men and women are not opposites. men and women are not enemies. men and women are two parts of a broad coalition which fights against a mutual enemy: inkjet printers
We had our usual quiet Christmas Day: stockings, family zoom, salmon-elevenses, roast bird dinner with my brother Jonny, a silly film (Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon). I even managed to drag the children out to the park for an hour or so before dinner, including some table tennis and frisbee.
One of my personal Christmas traditions is watching the Nutcracker, usually in a cinema broadcast, and I just couldn't make that work this winter. So I was really charmed to find a broadcast of the Royal Ballet's production on iPlayer; the advantage of watching it at home is that I can have a quiet chat with my brother alongside without bothering anyone else.
This morning I woke up nice and early and headed out for another of my booked hot yoga sessions, followed by dropping in on my old friend Shaun for a long-overdue catchup. This afternoon has mostly been reading and TV, and the evening will probably continue the same way.
They should add “On Horseback” option to Google Maps. For writers.
“Hevoslinja” (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words ‘skilless in riding and afraid of animals’ at the start.
The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they’ve took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.
Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son’). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.
Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.
For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.
By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it’s several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.
The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would’ve also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they’re trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it’s said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.
also it’s not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!
the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn’t cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:
and that’s not all! here’s a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):
“Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka’s Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways.”
it’s quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)
Oh, thanks for thinking of me! It's an interesting discussion so I wanted to get to the source material -- I don't inherently mistrust phrases like "ADHD Nutrition" the way I would for Autism, but anyone talking about nutrition on Instagram gets a little tiny bit of a side-eye for various reasons. The original study's abstract includes some interesting additional information but it is definitely very medically dense.
The insta does a good job of acknowledging the small sample size, but I can't blame the doctors for that -- they're working with pre-existing data, which is usually smaller but much easier to swing than a full on research grant. What I didn't see -- or missed if it was there -- was something that the abstract also kinda breezes past, that while stimulant medication seems to have caused biological changes in the physical brain, the behavioral scores -- the impulsivity tests -- didn't see meaningful change.
There's plenty of reasons for that, not least being that even the best behavioral scoring system is still based on perception rather than anything physically measurable. It could be that the people taking the inventories didn't perceive themselves as less impulsive, or hadn't had enough time yet to see it. The signs of behavioral alteration can be pretty personal too -- I felt like one of the techniques I was trying was working mainly when I stopped having to constantly have earbuds in when I was in public, both to keep me occupied and drown out the noise of Being In Public.
So it's promising initial research, especially in the face of a HUGE backlash against stimulant medication generally these days. I'll be interested to see where they go with it, and where frankly they'll be allowed to go.
Started my day with att 30 minute HIT session, and then finished the dragon for the right sleeve of [[Keldor copper trim tunic]]. Then sewed it to the Bright plum silk so the sleeve can be wrapped as a present.
Made a really yummy steamed mixed veg with a spicy peanut sauce that I brought along to Pernill's. Pernilla liked it. Keldor contributed Prinskorv (which I didn't eat), and Pernilla provided meatballs, ham, fish, and a couple of store bought creamy salad things containing vinegar in the sauce (none of which I tasted) and bread, butter, potatoes and a salad (all of which I enjoyed)
We enjoyed dinner with Pernilla and Tobias. After dinner Tobias. went to his room after eating and didn't join us for watching the rest of this year's Julkalender, nor for games after. We gave them some hugh quality chocolate, and she gave us som nice braided bands.
Keldor got a gift from work that he enjoyed, a game about Skellefteå. There are cards in various categories, each of which describes something that happend in Skellefteå. These are read aloud to the person whose turn it is,and they have to decide where on their timeline that happened. After they assign it to its place the actual year is revealed. If they got it right the card joins their timeline, and they can decide to end their turn and keep the cards they have already accumulated, or roll again for a new card from a new catagory. If they got it wrong, they loose all cards from their current turn.
Keldor and Pernilla both grew up here, they have known one another since they were little. So they could consult their own memory for all of the things that happened in their life times. I had to guess for everything. So I always stopped after guessing right for the second card.
