tablesaw: A redshirt says, "I'm just here to pay off my Academy loans anyway." (Academy Loans)
Tablesaw Tablesawsen ([personal profile] tablesaw) wrote2025-08-19 07:14 pm
Entry tags:

The Usual

Sometimes I think about "Earl Grey, hot."

When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.

The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.

Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.

In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.

Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-18 05:49 pm
Entry tags:

In which our heroine over-thinks self-sacrifice for fannish idols

Emboldened by drinking Iron Tusk (the Oort Cloud Mariner was off), and feeling metal as a sidequence, I have unwisely decided to share my thoughts on the tendency to handmaidenly self-sacrifice: if you see me walking down the street, try not to cry each time we meet, just scroll on by....

Warning for oblique mention of suicide by self-sacrifice.

I was thinking about places we tour as spectators, as differentiated from times and places we might choose to live in.

Which in turn led me to wonder about fandom, and how much human behaviour has or hasn't been modified by the wider availability of (more-or-less accurate) information through mass media.

For example, many human cultures used to indulge in the supposedly voluntary mass sacrifice of young people at the death and burial of a cultural idol. Not only a loving partner, whose motive might be more understandable to us, but also multiple handmaidens (of any sex/gender). And I'm sitting here idly wondering if such spectacular "high status" (i.e. resource-hoarding) funerals were still de rigueur in our contemporary global cross-culture then how many young women would want to sacrifice themselves as a public display of grief at the death of a mass media idol or in the belief they'd accompany him to an enticing afterlife (as historically it was usually hims - or perhaps we have achieved equality of exploitation)? Would being one amongst hundreds or thousands of ghostly handmaidens, instead of a select few, encourage or discourage potential victims of self-sacrifice? Would their families and societies encourage or discourage them from joining the ghostly horde / hoard?

What about young warriors sacrificing themselves en masse at the funerals of their dead idols? As far as I know there isn't even a fashion for mass sacrificing virtual gaming characters to honour a fallen leader....

When did humanity change its mind about this previously widespread fashion for terminal self-sacrifice and why? Or is it merely better disguised now as millions willingly throw their lives onto the pyres of billionaires? I dunno, but I am interested in whether a fashion for young people to mass sacrifice themselves for a dead idol could ever return.
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-15 05:31 pm

In which there is a round-up of random goodness from my recent travels

- Art, or whatever: Still loving the GIANT mechanical bull named Ozzy (lol) taking up almost the whole concourse at Birmingham New Street railway station. When I passed he had purple eyes and was swinging his mighty head from side to side. Non sequitur: I recall the last Ozzy I saw at New St was a tram, lol.
Ozzy: https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/7555438

- Lexicophilia: I love the marketing slogan for the Wolverhampton Canalside development: "Bostin ay it".

- There's no pleasing some people: there was a baby boy about a year old on the bus and he said, "Mama!", which we were told by his excited mother was his first word. The passengers reacted by applauding and cheering and waving their arms in the air (ltjdc). The little boy stared at us in horror for a minute or two then burst out crying and yelling in protest. He'll probably never speak again after being traumatised by our loving encouragement, lol.

- There's gno place like gnHome: I noticed a corner plot garden in suburban Llandudno with the road sign feet actually inside the boundary wall and the homeowner had taken the opportunity to surround the sign with an army of unusually large but otherwise traditional garden gnomes. Fantastic.

- What goes around comes around: I found a £1 coin on the pavement and later paid a boy's 75p bus fare because his mum claimed she didn't have any money (although she did have four massive market bags of what appeared to be shopping). The bus driver probably wished I hadn't as she then tried to stay on the bus beyond the end of the route. And, yes, she kept the 25p change and neither she nor her son offered me a word of thanks (not that I require any).
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-13 05:51 pm

In which our heroine reads and refuses

- Reading: 81 books to 13 Aug 2025.

