room and people keep commandeering it to store stuff. Specifically clients. I think I may have annoyed the client last Friday by informing them I wasn't going to open the theatre until that exit was cleared.

Of course, nobody will read the sign but at least it will be there.

Not as annoying as the time the Hack the North kids decided the best place for a pile of duffle bags was against the outside of door 8, one of the two main balcony entrances.

The legion of house managers got a long form of things that we're expected to do, each section of which we had to initial before returning it. I was not the only one who read it looking for sections that might have been inspired by something I did or did not do.

On a Weekend of Outdoor Hobbies on Sunny Days

I was also out in the sunshine doing outdoor hobby things over the weekend.

Spent Friday at the Hive with My Lovely Wife watching Edinburgh Rugby's last (home) game of the season and saw them unexpectedly win and qualify for the European Champions Cup and United Rugby Championship play-offs. Edinburgh can be a bit wobbly in crunch games. They needed at least one other result to go their way. They've been (rightly) focused on their European Challenge Cup run to the semi-finals. I thought they'd be exhausted and fumble a that the last. Instead they played with the buccanneering freedom that I enjoy watching so much and won quite convincingly in the end.

Which means they finish in the top eight, and qualify for the play-offs and, more importantly, next year's senior European tournament, the Champions Cup. The play-offs will be a challenge. They have the second placed Bulls away in South Africa which will be a challenge.

Lovely sunny evening watching rugby with my wife, drinking beer in the sun.

Saturday evening I went to see An Audience with Aggers and Tuffers at the Assembly Rooms with a non-cricketing pal. My dad dropped out due to his back. Lovely gentle chat familiar to anyone who regularly listens to Test Match Special. Had a few beers.

Sunday, did a bit of light gardening e.g. stood looking at some things in the sun whilst holding a hose either at my garden or my dad's.

It's been very dry here for several months. I don't recall any rain in Edinburgh for a month. There is talk about hose-pipe bans.

On a Weekend of Indoor Hobbies on Sunny Days.

As part of my stop being miserable and start being alive again programme I am taking up in earnest a number of hobbies.

I have joined a board games club that meets on a Friday, a table top role playing club that meets on Wednesday and next week I have an introductory session to a table top wargaming club. This all is in part spurred on by finding my old Warhammer kit spread across the bedroom floor after the burglary and being inspired to try and get it back on the table. (Improv and acting to follow.)

So over the week I spent some time assessing how much of my Games Workshop Bretonnian army was damaged (very little), how much stuff I thought I had was missing (a couple of pieces but they could easily be in a box I've not looked in yet), what sort of stuff I had that could go on the table (painted, based etc - enough for one functional but small army). That job done I needed to find a better way of storing them and put them on some movement trays.

The answer turns out to be magnets and the wonder of Amazon's business model.

Buy small magnets, glue these to the bottom of your models. Buy ferrous-rubber sheeting. Buy self-adhesive velcro tape. Buy Really Useful Storage Boxes. Spend Saturday morning listening to classic Just a Minute whilst Your Lovely Wife and Your Energetic Son are out shopping and playing golf respectively sticking them all together. Then spend some time on Sunday making magnetised movement trays out of the cardboard that your Amazon deliveries came in, self-adhesive A4 sticky labels and cut-to-fit rubberised magnetic sheeting.

So that's the core of a Bretonnian army ready to go.

Due to changes in the rule-set I need to add in some additional models and I miss my Green Knight. The Green Knight is such a wild, mad character, in both narrative and play terms that I insist on replacing him and I need some more flag-carriers and trumpeteers and junior officers. But that can wait until after I've tried out at the club. I will avoid buying anything from your actual Games Workshop because I try not to support the business model of "change rules to force lonely teenagers to buy new models."

In terms of changes to business models that make this easier, Amazon, Amazon-style delivery, 3d printing, YouTube and all mediate by the internet.

It's now easier and cheaper to find new ideas, new suppliers, new things and have them get to your house.

When I first took up this hobby it was very difficult to buy models that were not bought in a Games Workshop shop and made by Games Workshop. Games Workshop would not sell you alternative models (and in fact ban unofficial proxies from their shops and sanctioned tournaments). They also mediated / gatekept participation in the hobby. If you didn't already have a group of friends to play with you could only easily find them with the help of Games Workshop. Knowing how to store models using magnets was difficult to find out. Perhaps Games Workshop would rather sell you £200 worth of foam-filled boxes than £30 worth of magnets and velco and therefore didn't write articles about it in their official magazine. Perhaps not, coincedence or magic, you decide. If you knew the technique finding the kit was tricky. Who has 200 5mm by 2mm magnets? Where can I get ferrous-rubber sheets? Which part of my city is the place to look for people who know who to put those together.

