kaberett: A green origami stegosaurus (origami stegosaurus)
... that was definitely a nonsensical Western about dinosaurs, with a lovingly rendered backdrop of thoroughly referenced completely incorrect geology

I object strenuously to the fact that it made me cry that much in spite of the baffling artistic licence taken with evolution and wish to lodge a complaint

Nipples don't exist! But that's okay because the C4 photosynthetic pathway does, paving the way for remarkably resilient leaf loincloths

This concludes your complementary review of The Good Dinosaur, now showing in cinemas near you!
kaberett: Stylized volcano against a stormy sky, with streams of lava running down its sides. (volcano)
World On Fire (2011; apparently also called Miami Magma and Swamp Volcano) is something I picked up a few years ago while creating a collection of Terrible Geology Movies; I finally got around to watching it on Saturday night and it was actually surprisingly good.

I mean. Not the science, obviously; the science was gloriously wrong in all the ways one hopes for when one goes about buying this manner of thing. (THAT IS NOT HOW LAVA TUBES. THAT IS NOT HOW OIL FORMATION. THAT IS NOT HOW LAVA. :D) But... it passed Bechdel repeatedly (because the female PI kept talking to her younger sister, a "volcanology prodigy", about science); male characters died in a way that would have been fridging for the sake of the women's character development except they were too busy doing cool science to care particularly; bonus terrible CGI; and mind-bendingly wrong data security. A+ will probably watch again.



The Martian (2015) I unabashedly adore, because it is full of brave space robots and also brave space people and people making hard decisions as best they can and diversity in science and loyalty and brave space potatoes and did I mention the space robots. I cried most of the way through it (BRAVE. SPACE. ROBOTS.), I about corpsed when I muttered to [personal profile] shortcipher "... is that Sebastian Stan" and received the response "[confused look] who's Sebastian Stan?"

Laughed out loud several times in addition to crying, applauded it a fair bit, was gently horrified by the approach to spacewalks but whatever, am now intending to actually acquire and read the book. Probably also the DVD, because I think this can go on my safe shelf. Much gratitude to my useless ex for coaxing me out of the house and to the cinema.
kaberett: Reflections of a bare tree in river ice in Stockholm somehow end up clad in light. (tree-of-light)
1. Today I was introduced to a roomful of professionals and musicians at a dress rehearsal as "Alex, who did research and translation". It was weird. It was even weirder to hear translations I'd done forming part of an opera. I... actually helped make a thing. And it sold out. And has resulted in a creative collaboration with a charity. ???? etc.

2. So yesterday I decided that the correct approach to dinner was cold couscous salad, with parsley and mint and very finely diced raw fennel and pomegranate seeds. I made a lot. Tonight I decided the correct approach to dinner was to dump a spoonful of that plus eggs scrambled with cheese & smoked paprika plus hot sauce on a wrap. I was completely right and I'm doing it again for breakfast.

3. All of [personal profile] recessional's fic; in particular I'm currently doing a partial reread of (even if i could) make a deal with god, for shorts associated with your blue-eyed boys, and... yes.

4. Strawberries. Got a punnet from the market; they are tasty. (And the pears I picked up at the same time will soon be ripe enough to eat!)

5. ... there's a new Frank Turner album, released yesterday, which I stumbled upon via YouTube recommendations; it appears to be the case that I actually like most of the stuff off this album that's been released there, which was a pleasant surprise. (Meanwhile I am facepalming about the fact that I apparently missed a 2013 release that is entirely about his ongoing massively self-absorbed self-pity about a breakup, and folk, this is me facepalming over that shit, okay. So I'm glad to have missed it at the time, and having pulled An Increasingly Incredulous Face while reading lyrics on his website... yeah, no, I'm good to not be completionist about this one. I can pick up the bonus track about tattoos somewhere else.)

6. I'm actually really appreciating currently having enough brain to (i) sort through a bunch of stuff via the medium of discursive posts and (ii) do DW work, both of which I am finding soothing and consequently Helpful.

7. You lot. Relatedly. <3

8. ... yeah I am actually getting more functional as the sertraline leaves my system, which is nice but also a bit horrifying. Start the new thing on Monday, it'll be exciting, etc, but in the meantime I'm really rather enjoying having something that more plausibly resembles a sleep cycle and significantly less insomnia.