DNFs: 5/86. I've had a higher percentage of dnfs than usual this year. Can't decide if my sense of personal mortality and the easy availability of other reading material is causing me to be pickier or whether I'm finally inside a demographic targeted for enough marketing guff to negatively effect my choices. Woe is me - the algorithms fail again &c. An especially surprising dnf was a book about trains and train travel that the author had mysteriously managed to make dull!

Current reading: 81. Perspectives by Laurent Binet, a library reservation with a waiting list, which was recommended by a discerning friend and is a good read so far (approximately 30% in).

Finished reading: 80. The Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, (translated by Michael Hulse), 1995 (1999), a patchwork of fictionalised (?) autobiographical essays and historical fact-tion and I-refuse-to-call-this-a-novel, 3/5. As I previously mentioned, I read this meditation on death and destruction while in similar settings to the framing story of a walk along the East Anglian coastline, and with the addition of extreme and bizarre weather this occasionally became a near-hallucinatory experience. I didn't find it engaging, however, nor as depressing as reading too much poetry by Thomas Hardy. Although I admit I over-identify with the habit of living like a refugee in your own life, as I'm sure many people exiled traumatically from their roots would. This is a better review of Rings of Saturn than I could ever write, lol (and, yes, three stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221843487

- Holiday history, enslavement: there was a debate about whether I'd visit Castell Penrhyn while I was in the area (I'm a NT member so get in free). I'll note here that I have a permanent bee in my bonnet about the way enslavers such as the Pennants are described and especially the following normative wording (not this author, whose book I enjoyed, but the whole normative framing):

"the Pennants [family], received £14,683 17s. 2d. (around 1.3 million today) for the freeing of 764 enslaved people in Jamaica"*

Because what actually happened was that the British people collectively through the British state bought people enslaved legally under British law, and the British people chose to free those enslaved people after changing British law to make owning people as chattel slaves illegal (although that didn't end other forms of "slave" labour, as the continued use of "indentured labour" and the need for a Modern Slavery Act in 2015 demonstrates). Owners of enslaved people in the British Empire could have legally "freed" those people any time but they didn't want to do so. The act of the British state buying and freeing enslaved people is framed as "compensation" for the owners "freeing" slaves, but the owners were forced by law to allow their slaves to nominally go free, and I for one refuse to accept any framing that credits the enslavers and not the people who made them stop (and British taxpayers continued paying for that from 1833 until 2015). This belated, and expensive, partial justice isn't worthy of any praise or pride but we should at least be honest about who did what, and what exactly they did. Reminder: the abolition of chattel slavery only became a popular cause after successful revolts by enslaved people, and the British "sugar strike" that hit enslavers' profits (the boycott was mostly participated in by working and middle class British women), and William Wilberforce et alia wanted to slow down the freeing of enslaved people.

* Note: the ex-slaves received no compensation, obv.
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-12 04:49 pm

In which there is flanage inside Conwy's medieval town walls

Conwy is a town in North Wales, beside the estuary of the River Conwy and currently in the county of Conwy. The medieval town walls were built between 1283-7 to exclude local people of the Kingdom of Gwynedd (aka Cymry / Welsh) from a town of English colonial settlers planted by successful invader Edward I of England.

As the area within the walls is small and the streets are mostly gridded I decided to try a walk using the pattern first left then second right then first left &c. My starting point was the highest gate through the walls, which is conveniently called Upper Gate and provides staircase access up to the wall walk along the battlements (also currently accessible during Castle opening hours from Rose Hill St, and from Conwy Railway Station although the access here isn't obvious).

Cut for your scrolling pleasure )

Spiralsheep's Quick Guide to Conwy

- Quirkiest feature: educational bilingual wall-plaques on Chapel St at the top of York Place.

- Best building: Tudor townhouse Plas Mawr (fabulous - best in show - but 3 to 4 storeys of spiral stairs + a ladder to the viewing tower). Plas Mawr on wikipedia.

