Consumption

[kaberett]

Via sciatrix: beauty arising from both natural and sexual selection.

Books: very slowly working on Becoming, by Michelle Obama, which slightly to my surprise I've borrowed from my father.

Film: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was, as you all said, fun; I was quite ??? at the Ha Ha I'm A White South African Just Kidding joke, and the fat "jokes" were Tedious, but it was engaging and entertaining and I'm glad I saw it and I now kiiiiiiiiiinda want to read all of the Miles Morales comics, even though I basically never read comics.

TV: utterly failed to buy either Elementary S5 or Orphan Black S5, because HMV had the one at £12.99-or-two-for-£20 and the other at £12.99. (And seasons 4 and 6 of Elementary also weren't in the offer, and nor was anything else I wanted that I could find.) This week has been Rather so we haven't actually progressed with Orphan Black, but I have finally convinced Adam that it is Good so we'll keep slowly doing that.

Music: did buy two new-to-me-albums, one the latest Frank Turner at a ridiculous discount and one the third Kings of Convenience album, which I hadn't even realised existed. I... am also not somewhere with a CD player other than in the car, but OH WELL.

Food: slightly desperate-to-be-used beetroot got roasted yesterday with some garlic, and is now in a tart with balsamic-caramelised onions and Lancashire cheese. Cooking is hard, so... that... happened.

Comments

[recessional]

*grump* it does NOT defy understanding it just requires you to understand that animal as much as human behaviour is the result of a lot if kludges that work together in complicated ways and that animals have subjectivity rather than being boring robots programmed to a bad 1950s understanding of "fitness".

(Grump at general world not you.)

[sciatrix]

oh no, it's worse than that: the hangup is that people are convinced that there's got to be a reason that prettier animals are inherently "better" (for values of better = survival) than the less pretty ones.

this is a worldview that bugs me on any number of levels, not least of which WHERE IS THE ROLE OF RANDOM CHANCE ON THE RESOURCE LEVELS AVAILABLE TO ANY GIVEN INDVIDUAL

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL YOU PEOPLE

(I nattered on quite a lot more on Metafilter, which is why I'm assuming kaberett associated this one with me. tl,dr: this article quotes two people on my thesis committee extensively about a major peeve in the relevant literature that's currently consuming one of them and also me; I have opinions for days.)

[hairyears]

Wait 'til these joyless mechanists see that animals have a sense of fun. Play matters, in adult animals as well as juveniles; and it's not so great a leap to ask if they have a sense of aesthetics that is more than the mere gratification of the senses.

The hard part is - or ought to be - avoiding anthropomorphising animals: whatever their internal world may be, they are not 'us' and they do not think the way we do. But is seems that some humans make a strange mental leap into insisting that all and anything which is not 'us' is a mere mechanism of stimulus, response, and evolutionary advantage: for them, there is no 'them', merely a blind insistence that 'it' has nothing whatsoever of whatever makes us 'us'.

Enrich the mix with the fanciful notion that nothing of any complexity and interest can possibly exist without the intervention and design of 'us', or some invented abstraction of us that diverts from the disturbing idea that the universe doesn't need us at the centre of it, and elaborate it it all with the delusional trappings of religion, and all such articles and sermons are easily explained...

...It's almost as if a simple script could generate the entire inner world of these mechanists, by applying a ruleset from the dismally impoverished logic of a 1950`s behaviourist.

[kaberett]

(I think I'd seen you link to Metafilter and I'd seen you... existing on Metafilter... so I assumed it was via you, but PERHAPS NOT, thanks brains!)

[sciatrix]

lol and also I was all over that thread--I don't blame you at all for associating it with me! I'm just also pretty sure I wouldn't have been allowed to link it, what with "two of the researchers it interviews are on my committee" thing.

[sylvaine]

Omg, that food sounds delicious. Also complicated, but NOMS.

... I definitely need to cook for the week today :( cooking is so very hard :(

[kaberett]

Yeah, I... am really lucky, I think, in that "food is hard" doesn't, for me, necessarily mean that cooking is hard; if I set up enough of a technical challenge for myself to get stuck into, I'm almost surprised by the resulting food...

