Consumption
Feb. 10th, 2019 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettReading. Mostly Predator's Gold, the sequel to Mortal Engines, because I found it for two quid in a charity shop and I wanted to know what happened next. Spoilers beneath the cut. Unfortunately mostly what happened next is that I am so angry about Hester's shitty self-absorbed terrible no-good decision, and so angry about the narrative treating it like it's forgivable without any actual reparations, that I'm... going to finish this volume and then nope furiously out of the series, I think. I had high hopes! I... should have known better. Also: what the fuck, Tom, what the fuck is with your shitty ableism. Why are you suddenly all terrible. Augh.
TV. Slow progress with Leverage S4, encouraged by a visitcousin who's very into the show. Still pausing several times an episode to go YOU WHAT. THAT ISN'T HOW ANYTHING EVEN. (It's possible I've been spoiled by Matt Damon's Important Space Potatoes, but like, show. SHOW. That is NOT HOW POTATOES.)
Food. I had... two surprisingly faily attempts at sourdough, after a long run of Good Bread. One was in no small part because I started cooking it using the grill rather than the oven because I was Not Terribly With It (...), but both were more of a bread-puddle than they ought to have been. I eventually worked out that I'd made the starter slightly wetter than it had been previously, which meant I needed to decrease the liquid some. Nevertheless our guests this weekend (my parents; a cousin) have consumed three loaves in their entirety, and cousin will make further inroads into the fourth once I've baked it tomorrow morning, so that's all gratifying. For bonus points the cousin is in the process of setting up her own starter so I am getting to do lots of Sourdough Nerdery with her.
Tiny adventures. Yesterday we took a trip to the Giant's Causeway, because it's right there and it would have been silly not to (and also I only waited this long because my mother had put in a special request that we delay it until she could join in). It turns out that despite perfectly well knowing the relevant physics for columnar jointing and therefore what the scales involved are, I'd somehow interpreted "Giant's Causeway" to mean that the jointing itself was on a giant scale i.e. I was expecting diameters of, oooh, at least 75cm or so? Rather than... the thirty-odd we were actually getting. Which, to be fair, is still a good deal larger than my previous in-the-wild encounter: we'd plonked ourselves down in a pile of bracken in a streambed to have lunch, one day during my mapping project, and went "oooh, that's a funny-looking rock..." It turned out, on slightly closer inspection, to be a very small exposure of some really small columns (diameter ~5cm), and I was charmed and delighted. (They were SMOL.) So, yes, this was much more impressive than that, in both scale and definition, and I'm very glad to have seen it, even as I wist after being able to do the proper hike. I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures as a result of vertical contraction because they're less spectacular so my lecturers just... didn't bother mentioning them? But they were charming, I was charmed, hurrah.
Today we visited HMS Caroline, because my mother is interested in naval history (and my father can be persuaded to be) and it spent nontrivial amounts of time stationed near HMS Essex, which my great-grandfather served on; in the most recent trip to the mouldering ancestral pile some of the things we dug out were A Lot of records pertaining to his time aboard both the Essex and, before that, on the cable-laying ships working the Atlantic. The Caroline is remarkably accessible -- they've installed three lifts, and the ramp to get on board is only unnavigably steep at high tide. I... had a bunch of feelings.me_and's favourite fact was probably that regarding the ships mascots during WWI: two cats and... a rabbit. (I'm not sure I can generate one, because feelings.)
This week coming. Hopefully actually managing to send off a draft of my paper; hopefully actually getting the final data for the final segment of it; hopefully getting to spend a good deal of time at the allotment.
TV. Slow progress with Leverage S4, encouraged by a visitcousin who's very into the show. Still pausing several times an episode to go YOU WHAT. THAT ISN'T HOW ANYTHING EVEN. (It's possible I've been spoiled by Matt Damon's Important Space Potatoes, but like, show. SHOW. That is NOT HOW POTATOES.)
Food. I had... two surprisingly faily attempts at sourdough, after a long run of Good Bread. One was in no small part because I started cooking it using the grill rather than the oven because I was Not Terribly With It (...), but both were more of a bread-puddle than they ought to have been. I eventually worked out that I'd made the starter slightly wetter than it had been previously, which meant I needed to decrease the liquid some. Nevertheless our guests this weekend (my parents; a cousin) have consumed three loaves in their entirety, and cousin will make further inroads into the fourth once I've baked it tomorrow morning, so that's all gratifying. For bonus points the cousin is in the process of setting up her own starter so I am getting to do lots of Sourdough Nerdery with her.