Keldor let his piles get up to four or five cards before locking them in, so it only took him three turns to win (one needs only 10 cards for victory, but after the first person achieves 10 everyoneelse gets one more turn as a chance to beat that). Pernilla had the bad luck to guess wrong several times early in her turns, so she and I wound up tied for second place, even though I am so new to the region.
Then we played Catan. I have had a small trvel version since I lived in Australia, but Keldor decided that he wants a full sized set, as then it will be possible to add expansion sets.
As usual, I forgot to take photos, but Pernilla shared some, so I put them here, too, not that they are visible on Dreamwidth, yet
Other than waking up just long enough to take my morning vitamins with a single bite of a banana (as they are supposed to be taken with food), we slept in. A lovely lazy morning. During breakfast Keldor set the filter he had taken out of the aquarium yesterday into a pot of water and set it on the stove to boil. When I started cleaning up after breakfast he asked me to lower the temperature, so I did.
When the dishes were clean and put away he took the pot from the stove, swt it in the sink, and, forgetting that no one had ever turned the heat off, thinking that it had been cooling for a while, reached into the pot to grab the filter and wring it out. He manged to get his fingers all the way into the not quite boiling water and started to grip the filter before his nerves got their emergency distress message all the way to the reflex part of the brain to abandon that mission and turn on cold running water to cool them instead.
After he lowered his skin temperature sufficiently i fetched him the burn ointment that a Blacksmith always has available, and he spent the day on the couch, applying more ointment whenever his fingers felt uncomfortable.
There is no visible sign of damage, which is good, but he isn't interested in using that hand for projects today, either.
This is a shame, as we had planned to work in the attic on the insulation project to create an attic bedroom.
So, instead, I took the pieces of my silk bliaut short tunic and spread them out to figure out which pieces go where, and which one still need modifications to solve the problem with cutting it wrong.
Over the course of the day I have even gone back and filled in notes in the still fairly new crafts section of this Obsidian vault, finding posts about some of this year's projects and linking to them on the project note, and pulling in photos, adding properties like start and completion dates, materials, catagories, etc. So now I know that painting the Living room ceiling stars took about a month and a half.
Of course, none of those craft entries will show up on the github web page version of my blog till I am next at the computer to push them there.
My alarm went off this morning (only at ten, but I needed it) to make sure I was up in time to walk Teddy before his humans were away for their Christmas lunch.
I thought I was the first person to make it downatairs this morning but while I was just getting to the bottom of the stairs I was already greeted by angelofthenorth already in her usual comfy chair saying "Merry Christmas! Do you want some bucks fizz?" (Which is basically a pre-made mimosa. Luckily I'd been reminded of this recently by being offered it after the ceremony at the wedding we were at a few weeks ago; I'd been able to ask D then to remind me what it is.)
It's a lovely Christmas morning: chilly but not cold, usually pretty sunny, and dry.
It had been a week or so since Teddy and I had seen each other so we were both very excited to do so again.
On our walk, we saw a young probably-dad-type person heading to the recycling bin in front of his house with an armful of cardboard, the boxes already broken down. We grinned a greeting at each other.
A few houses down, a woman in pajamas and a big scarf was just trying to nip out to her car in front of the house, but since Teddy wants to say hello to everyone (human or dog) and assumes every human wants to pet him, so I couldn't drag him past her before she gave in and ruffled his ears and said "Merry Christmas" to me.
As we were leaving the park, I noticed we'd just been joined by two kids with the kind of lightsabers that make the noise when you hit them against each other, and a little scotty dog that I know is called Biscuit because they were getting told off/called over when they were ignoring the humans to say hello to Teddy.
I got home, opening the door to the lovely smells of angelofthenorth already well into the process of cooking our amazing Christmas dinner.
Popovers for breakfast! There’s nothing like pulling a six pound cast iron pan full of smoking hot oil out of the oven first thing in the morning to kick off your day.
Yesterday (Christmas Eve) I worked a half day from home before finishing for the year. I spoke to a few of my family on the phone. I went skating with some of my uni teammates on the last public skate until Saturday, but sadly failed to persuade any of the others to wear a santa hat along with me. I brought a teammate's kit back to my house so I know I have it to take to meet her in Prague next month (did I mention I'm going to hockey camp near Prague in January with the Women's Blues? same coaches & place as I went to last June). I got stocking supplies for the household.