(In this instance I'd roasted the garlic & beetroot the day before while doing other food prep, and the pastry was already made and just needed rolling out, and it doesn't take me long to chop an onion, so it just sort of... happened? but certainly A keeps being baffled by the sort of thing that I find Just Sort Of Happens.)

[sylvaine]

I've managed to mostly deal with the Every Part Of Food Is Hard issue by pre-cooking everything, so I just have one day to mentally "write off" to cooking rather than have to mentally deal with it every day. And in that situation I often do enjoy it, too! Turning ingredients into food is just immensely satisfying. (Of course, this doesn't help with the part where the process of eating is also stupid hard sometimes, but baby steps.)

[hydrangea]

Expensive DVD boxes... :S I use the time I spend in the UK visiting charity shops to get second hand DVD boxes and clothing that suit my build more than the average Swedish clothes do. I wish I could get back to Elementary - I read some earlier posts of yours from years ago that made me really curious, especially about this Flora person, who apparently talks like I do when I feel safe with someone.

Also: that sounds like amazingly yummy food. I love British tarts and have absolutely no idea how to make them. I need cook books.

[kaberett]

oooh I am very happy to be tedious about pastry at you! :)

(charity shop clothes are Great and I Love Them)

[hydrangea]

Pastry is an amazing source of mystery to me! British measurement tools are so strange and beyond that, you have so many different ingredients! I have a Great British Bake-off cookbook and I'm slowly trying to struggle through making cupcakes - thought I now have found Very Expensive self-rising flour. Caster sugar is still a mystery though.

My friends in Newcastle keep making faces at me when I buy ALL the different kinds of tarts and pies and cakes just to see what amazing stuff has gone into them. The pastry dough I'm used to is plain butter, flour and water kneeded together...

(I could probably yammer about this forever....)

[kaberett]

Oh I mean I mostly make shortcrust (half fat to flour, enough water to make it stick), with occasional diversions into misc flaky (though I'm considering learning to do that Properly at some point this year).

Re self-raising flour: it is PROBABLY the case that it would be easier/cheaper to get baking powder + add it to plain flour yourself than to faff about buying SR, but I've honestly never tried getting SR flour over where you are.

[hydrangea]

SR flour is new, fancy and expensive. :P So you're better off without. I just bought it because I wanted to see how the recipe was supposed to come out following the recipe to the dot. Plus baking powder vs yeast vs other raising agents confuse the hell out of me. Cooking wasn't something I learned as a teenager.

Ours is, er, not quite short pastry. We use some sort of family recipe and well, idk what to call it. It's not the regular cookbook recipes - I followed a cookbook recipe once and was completely baffled at how different it was. And we press it into shape from a ball? It's very confusing.

Cooking is fairly new to me - I've always had a block in my head when it comes to it. I was always afraid of poisoning people. Your cooking posts are absolutely fascinating to me because of it...

[kaberett]

HA. Yes, my first words were "heiss" and "nass" -- I was being taught about dangerous things in the kitchen by my Grossmutti -- and I have very much grown up Around Cooking Happening, yeah. Whereas A is... not a confident or adventurous or even minimally-anxious cook, which is an interesting mismatch to navigate with a housemate! But he helped peel a celeriac and made the dumpling dough for stew tonight, so. :)

[hydrangea]

My first set of grandparents were all about music and flowers, the second sheep, fiber arts and painting. All I know about cooking comes from home economics...

Finding edible things in the forest, knitting a shawl or sculpting a clay figure is easy for me - boiling eggs? I need a cookbook.

[sebastienne]

...shall I bring an external CD drive to facilitate ripping?

[kaberett]

Honestly we should probably just find the house sound system brain and play it via that

(Shameful admission: I don't currently have a music player installed on my laptop, because my favourite hasn't been updated for Debian testing and change is bad.)

[swaldman]

There's a third Kings of Convenience album? Huh :-)

(also, for some reason unknown to me I am always surprised when other people know about them)

[kaberett]

APPARENTLY it was released in 2009 -- Declaration of Dependence! Quite how I missed it for almost a decade I'm not sure, but there we are.

(I'm always a little surprised too -- I was playing some of their stuff off Youtube having found the album and been reminded, and was quite ??? when A started singing along, but apparently his mum was also into them Back In The Day...)