baroque_mongoose

I'm feeling woozy again this morning, which is why I'm here posting rather than trundling off to church. It's annoying, but I'm sure the bright side will eventually show up.

Anyway, there's been a survey on Discord lately (which closed rather abruptly last night) to find out what people thought about adding AI features; I should think most people - certainly most people I know - responded much as I did or even more strongly, which was "no, thank you".

The thing is, I am not philosophically opposed to AI on principle, any more than I am to hand axes. You can certainly use a hand axe as a weapon, but ideally you use it to chop firewood and similar useful tasks. AI is, when you get right down to it, another hand axe; it's a tool, which can be - and has been - used for good purposes. AI excels at finding patterns, so it is particularly useful to help with questions like "are there any risk factors for disease X that we don't know about?". No; my problem with AI is not about its basic existence. It's about how it's being used.

I've actually programmed some AI, at a basic level. I think it would be a really good idea if everyone who can program at all did that, because it teaches you, in a way that nothing else can, exactly what AI is and isn't. In particular, it teaches you that it's not magic and that it's not 100% reliable, and that there are some things it is extremely bad at. To switch metaphors here, no matter how good your hammer is, not everything is a nail.

So that's my first issue with it: it's being used for things it isn't good at, and, not only that, but this is happening on such a scale that it's getting difficult to find decent stuff (if you doubt my word, go and look for sewing/knitting/crochet patterns on Etsy, but for goodness' sake don't buy them). Then there is, of course, the environmental issue. At the level I was programming it, AI is harmless in that respect, but massive AI models which use huge data centres use a lot of resources; that's not to say they should never be built, but it's very important that sustainability is taken into consideration. They should, at a bare minimum, use entirely renewable power sources and recycle the huge amounts of water they use.

And then there's the matter of exactly who's profiting from it. It is, perhaps, a little simplistic to say "if something is making Elon Musk even richer, it's a bad thing", but, more generally, AI should not be reinforcing inequality, and therefore there need to be good open-source alternatives available which are not compromised by the drive to funnel a lot of money into the hands of a few people. But then, having said that, there also need to be strong mental health safeguards in place; probably everyone by now has heard the tragic story of the teenager who was encouraged to kill himself by ChatGPT, but that is just the tip of a very worrying iceberg. AI psychosis is a real problem, and it's the main reason why I think as many people as possible should have some experience of programming it. It's a great deal harder to be thrown off your mental rails by something if you wrote the underlying code.

And, finally, there's the whole copyright issue. AI models need to be trained, and that's fair enough; but there is a great deal of stuff out there that's in the public domain, and if anything more specialised is needed it should be written in-house. I strongly believe that AI models should not be allowed to go scraping copyright works or people's private conversations to use them for training, and that goes double if the models are producing anything for them that is going to be sold for a profit.

So, as far as I'm concerned, yes, let's have AI, but let's have it in its place, with due concern for all the potential dangers; and that place, to my mind, really does not include Discord.

Current Mood: groggy

Due to the fact that I was ill for a large part of December, I have just bought a small teapot.

The above sentence does make sense, but it probably needs a few more links before that becomes immediately obvious. The illness was due to my blood pressure going too low. One way to get your blood pressure up is extra hydration; however, in my case that is problematic because of Sibyl, so to take in extra liquid I have to "stealth drink". That means I have a flask and sip from it very slowly. I was originally drinking Marigold stock so that I also got the extra salt, but as I started to improve I decided I didn't need to do that in the long term, and switched to rooibos; however, I am keeping the stealth hydration going, as it does seem to stabilise Sibyl a little, and anything that does that even to a small extent is worth persisting with.

And I've been brewing the rooibos in the jug because I don't have a teapot, and, as you'd expect, the jug is now starting to stain a little. So I thought, right. I had better get myself a little teapot.

I went online and started looking, and the most suitable one turned out to be from John Lewis. I thought, oh, great, I've got £50 worth of e-gift cards for them in my inbox, so I can pick up some more kitchen stuff I need while I'm at it and save postage. For instance, there are a couple of utensils I don't need very often but always get annoyed when I do need them, because I don't have them. So I got myself those and a couple of other things, and they're all arriving today - well, almost all; part of the order arrived yesterday, in a very bashed-up box. Fortunately it wasn't fragile.

That particular part of the order had a two-year guarantee on it, which arrived by e-mail. The item is guaranteed against all forms of mechanical failure, but not against misuse, accidental damage, or the batteries running out or malfunctioning. It's very comprehensive; there are about five paragraphs of this guarantee.

I read through the whole thing in increasing disbelief and, I have to say, hilarity. You see, this thing has no moving parts. There's no actual way it can suffer mechanical failure.

It's a utensil stand. I mean, it's solid; it's Joseph Joseph, which is a good brand. It's not even going to break unless a steamroller drives over it or something similar.

But, hey. It has two years' comprehensive guarantee!

Current Mood: amused

My dad didn't like plastic... or, at least, he didn't like what he thought of as plastic, which was not quite the same thing. Terminology mattered in this case, as it did in many others. For instance, nobody was allowed to hit anyone, unless it was an adult hitting a child, which was perfectly legitimate as long as it was called "smacking". Adults would get very angry and upset if you called them out on this and said it was hitting, and they'd straight-up lie and tell you it wasn't, which was ridiculous. What on earth else was it? In the same way, "plastic" was cheap and nasty, but there was apparently nothing wrong with the seat of the loo (which was certainly some kind of hard plastic), and Dad's extensive record collection was all "vinyl", so that was perfectly all right.

Dad's attitude was nothing to do with environmental considerations. Nobody really thought about those at that time, or at any rate not in connection with plastics (there certainly was concern about emissions, but that wasn't the same thing). It was more that he grew up at a time when plastics were just coming in, and at that point there wasn't much around for which plastic was the ideal material. Generally speaking, it was a cheap and usually inferior substitute for wood, glass, metal, or even ceramics. So he had learned to think of them as cheap and nasty, and once he got an idea into his head - as has previously been mentioned - it was well nigh impossible to shift it. And, interestingly, he didn't have any problem with synthetic fibres, because in his book those weren't "plastic". He did tend to prefer natural fibres in general, but the sheer contempt with which he'd look at some item and exclaim "It's plastic!" never extended to polyester, acrylic, or anything of that sort.

Very recently, and quite interestingly, I've been noticing a few people in the sewing community who not only don't like using these fibres for environmental reasons (which is entirely fair, and I try to limit them as far as possible myself due to that), but they actually seem to find them squicky. Just as fibres. They will go on and on about how polyester isn't breathable and it's like wearing a plastic bag, and so on, and so on.

That is partly true. Actual polyester fibres are not breathable. Neither, for that matter, was a suit of plate armour; sometimes you don't wear things for their breathability. On the other hand, quite a lot of polyester fabrics are reasonably breathable due to their construction, so the "plastic bag" comparison is unfair. The plastic bag has an awful lot of ventilation holes. Polyester lining, on the whole, is quite closely woven and therefore not very breathable, so I wouldn't use it to line a fitted jacket; however, I have no problem using it to line a cape or a skirt, since the nature of these garments allows plenty of air access so it doesn't really matter what they're made of.

As I say, I do prefer to limit it. Lining is the only "fresh" (as it were) polyester fabric I buy; other than that, I try to avoid it unless it's deadstock, which is being sold off so that it doesn't go into landfill, and we really don't want polyester in landfill so I am quite happy to put it to good use. On the other hand, I do use polyester thread, which is stronger and less inclined to tangle than cotton is, and I'm not going to wibble about a little bit of polyester in a blend. Reducing the use of it is good, but cutting it out altogether is (at least at the moment, until good alternatives are developed) more trouble than it's worth. Still, I'm rather fascinated by the whole squick thing about polyester (in particular; it seems to be less pronounced with other synthetic fibres). Polyester is problematic due to the method of manufacture, but I don't see how it is inherently squicky. It's not, for instance, unpleasant to touch; there are a few rare people who have a sensitivity to it, but sensitivities to natural fibres (wool in particular) are much more common.