Tiny adventures. Yesterday we took a trip to the Giant's Causeway, because it's right there and it would have been silly not to (and also I only waited this long because my mother had put in a special request that we delay it until she could join in). It turns out that despite perfectly well knowing the relevant physics for columnar jointing and therefore what the scales involved are, I'd somehow interpreted "Giant's Causeway" to mean that the jointing itself was on a giant scale i.e. I was expecting diameters of, oooh, at least 75cm or so? Rather than... the thirty-odd we were actually getting. Which, to be fair, is still a good deal larger than my previous in-the-wild encounter: we'd plonked ourselves down in a pile of bracken in a streambed to have lunch, one day during my mapping project, and went "oooh, that's a funny-looking rock..." It turned out, on slightly closer inspection, to be a very small exposure of some really small columns (diameter ~5cm), and I was charmed and delighted. (They were SMOL.) So, yes, this was much more impressive than that, in both scale and definition, and I'm very glad to have seen it, even as I wist after being able to do the proper hike. I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures as a result of vertical contraction because they're less spectacular so my lecturers just... didn't bother mentioning them? But they were charming, I was charmed, hurrah.
Today we visited HMS Caroline, because my mother is interested in naval history (and my father can be persuaded to be) and it spent nontrivial amounts of time stationed near HMS Essex, which my great-grandfather served on; in the most recent trip to the mouldering ancestral pile some of the things we dug out were A Lot of records pertaining to his time aboard both the Essex and, before that, on the cable-laying ships working the Atlantic. The Caroline is remarkably accessible -- they've installed three lifts, and the ramp to get on board is only unnavigably steep at high tide. I... had a bunch of feelings.
me_and's favourite fact was probably that regarding the ships mascots during WWI: two cats and... a rabbit. (I'm not sure I can generate one, because feelings.)This week coming. Hopefully actually managing to send off a draft of my paper; hopefully actually getting the final data for the final segment of it; hopefully getting to spend a good deal of time at the allotment.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-11 11:05 am (UTC)I have CLIMBED columnar jointing!!! It was great!
There's a diagonal patch of it on Carreg Wastad in North Wales, on this route: https://www.ukclimbing.com/logbook/c.php?i=1721
I hadn't realised about the concave-and-convex ball-joint horizontal fractures
OH YES. Which means that some of the columns break across, but sit in place (mostly), and ... wobble. So the last pitch of this route has the best holds you could want, but a lot of them MOVE. Which adds excitement.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-11 06:58 pm (UTC)(I recommended Free Solo to my small cousin, not having yet watched it, because she has a gentleman friend who likes climbing and she likes watching films with people...)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-11 08:52 pm (UTC)I geek out about climbing on different rock types, because they demand such different movements and climbing styles; you learn different thing from each one. Basalt climbing at Dumbarton is very interesting, and it actually illuminates how Dave MacLeod (top climber who started out at Dumbarton and climbed there obsessively for ages) developed his particular style and strengths.
(I recommended Free Solo to my small cousin, not having yet watched it, because she has a gentleman friend who likes climbing and she likes watching films with people...)
This seems like an excellent rec! It is a really really good film about climbing, which is totally accessible to non-climbers (and being enjoyed by many many non-climbers) while not coming across to climbers as if it's over-simplifying/patronizing*. Which is a hard trick to pull off.
There's also a thing which I feel with both this and The Dawn Wall, where -- mainstream representation of climbing and climbers tends to be stuff like Cliffhanger or the soloing in Mission Impossible, which is hilariously/cringe-inducingly WRONG. As is the case for most niche interests, I suspect.
Whereas Honnold and Caldwell -- these are our dudes! This is what some of the greatest living climbers actually look like, the gangly spectrum-y dude with the unusually chill amygdala who mostly communicates in Valleyspeak, and his friend the scrawny nerdy self-described "dyslexic and clumsy late bloomer" with the considerable amount of backstory. They are excellent people! We can be proud to have them as our representatives, and delighted to see them being appreciated by the wider world!
{*Barring a couple of moments of over-simplification, which I will grudgingly allow them for narrative purposes.}
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-11 10:13 pm (UTC)Yes! My baby brother does a certain amount of semi-serious climbing (he lives in Bristol, he goes on climbing holidays, it's not his job but he is considering the merits of at some point quitting the job and opening a climbing wall), one of my exes did a bunch of similarly semi-serious climbing, so I've got a degree of appreciation from that angle that possibly isn't actually obvious to you (and also I had the kind of childhood that did involve messing around climbing walls a bit); most of my experience with How Do Different Rocks Behave For Moving Around On is very much in a context of hiking (and fieldwork) rather than in a context of climbing but is definitely a thing I nerd about. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-12 08:40 am (UTC)Aha, you are correct, I did not know that context.
most of my experience with How Do Different Rocks Behave For Moving Around On is very much in a context of hiking (and fieldwork) rather than in a context of climbing but is definitely a thing I nerd about. ;)
Yes! So you will understand that how different rocks behave for moving around on them vertically is very worthy of nerding about!
This is why I am part-time in the Peak District, because of the GRITSTONE, which is IMHO the most interesting rock to climb on (gritstone has a very different opinion to other rock types about what constitutes a "hold").
I have issues with limestone partly because it has actual holds on and I tend to feel that's cheating.
It was very pleasing to climb on the basalt and go OH, this is why Dave MacLeod is so good at big powerful reaches combined with very precise controlled footwork.