Consumption

[kaberett]

Reading. 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.

Comments

[recessional]

I actually cannot watch Leverage because the show wants me to think it's competence porn while what it's showing me on-screen is actually incompetence.

It gets ESPECIALLY bad with Eliot.

And I wish it wasn't like that because in theory, characterwise, there's so much catnip! But in terms of what's ACTUALLY SHOWN ON SCREEN Sophie's accents are awful, Eliot should be dead six times over, they don't let nearly enough of Hardison's computer magic happen OFF-SCREEN and also Cold Doesn't Work Like That Guys, At All Oh My God.

(Sense8 made better choices with this one: Nomi's computer-magic is treated like the impenetrable magic it should be, and they have much better fight choreographers for Wolfgang and Will.)

[jesse_the_k]

That was a lot of social/natural interaction.

The Giants Causeway looks fabulous. sadly no lava flows in my neighborhood but I’ll keep my eyes open.

[skygiants]

I don't remember anything about the Mortal Engines books except that I wanted to love Hester so bad from the start and I kept waiting for her narrative to be anything that I wanted and it NEVER WAS.

[rydra_wong]

*flappy hands*

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.

[davidgillon]

Ooh, HMS Caroline. Let's just say I didn't need the history section on the website!

[sebenikela]

I love leverage but yeah that episode is.... Not how anything works.

Also the one with the big ag conglomerate Parker breaks into, there's a moment where the Bad Guy lady is like "I have a PhD in Agronomy from STANFORD" and every time I have to yell STANFORD DOESN'T HAVE AN AGRONOMY DEPARTMENT because oh my god.

The wheat blight they talk about in that one is a real thing though at least.

[jedusor]

I watched the hockey episode of Leverage and was so deeply furious at how pointlessly incorrect it was about everything that I refuse to watch any other episodes. (it was wrong about hockey but it was also wrong about BASIC MATH. you cannot write a plot about a best-of-seven series relying on the fact of the seventh game being played! this is not complex sports knowledge, it is COUNTING TO FOUR. GRRRRGHFGH)