Now, the place where I do have breathability issues is on my feet. For years I couldn't afford anything other than cheap shoes, which are, basically, plastic, though again nobody calls it that; and for years I struggled with athlete's foot as a result. But ever since I've been able to get hold of shoes made from really good quality plant-based breathable materials, I've never had a problem with it... so it's quite a major issue, certainly for me. Yet I never hear anyone going "oh, synthetic leather, eeeew, horrible".

People are strange...

Current Mood: logical

It happens. You haven't GM'd (or even played) for a while because circumstances happened, and all of a sudden you find you have an enthusiastic group who are all ready for you to write them an exciting adventure to get into. But you're rusty... really rusty, in fact. You can't even remember exactly how Damage Reduction works. What do you do?

I am not claiming any credit for the answer because I stumbled across it by sheer accident; but what you do is this. You write a story.

I mentioned a little while ago that I had started writing a D&D-based story with the Three Musketeers and myself as the adventuring party... wheelchairs and all, incidentally, though Athos' wheelchair and mine are both magically enhanced in the story. (They don't propel themselves around by magic because there is no canonical spell to do that, although it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of the characters could devise one. They do, however, have inbuilt defensive capabilities.) Generally when I play D&D I play a character who doesn't have any significant disabilities, but I thought for the purposes of the story it would be intriguing to have everyone as the most faithful rendering of the original that works in the D&D world. So, for instance, the story version of me doesn't have a stoma because there's no way anyone in that world would; on the other hand, the story version of the friend with the alpha-gal allergy still can't eat red meat, but it's now because of a magical geas which prevents him from doing so, rather than an allergy (as allergies don't seem to be at all common in the D&D world). And then, of course, there's the fact that d'Artagnan's character is the bard, naturally, and bards tend to have travel spells, including interplanar ones; the D&D universe has a number of "planes", which are best described as interconnected parallel realities, each of which has its own particular features. In real life, d'Artagnan avoids air travel as much as he can for environmental reasons, so it was great fun to make his corresponding character have strong reservations about "plane travel"! (Again, the reasons are different in the story; the bard's reservations are due to the fact that it's genuinely dangerous. You can meet some seriously nasty things on alternative planes.)

I am having a huge amount of fun with this story, and it's definitely going to end up being a full-length novel; but the crucial thing is that I have to keep researching. At every turn, more or less. The party needs to get to Place X ahead of the people they're currently following, if possible? OK... let's go and see if there's a spell for that (ah, yes, there is), and if so, who's likely to have it (oh, the bard, that figures). The bard can bring the entire party with him as long as they're all touching him, but there's a problem with that because they're travelling in a cart. It's reasonable to assume that the cart will follow if he takes the horses with him, but what about the people in the cart? The books don't answer that question, so then I have to write a little section where he tests it out using the cat who is accompanying the party, because if the cat falls to the ground from the height of the cart's floor he won't take any harm, whereas two people in wheelchairs definitely would. The cat is successfully transported with the cart, so the bard returns and everyone gets back in the cart, including the stone golem, who normally walks alongside.

The party is now travelling extra fast relative to the Material Plane (which is the basic "world as we more or less know it" reality) because they are, despite the bard's serious misgivings, on the Plane of Shadows. I check the books again to see what they might encounter there. Aha - nightcrawler. That's pretty fearsomely unpleasant. What spells are they going to need? Check, check, check... ah, well, before they do anything else at all, the cleric (that would be me) is going to need to cast Consecrate over the entire area to neutralise the creature's massively evil aura, and that requires sprinkling the area with holy water and scattering powdered silver over it, and how do you do that when you're sitting in a wheelchair inside a cart with a worm-type thing the size of a respectable dwarf hall approaching at some speed and you know it can easily swallow you whole, wheelchair and all? Oh, right. You get the sorcerer, who's also in a wheelchair, to cast Mage Hand a couple of times to take care of the sprinkling and scattering side of things. Then the wizard can start throwing actual attack spells, but he gets blasted with... [check creature's abilities again]... oh, yes, Cone of Cold, pretty nasty from a creature as powerful as that, he'll need healing before he can try again. And so on, and so on. And by the time I've written four pages of gripping encounter, I know a great deal more than I did before.

It's not just encounters. Pretty much anything that happens raises questions like "is there a spell for that? If there is, who's casting it? Is it an expensive spell? (If it is, the characters will usually be looking for another way round, the exceptions being emergencies like the Consecrate spell mentioned above.) Is it possible that someone other than the characters may be casting a spell here?" And more; it isn't just spells, though, despite the fact that this particular party is heavily magic-biased (any melee fighting they need to do is done by constructs or summoned allies, because none of them is any good at it). It's all kinds of little bits and bobs about the D&D world. It's almost like learning a language by immersion, or, in this particular case, re-learning it.

And now I even know how Damage Reduction works.

Current Mood: creative

I was in the St John Ambulance Brigade in Sheffield for quite a few years, as I think I have mentioned before; so I used to cover all the home matches, which meant I was usually out at the weekend, and fairly often also midweek. We were primarily there for the crowd, not the players, although some of us did occasionally get pressed into service to help stretcher someone off. And, to be honest, there weren't that many incidents; they averaged maybe two or three per match, but we were put in small teams of two or three to take charge of different sections of the crowd, so it was quite likely that you'd get no incident in your section and you would just get to watch the match free.

When I talk about this, everyone automatically assumes that the most common things we had to deal with were either a) the results of fights, or b) people falling on the steps. As a matter of fact, both of these were pretty rare. I don't recall ever having to patch anyone up after a fight; in fact, I don't recall any fight taking place in or near the stadium. Most fans, with a very few exceptions, were well-behaved and not looking for trouble. You would get occasional street fighting later sometimes, especially after a derby match, when people had had a few drinks and weren't thinking straight; and I do vividly remember Cardiff City coming to Bramall Lane for a cup tie, and that was the scariest bunch of fans I'd seen bar none. I'd seen Millwall, I'd seen Wimbledon, I'd seen them all, and they'd all treated me and my colleagues with great politeness and respect... well, you do, if you think you might need us at some point. Cardiff City, though? They'd been drinking all the way up the motorway and they respected nobody. But at least they didn't bash anyone in the stadium.

Falling on the steps did happen, but it wasn't common. If someone was already a bit unsteady on their feet, or it was very wet, then you might get a fall. I don't remember anyone getting much more than a few bruises from that. Much more common was someone having an epileptic fit, especially at Bramall Lane, where we had one bloke in particular who was a passionate United fan and came to every match... but his epilepsy wasn't very well controlled, and excitement tended to bring it on. So we fairly regularly got him, or just occasionally someone else, down to the first aid room in great haste and laid him on the couch, where we had to hold him so he didn't fall off. Normally you should not restrain someone who is having an epileptic fit; however, in this case, the couch was the safest place for him, so we needed to keep him there. Everyone would just grab the nearest limb and hang on tight.

Nobody ever guesses what the most common incident was. It was, believe it or not, toothache.

Well, you see, it was like this. Someone with a dodgy tooth would come to a match. They'd sit there in the freezing cold for an hour or so, and then at half time they'd go and get a cup of hot Bovril to warm up; and the temperature change would hit that dodgy tooth like a mallet. Sadly, there wasn't a lot we could do about that. What you did was you took the sufferer down to the first aid room to see Dr John (that was what we always called him; I forget his surname), and Dr John would give them an aspirin and tell them to go and see a dentist. The aspirin, at any rate, would get them through the second half.

Having said all that, one of my most vivid memories wasn't a real incident at all. It was the daft Manchester City fan who thought he could wind me up (and possibly impress his friends) by claiming to have sprained a part of his anatomy that a) probably isn't sprainable, and b) if it is sprainable, then if you manage to sprain it at a football match there are going to be quite a lot of eyebrows raised. I just laughed and told him not to be so bloomin' daft, and went my merry way.