9. I got to sit around in a cafe post-dress rehearsal Setting The World To Rights with one good friend and one person I keep wanting to Actually Friends With (as compared with the current situation of mutually sympathetic acquaintancish, and catching up with one another's Major Life Events largely via mutual friends).

10. Jesus & His Judgemental Father are gigging locally at the beginning of October and my useless ex has made there be tickets. <3 (I adore them. MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING for cissexism, violence, and murder on the track Kings & Queens, if you go looking, but it's brilliantly done.)

Oh, and bonus 11: [personal profile] ann_leckie has started posting Ancillary Mercy at a rate of a paragraph per day (with the entire first chapter due to be released by her publisher in a month's time).
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
So a little while back my useless ex decided that there was a particular thing his grandmother used to make that he wished to recreate, and consequently dug out a recipe. I am blogging this partly so I've got it and partly in an attempt to provide him with handwaving on how I spice it.

ingredients )

Method )
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
For starters, I knew it was an option because I grew up being mentored by a bunch of folk (hi ♥) who viewed poly as normal and fine and just the way some people work; I got to see lots of examples of people making it work, and people not making it work in ways that were nothing to do with being poly and everything to do with the fact that sometimes relationships don't work or stop working.

As it happens I was still massively insecure; one way or another it was the case that I was cool with the concept of me having more than one partner, but got incredibly tied up in knots about the concept of people I was seeing having other partners, and consequently didn't think it was good or kind or fair for me to try to do the thing. Thus began (after my useless ex & I broke up) a period of ill-advised monogamy (ha, folk, I am so so sorry for turning into That One Friend Who Keeps Making Inexplicably Terrible Relationship Decisions), from which I emerged blinking and very, very mad. In the aftermath of getting on anti-depressants and out of that particular horrorshow, I found myself increasingly spending time with the boything and increasingly doing things that were unambiguously flirting and dates. I didn't properly register what was going on until his boyfriend Lucian cheerfully turned around during a birthday party and went "so, are you and [insanejournal.com profile] dreamfracture a thing, then?" whereupon I went "... I DON'T KNOW WE HAVEN'T REALLY TALKED ABOUT IT??? :D"

And that was how hanging-out-with-a-person morphed into a relationship in spite of the boything having other folk in his life, and mysteriously the world didn't end. I thought I was treating it as fairly casual; I was still surprised when I turned out to be completely fine with him rolling over one Sunday morning and going "alex alex alex last week I slept with a PERSON", apart from the bit where I still wanted to be asleep.

Read more... )
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
I had my second attempt at making Spaetzle! It worked! (The last time I tried was in my... second year at university? It did not go well, and I was discouraged.) Both my useless ex and [personal profile] sebastienne nommed it enthusiastically, once I'd got my act together with respect to working out the best way to use the tools I had to do the things I wanted to.

I pretty much used this recipe from BavarianKitchen.com -

400g fine/00-grade flour
1 tsp salt
3-4 eggs
250ml water

Flour and salt combined. Eggs added one by one and beaten in. Water added gradually and beaten in likewise. Mixed well, then set aside for 20 minutes.

Pot of water brought to rolling boil. Batter dropped through colander to form small droplets in the water, one ladle at a time, encouraged through with a spoon. After each ladleful rinse out the colander and leave it to dry; once the Spaetzle are floating, move them out into a seive or colander or something to dry. Repeat until you've used all the batter.

Congratulations! You have Spaetzle. Now you want to do something more interesting with them.

So what I did was: before I started making the batter, I stuck a finely sliced onion in some butter over high heat and got it brown and crispy. I left it to sit while I put everything else together. Then I dropped another spoonful of butter in the pan and stuck in the Spaetzle, letting them sit and brown before flipping them over. Once they are sufficiently at-least-in-part browned, dump a bunch of grated cheese and some finely-chopped parsley and some ground pepper over the top, and then it is FOOD.

(Served, on this occasion, with some token green beans and some much-less-token red cabbage cooked with cloves and apple.)
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
I made such overenthusiastic brunch, people. Details of food. )

And now [personal profile] sebastienne is making us tea, and then we are going to curl up and watch the first episode of Orphan Black and I am going to take every. single. painkiller.

(Also achieved this morning: bought a replacement lightbulb! Route-planned for afternoon activities! Not yet showered but working on it!) Hurrah people.)

...

