kaberett | vital functions

Reading. More slow progress on Tales from the Inner City, and dipping in and out of

recessional's your blue-eyed boys (because I needed the reminder that it's okay to be me, which ybeb does a really thorough job of).

Film/TV. Dosage V, Rodden and Meltdown: oh no Tommy's little FACE. He so BADLY wants her to DO THIS. Aaaaaaaah. Oh no her face when she sends it. (Gosh it is... a thing, knowing what all else was going on in their lives at the time.)

And we finished Leverage! I... really want to care about them, but it just didn't quite gel for me. (Happy to discuss this in more detail in comments! Do not actually want to squee-harsh, though.)

Music. I got home from Cornwall to discover that Adam had pre-ordered hurts 2b human (P!nk) for me, after we'd spent a little time the week beforehand watching music videos (I particularly love what she's doing with Walk Me Home). I love the way it's a concept album about Being P!nk; I love the way it threads a narrative with references and allusions that don't prevent the tracks standing alone; I really want her to be okay. Happy in particular is written Specifically For Me, obviously.

Which has also brought to mind the part where

sciatrix has been talking recently about "ASMR", which is apparently a thing now. Like

sciatrix, that sensation (or at least the sensation I think is being described) is one that's absolutely just... been part of my life for as long as I can remember, and that unlike the various videos set up to provoke it is... mostly associated with what I'd loosely classify as religious experiences, which sometimes show up in connection with music, and indeed did with part of this album.

(Relatedly: I love Pink Floyd. I have a... lot of emotional response absolutely hardwired to Pink Floyd, such that I really can't actually usefully listen to it while attempting to do anything else, because it just entirely hijacks my brain. Which means that of all the music I've played to Adam, Floyd isn't yet on the list, because I want to be lying on the ground in the dark and just Having An Experience, where most of the introducing-Adam-to-music I've done has been in the general spirit of putting on background music, or playing him a couple of tracks, and I just can't do that with Floyd: it's got to be the whole album, start to finish, without distractions, or my emotions and thought processes end up upended across the floor and it takes me hours and a sleep reboot to properly recombobulate them.)

Culinary adventures. I went to a knife skills workshop!

Additional notable cooking: baby's first attempt at home-made refried beans, because (1) I had a burrito craving, and (2) I realised that the Instant Pot made this actually fairly trivially achievable. I poked around the internet a bit and found some advice, and also I decided to have a go at sweetcorn salsa.

Ingredients
500g pinto beans
1 shallot
Some Garlic
a bay leaf
some oregano
some cumin
some chipotle paste
1l vegetable stock
500ml water
salt (to add at the end)

Method
Stick all of the above in the Instant Pot, set it to 30 minutes of Cooking A Bean, and leave it to decompress under its own steam. (As it were.) Then: fry up an onion and some garlic, dump in the beans, and mash them a little. Once they've heated through some and combined their flavours, add salt and mash. Optionally additionally add lime juice.

These were better after they'd sat for a day.

Sweetcorn salsa
Make a tomato-based salsa (onion/shallot, garlic, tomato, herbs to taste, oil and lime juice and seasoning to taste, chilli to taste) and... add a tin of sweetcorn. And also some cubed avocado, if you're feeling super enthusiastic.

I absolutely spent the train ride back up from the mouldering ancestral pile looking up recipes instead of wrangling my to-do list, but there we go.

In summary, I had a craving for burritos that I didn't have to pay someone for, and now I've got proof-of-concept for at-home burritos, and my only sense of mild impending peril is regarding the risk that I'll start actually making tortillas at home. ("We might need a bigger crêpe pan," I said to Adam, mournfully.

sebastienne apparently thinks this is incredibly on-brand for me.

Final culinary-adventure-in-potentia: I'm tentatively considering having a go at panettone, and I tracked down (surprisingly easily) wahaca's black bean soup recipe, which I am excited about because I Particularly Enjoyed That. And, again, Instant Pot = I'm actually willing to cook dried beans.