It was only later that I realised that I had missed a golden opportunity. What I should have done was shaken my head, sucked in my breath, and replied, "Oh dear. Nasty. That sounds like an amputation job to me!"

I like to think the next St John member he tried that on had the presence of mind to do that. :-D

Current Mood: cheerful

This morning I got an e-mail from a company asking me to review it on Trustpilot. I like this company a good deal, and I would be delighted to review it anywhere else. I am not, however, touching Trustpilot with the proverbial barge pole any more; and this is why.

One day last year I got an e-mail out of the blue from Trustpilot to say that they had taken down one of my reviews (which had been up there for several months) on the grounds that it might possibly be fraudulent. I didn't recall having reviewed that company, so initially I was just puzzled. I e-mailed them back asking for a copy of the text of the review so that I could confirm whether or not I had written it, and then we could take it from there. To this I got a canned response saying that they understood that I was disappointed but they couldn't change their decision.

Well, that was nothing at all to do with what I'd said; so I tried again, this time making what I was actually asking even clearer by putting it in bold type in a separate paragraph. My initial assumption was that my e-mail had been skim-read by some overworked grunt who was probably getting paid for answering e-mails as fast as possible. I got the identical canned response.

This is where I realised I was dealing with not so much AI as artificial stupidity. So I looked to see if there were other ways of contacting them that would necessarily involve a human in the loop; well, there was snail mail. I wrote them a letter explaining the situation, and requested them to reply by e-mail. Meanwhile, there was always a chance that if I kept the e-mail ticket open someone would eventually spot what was happening and respond, so I decided to keep replying to the canned response, and while I was waiting I might as well amuse myself by training their AI. In unexpected ways.

Trustpilot therefore got a whole string of e-mails from me; every time they sent me their identical canned response, I'd reply with an e-mail that started "this isn't relevant and I need to speak to a human" (or words to that effect), followed by something pretty much entirely random. I told their AI exactly how to fit a bra. I explained to it my philosophy of maths education. I gave it a lecture about arsenic poisoning during the Victorian period. Sometimes I just gave up and fed it a couple of paragraphs of lorem-ipsum. You get the idea.

I can't remember how I eventually got through to a human except that I do recall the letter didn't work; but in the end I did. It took more than two months. The human was actually very nice, and she did, at last, send me the text of the review, which enabled me to confirm that I had indeed written it. So I said, right, then, what exactly is the problem with it? I don't see how you can consider it in any way fraudulent. I've just told you I wrote it. What more do you need?

Ah. Well. Apparently the AI had picked up some kind of patterns in the text that were often associated with fraudulent reviews, and obviously they couldn't tell me what those were because they had to be secret so that fraudsters couldn't work round them, so for the protection of the general public they couldn't reinstate my review.

By this point I was really furious with them. I told them in no uncertain terms that they knew very well it wasn't fraudulent; I'd written it myself and I'd told them so. Being humans with brains, they could override the AI and it was their duty in this case to do so. But they were too scared to do that, so I said, right, in that case I am having no more to do with you, please tell me how to delete my account.

There was a pause for about a week, and then I did actually get an e-mail telling me how to delete my account.

It was in Italian.

No, really. The entire correspondence up to this point had been in English.

So I e-mailed them back in the same language asking them how on earth (come mai) they knew I spoke Italian, and thanking them for the information; I was quite seriously tempted to write "how the heck" (come cavolo), but decided that was perhaps a little lacking in dignity. Then I went and deleted my account, in English.

And they can all, as one says in Italian, go away and get themselves blessed.

Current Mood: busy

Athos has a lot to answer for. Yesterday he sent me this link: https://www.routledge.com/Making-Mathematics-with-Needlework-Ten-Papers-and-Ten-Projects/belcastro-Yackel/p/book/9781568813318 So I may have accidentally bought the book in question.

I have always relished mathematical crafting. To be honest, most crafting is mathematical at least to some extent, but it's not always immediately obvious, and in many cases the maths has already been done for you by the pattern designer. Fitting together flat pieces of fabric to shape to a human body (or even make a plushie) is mathematical. Knitting is mathematical - you're making specific shapes out of tiny rectangles, which is rather more complicated than tiny squares (but knitting stitches are rectangular and there is no way round that), plus you generally have stitch patterns of some sort that need to fit neatly onto a row. That is pretty much just the background, though; some pieces are what you might describe as mathematical for the heck of it.

Case in point: the exponential bath scrunchie. It's a very effective bath scrunchie, at that, and it is comfortable to use, as long as you pick the right yarn; a dishcloth cotton, or similar, is ideal. I don't often crochet, preferring in general the versatility of knitting, but I cheerfully crocheted one of these things. You start off with a small ring of chain stitches exactly as you would for a granny square, and onto that you crochet a suitably sized ring of either double or treble crochet, according to taste. For the next round you work two double/treble clusters into every space... and then you just keep doing that, so that the length of the outer edge doubles every time. (I think I used trebles, and I think I separated the clusters using one or two chain stitches to make it easier to see where the gap was. I no longer have the scrunchie.) So you end up with something resembling brain coral; it's a very convoluted ball of crochet which, mathematically speaking, has a fractional dimensionality somewhere between 2 and 3. Plus it's much nicer to wash with than those things made from plastic netting.

Then, of course, there are Moebius scarves (which I have never knitted, though I've occasionally nearly knitted one by accident; when you knit in the round, you quite often get a twist in the first row if you're not careful) and Klein bottle hats (which again I have never knitted, but the temptation is there - probably the only thing that has stopped me doing it is the fact that I'm not sure how I'd work the cables). I don't know if those are in the book; the contents list doesn't give a great deal away, but I am quite certain that there will be at least one project in the book that I will look at and think "right, that is it, I have to make that."

Watch this space...

Current Mood: creative

Yesterday's surprise correspondent was, indeed, not a romance scammer. Or, at least, not in my case he wasn't (though I do now have reports that he was trying to be overly flirty elsewhere).

Nope. He was an investment scammer, as it turned out.

We were having a pleasant enough conversation when he suddenly said he needed to check his e-mails because he was expecting a withdrawal notice from some metals company or other. Which I thought was odd; why would he give me that information? It wasn't relevant to the conversation in any way. I expressed a certain amount of puzzlement, and he explained that he was an investor in this company, gave me a link to their website, and invited me to check them out. I thought "now why on earth would I want to do that?"

Then the penny dropped, and I told him, very politely, that if he was thinking of trying to persuade me to invest in them, the answer was no. I explained that I don't take investment advice online, and I was sure he understood.

Had he been innocent, he'd have responded in one of two ways. He would either have said, "Oh, don't worry, I wasn't going to try that - sorry, I can see what this looks like, I didn't mean it like that!" Or he'd have said, "Oh... well, I'm really excited about this and I think it's a brilliant opportunity, but I totally understand why you'd be cautious." He didn't do either of those things. Instead, he got angry and... get this... actually demanded an apology. What, for taking basic common-sense safety precautions online? I hadn't been rude to him. I hadn't even accused him. His own conscience had done that.

So I just didn't respond, and after a bit he said he would "have to stop responding" and stormed off in a huff, and I thought... good. That will save me the trouble of telling you I want no more to do with you.

Pro tip: if you are unwise enough to try scamming people on Discord servers, do not compound that lack of wisdom by including a mod in your attempts. (And it's not even as if it's unclear that I'm a mod. I have a big shield symbol next to my username on that server.) If you do that, you will get reported and thrown off the server. That was what happened to him; and it turned out he'd also been DMing a number of other people, one of whom had told him he was using an awful lot of flirty emojis to someone he knew to be a married stranger. He vanished abruptly after that.