Turns out the internet has you covered. Mostly Amazon. Amazon can afford to stock all of the things I need and ship them to me. 3d printing allows model designers using 3d print software to dis-aggregate themselves from physical 3d printing producers. 3d printing itself is perfect for high-value, low-volume small batch production. YouTube and Google will tell me how to make better storage and which producers of alternative models are good. I don't have to bodge together a foam-filled box in order to not have to buy one for £200. I know have instructions step-by-step on how to make a better alternative and can buy all the materials and have them arrive next day at my door.

So I've had all the storage I need delivered to my door. Assuming that I enjoy Thursday as much I hope to I'll then have models for the Green Knight, the Lady of the Lake, some heroic knights, some on flying horses, and some pikemen delivered to my door. That should complete my Bretonnian army for the time being. Then to make and paint High Elves and Skaven which are still mint in the box. The long winter nights will be filled with joy (and from MLW and MES, baffled incomprehension.)

Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 19-05-2025

1. Japanese Diver Has Been Friends With a Massive Fish for 30 Years: (tags:fish friendship )

On 15s

I made some tray bakes at the weekend

Fifteens are a Northern Irish fridge-tray bake - apparantly unknown outside of Ulster. I came across them on a BBC evening tour of Irish food programme which is currently filling the space usually taken up by Michael Portillo and his trousers. I like the food tour programme but I miss Michael Portillo, who, if in office now would probably be the Labour Party's third greatest Prime Minister.

I'm practicing for the bake sale attached to the end of season rugby festival.

They are very very sweet.

Fifteens ingredients

Digestive biscuits

Marshmallows

Glace Cherries

Desicated Coconut

Almond

Condensed Milk

Milk Chocolate Chips

Very easy to make 15 each of digestives, marshmallows, cherries - whizz the biscuits in a food processsor. Chop up the marshmallows and cherries, mix in a bowl with the condensed milk, put most of the coconut on a sheet of cling film,dollop the biscuit mixture on to that, top with the rest of the coconut, roll up in to a sausage and put in the fridge overnight. Cut up in the 15 pieces (or smaller as they are very very sweet.)

I'm not actually eating them myself as I'm on a diet but the small taste test I did suggests they are dangerously moreish.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

alithea and

clanwilliam!

Current Mood: calm

Entry tags:

books,
read25

2025/074: A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece — Philip Matyszak

2025/074: A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece — Philip Matyszak

...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]

Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

walk

I went for a walk this afternoon with Cattitude and Adrian: downhill to Beacon Street, then inbound as far as the Summit Avenue T stop. Not only was it useful exercise, I got to smell one of my favorite flowers, rugosa roses. It may have been too long a walk, because my joints were feeling the strain before I turned back and took the trolley partway home, but if I'd turned back any sooner I'd have missed the roses. While I took the T home, Cattitude and Adrian continued to Coolidge Corner, to shop for groceries and then get bagels. (Most of the time, the two of them can walk further than I can.)

I had to walk a few blocks uphill from the T to get home, but I allowed for that when I decided how far to walk. I came home, took my shoes off, and sat a while before I put on the shoes that I'm still breaking in. I will probably break them in a little more before I wear them outside.

Entry tags:

ball games,
diary

I'd like a weekend to recover from this weekend please

I applied for a job and I talked to my parents this evening. And I watched the Twins lose a heartbreaker (all credit to Jackson Chourio though, wow).

Can't believe my reward for this is that I have to go to bed soon so I can go to work in the morning!

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

Celebrating. My 35^th birthday! With a picnic at the allotment (and the allotment fox, and a slow worm, and THE WOODPECKERS); and birthday cake courtesy of my mother. :)

Reading. Finished The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke, and enjoyed myself so doing!

Then What An Owl Knows, Jennifer Ackerman, showed back up from the library. I am making better progress this time and continue to enjoy Owl Facts.

I have made 0 progress on any of the books on pain, and The Silence Factory (Bridget Collins) has jumped to the top of my read-next list courtesy of getting to the front of the holds queue much sooner than I'd expected to...