Aug. 26th, 2014 08:44 pm
kaberett: Photo of a cassowary with head tilted to one side (cassowary)
kaberett: ... chris
kaberett: chris I have broken everything enough
kaberett: that alt+ctrl+f2
kaberett: doesn't give me a terminal
kaberett: please tell me you're impressed
Chris: ...
Chris: *how.*
Chris: this is the machine you just reinstalled, right?
kaberett: no this is the desktop
Chris: oh ok
kaberett: chris
Chris: so I mean it's possible that xorg.conf contains DontVTSwitch I guess?
kaberett: how did I do this
kaberett: it didn't ought to
kaberett: how do I fix the thing
kaberett: sorry the clarifying point
kaberett: is that it's failing to load the graphical desktop either
kaberett: which is why I'm even trying
kaberett: :-p
Chris: ah
Chris: ..
kaberett: I AM GLAD YOU'RE IMPRESSED
Chris: but I mean, is it showing you some empty/faulty graphical screen which you then can't switch away from, or..?
kaberett: black featureless screen of d00m
Chris: (or something text based I mean)
kaberett: it briefly shows me a text-based login prompt
kaberett: which gets REPLACED
kaberett: by the BLACK FEATURELESS SCREEN
kaberett: never to be seen again
Chris: ...
kaberett: ... there's the additional special
kaberett: (yes there's more)
Chris: those sure are some impressive sharks you've got there.
kaberett: (do you actually want to hear it)
Chris: yes
kaberett: okay so
kaberett: I was fucking around with installing some more xserver-xorg packages
kaberett: on the grounds that the internet suggested that was a reasonable fix for the issue I'm having -- ... was having? -- with saving xorg.conf
kaberett: and nothing obviously broke
kaberett: ... until I went away to the kitchen
kaberett: ... and came back after the screens had gone to sleep
kaberett: ... whereupon um
kaberett: ... they wouldn't wake up again?
kaberett: I got a brief flash of background+mousecursor every time I hit space or moved the mouse enough to trigger
kaberett: ... you're proud
Chris: wtf.
Chris: *applause*
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
The sky's beginning to turn deep blue. I appear, accidentally, to be watching sunrise around a solstice again, more or less.

Here are some things that have happened: yesterday, I finally (finally) got 24-hour access to our buildings; this was supposed to have been granted back when I started. And in spite of the fact that I was in the middle of a mass spec run, I actually managed to head home from work before 8pm; and my first use of the access was getting in at 6.45am to check on how my run was going (my machine time technically finished yesterday, but today's user wasn't going to get started til 10am, which gave me a solid 12 hours for an overnight run even if I'd got it started late), and the answer was good and I have data and tasty TASTY data.

I spent a significant chunk of the day sorting out the data-from-the-machine into something useful in my master spreadsheet; another chunk messing about with some of my incredibly shonky python; some on final tweaks to the transfer report (still need to write some and replot some graphs then send it off tomorrow, oops); and yet another on a flurry of e-mails about the solid month of labwork I've got planned once I return from the US trip, along with sitting around with my supervisor being excitable about rocks. I've got ten grams of a mica previously analysed as containing 550 parts per billion (ppb) of thallium; bear in mind that the average concentration of thallium in the mantle is ~2ppb, and most of my samples have concentrations around 30ppb. For these typical samples, 100 milligrams is enough to get three to six measurements out of -- what on Earth we're going to do with ten grams of 550ppb I am not entirely sure and nor's my supervisor, but that's the smallest quantity they'd sell it us in. (Exciting times in analytical terms, incidentally: of the three sample sets I'm wanting to shove through chemistry in July, #1 is of direct and immediate relevance to the PhD in terms of being actual data relating to the central question; #2 is tangentially related and getting me second authorship on a paper that's basically ready to go apart from firming up the numbers; and #3 is a set of geological reference materials nobody's measured my element-of-interest in properly before, which (1) have direct relevance to the PhD in terms of helping work out why I'm seeing what I'm seeing in the whole-rock samples, and (2) will make a nice little technical paper in their own right, which I have hopes of submitting by the end of the year.)