So I am now about to alter my Discord bio to make it clear that I am not looking for a partner and I do not take investment advice online. Then maybe they'll leave me alone in future.

You know... I should not have to do that.

Current Mood: cynical

This morning I got a DM on Discord from some bloke in the SCA. I recognised the name; he's a Norse mythology geek. That was all, though. We hadn't really interacted, so I couldn't think why he would be DMing me.

So the first thing he did was to ask where I lived. I said "Drachenwald", which is the SCA region covering everywhere from northern Scandinavia down to somewhere in North Africa (I think); only in the SCA could I get away with being quite that vague. I also asked him why he asked. He said he "would love to connect", and I thought... oh. Right. Would you, now? So I told him my age at the first opportunity.

He shut up for a bit and I thought I'd got rid of him, but no; he popped up again a bit later to tell me he's 15 years younger than I am and to show me a selfie (which didn't help - he looks rather disturbingly intense). He wanted to know more. So I told him about the disabilities, and the asexual-spectrum-ness, and the maths degree.

None of that has put him off. Which means that he might actually be decent friend material. I'm impressed.

Usually, though, this is not how it goes. Men who DM you without having previously interacted are generally so desperate for some form of romance that they're prepared to take their chances with a complete stranger, which is completely the wrong way round. No matter how much you like someone's appearance, you can't sensibly fall in love with them until you know them pretty well (emphasis here on "sensibly", since many people seem to do that anyway). And so one becomes very good at letting them down gently. You can, of course, just tell them where to go and then block them; but they aren't all scammers (though quite a lot of them, inevitably, are). Some of them are just hapless. They're so socially inept that they're struggling to find romance in the usual way, so they think they might have better luck online, without realising that there are social conventions there too... so they're surprised if someone is suspicious on being DM'd out of the blue.

I wish anyone like that all the best, but I also try to tell them as gently as possible that they're going to need to change their game. Finding a photo of someone online, deciding they're beautiful, and then showering them with romantic DMs... that's just not going to work, unless that person is equally desperate, in which case it's almost certainly not going to work for very long. The most likely thing that will happen is you get blocked without further ado. And, besides, even if the person does respond positively, you're getting a pig in a poke. Everyone has their flaws, but some sets of flaws are reasonably compatible and others really aren't. If you're a neat freak, for instance, you really do not want to live with me; I'm constitutionally untidy in the way that quite a lot of creative people are. It doesn't matter if you think I'm beautiful. You're not going to want to live with my chaos, and I'm certainly not going to want to live with you trying to tidy it up all the time. I know where things are, thank you!

There was someone on Mastodon around the middle of last year who tried. He was very persistent. Claimed to be in the US Army, went full Romeo (to the extent that I kept having to say things like "thank you very much, but I'm not yours!"), and wanted to talk to me off-platform. Except that I wasn't on Discord at the time and wasn't feeling at all like going back on there at that point, Magda having died fairly recently; and the only other alternatives I could find involved either having a smartphone (which I don't) or revealing my e-mail address (which I was not going to do for any reason). He was puzzled (or at least, he acted puzzled) about why I should think it was such a big deal whether or not he knew my e-mail address. I replied that it was a privacy issue, and he wasn't getting that unless and until I was sure I could trust him. I think, looking back, he was probably a scammer; I've heard since then that quite a lot of romance scammers tell you they're in the US Army (as if that were a positive). Anyway, I stonewalled him very politely, and eventually he gave up and went away.

So I updated my bio on Mastodon to say, basically, "please do not attempt to flirt"; it seems to be working well so far.

I may have to do the same thing on Discord. It's just... you don't really expect it when you get to my age.

Current Mood: exanimate

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov. I think he was born in 1920, so he'd be 106 if he were still with us; in fact, he died rather younger than he really should have done, because he was one of the few unfortunate people who got HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion. (They are a great deal more careful these days. In this country, at least, you're not even allowed to give blood now if you've ever had a blood transfusion yourself, to avoid the risk of passing on anything like that at third hand.)

I first ran across Asimov in my teens. I got a school prize of some sort and it included a book token, so I went off to my favourite bookshop, where I spotted a bright yellow paperback called Nightfall 2 in the SF section. It turned out to be a collection of short stories, and I didn't have too many of those at the time, so I bought it because I thought it would be perfect for reading in odd moments. Then, when I got it home, I sat down to read the first story, and ended up reading the entire book.

It was one of the best things I'd read in quite a while, so naturally I wanted to read more by this author. I eventually bought the original Nightfall collection (it took a while for the shop to get it in); in the meantime I read I, Robot and all the other Asimov SF I could get my hands on. And after a while, I discovered he didn't just write SF. I came across Asimov's Guide to Science, and I decided that if it was anything like as well written as his SF, it was going to be good. It really was; he was an exceptionally clear writer.

There was more. In fact, there was much more. Asimov had the unusual, and indeed I think still unique, distinction of having published at least one book in every one of the ten major areas of the Dewey classification system. I read as many as I could find, but I never found them all; and I enjoyed everything I did find, from the works on popular science to Asimov's Bumper Joke Book (no, seriously - I can't recall if that was the exact title, but he did indeed write a joke book and I do still tell some of the jokes that were in it). And, very much like me, he enjoyed livening his writing up with an anecdote now and again, hence the title of this post.

At one point in his long and varied career, Asimov had occasion to use a chemical with the rather jaw-cracking name of para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde, and so he went into the lab storeroom to get some. And the person in charge of this storeroom said cheerfully, "Oh - para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde? Do you know you can sing that to the tune of The Irish Washerwoman?"

Asimov was immediately, and severely, earwormed, to the point where he found it difficult to stop singing the name of this wretched chemical repeatedly under his breath. A little later, he had to go to an editor's office about a story he'd written, and while he was waiting to see the editor he found himself singing "para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde, para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde..." softly to himself.

"Oh my," said the receptionist. "You know it in the original Gaelic!"

Asimov wrote: "What could I do? I smiled modestly and had her introduce me as Isaac O'Asimov."

I'm still chuckling. Thank you, Doctor!

Current Mood: content

I have said a fair bit about the remarkable Minsky so far, but not very much about his brother Chomsky, who was, I'm afraid, perhaps the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever. They looked very similar, both of them being big tabbies; but there the resemblance ended. Chomsky was, in fact, even bigger than Minsky; there was Siamese in them somewhere, but it showed much more strongly in Minsky, who had the slim build, the brains, and the slightly kinked tail end. Chomsky wasn't overweight, but he had a much more cobby sort of build.

I always used to say about those two that there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both. That was an accurate summary, but it also wasn't the half of it. Minsky also got the astonishing reflexes, the sheer determination, and the physical strength, whereas his poor brother basically drew the wooden spoon in the genetic lottery. Even his health wasn't great. Chomsky was very prone to cystitis, and he died quite young from a previously unsuspected heart problem. But for all that, he was an adorable cat; he was very affectionate and would get into my lap at every opportunity. Of course, being so dim, once he got there he had no idea what to do with his legs, so I would have to sort them out for him; and he would purr most gratefully.

Anyway, back when Chomsky was alive, I was married, and therefore we had a double bed. As you do. And this double bed had been slightly damaged during a house move; it was a drawer divan, and it had taken a whack to the frame which meant that one of the drawers could no longer be inserted into its slot (so it lived at the bottom of the walk-in wardrobe). And one New Year's Eve, so long ago now that it was before anyone had the idea of setting off fireworks at midnight, I went to bed at the usual time; I don't recall what my husband did, but he was much more of a party animal than I was, so he probably went out and got squiffy with his friends.

Some time between 5 and 5.30 am, I woke up, rather muzzily as one would at that time of the morning; and I realised I had been woken up by a noise. "Who on earth," I thought blearily, "is revving a motorbike at this hour on New Year's Day?"

Husband also woke up. I put the same question to him, not really expecting he'd be able to answer... and, as I was asking it, I realised something.