Writing. PIP submission got to Good Enough by very early Friday morning. That has been most of my make-words-go brain this week, shockingly.

Playing. I Love Hue: I am Infuriatingly Stuck, presumably at more or less the point I got Infuriatingly Stuck last time. I am more-or-less at the point where I am going to just restart the level and hope I get luckier on my second attempt, but that is never a particularly satisfactory!

Cooking. Choy sum with ~~oyster~~ mushroom sauce, garlic, and peanuts: didn't really get the point of the peanutty topping; unlikely to bother with again. White miso ramen with asparagus and tofu: I was extremely dubious about this based on reading the recipe, and somewhat to my surprise wound up actually really liking the broth; not a high priority for eating in-season asparagus in future, though. Bay, rye and hazelnut cake with poached rhubarb: Y E S, especially using the poaching syrup as a drizzle!

Eating. A made me Saturday brunch waffles, and conveniently we had leftover picnic strawberries and some cream that needed using up, so I got fancy strawberries-and-Chantilly-cream waffles as a Birthday Treat :)

Also had a cream tea at Wimpole early on Sunday afternoon, and curry from a restaurant in Cottenham following Terrible Further Sunday Afternoon Adventures. Some of my mother's bread; birthday cake courtesy of my mother also; also also lentil moussaka ditto :)

Exploring. Visited Home Farm at Wimpole Hall, where we scritched piglets and observed a variety of rare breed hens, rare breed ducks, chicks and ducklings ditto, The Horses, The Rabbits, The Bogat Goats incl. Baby Goats, and we waved to the donkeys, in addition to being very pleased about the various swift-ish things and sparrows making their way in and out of the barns.

Also spent an afternoon sat at the junction of the A10 and Landbeach Road, for terrible hobby purposes, and relatedly a little bit of time poking around the even-more-immediate vicinity of the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP, aaand also drove past the house we are not even remotely going to buy just to sort of wist at it.

Making & mending. Sawed some wood! All of the bits for railway sleeper raised bed #1 are now in position and I've filled it; but on reflection I deemed the 180mm screws Too Short so am awaiting delivery of some 300mm for Final Assembly. (Whereupon I get to decide to do it all again for bed #2...)

Growing. First broad beans will be ready for harvest any day now (and in fact if we wanted to eat some immature pods I could have the first handful already). Peas are starting to flower! Strawberries are extremely Set Fruit and might even start ripening at some point soonish!

I am extremely excited about how happy the raspberries are looking.

Have sown all of my remaining elderly quinoa seed, which I am not expecting to do much of anything, and will be pleasantly surprised if it does; having one final go at getting any viable plants out of the pineapple physalis seeds I bought at the beginning of the season; have been Donated some Moneymaker tomatoes and a basil plant from my mother; really really need to get the cucumbers started, but Not Quite Yet.

Have started putting squash various outside. Need to finish prepping beds for them to actually go into.

Oh! And the tomatoes are also going out! Annoyingly I lost track of which were Orange Banana and which were Blue Fire so I'm not entirely sure I'm going to actually manage planting up a rainbow of the things, but -- fingers crossed, eh?

Observing. IN ADDITION TO the excellent allotment wildlife and the Creatures at Home Farm, we enjoyed various plantings around Wimpole (including the incredibly striking Very Tall Straight-Stemmed Ferns), and while Doing A Traffic Survey At The A10/Landbeach Road Junction saw also: lambs! corvids harassing a red kite! more swift-y things! goldfinches??? wild rabbits, to A's delight. Some geese, honking merrily away to themselves.

It has been a particularly good week for Creatures. :)

Entry tags:

ice hockey

GIP: I need a nap

I was caught unawares in the background of photos taken yesterday after the game, and I was so amused by the exhaustion evident in my position and expression that it had to become an icon.

(I was revived with cake and a drink shortly after this was taken.)

Entry tags:

I think I'm allowed another self-promo in case anyone missed the first

It took me a year to drag this fic out of the scorched earth that certain parts of my brain have been since my Epic Psychiatric Misadventures, I think it's genuinely one of the better things I've written, and I am very proud of it.

a word you've never understood on AO3 (Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen Macdonald, M, Sunil Rao/Adam Rubenstein, 9K words)

Summary: He’s been starving for so long. He thinks he’s never not been starving.

Note: massive spoilers for canon, and probably won't make a lot of sense if you've not read it. I am aware this is niche.