In the early evening Tony, Charles and I gathered for the ritual watching of Die Hard and followed it with Knives Out. I enjoyed both films very much, still. I filled the stockings for everyone before going to bed, and fell asleep over a library book.
I am grateful for my home, my family, my friendships, and all the good things in my life.
I spent the whole day fixing up the road from last night's 2 inches of rain. Lots of digging out ditches for the first two hours and then three hours of work on the culvert near the main gate. Dad put the 30" (?, it is big) culvert in around 1965. At that time the neighbor took a bulldozer into the creek and cleaned out all of the vegetation. No one would be allowed to do that these days, but back then no one noticed. As time went by willow, blackberry and cottonwood trees grew up, dramatically slowing the flow of water below the culvert. Above the culvert silt slowly began building up. And up. Then the willow and cottonwoods started to fall. They weren't sick, they were just old. That blocked the exit of the culvert where even more silt built up. About eight years ago I realized there was a crisis with the culvert. Water had to first go down to reach the culvert, then up on the other side to exit. Donald and I spent two days fighting our way down into the stream with a chainsaw and clearing out dead wood. It helped, some. Since then I've been down there several times, each time clearing more. Today I mostly cleared willow that had regrown into the creek, once again making it impassable. Last week a huge very dead old cottonwood finally fell on the road right over the culvert. We have been watching that tree just waiting for a windstorm to jiggle it a little. ( Read more... )
Yesterday's trip up Red Barn Creek to work on trail maintenance was lovely. Kinda wet, but lovely. You may remember that I went off with some of the folks from the Grace Hudson Museum ( https://www.gracehudsonmuseum.org/ ) to pick Dogbane, sometimes called Indian Hemp. At the time I didn't post a picture of the plant. Here is a clump of Dogbane growing -in- the creek. There is a small green bit of grass coming up through the clump. This is the right time to harvest these plants, the stems will need to dry before use, but the plant is dormant.
here is a very good analysis of the whole “are kidfics and fluffy coffeeshop aus reflecting the rise of fascism? where has the complex, plotty fic gone?” discourse by my esteemed colleague @tobermoriansass
but me, i want to only ask
can we also remember instances of “complex plotty violent work” that were so, so bad??
i think, for integrity’s sake, we must look back and do this. the good ones endure in our collective memory, but, man, the bad ones. there used to be a specifique tenor of ineptly gritty, falsely worldweary writing that has all but gone extinct (in my fandoms) (for now) (touch wood): the genre of, like, “the grizzled cop walks down the dangerous street, and he thinks grizzled thoughts about the [slur] [slur] looking to get his next fix, and the [slur] [slur] [slur] selling her services with empty eyes”, written by sheltered dorks aiming for violent complexity and missing.
and, sure, it’s fair to ask - where did that go?
i do NOT believe fic overall has gotten less bigoted - how do you even measure or compare that? - but, hm. maybe people today are more prone to writing only within their comfort zones, and thus steer clear of those particular excesses? but then also, the expectation of upholding the characters’ masculinity has dwindled, which i do think is a good thing, more or less.
it’s also possible the canons themselves have changed. maybe it’s the zeitgeist that has brought us fantasies of peaceable gay baristas, and maybe that’s just a neutral fact instead of a positive or negative one.
but also, more than anything, i think it’s specifically the combination of fluff and slash that has become more common! and again, i don’t think that is a bad thing in and of itself.
like, okay, kidfic in het has always been omnipresent, and in fact it was like 100x more gender normative in olden times unless you were very skilled at finding the good stuff. there are slightly more no-kids-ever-thx heroines in fic than there used to be. (abortion in fic is still truly outrageously rare.)
kidfic was also always present in slash, really always, but i think it’s likely that it used to be less common than it is now. like there are some self-evident reasons for it becoming more common! that i think are overall good!
to be clear, i think complex violent works are also great (and i think they still keep getting written!! like they didn’t actually leave us, you just need to be skilled in finding the good stuff, same as you always were). i
t’s completely fine to miss certain genres or certain tones or approaches to characters, it’s fine to resent the perceived same-y-ness in fic written today. i PERSONALLY think everything is more or less as good or as bad as it ever was, but i understand and respect why some see a decline in what they personally enjoy.