It wasn't a motorbike. The noise was coming from inside the bed.

Husband, very kindly (since he'd almost certainly been drinking the night before, and must therefore have been even muzzier than I was), got up and reached inside the hole left by the missing drawer. To be fair, I probably wouldn't have had a chance; he was not only stronger than I was, but, crucially, he had longer arms. Even then, it took him a bit of time and trouble, but eventually he managed to extract Chomsky from his impromptu nest among the bedsprings. That cat had a very loud purr in any case, and when it was being amplified by the bed's framework it was... quite something.

Chomsky was duly evicted from the bedroom, the door was closed behind him (I can't think why it had been left open in the first place), we both went back to sleep, and all was well.

Happy New Year!

Current Mood: relaxed

I've already said quite a lot about vegan meat substitutes, but nothing yet about vegan cheese; so, for the curious, I'm going to put that right this morning.

Vegan cheese comes in two broad categories: the cheap sort and the expensive sort. The cheap sort is made from coconut oil and various starches, and it is usually pretty cheese-like, assuming your definition of cheese extends to the processed variety (though a few of them are at least up to the standard of a decent processed cheese). It comes in a wide range of flavours and melts nicely, though, of course, it doesn't melt in that curiously stringy fashion that dairy cheese does. The mozzarella types are good on a pizza, and, while on the whole you wouldn't put the other sorts in a sandwich, they're perfectly acceptable on a baked potato or in cooking generally.

The expensive sort is rather interesting, because often (though not always) it's actually a lot less cheese-like than the cheap sort. It is made from nuts of one type or another. Nush, for instance, make a very good soft cheese from almonds, which comes in a tub, and that really does taste like a cream cheese. Tyne Chease use cashews, and the results have their own particular flavour profile which is not that close to cheese, but which I generally like very much. (The exception was their short-lived experiment in making a Camembert substitute. They used real Camembert cultures with their cashew mixture. I tried their "Cashew Bert", as they called it, and it was so disgusting I couldn't finish it; it seems a lot of other people felt the same way, because by the next time I went to order it had disappeared from the site.) There are other manufacturers, such as La Fauxmagerie, who specialise in trying to reproduce particular cheeses as accurately as possible. Tyne Chease is fairly expensive and these tend to be more so; I've occasionally tried these vegan cheese-clones, and the flavour is usually pretty good. However, nut-based cheeses don't melt. As far as I know, there is no vegan cheese in existence - yet - which is both top quality and meltable.

You can also make your own. You can even buy kits to do that, which I've never tried, since there is just me and the kits do tend to make a lot of cheese. Or, if you just want a kick of cheesy flavour in something, you can rather easily cheat by using nutritional yeast, or "nooch" as a lot of vegans affectionately term it. This is wonderful stuff. It's dead yeast, so you can't raise bread or brew beer with it; it comes in thin yellow flakes which conveniently dissolve easily even in cold liquids, so you can mix it not only into cooked dishes but into things like spreads (and I do, regularly). It's very good for you, as it contains a lot of B group vitamins in particular, and the flavour is cheesy with a nutty undertone. Adding garlic to the mix tends to bring out the cheesiness even more.

So, basically, if you're thinking about going vegan but hesitating because you're a cheese addict, there is hope. You can fill that particular gap; it just takes a little more thought and care than it does with meat, which is very easy to replace these days. Unless you only ever eat cheese cooked, or you only ever eat it uncooked, you're going to need to buy a slightly larger range of products because they don't all do the same things; but you can, at least, get them. It will take a bit of experimentation to find the ones you like best, but then, to be fair, it probably also did with cheese.

And even if you're not thinking about going vegan, you won't go too far wrong if you get yourself some nooch. It's one of the most versatile ingredients in my kitchen. You don't have to be a vegan to enjoy it!

Current Mood: cheerful

For some reason, the subject of allergies seems to have come up a lot recently in different places. Last night, for instance, I learnt that Mel Blanc, who famously voiced Bugs Bunny (as well as a number of other characters), was allergic to carrots. However, he felt rather strongly that you couldn't fake the sound of someone biting into a carrot; so, for all the years he voiced Bugs, every time Bugs took a bite out of a carrot he would bite an actual carrot, then say his lines, then spit out what he could and deal with any subsequent consequences. I call that dedication far beyond the call of duty.

And then there was the person elsewhere who caused me to roll my eyes so hard I risked making myself dizzy. She knew perfectly well she had a lot of skin allergies, and she was complaining because she'd had a massive flare-up under her arms... because she'd used her mother's aerosol deodorant. I'm also someone with a lot of skin allergies, and my immediate reaction (which I was at least polite enough not to type) was "how on earth can you be so incredibly stupid?!" If you know you have skin allergies, you simply do not take that sort of risk. I spend quite a lot of time having to remind myself that this person is actually in her early thirties, not 15 or 16, given the way she habitually acts.

Thankfully I have only one serious food allergy; it rather blindsided me by not developing till I was in my late forties, but at least it's something which is easy enough to avoid. However, one of my Three Musketeers (and I had perhaps better not say which one) has a rather inconvenient allergy; he's allergic to mammal meat. Fish or fowl he can eat, but even cheese sets him off occasionally, and a couple of years ago he had quite a nasty episode which was brought on by a dish of seafood containing - unbeknown to him until it was too late - a very small amount of meat stock. (Fortunately someone he was with had some antihistamines, so he didn't have to go to hospital.)

I'd never heard of this before, because it's not at all common in these isles; but recently I found out that it's a well-known phenomenon on all the major continental land masses. This particular allergy is called alpha-gal, and it is caused by a tick bite. There are several species of ticks which are able to cause it; I don't think any of them live in the UK, but my friend's been about a bit (not to the USA, as far as I know, which is where it seems to be most common, but certainly to several countries). When I found this out, my already low opinion of ticks descended still further. I remember ticks. We were always having to pick them off the dog in the summer. What you did was you soaked a cotton wool pad in whiskey or vodka and laid it over the tick, which would then get rolling drunk and fall off. You could then pick the nasty little vampire bug up and dispose of it suitably.

Well, obviously, if you have alpha-gal allergy you avoid mammal meat, so my friend is quite safe with me because I just feed him vegan; but unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that. The allergy was originally identified because medical scientists were trying to work out why some people were sensitive to a particular anti-cancer drug... and, when they did identify it, it turned out to be not just that. There is a disturbing amount of medication which is made using animal products, and at the moment (I very much hope this changes in future) it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to avoid those. In the USA there are now some medicines available which are specifically designed to be safe for people with alpha-gal allergy, but I have no idea if either a) you can get them here or b) if so, you're allowed to have them because you're a vegan. (And, indeed, while "vegan" automatically means "safe for alpha-gal allergy", the converse is not true. Fish, birds, and even reptiles could have been used.) I have a personal beef (pun entirely intended) in that many of my medications contain lactose, which is invariably of animal origin (lactic acid is not), and which isn't even strictly necessary. I do not want to be swallowing lactose, even in tiny amounts; but I need the medication to keep me alive.

My friend is perfectly cheerful and doesn't appear to miss eating (most) meat at all; he's also quite a fan of some of the substitutes I've been able to recommend him. He's also in excellent health generally. But still, it is an awkward allergy to have, if only because it limits what medication he can potentially be prescribed if he needs it in future. I suspect not everyone with this allergy is anything like so sanguine about it.

Alpha-gal allergy is on the increase worldwide. I am hoping very much that at least there will be a silver lining in the form of the development of good non-animal-based medications. But for the moment, I'm about to explain to my friend how to make his own seitan; I suspect that will make him even more cheerful!

Current Mood: curious

I think I may have already mentioned that Porthos is half Russian. His mother had the great misfortune to be born in Siberia; she eventually got out by dint of marrying an Englishman, the result of this being, of course, Porthos. She did very well for herself over here as a translator, though I think she's now mostly retired; and she and Porthos regularly stick two fingers up at Putin by finding all the Ukrainians they can and royally entertaining them (they live in the same town, though not in the same house).