Entry tags:

cooking,
recipes

Culinary

This week's bread: managed for the first time in yonks, to score a bag of Shipton Mill Three Malts and Sunflower Organic Brown Flour, so made up a loaf of that, v tasty.

Friday night supper: the hash-type thingy with the last 2 sweet potatoes cut up, boiled, and then sauteed with chopped red bell pepper and Calabrian salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, strong brown flour, maple syrup, cranberries, nice.

Today's lunch: seabream fillets, rubbed with ginger paste and lime juice, salt and pepper, and left for a couple of hours then panfried in butter + olive oil, splashed with the remaining juice at the end; served with baby Jersey Royal potatoes roasted in goosefat, large flat mushrooms marinated in dark soy sauce (was meant to be tamari but I didn't have any) + mirin + tspn toasted sesame oil + star anise boiled up together, then healthy-grilled, and asparagus steamed and tossed in melted butter with lemon juice and lemon zest.

CD version of the "complete" La Vie Parisienne

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/05/18/the-complete-la-vie-parisienne-encore/

The best known books set in each country: Cameroon

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-cameroon/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61339

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Cameroon.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
How Beautiful We Were	Imbolo Mbue	18,281	726
The Informationist	Taylor Stevens	11,303	950
A Zoo in My Luggage	Gerald Durrell	5,281	959
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut	Nigel Barley	3,375	623
The Bafut Beagles	Gerald Durrell	2,022	709
Les impatientes	Djaïli Amadou Amal	8,714	105
Houseboy	Ferdinand Oyono	2,295	372
The Overloaded Ark	Gerald Durrell	1,418	472

This was one of the easiest runs I have had for a while. Gerald Durrell does well, and I remember reading those books when I was 13 and loving them; and I also remember really enjoying The Innocent Anthropologist when I was a bit older. But I’m glad that the top spot goes to a Cameroonian woman writer, and I’m interested that a novel by another Cameroonian woman writer, that hasn’t even been translated into English, also makes the top eight. I must add also that The Informationist sounds like great fun.

I’m used to a certain fluctuation between the popularity of books on both systems, but the relative LibraryThing invisibility of Les impatientes by Djaïli Amadou Amal is remarkable. It’s the third most widely owned of these books on Goodreads, and not even in the top fifteen on LT.

I disqualified two books, neither of which was a difficult decision. Behold the Dreamers, also by Imbolo Mbue, is about Cameroonian immigrants in New York, and seems to be set entirely in the USA. The Marco Effect, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is a Danish crime novel with a subplot set in Cameroon, but it’s much less than half of the book as far as I can tell.

Other countries where I only disqualified two books: China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa.
Countries where I only disqualified one book: India, the USA, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, the UK, Spain, Iraq.
Countries where I have not disqualified any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: Nepal, Venezuela, Niger and then Australia.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-best-known-books-set-in-each-country-cameroon/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=61339

Entry tags:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag and his wife Millie live comfortable, conventional, middle-class lives. Millie finds purpose in an endless stream of television entertainment. Guy burns books.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Entry tags:

photos,
pixelfed

Photo cross-post

We went to the Highland Folk Museum where they had a recreation schoolroom. Sophia loved writing with an ink pen, Gideon loved supervising her.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Holloway

'Holloway' comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hol weg', and refers to a sunken path that has been grooved into the earth over the centuries by the passage of feet, wheels and weather...

'The Old Ways' Robert Macfarlane

( West Dorset holloways. )

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: On the train

Entry tags:

book review

Emily Tesh: The Incandescent

The second Tesh novel in a couple of weeks for me, thanks to friendly comments pointing out a new one was about to be published. This one in a completely different genre: magical school story with some horror mixed in instead of military space opera with some dystopia. Unusually and refreshingly for any type of school story, our heroine and central character is one of the teachers, and so is most of the supporting cast. There are four students who are important to the plot in the way teachers are in other boarding school stories - from Enid Blyton to Harry Potter - , which is to say, you get to know them, but strictly from the outside, they are plot relevant, but the narrative emphasis is strictly on the teacher side of things, not just in terms of our central character but also the main supporting characters.

