vital functions

[kaberett]

Reading. Apparently I can read things if they are (i) nonfiction, (ii) I placed a hold on them at the library some time ago that Finally Showed Up, or (iii) they are absolute undemanding fluff.

Night Theatre, Vikram Paralkar. I gulped this one down; as I said last week, it wasn't what I was expecting -- I think I'd been anticipating something more like Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice, and it wasn't very much at all. I enjoyed the experience of reading it and found the ending frustratingly ambiguous.

Red, White & Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston. This prompted me to actually get my act together to look at Royal Archives policies re personal correspondence, because I have now read two different Royal Romances by Americans with wildly diverging ideas of How Royal Correspondence Is Archived, and while on the one hand I don't expect a great deal from people who are writing such a bafflingly incorrect How To Undergrad Geology In The UK I still found I wanted to know. Extremely alternate-timeline wish fulfilment for a very specific demographic; very readable even as I was sputtering (not about undergrad geology, that was the other one); I... am not entirely sure whether the book knows it's doing what it's doing with having our USois protagonist be Important primarily because of who his mother is, in a striking parallel to our UK protagonist, but hey.

ExtraOrdinary, V.E. Schwab. Short graphic novel. It has been a while since I last read something that was quite so Very Stereotypical Comics Girl Shapes (here's the artist's portfolio). I am not convinced I understood what was going on but on the other hand that is I suppose what ill-advised reading at 1 a.m. gets me.

The Beckoning Silence, Joe Simpson. As excerpted yesterday! Mostly it is a book about mountaineering; there is a chapter in the middle that is definitely A Polemic, complete with phrases that read like rhetorical questions but are punctuated with full stops, on the general theme of The Ethics Of Mountaineering And Reporting On It. Photos are lovely. Got this from Oxfam and am going to give it back (probably) (though rydra, yell if you want it posting to you, actually?). Definitely giving me a bit of a hankering to reread Clear Waters Rising. Not done yet, but won't be long.

Writing. I. have made a start. on the sodding PIP review. I am seven pages in. I am just about to start on Question 2. There's a bunch of placeholder in Question 1. It is deeply unpleasant.

Watching. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young (region-locked YouTube but also available elsewhere on the internet), while covering A in dye on Monday. Greatly enjoyed.

Listening. There are singles from three separate artists I am Emotionally Invested In that have been out for a minimum of weeks now, none of which I have yet been able to coax myself into listening to. :|

Playing. Filament, which we have finished. We... are disappointed by the way the story wrapped up or, you know, didn't, as the case may be. We spent a bit of time poking around TVTropes and discussion boards and so on and none of it was satisfying to us; I'd definitely have preferred less ambiguity and more of a sense that the creators thought they knew what was going on, and less of a sense of It Was All A Dream. (I am marginally unfair, there.)

I think we did all but... about eight...? of the environmental puzzles ourselves, but were sufficiently put out by the ending that we looked those up in a walkthrough rather than continuing to bang our heads against them. Um. Let's see: * the books (which we had worked out were a puzzle but could not quite bring ourselves to spend long enough looking at to sort out, given the ending) * the Chalk card, which I had wound up half-convinced was partially Braille but which, it transpires, very much was not * the ridiculous swoopy substitution cipher * the grabby hand in the workshop (which I had TOLD ADAM was binary, in response to which he informed me that he didn't want to sit around transcribing it with me and I'd get bragging rights when we looked it up and it was) * the secondary reading of the lights in the engine room * the tiles in the bathroom, which I had copied down correctly even (having spotted the bonus extra one!) but then introduced an off-by-one error in drawing on the boundaries! of! the grids! * the ID cards * the escape pods (HOW did we miss that??? I mean, the answer is the 05 printed everywhere on the ship, but) * the lights in the atrium -- we had worked out it was height but Just Could Not * the art on the walls in the living quarters corridor (having spent some time utterly failing to get it) * the arrows at the bottom of the screensaver * The Card With The Spaces On * THE RESISTORS * the nested fucking nonagram * the yin-yang superposition card

... and technically we accidentally looked up the existence of the shelves-of-boxes in the entryway, while we were looking up the substitution cipher on the leaflet, but that was unintentional So There.

... okay that's more than eight. But I am glad to have catalogued them before I totally forgot.

Cooking. Two new-to-us recipes! Mouth-numbing noodles with chilli oil and red cabbage, which A was dubious about and I expected to like a lot; I wound up dubious, whereas A is in fact sufficiently keen on it that Making It Again is on the cards. Unsurprisingly (at this point...) we wound up wanting to make the full stated quantity of vegetables ("four portions") and a quarter of the stated quantity of noodles (i.e. one portion) for two portions.

date, feta and red cabbage salad, which I adored (even without the parsley) and A thought was perfectly acceptable but not particularly exciting.

(Yes, this sounds like a lot of red cabbage. That is because I bought a discount slightly battered red cabbage and we've spent the week slowly working our way through it.)

Also we (mostly A) made tiramisu tonight, so we get that for pudding for the next few days.

Exploring. Little bit of a poke around St Albans while dropping off an Objects with a Cousins.

Creating. Painted A!

Growing. TOMATOES: HATCHING. Enthusiastically. All except the Green Zebra, which I might try to start some more of, once I've got the current batch of seedlings into newspaper pots.

Comments

[oursin]

I can't remember the exact details in RW&RB - I mean, the nitcomb just got so much work-out - but my general rule is, any time archives appear in a book, whatever the actual archive, the details will be RONG, probably on the grounds of absolutely basic archival practice never mind particular institutional regulations.

(Though, Royal Archives once wanted Institution I was employed in to close an item we had received, which was as I recall over 100 years old, containing phrenological readings of royal offspring. And there are a plethora of researcher horror stories.)

[taimatsu]

Please could I have your advice on tomatoes? I have tiny baby seedlings in a propagator tray and I’m not 100% sure what to do next.

[rydra_wong]

Commended to your attention, as IIRC it's very good -- The Beckoning Silence, the documentary (focused on the north face of the Eiger): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibrULCtvKkY

[kaberett]

SO NOTED.

[wildeabandon]

Heh. I am making that very noodle dish tonight, but we seem to have approximately the opposite approach to quantities, in that I generally just follow the recipe as is for three of us, and we always have vegetables left, but not noodles.

[kaberett]

Hee! Excellent calibration, thank you :-)