Life in Siberia was, as you might expect, pretty grim, especially in the winter. When Porthos' mother was growing up, every winter, as soon as the freeze set in properly, her father would go out, shoot a bear, drag it home, and stick it in the shed. For the rest of the winter, every time the family wanted meat, he'd go and hack a bit off this frozen bear with an axe. Porthos' mother wasn't the biggest fan of bear meat, and I should think that by the time she left home she was very glad not to have to see it again. But, apparently, that was just what you did in Siberia.

So our Porthos grew up fluently bilingual, which gave him a massive head start learning other languages; he is still probably the best linguist (in the sense of "language learner" rather than "student of the way languages work") that I know. He and his mother still code-switch all the time with dizzying rapidity, which can get a bit disorientating at times, but that's just how they function.

Well, one day, he decided he wanted a frock coat; and you can't just go and buy one of those off the peg, especially not if you are (as he was at the time) an imposingly large gentleman. He's tall, and at the time his circumference was not too far off his height. So he asked me if I could make him one, and I said, of course. I found a pattern, enlarged it fairly considerably widthways, and made it up for him; he was very pleased with it, and decided he'd like a pair of knee breeches to go with it. Conveniently, the frock coat pattern also had a pattern for those included.

Now, this was a long time ago. I had never widened a trouser pattern before, so it didn't occur to me that I didn't need to widen it throughout; his legs were not as thick (in proportion to the pattern) as his torso was. So I just widened the whole thing, then I made a calico mock-up and got him to try it on.

He came out of his bedroom wearing this mock-up. We looked at it, and each other, and laughed. And then his mother rang.

He answered his mobile. "Zdrastvuitye, mama... [Russianrussianrussianrussian...] [Russianrussianrussian...] [Russianrussian Bermuda shorts Russianrussianrussian...]"

I mean. I couldn't argue. But that's how I found out that there is no Russian term for "Bermuda shorts".

There's also no Russian word for "gonk", but that's quite another story!

Current Mood: calm

My Best Online Friend would really like to eat less meat, for a variety of reasons; but she has a problem with a lot of vegan fake meats because they contain pea protein. It's quite often the case that if you very strongly dislike something, you can taste it in almost homeopathic amounts. I'm like that with vinegar. And she dislikes all forms of legumes just as strongly as I dislike vinegar, so, whereas I (and most other people) don't notice any pea-like flavour in our veggieburgers, she does. You can, of course, get meat alternatives that are just soya, but both of us agree that those are pretty meh. (I really like soya beans, as soya beans. They're great in a casserole. Tofu is also OK if properly marinated or mixed with other ingredients, because it doesn't taste of anything very much. But soya meat substitutes definitely lack something.)

My friend doesn't have to avoid gluten, thankfully, so I suggested she might like to try seitan; and she's also a good cook, so I strongly encouraged her to make her own. I have tried shop-bought seitan precisely once. It's both expensive and not that great. There are several recipes about, but the one I always used to use was a real cracker, so I shared that with her. The principle is much the same in all cases: you knead gluten flour with liquid (usually a mixture of oil and water), plus whatever other ingredients you're using. Then you roll it into lumps, put them in a pan with good stock (my recipe is heavy on the soy sauce), and give it a good long slow simmer. Boil it too fast and it'll go spongy, which is not what you're after; you want a good firm consistency.

Because of that long slow simmer, and the fact that I can't stand for long periods these days, I honestly thought I'd never make it again. But we were chatting about it, and I was stressing the importance of the long simmer, and in the middle of that it suddenly hit me.

Slow cooker. I could do it in the slow cooker. That would be perfect! In fact, I should think it'd be even better than doing it on the stove top.

So I am now getting quite excited about this, especially since home-made seitan freezes very well. And, for reference, here's the recipe; I originally found it online, but that was a long time ago now, so there is no guarantee it's still out there. The author of the recipe recommends sauteeing your seitan for a few minutes before adding it to other recipes.

150g vital wheat gluten flour
3 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
125 ml cold vegetable broth
60 ml soy sauce
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed or grated on a microplane grater

For the simmering broth:
1 litre vegetable broth
1 litre water
60 ml soy sauce

Fill a stock pot with the water, broth and soy sauce, cover and bring to a boil.

In the meantime, in a large bowl mix together gluten and yeast. In a smaller bowl mix together broth, soy sauce, lemon juice, olive oil and garlic. Pour the wet into the dry and combine with a wooden spoon until most of the moisture has absorbed and partially clumped up with the dry ingredients. Use your hands and knead for about 3 minutes, until it’s an elastic dough. Divide into 3 equal pieces with a knife and then knead those pieces in your hand just to stretch them out a bit. Let rest until the broth has come to a full boil.

Once boiling, lower the heat to a simmer. Add the gluten pieces and partially cover pot so that steam can escape. Let simmer for 45 minutes, turning occasionally. Turn the heat off and take the lid off, let sit for 15 minutes.

Remove from broth and place in a strainer until it is cool enough to handle. Slice and use as desired.

Current Mood: excited

I am... kind of conflicted about fireworks. But I do know for a fact that I don't like them out of place, and last night they were very much out of place. Who sets off fireworks on Boxing Day? (Given the way the wind was blowing at the time, I think the answer was probably someone in the next village; but still.)

When I was a child, I begged and pleaded every year to be allowed to go to a fireworks display, and the answer was always a categorical no. Of course, taking me would have inconvenienced the adults, and the primary rule was you don't do that; I therefore didn't know for a very long time that there was anything more to it than that. So, in about the top year of infant school, we were all told to write about the fireworks we'd been taken to see the night before, because it was taken for granted that the entire class would have got fireworks; they all had, apart from me. So I wrote about what I'd done instead. I'd got a few bits and pieces and come up with an imaginative pretend-fireworks game, because that was all I could do. The teacher was apparently quite impressed with it, and many years later I discovered she'd felt sorry for me.

I must have been over 40 when I finally discovered why I'd never been allowed fireworks as a child. It turned out - and I'd completely forgotten this - that Dad had gone out and bought some fireworks when I was three. I was supposed to be delighted. Unfortunately, being three and rather nervous in any case, I was scared; and not reacting the way you were supposed to was very bad. So bad, in fact, that Dad was furious and vowed that as a punishment I'd never be allowed fireworks again; and sure enough, I wasn't.

Not that I ever wanted to be too close to the things; and this was reinforced rather later in my childhood when this boy, a few years older than I was, with a badly disfigured face arrived in our neighbourhood. I didn't know him personally, and I don't remember being anything much more than vaguely curious (had he been ill?); but after a while I got chatting to someone who did know him, and it turned out he'd been messing about with fireworks and one had blown up in his face. This person got on well with him and was quite defensive on his behalf (which they didn't need to be with me, but I can imagine they'd had to deal with people who saw him as some kind of freak), and they actually said it wasn't his fault he looked like that. I said nothing, but I was thinking... it's very sad that he looks like that, it can't be easy for him, but you've just said he was playing with fireworks when he was far too young to be handling them at all; so, sorry, but yes, it is his fault. And equally well the fault of whoever should have been supervising him.

So I've always been quite happy with public firework displays, where very few people are actually handling the fireworks and there's a whole raft of safety measures in place to protect those people. I've never been so happy with people setting them off in their gardens, partly for safety reasons, and partly because if you have a lot of people doing it then it becomes a nightmare for pets, especially those of a more nervous disposition. Minsky was a rare cat indeed; when Bonfire Night came round, he'd go out for a stroll to watch the fireworks, having worked out a long time ago that they weren't dangerous if you kept your distance. The others were not at all keen on all the noise, and I couldn't blame them.

But at least it was only once a year... to begin with.