Since Dr. Walden (first name Sapphire which is her parents‘ fault; friends refer to her as „Saffy“, but the narration and her own pov call her „Walden“ almost through the entire novel) is near forty and a determined bisexual workoholic, the difference to the Young Adult tone with which many a boarding school story usually arrives is there from the start. At first, the novel seems to go for wry comedy as we get to know the characters and the setting; the rules for this particular universe are established: An AU in which magical abilities are publically known and a thing; the problem is that teenagers with their magical abilities running wild and them not yet able to really control them are the favourite snacks of demons, both, depending on the size of the demon, in the literal sense or via possession or for the smallest imps just via annoyance by them possessing machines. I mean, we all knew that about printing machines and photo copiers in offices, right? Anyway, hence the need for schools simultanously teaching the kids how to control their abilities and doing their best to save them from ending up as snacks. This can be difficult because teenagers by definition think THEY are invulnerable and able to conjur up the cool demons, which is why in addition to the regular teachers like Walden, there are also „Marshals“, i.e. magical cops who mostly don‘t have an academic background but excell at demon fighting. We open the novel with Walden meeting the latest Marshal, Laura Kenning; there is mutual resentment and UST from the get go.

It comes more and more evident that larger demons are no laughing matter and really incredibly dangerous, though the black humor never leaves the narrative tone, either. Walden, for all that she oozes competence and cool in the present, had A Tragic Event in her own youth; basically she‘s female Rupert Giles if you‘re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and/or female John Constantine from Hellblazer, if John/Joanna had gone into teaching after the event in question), and while she is really as good as she thinks she is in all things magic, she also is slightly hubristic because of it, and that becomes highly plot relevant. I also appreciate that she has a genuine passion for teaching. As for the demons, they‘re gratifyingly complicated and alien; leaving the comic relief ones you find in printers (I KNEW IT) aside, the reader is presented with two important ones, and while the first one‘s goals are obvious and very Exorcist the tv show, what the other one is up to is infinitely trickier and yet the hints are there early on.

By now, I‘ve found out that there were some complaints re: Some Desperate Glory regarding the characters being queer but their romances only seen in glimpses, so to speak, which I thought was appropriate for the characters and the story of Some Desperate Glory (plus it invites fanfic), but I take the general point, so let me say that Walden‘s romantic and sexual life gets more narrative room, plus Walden/Laura is central to the plot. Also, the novel avoids two extremes I find annoying which some media take with bisexual characters: either a character is declared to be bi but we only ever see him or her with one gender of romantic partner, i.e. the opposite if it‘s a more main stream show (looking at you, Da Vinci‘s Demons) or the same (Torchwood fanfiction; the show itself gave more screen time to Jack‘s same sex romances, but we did get some examples of him and women as well); OR there is the cliché of the evil, disturbed or at least amoral bisexual, unable to commit and breaking hearts that way (famously Basic Instinct, but also the novels of an author I otherwise really like, Sosan Howatch). By contrast, both in the past and in the present Walden is someone the reader sees to be attracted to people of both genders, we‘re not just told that in theory she is, and she‘s emotionally involved in the relationships in question (with one exception). (While at the same time being a sensible force for good. )That said, it is rather clear which relationship in the present we‘re meant to root for. *g*

In conclusion, this was another highly readable and very captivating novel by this author, who I hope will gift us with many more in the years to comem.

Entry tags:

ice hockey

Multiple hockey milestones yesterday

Yesterday Kodiaks B played Solent Valkyries in Gosport. I hired a 9-seater and drove a bunch of the team down and back, and in between played a game, captaining the team for the second time. For some reason I am tired this morning.

Some milestones:

It was the first win for Kodiaks B, certainly this season and I think ever.
I got my first points for Kodiaks, ever: a goal and an assist, doubling my lifetime points. (1 assist for Women's Blues two seasons ago, 1 assist for Warbirds late last year)
That's my first recorded goal ever (I scored my first goal ever in a scrimmage at the end of last year)
For extra hilarity I did not actually score this goal, it was an own goal credited to me because I was the last Kodiaks player to touch the puck before the poor Valkyrie kicked it in her own net. A point is a point and I'll claim it. But I have yet to actually score a goal in a formal game.

Also at one point my stick blade got stuck in the boards at the side of the rink when I was digging for a puck. I couldn't get it out, so I went skating hard back to the bench yelling for a change and instead one of my teammates passed me her stick, which I grabbed at speed and went straight back into play. So dramatic! So much fun!

(the ref retrieved my stick and returned it to the bench and I got it back when I changed with my line; it is fine from its adventure)