Notable wildlife. First swallow! Also a splendid red kite at rest on the power lines on the way up to Oxford on Sunday.

Notable Pokémon. My very first Mesprit raid had 100% stats, and I actually caught it, which... WELP. No new shinies this week (!), but A indulged me to the tune of spending a lot of yesterday evening Trading Pokémon, which (1) got me a lot more Pokébox space (I'd been saving a bunch of things for him, either because they were from Far Away or because they were potentially interesting), and (2) several Lucky Pokémon. I am delighted about the Togepi and the Piplup; I'm rather more dubious about the Primeape and the Delcatty.

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From:

recessional

I am still not sure what ASMR refers to. And every time I try to pin it down I end up more confused.

From:

archangelbeth

Sounds that make your head/brain tingle in a good way, I think? (I get a minor, pleasant effect. Like someone brushing my hair, but without the physical stimulation.)

I'm listening to the vid at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/magazine/how-asmr-videos-became-a-sensation-youtube.html .

From:

vass

You know the "fingernails on a blackboard" feeling?

Like that, but enjoyable. (If your wiring, like mine, is nonstandard, then the videos other people watch/listen to for producing good tingles may produce the same bad tingles as fingernails on a blackboard, but in that case you probably are already aware of other sensory things that produce the good tingles. Like, e.g. a reliable one for me is hearing a well-produced fil di voce on a high note.)

Just in case this is coming: if your immediate reaction contains "but I've known about that feeling all my life and had my own vocabulary both based on my internal autism experiences and/or personal gnosis and also based on things people said in my classical music studies" then congratulations, you got there before the rush too, they are Today's Lucky Ten Thousand.

From:

recessional

From:

vass

....if I am actually associating the word with the right thing, then I am experiencing something more akin to everyone announcing that they've discovered something called fnurgle, writing articles about it, etc, and then realizing they mean "the ability to see and be emotionally affected by colour."

Oh! Okay, I think... so I haven't dug too deeply into ASMR meta, but from what I have read (which tbf was 101 level and at least some of it was written by someone who was lowkey actually addicted, so I might have a biased view) it's more like if they'd discovered that (for them) they could reliably produce a feeling of intense awe/connection/wellbeing when looking at certain shades of the colour green in certain lighting. And had gone into considerable detail about the specific physical sensations with which those emotions manifested. But weren't talking as much about generalising that further to "other colour/lighting combos might produce other sensations" or "maybe this is already a studied phenomenon" or "is this a thing people work on in art school?"

And were explicitly not interested in exploring "what if we made that feeling the focal point of a whole complex and balanced emotional/aesthetic meal of other feelings and sensations instead of slamming back that same flavour over and over again?"

So I think you're probably not misunderstanding so much as focusing on the forest and also not as interested in the specific trees they're interested in.

From:

recessional

Ah! Okay. That would make more sense.

. . . .I mean it also seems extremely . . . wasteful? is that the word? And also has anyone told them that they may in fact be able to get the exact same thing from other things than, well, sounds?

Probably not.

People are very strange. >.>

Edited Date: 2019-05-07 01:41 am (UTC)

From:

vass

And also has anyone told them that they may in fact be able to get the exact same thing from other things than, well, sounds? Probably not.

They worked it out for themselves. I've heard hair-brushing mentioned in particular.

And it's not like everyone who enjoys the thing enjoys only that thing ever. It's like sex or drugs or gaming or perfume or food or fanfic or any other hobby. (I mean both it's like that because it's that category of thing, but also in that it has all the signs of being a fandom itself.)

Some people find one specific niche that they enjoy because it invokes one particular feeling or experience, and then hyperfocus on that thing in their free time and are happy just consuming more iterations of the same ad infinitum. Other people aren't that obsessive but are sometimes in the mood for a particular sensation and if they know where there's a source for Just That Thing, why not go there?