I have no idea whose idea it was to celebrate "the millennium" (it wasn't even the millennium; it was New Year's Eve 1999, and the millennium didn't start till a year later) by setting off fireworks at midnight, but if I ever find out I'm having words with them. At length. I have never been inclined to stay up to see the New Year in, reasoning that if it isn't sober enough to find its own way in, then I'm not bothering with it; so that night I went to bed at the regular time, and was both surprised and disgruntled to be woken up just before midnight by a firework going off. "Who?" I thought. "Why? Don't they know this is an unsociable time of night?"

It was only the first. There were a lot of fireworks; they were ridiculously noisy; and they went on for over an hour. After a little while I heard a gentle scraping at my bedroom door, so I put on my dressing gown to see which cat was (entirely reasonably) feeling bothered. To my surprise, it was Minsky. Well, he hadn't been expecting them in the middle of the night either, and, honestly, it was like Beirut out there. Since there was clearly not going to be any sleeping done till all the nonsense was over, I sat down at the top of the stairs and cuddled Minsky instead. I think it did both of us good.

When I finally crawled back to bed, I thought "oh well, at least it's a one-off, and thank goodness it's over". Except that, sadly, it wasn't. People have been setting off fireworks at midnight on New Year's Eve ever since.

Well, m'lud, I object. Being awake at midnight on New Year's Eve is not compulsory, and shouldn't be made so by default. I don't have a problem with Bonfire Night, when the fireworks are mostly for the children and have generally stopped by eight or nine in the evening; but bangs and crashes at midnight, nope. And if people absolutely must have fireworks at that time of night, there should be a law severely limiting the amount of noise they're allowed to make. To be fair, it's never been quite so bad since then as it was on that first awful night; I certainly never got Minsky coming upstairs wanting a cuddle again. But still, it's invariably enough to wake me up.

This year, however, I hope to have the jump on it. This year I have ear plugs!

Current Mood: groggy

Today did not get off to a good start. How do I put this without being too gross?

OK, let's just say I'm inclined to retain water. On one side. To the extent that I own a couple of bra inserts, a larger one and a smaller one, and yesterday I needed the larger one. It augments the side which is not retaining the water by two cup sizes. And this morning, if I were going out (I don't bother with an insert if I'm not), I could pretty nearly get away with not wearing an insert at all. We're talking about maybe a couple of hundred millilitres of water which stopped being retained overnight, and that water, naturally, had to go somewhere.

Sibyl is a water hog. That's why, if I want to take in more liquid than usual, I have to diddle her by sipping it very slowly from a flask, so that she doesn't notice. Last night, she water-hogged in a pretty big way.

And now, there is unscheduled laundry. I really hate Sibyl sometimes.

Other than that, however, things aren't too bad. Yesterday was a pretty good day; I felt a bit woozy after lunch (I hadn't overeaten - I think it was just the excitement of finally being able to get to church which had caught up with me), but I wasn't too bad and I perked up later, which meant I could do a bit of knotwork practice and some knitting. And I have Ideas, courtesy of Ingvar.

Ingvar was the chap I mentioned a few posts ago who turned out to know Porthos; after a while it occurred to me that I probably knew where they knew each other from. It took me that time because I was around there too, but I don't recall Ingvar from those days (having said that, it was a long time ago now, so I can't remember everyone). We were all on the alt-fan-pratchett IRC chat, back in the day; that's how I first got to know both Athos and Porthos, and Porthos introduced me to d'Artagnan very shortly after that. (To my knowledge d'Artagnan was never on #afp, but he is a Pratchett fan too, nonetheless. It's the one thing, apart from very high intelligence, that all three of them have in common.) So Ingvar and I were talking about all that and trying to see who else we could recall that we both knew, and somewhere among all that he linked me to something called The Tale of Westala and Villtin, an epic comic fantasy tale about a pair of adventurers based on the two authors, with several characters in it based on other #afp-ers. Porthos is in there, with a sex change (it really can't be anyone else). Ingvar is in it too. I have not yet found anyone I recognise as being Athos, but I have come across a few other people I recognise, including Porthos' friend the tenor (who isn't d'Artagnan). It's perhaps telling that I think of him as "the tenor", but the writers of the tale thought of him as "the biologist" (he's both, of course); in the tale he appears as a mad doctor who does some fairly odd biological experiments.

I am enjoying this tale very much; and it is also making me think that I'd like to do a D&D-based fantasy story of a similar nature, with the adventuring party based on the Three Musketeers and myself. And, of course, if you're going to do D&D-based, then you need a race and a class for all your main characters. None of us is a natural fighter, but I thought of a way round that: I could have Athos be a cunning artificer who specialised in making fighting automata. That'd suit his technological bent. Obviously d'Artagnan has to be the bard, and if I'm not the bard I'm the cleric; that neatly left Porthos handling the magic, and I think he'd make a great wizard.

As for the races... there is no actual half-dwarf in D&D, but since there are half-elves, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be, and it would entirely suit Porthos; so that's what he'll be. Half-elves and gnomes make the best bards, so I was going to have d'Artagnan as one of those (there are good arguments both ways), until it occurred to me that Athos would really enjoy being a tiefling (half-infernal). And I thought... well, if we're going to have a tiefling, it'd be a lot of fun if we also had an aasimar (half-celestial) so that we could have some Aziraphale and Crowley vibes in the mix, and aasimar would very much suit d'Artagnan; which also means that I get to be the half-elf (yes, you can have more than one in a party, but it is fun to have a mixture). And I do like playing half-elves. They're great negotiators.

Having established the characters, the next question is: what exactly is this lot going to do? That was easy enough. I decided that Lord Smallpiece of Ashwood's great-uncle Algy had gone missing, and he was very keen to get him back, not merely because of the obvious family ties, but also because Uncle Algy did such a great job of guarding the manor house at night.

Lord Smallpiece is in his sixties.

Yup. You got it. Algernon Smallpiece is a vampire.

So I was already churning this stuff round in my head when I found a few people who were interested in an actual D&D campaign. I thought "oh no, I can't write two at once... oh, right, I'm being stupid, I don't have to!"

This is brilliant. The story will feed into the campaign. The campaign will feed into the story. Both, I think, will be better for it.

All I need now is for Sibyl to behave!

I made it to church this morning, and I can't tell you how glad I was about that, having missed it for the last three Sundays due to blood pressure shenanigans. This year, for I think the first time since the church was planted, we were indoors; in the past we've been unable to book the school hall on Christmas morning, so we've made the best of things by having an outdoor service under the big Christmas tree on the Green. It is evocative and atmospheric, and we've had more than a few random dog-walkers and other passers-by decide to join us and sing some carols, which is always lovely to see... but... it's chilly. And, while I am very much a winter bunny and I like chilly, that doesn't mean I like sitting out in it, especially since I can't move around very much to keep warm. In previous years it's always been "Merry Christmas, lovely service, see you on Sunday, bye!" as I shoot off back to the flat to thaw out.

But now the school no longer deals with hiring out its own hall; there's an external company that does that, and they're vastly better to deal with than the school itself was. (I know about dealing with the school from experience, having run a couple of concerts in there. It... had quirks.) This is just as well, as it is not only cold today but quite windy. Even with an extra layer on, I didn't want to be out for too long.

Having said that, I'm still not quite 100%, though I have been functioning a lot better this week. And I'm reading about everyone else's Christmas dinners and even that is making me feel a bit tired. It started with an overnight e-mail from d'Artagnan wishing me a merry Christmas, and mentioning that he was tending something that was cooking in the adjacent room... at nearly 1 am. That's what I call an early start. Alexandre from the SCA was baking from 6 am and posted a photo of some magnificent-looking bagels. Various other people on other Discord servers, or Mastodon, were doing similar... maybe not starting quite so early, but nonetheless expending more energy than I have even when I'm running at 100%. It was all very impressive and very daunting.

Well, this is what I did.