- Best views of the estuary: currently from the wall walk of Conwy Castle (steep slopes, spiral stairs, and trip hazards), but the flattish walk along the estuary from the northwest corner of town also has glorious views. Example view on geograph.

- Must do freebie: town walls (ascend to the wall walk if you can - the highest watchtower, Tŵr Gwylio, has one of the best views of the town - or at ground level where the walls are best seen from outside and at the gates).

- Also known for: two of the three bridges, especially Telford's historic suspension bridge. Conwy suspension bridge on wikipedia.
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-11 06:01 pm

In which the British government continue to support genocides

Amnesty International, amongst many other local and international human rights organisations, have yet again warned the British government of Keith Starmer about its disturbing overreach in outlawing peaceful protest and enforcing the arrest and criminal charging of ordinary British subjects as "terrorists" for sitting quietly while holding anti-genocide cardboard signs in public places (such as below statues of Gandhi and Millicent Fawcett). According to my tally over 720+ politically-motivated arrests of peaceful protestors have been committed within the last few weeks. The 521 arrests in London on Saturday 9 August 2025 were the most in a single police action for at least a decade according to the Met. I will be thinking of Jeremy Shippam, 71, and Judit Murray, 71, and Fiona Maclean, 53, on 16 September when they become the first of these political prisoners to be tried for the "terrorism" of peacefully sitting where they could be seen silently expressing anti-genocide sentiments in public.

Amnesty International's statement on their website.

It horrifies me that I live in a nation state in which people peacefully protesting against genocide are targeted for the utter destruction of their lives through misuse of the legal system, although it's unsurprising that abuse of the legal system is Keith Starmer's choice of weapon and England does have recent historical form for destroying people who stand up against genocide by foreign powers (if that genocide is perceived as profitable for UK PLC). /the ghost of Roger Casement and every Brit who campaigned against genocide in the Belgian Congo stares over my shoulder... amongst many others....

The nation state of Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians in Palestine. The UK continues to export arms to Israel for use in this genocide. The UK continues to supply arms used in several ongoing genocides (and the UK taxpayer subsidises this).
spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-08-10 03:42 pm

In which our heroine returns from her lolibobs

1. Lolibobs: There were boats, involving only the usual amount of human error and random mechanical failure. Fortunately, "There were no wrecks and nobody drowneded, ' fact nothing to laugh at at all." There was rarely seen wildlife. There were truly rare plants. There was geology that wasn't entirely featureless and grey. Scientific and historical conservation work was done. A good time was had by all. Or at least a good time was had by me, and nobody else complained. (Ok, I confess I still enjoy a dose of adrenaline, and even impromptu dangerous sports, as much as I did when I could still indulge my inclinations intentionally rather than because a local volunteer bureaucrat miscounted and we ended up having to embark one too many people on one too few boats with a dangerous tide rapidly advancing).

2. Geolibobs: I was on a tour of a limestone quarry when the guide described a patch reef in the rock face and everyone else looked at him blankly so I went over and pointed to the marginally different grey rock in the predominant grey rock, and then everyone except the guide looked at me blankly and I realised I've spent too long with geologists and they've assimilated me, lmao. (If you ever want to see good examples of patch reef geology then I suggest polished examples in museums or urban paving slabs - central Leeds has some especially good cross-sections.)

3. Reading: for some reason beyond the comprehension of hindsight I took The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald to read and had near-hallucinatory experiences reading Sebald's examination of the horrors of death and destruction while in dilapidated seaside resorts; the reconstructed walled garden of a historic house; various ruined fortifications destroyed by warfare, intentional slighting, and time; and deserted beaches with tidelines that are museums of death and decay. Strange and extreme weather compounded the hallucinatory effect.

4. Habitat, week 32: the fresh perspective, after being away, has opened my eyes to a whole nother layer of accumulations to remove from my home. \o/

5. Birb log: twelve Jackdaws in front of me now, no fighting only eating. :-)