Like... suppose you (generic-you, not you-M.) like vanilla-based perfumes. You like other perfumes too, but sometimes you just feel like vanilla in particular, and there are people who produce one-note vanilla fragrance oils. So you buy some of those and diffuse/wear/smell them when you want some vanilla. And there are other people who only wear vanilla, smell vanilla, want to talk about vanilla. And if you can't relate to that level of obsession, you still might be glad they're doing their thing and maybe hit up their perfume review site if there's a new vanilla-based perfume you're thinking of trying.

Or maybe you're a fanfic reader and your favourite thing is fake dating with mutual pining. And you'll read fake dating without mutual pining, or mutual pining without fake dating, or one-sided pining, or -gasp- other romantic tropes, or established relationships, or even gen... if it's in fandoms you already like, or it's by authors whose writing you like.

But if it's fake dating with mutual pining, it doesn't have to be in one of your fandoms just as long as it hits the right notes and beats. And if you find communities of people specifically working on fake dating with mutual pining and discussing what makes it work and how to make a more satisfying fake dating with mutual pining fic, then that might make you really happy. (Or maybe you might feel weird about it, or indifferent, or embarrassed, or repulsed. But I don't think being happy would be an unexpected response.)

. . . .I mean it also seems extremely . . . wasteful? is that the word?

What are they wasting?

From:

kaberett

<3

Thank you lots for doing a bunch of unpacking/explanation having done way more reading than I'd got around to thus far!

From:

kaberett

The thing I experience that I think they're referring to is: brief lightheadedness, simultaneous with fizzy/tingling/pleasant static/pins-and-needles-but-without-the-dull-red-ache spreading from along the top of my shoulders up the back of my neck and scalp and down my upper back and the back of my arms, plus a sense of floaty wellbeing.

From:

vass

That's my understanding as well, with the addition that the tingling/fizz would be inside one's head as well as the scalp.

From:

kaberett

*nod*

From:

jesse_the_k

Congrats on further adventures in fancy ass spoons.

There's a typo in your recipe: it should read all the garlic.

From:

me_and

The instructor on the knife skills course was, amongst other things, very insistent that Garlic Is Vastly Overrated. I disagreed loudly, but only in my head.

From:

kaberett

remind me to make you the roast garlic soup

From:

azurelunatic

I really must figure out what to do with the instant pot.

Burritos sound good!

From:

kaberett

So far I'm at "I can get dahl started in it and it'll be done by the time I've reasonably-rapidly got the other curries made", which is super useful! And, apparently, I Can Be Bothered To Cook Dried Beans. (So the black bean soup is on the list to do, as is sweetened red bean paste for BOBA, which I made a couple of times the long slow way five years back and ABSOLUTELY cannot be bothered with again.)

(it might also be possible to preserve baby figs this way in finite time???)

From:

tree_and_leaf

I've found it useful for a bunch of things (it makes risottos very very easy, and I did some really good ribs in it the other day), but the bean cooking is probably the most useful. I've been making my own hummus and bean dips!

From:

kaberett

Yes, I'm coming to the conclusion that it might actually reach the point where my default chickpeas don't come out of a tin!

From:

archangelbeth

Instant Pots have such a promise of cooking ability... *wist*

From:

kaberett

I am Tentatively Experimenting still...

From:

archangelbeth

Good luck!

From:

vass

I'd be interested in reading more about the Instant Pot if you'd like to write it at some point. I've heard so many people praise it, and am curious but wary of big new kitchen gadgets. Can supply a list of questions if helpful.

From:

kaberett

I have been contemplating setting up a food:gadget:instant pot tag!

From:

sebenikela

i find that just a pinch of cinnamon is a great addition to refried beans--i usually make them with black beans rather than pinto but i think the principle is still sound. :)

(hmm i should make refried beans that used to be a Thing I Did)

From:

kaberett

Oooh, I contemplated that and then chickened out, but I am delighted to be given the rec. :D

From:

cadenzamuse

New P!nk album! Knife skills! (I HATE cooking, but I have always kinda wanted to take a knife skills class. I suspect it might make me hate helping in the kitchen less.)