Last night I made up the stuffing. It says "add to boiling water" but that's not the most practicable way to do it, so instead I put the stuffing in a little crock pot, poured the requisite amount of cold water on it, stuck it in the microwave for a couple of minutes, took it out, stirred it, decided "that needs a bit of oil" and so added some, then left it to cool down overnight. This morning I put it in the fridge.

Come lunchtime, I transferred the stuffing to the air fryer for 18 minutes (it said 20 on the packaging, but that was for a conventional oven, and 18 turned out to be plenty). I then got a not-chicken breast out of the fridge, decided that brushing it with oil would be a sensible move and therefore did so (I think I was absolutely right, and it'd have dried out too much on the surface otherwise), and stuck that in the air fryer for 7 minutes as soon as the stuffing came out. Meanwhile, I put some broad beans and chopped onions from the freezer into another little crock pot and roasted those in the microwave, and as soon as those came out a little jug of gravy went in (made up from Marigold gravy powder). Total faffing-about-in-kitchen time: minimal. Quality of meal: omnomnom. (And I shall do similar tomorrow, but I'm out of broad beans so it'll probably be peas.)

No potatoes. There was a lot of stuffing, and it contained all the carbs I required. I don't have a huge appetite and I hate feeling bloated.

So I am having a very merry (and low-energy) Christmas so far, and I hope everyone reading is having the same!

Current Mood: thankful

I am having a third good day in succession. That hasn't happened since the beginning of December. While I'm not quite right yet, I'm definitely running in the 90% range, and that is encouraging. Yesterday I put up the decorations a day early in case I felt rough again today, and I made banana loaf (which I don't quite need yet, but it freezes well, plus I didn't want the bananas to go all yucky); today I have some slow-cooker casserole lined up for lunch, so I think the most energetic thing I have to do is make some tofu pesto spread. (Which isn't very energetic. I can do most of that sitting down.)

I also haven't yet mentioned that I went to see the GP on Monday, who says I'm doing all the right things to manage it (other than compression stockings, which with a fair wind I may be able to avoid; I don't want to have to wear them if I can help it, as they'd be a nightmare in summer), and also thinks I may have something wrong with my inner ear, which would explain why I tend to get dizzy sometimes even when lying down. So she's given me some gentle exercises to help fix that if it's the case. She also put me through a formal pre-assessment for autism; if you score 6 or more on that test, they do further investigations. Not remotely to my surprise, I scored 1; so hopefully that one has been finally put to bed.

And other than that... last night, for some reason, a bunch of us got into conversation about drains, and specifically the cleaning thereof. Several people mentioned the difficulty of cleaning "sink siphons", and initially I thought this was some strange kind of modern fitting that I don't have on my sink and have never seen on any other sink; but after a bit I realised they just meant the sink trap (which is not a siphon, and if it is siphoning then you have a problem). And, as almost inevitably happens, that reminded me of something.

When I was at university, I had two friends called Sian (without the accent) and Robin, who were also friends with each other. Sian and I discovered that Robin had a birthday coming up, so Sian decided we ought to make him a birthday cake, and we therefore asked him what sort he would like. We got a surprising answer: he didn't really fancy a cake. What he'd like most of all was a blancmange.

Sian lived in a hall of residence at the time and didn't have access to a proper kitchen. I was in a student flat, so I did. Therefore, I got the job of making this blancmange. We bought one of those mixed packs - two sachets in each of three flavours - and I used three of the sachets, layering them in a large rectangular tub. I then very carefully carried this tub round to Sian's, with instructions to turn it out onto a suitable plate once it was set (I think I may also have brought the plate, but it was a long time ago, so I don't entirely remember). Robin had been invited round to Sian's the following morning, and the plan was that I'd arrive shortly before he did.

Now I have no idea what happened that night, because Sian was normally a model of patience; but for some reason it entirely deserted her on this occasion, and she couldn't resist turning out the blancmange before she went to bed. It may well have been set on top, but it was most certainly not set all the way through. I'm pretty sure I'd explicitly told her to leave it overnight... but, anyway, she didn't, and the consequences were entirely predictable. She had put the plate over her washbasin in case of any spillage, and of course the whole lot simply glooped down the plughole. When I arrived, I found a very sheepish Sian with a confession and a lot of apologies.

"Don't worry," I said. "We still have the rest of the blancmange. I'll go round to Robin's and get him to come here tomorrow instead, and meanwhile I'll make up another one."

She was relieved at that; but it turned out she hadn't yet quite told me the full story. She had also had to call one of the hall porters to unblock her washbasin. He'd come along and done that, but when he'd finished, he'd looked at her and asked her what that stuff was down there. "It wasn't just hair, was it?" he said.

Sian's self-possession never faltered for very long. She gave him a brilliant smile.

"Blancmange," she explained.

"Blancmange?!"

"Blancmange."

Sian, I might add, had such an air of unassailable confidence almost all the time that she'd successfully held down a job as a bouncer in one of Liverpool's roughest nightclubs, despite standing somewhere below 160 cm and not being especially heavy of build. Faced with that, the hall porter decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that he was going to ask no further questions. I truly wish I'd been there at the time.

Anyway. I went and postponed Robin, made up the second blancmange, left it a bit longer this time before taking it round to Sian's, and all went without a hitch the following day. He did offer us some, but neither of us actually liked blancmange; so he ate the whole thing himself, in one sitting. I was impressed.

And now you know why I can't hear about blocked drains without automatically thinking about blancmange.

I think I've mentioned in a previous post exactly how I read my Bible; basically I read both Testaments in order (more or less - I can decide to read one of the Gospels at any time), but interleaved. And so it happens that tomorrow I shall be finishing Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament.

It's remarkably apposite timing; and yet the Old Testament didn't really finish on Christmas Eve, historically speaking. There was a gap. A gap, to be precise, of about 400 years.

It wasn't that nothing happened during that period; if you read the Apocrypha, in particular the books of the Maccabees, you'll find that there was a good deal of quite important history going on during those 400 years. Well, there had to be, really. We finish the Old Testament with the Jews having freshly returned from exile in Babylon under Cyrus and Darius, and by the time we start the New Testament they're very much a nation again, but now they're a Roman colony. But - as far as anyone is aware - there were no prophets in that gap. God wasn't speaking to his people directly for all that time, but only through what had already been written down. And this must have been puzzling and disturbing, because up to that point there had been prophets throughout the history of the Jewish people. Granted, they frequently weren't listened to at the time; but there was always someone who did listen, as evidenced by the very fact that their words were recorded. Even Jeremiah, who got so demoralised about the fact that nobody was listening that it's tempting to diagnose him with clinical depression, didn't just have his faithful scribe Baruch; had it just been those two, his words would not have survived. There must have been other people who saw to it that the words of Jeremiah written down by Baruch were preserved, rather than destroyed, despite the fact that there were clearly those around who'd have been happy to destroy them.

That is one of the reasons why Advent is a season of waiting. It's merely symbolic; the Messiah was awaited for thousands of years before he finally arrived, and the last four hundred of them in apparent silence. Waiting for no more than four weeks doesn't really give any idea of that. Still, we can at least be mindful of those who did wait for all that time; and I think it's good to do that.

I had a good day yesterday and I'm having another one today, so I am going to put up the Christmas decorations today; it is a day early, but I may feel rubbish again tomorrow, and if I do I am not going to want to be mucking around with sticking things to windows. (That's how I normally decorate these days, as it's not safe for me to stand on things in order to fix things into the corners of the ceiling; and I sadly don't have room here for a Christmas tree.) Because the symbolic wait is almost over now.

There is very much a time and a place for reading Revelation, but I think I am not going to start it on Christmas morning. That seems to me the perfect time to start John again instead; for me, there is no passage that conveys the sheer wonder of Christmas like the first chapter of John's Gospel.

God took a deep breath for four hundred years, and then... the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Current Mood: hopeful

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baroque_mongoose

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