I also spent some time on the phone to Air Canada, who I am finding somewhat infuriating (oh crap, must remember to fill out my visa waiver application...), and was left sufficiently pissed off that I went "buggre all this for a larke" and jumped on a train to Brighton, where my useless ex + the Boything + [personal profile] sebastienne + Entomancy + I ate dinner at Giggling Squid before a subset of us headed off to a gig. [personal profile] sebastienne was there for David Devant & His Spirit Wife; I was there for 30 minutes of Indelicates, and because they were a support act and the rest of the audience were being awful and talking I got to sing along without feeling bad about it. (Also, I am so so SO looking forward to the repeat CNdeliMechs show happening in London in September -- CN Lester, The Indelicates, The Mechanisms as triple headliners, please join me, it'll be fantastic, I'll link to the deets once they've actually been announced...)

-- and then meandered my way home via the last train from Brighton to London, and shenanigans with night buses (I keep thinking I should maybe do something a bit more rigorous than go "I know roughly where I want to go and I'm comfortable navigating by a mix of dead reckoning and Boris map" for the occasions when I get back into London at gone 1 with no idea how to get home except a certainty that I can wing it) and walks: I do still adore walking round central London at 2, 3 in the morning (having said which, highly unusually for me I was wearing a skirt in public today and got noticeably more hassle than usual, though not enough to actually upset me).

Right. Yes. To sleep as the sun is rising, the better to be human when That One Lady gets into town later today...
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
1. On the bus from Paddington back to the general vinicity of Hammersmith, the tired-looking lady opposite had one of her many bags fall over. It disgorged a plastic clip and a thesaurus and before she had managed to muster the cope to stand up I had got it back upright and handed the book back to her and she was... astonishingly grateful. We got chatting. She's Swedish, she's a dayjob as a teacher, and we geeked a bit about languages... and she insists that I get in touch with her so she can make me a necklace. asdf;laksdflksdj chance encounters on public transit restoring my ability to cope with people.

2. My new backpack continues awesome, to the tune of having working zips and also being massive and pretty fantastic at weight distribution. And all the pockets.

3. I am putting together a tea order for my household. In particular, NothingButTea currently carries creme brulee redbush.

4. It turns out that That One Gent had come across a picture of a lovely rockface with a waterfall down it that just happened to resemble spread thighs & labia. Naturally, he thought of me. I therefore know that this is a place in the world, and am appropriately delighted.

5. Polymer group outing for lunch and board games (and cinema, though I skived off that bit) -- and to my gentle astonishment I managed to watch people play a game, and to kind of pick up the rules, without completely freaking out. I would not have coped well with playing, but I now have useful data. (& in re lunch -- turns out I really like ridiculous veggie burgers with rocket, red onion marmalade, goats' cheese, and refried beans. I shall bear this in mind for the future.)

6. ... holy crap I did a poetry reading. I was a small mess about it - quiet, very apologetic, didn't give the audience enough opportunity to come with me - but I got some laughs and I got some compliments and I am super, super grateful to the organisers of Quiltbag Cabaret for having me. And, do you know, it was a success -- in that I have now done that thing, and I will be able to do it better next time.

7. Sunshine. I have been photosynthesising cheerfully all day. I actually had to get the suncream out, which was nice :-)

8. I am feeling vaguely useful -- I have not achieved putting bread on tonight and kind of want to get around to it, but I have done the washing up and conditioned my griddle pan and cleaned the bit of the hob that needed it; and I've - I think - sent all the e-mails that needed sending (links to various things I'd bought that people wanted specific recs for; a couple of chatty messages), plus read a Scary One, plus faffed some logistics (incl attempting to get together a group to see a Morgan & West show; I think Awesome Ex-Housemate C will really enjoy them if I can actually pin her down; I've got all the Hugo nominees into Calibre, thence to my ereader; and not only have I sorted out meds for the next week, I've put a note in the shared calendar asking people to tell me off if I haven't replaced the vitB I buy in bulk and am nearly at the end of. Also, I have done some minimal work on The Thing That Shall Not Be Named.

9. I failed to actually see my mum and baby brother today, but I have chatted to my mum quite a bit (carefully eliding any discussion of TTTSNBN, because I don't appear to be able to can on that front unless in person and dodgily even then; nothing world-ending and I will probably talk about it when it's over).

10. I managed to wake up with a rather unpleasant crick in my neck on Saturday morning, but range of motion is restoring itself. :-) Not all the way yet, but a good deal better!

todo/tada

May. 1st, 2014 02:31 am
kaberett: Toph making a rock angel (toph-rockangel)
Because if I write them down I might be able to sleep.

TODO )

TADA )

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