… but. it’s just like, look, social pressures have always affected fic, and we reallllly need to not forget the, you know, the cop smarm and the soldier smarm of live action western fandoms, for example. if conservatism is present in fluffy romance, it is presenet in plotty genfic as well.
yeah i have to be honest sitting in tolkien fandom any time anyone starts talking about the lack of plotty fic i am bringing out my monocle and examining them very closely and wondering who exactly they are, because 9 times out of 10 that is, unfortunately, a christian really upset that people are writing boys sucking and fucking instead of having boys own adventures 😬 and this is not particularly unique to tolkien fandom. just, you know. visible.
I recently learned about a kind of embroidery called bobbinwork where you put a really thick thread in the machine bobbin and sew from the back side and it’s so fun! I’ve tried doing a bunch of sample lines and shapes and squiggles, but most importantly I have made a beautiful garlic. I’m doing it mainly with the regular sewing foot and a lot of pivoting, because when I try it with the free motion foot it skips a lot of stitches.
well thats neat as hell :o also, woah, vintage embroidery machine?? sweet
no no not an embroidery machine, it’s an ordinary Singer 15-91! Just a basic domestic machine that does straight stitch forwards and backwards and that’s it. But there’s a lot of embroidery you can do without a special machine! I’ve just come across a very intriguing 1911 book on the subject which I’m excited to read.
And there is a lot of fascinating stuff in the 1997 video that I posted about a while ago. She’s also using a domestic machine without any fancy embroidery settings or attachments (beyond a darning foot and a hoop), but being newer it has zig zag, which has even more possibilities.
I wrote and sent (luckily could retrieve in time!!) an email to them from my erik@ address, rather than the Gmail address I've had since 2004 and use for bank stuff and parent stuff and... that's about it now.
I have never even started to do such a thing before, I don't know what happened here! I'm feeling fine today, so for my brain to be so addled is very weird!
Luckily (??), emails sent from the erik@ account from my phone often bring up an error message that means I have to fiddle around a bit to get them sent, and when that happened this time my blood ran cold and I quickly deleted the email altogether. It never got from "outbox" to "sent" so that should be okay!
But sheesh what a near miss!
It was an email about my birthday present too so very obviously from me, I couldn't say it was just spam or something.
1. Work load at dayjob has been low this week; we got out at noon yesterday, and today I can log off at 12:30 pm. We are then off through January 2 for winter break (yay, academia). I had a couple of small things I was able to resolve this morning, go me!
2. I did not send out Xmas cards this year, but I appreciate every one I received. I hope to be back to it next year.
3. I am thawing out a chuck roast to cook later this week, probably Friday. My tamarind-sauce-flavored vegetable soup from Sunday, which includes silken tofu, grape tomatoes, carrot, potato, and green beans, is very delicious, especially with a couple tablespoons of congee dumped in. Last night, I finished off my bag of post-surgery chicken nuggets and baked sliced golden potatoes at 425 degrees F with olive oil and salt.
4. I have been listening to a ton of Xmas music, so at least I am somewhat in the holiday spirit. I did not have energy to pull out my ornament tree and dress it up, but we have a smaller one downstairs so I moved it from the corner onto the dining room table--the ornaments were still on it from last year! We have some cards propped around the base, and I have more on the little desk in the guest room. I didn't use my usual space in the back room because it would block my DVD screen, which I need for the Blake's 7 watchalong and possibly even some Shakespeare.
5. I have tentative plans for Xmas afternoon with local friends. I want to get started on my fancy wooden turtle puzzle (which I have had for several years), and also to do some mending of clothing. I especially want to try needle-felting a hole in a very old black cashmere cardigan (commercially knitted); I was wearing it when I broke my elbow years ago, so couldn't wash it for weeks, and it got a moth hole under one arm before I was healed up. I am not sure if the hole is too big for felting. We shall see. I have washed it after its long storage!
Turns out one of my uni hockey friends has a long-standing history channel on YouTube, and of course he made a video about ice hockey history. I think I'd have liked it even if I didn't know the creator, enjoy:
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