For me, Leverage was enjoyable but not life-changing, although it made me rather like John Rogers as a person (even before the "made the OT3 canon" tweet).

From:

kaberett

<3

Yes, I think I am with you on the liking-John-Rogers-as-a-person; I just wish the characterisation had been sufficiently consistent that I Cared. (This might end up being media where, like the MCU and the Vorkosigan series, I go find an epic multi-novel fanfic that becomes My Canon...)

From:

jedusor

I was briefly startled that someone who cooks as much as you do hadn't made burritos, which I think of as a very basic don't-feel-like-real-cooking-tonight dinner option, but then realized that my California upbringing may have something to do with my assumptions on that and most people probably don't start making their own burritos when they're eight. But I don't soak dried beans or make tortillas from scratch, that does sound like effort XD

From:

kaberett

HA. Yes, they are not a very default food here -- tortilla have only started becoming Readily Available within my lifetime, and tinned refried beans are basically still only available as a single massively marked-up brand!

From:

tree_and_leaf

Two brands, but still both massively marked up....

From:

jedusor

I mean it makes sense, but my California mind is still blown. Refried beans are so cheap here they're a broke-college-student staple, and I've never been to a grocery store without multiple kinds of tortillas. I actually don't generally use refried beans in my homemade burritos, I like to cook up whole black beans with onion and spices. But I could. XD How much is a can of refried beans there, out of curiosity? Here I could probably find it on sale for 79 cents at a chain supermarket.

From:

kaberett

About £1.50 a go, it looks like, and now I'm remembering wistfully how cheap tofu was in LA...

From:

silveradept

I am jealous of your 100% raid character.

I got Shiny Lugia for my 7-Day Research Reward (earlier, I had received a Shiny Articuno and assumed that would be the last shiny I ever got from there) today, so I should probably not be all that jealous.

I am curious to hear your feelings on Leverage and what did not gel for you.

From:

kaberett

Ooooh, shiny Lugia! I do not have one!

Re Leverage, I think there were two key things: (1) characterisation was inconsistent in service of plot, in a way that made it really hard for me to believe in or get emotionally invested in any of the characters (like... in an episode towards the end of the run Eliot just... decides... Parker... is really incompetent... at stealing things... for no actual reason... excepting that it sets up a joke?!), in a way that sometimes (2) involved this crew who is The Best being bafflingly incompetent. Like, A and I had to keep pausing to yell THAT'S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS and dissect how wrong it was, levels of incompetent.

But honestly I'd have been happy with suspending my disbelief over (2) if (1) hadn't been the case; I was actually genuinely invested up until partway through season 4, which I think was the point at which the accumulated inconsistencies hit critical mass for me and I started just getting annoyed and unhappy.

I really want to have liked it, though, so I'll probably go hunting fic...

(oh right, and I super didn't care about Nate's Tragic Backstory. I know I should! but I... didn't.)

From:

silveradept

My shiny luck is generally reserved for community days or "when it would be really funny/times immediately after a complaint about a lack of shiny."

I absolutely did not care about Nate's tragic backstory at all. It interfered with the HEIST! mentality of the show, in my opinion.

Much of fic you will find is heavy on the romantic entanglements of various permutations of Hardison/Eliot/Parker, especially that as an OT3. There's also some Nate/Sophie, but there's a lot less of it.

At least in the circles that I travel in, there's not as much heist fic as there is "excuses to get everybody in bed" fic.

From:

calissa

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Tales from the Inner City sometime. It won a couple of Aurealis Awards last weekend and I need to pick up a copy to read before voting in the Ditmar Awards.

I also love the notable wildlife! The other day I had my first sighting of wedge-tailed eagles for the season, which was glorious.

From:

kaberett

Still working through it veeeeeeeeery slowly, but so far I love it a lot. <3

HI BIRDS. :D

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