igenlode | Entries tagged with venting

"It took an average of three minutes and 38 seconds to drive one kilometre (0.6 miles) in the centre of London last year... This was partly blamed on widespread 20mph speed limits" -- *what*?

20mph is 32km/h (using the rule-of-thumb conversion ratio of 5:8). So if you were travelling at 32 kilometres per hour it would take (60/32)=1.875 minutes to cover one kilometre: 1 minute 52 seconds. Clearly the majority of the time spent driving in central London is already spent travelling at speeds far *lower* than 20mph; probably spent stationary in traffic jams consisting of other cars. So just how fast are they expecting drivers to sprint between traffic jams in order that increasing the maximum speed limit will reduce journey times?

I tried Jack Monroe's Peach and White Chocolate Traybake (as I happened to have a tin of peaches sitting in the cupboard), but it was a failure -- and while I know that prices have shifted around quite a bit in the last ten years, and chocolate in particular has gone up a lot, I really can't see how a recipe specifying three eggs and *eight ounces* of butter (not even margarine; she specifically says butter) can ever have been considered a 'budget recipe', let alone priced at 28p per portion if it only makes eight portions.( Read more... )

"The Four of Us" has now shot up to 118 hits and 19 kudos on AO3, which is more in six days then any of the other five fics I posted in that fandom have achieved in up to nine months.
Chapter 3 of "Little Gentlemen" has received three page views... which is better than the nothing it got on the first day of upload, but probably about as many as it is likely to get in total!

Having decided to rename Auguste-Philippe-Gérard du Chaligret de Fouilgieux to Henri-Auguste-Gérard in order to avoid an overlap with the familiar Raoul and Philippe of my "Phantom" stories( A Mad Hatter's name-party )

( Class consciousness )

Viewing stats: Chapter 1 received a grand total of ~~six views~~ [edit: now eight!] in its first few days before getting stuck. ( invidious comparisons :-( )

Chapter 2 — A Fresh Start

Warm, well-fed and comfortable, Venya slept until long past daybreak, and woke to find himself sharing a bed with a small and wriggling body that was kicking him in its sleep. Venya kicked back, instinctively, with one of Big Dima’s favourite oaths, and sat up with a jolt in the realization that he was no longer in Dima’s cellar. Sun was streaming in through open shutters, boys’ voices echoed down the corridor outside the room and dogs were barking somewhere beyond the window, and it seemed his companion of the night was a curly-headed child some three or four years younger than himself, into whose bed he had evidently been put the evening before.

The two of them pummelled one another wordlessly for a moment, then broke off by unspoken common agreement, with honour satisfied on both sides. The little boy bestowed a beaming smile upon Venya, along with a hopeful enquiry in a language he could not understand at all. He did his best, haltingly, to explain.

( Read more... )

YouTube thinks that because I watch Russian-language documentaries about Soviet-era films I might be interested in eavesdropping on a right-wing ex-Army channel about how the real enemy is not the poor innocent Russians in the Ukraine, but the British government and the 'Islamic invasion' against whom super-surveillance and protective barriers are required on British streets. ( And I, of course, like all of the above, consider myself to be the reasonable, rational, self-evidently 'normal' one... )

My electronic scales (used for very fine measurements -- I use an ordinary balance and set of weights for cooking!) were mysteriously not working *again*, what feels like only a few months after I had to replace the battery last time, and despite barely having been used in the interim. They don't have an off-switch, so cannot have been accidentally left on long-term; they always time out after five minutes or so. I am not impressed by the longevity of the "+70% Extra Life" Duracell batteries ("Baby Safe With Repulsive Taste") that I was sold.

( Special screwdriver required )

I was also displeased to discover that the latch on my bathroom door has malfunctioned for a third time, making it impossible to keep the door shut -- just in time for the chilly season :-(
( Read more... )

Another Big Name Content Creator (naming no names) has published a novel tying in to his channel content, and again, while I enjoy the source material, going by the preview the actual writing just isn't that good. ( Read more... )

And yet these books are selling just based on the author's existing following; it just goes to prove that publicity and name recognition is everything. If people know you and like you then they will buy your book, and probably like it.

(On the other hand the non-knitting lady came back, and actually appeared to have improved since last week; I had her knitting garter stitch on her own by the end of lunch...)

I spent an incredibly frustrating hour at lunchtime trying to teach a woman how to knit -- I have never known anyone so utterly fail to *understand* the process before. ( She just could not *see* the basic principle of how it was supposed to work )

Still struggling to contact a human being via a morass of menus. I've already had to wait an hour for an automated check to confirm that there is nothing technically wrong with my Internet connection before being able to pass this stage.
"You are caller number... forrdy-seven in the queue."

The wind has swung round from its prevailing southwesterly direction (about 80-90% of the time) to blow pretty much dead east. Which may mean a welcome change in the weather, although the forecast is for more stiflingly hot days, but unfortunately means that there are now low-flying aircraft making their final landing approach every two to three minutes, which is sufficient to render spoken Russian at least completely unintelligible -- I simply can't fill in the 'missing bits' the way that I automatically do with English. And I can't very well shut the windows, because it's boiling hot indoors and I'm desperately trying to flush the day's accumulated heat out now that the sun has at last gone down outside.

It gives you an insight into the level of educational disruption proverbially experienced by pupils of schools under a regular flightpath :-(

This afternoon on the radio I heard one of the more breathtaking stupid pieces of scientific claptrap that I've come across, from a museum curator none the less, who was (by his voice) a young man bemoaning the arrant sexism of the scientists who defined the 'type specimen' for the majority of birds as being represented by the male of the species. Apparently it had not occurred to him -- as it immediately occurred to the (female non-scientist) presenter -- that if you tried to represent the appearance of bird species using female rather than male specimens then you would simply end up with a vast number of bespeckled 'little brown jobs'; not at all helpful in terms of distinguishing features!

Sometimes ideology can really get in the way...

I went to my GP because I was told that I really ought to get a mysterious pain in my left hand checked out which has been troubling me since before Christmas -- I have been putting it off because I know that you have to jump through a vast number of hoops to see a doctor nowadays, and I always try to avoid doing so for anything that might go away of its own accord. I went to the GP surgery in person to try to book an appointment in the hopes of being able to simplify the process.

( telephone tennis ) Well, I feel vindicated; it wasn't worth the effort (and when the telephone assessment eventually comes I shall probably be given a brush-off -- I can't even inflict pain on myself by deliberately prodding and poking at the area at the moment, which makes remote diagnosis pretty much impossible).

I might as well have sat at home with my intermittent stabs of Something Wrong and let the doctors get on with the patients who actually do need urgent help, as opposed to wasting everybody's time, including my own...

I just upset a large tin of grapefruit into my cutlery drawer whie trying to spoon out the juice.
Oh well, I daresay it needed cleaning out anyway, but I don't actually have enough room in my draining rack for *all* those knives, forks and spoons at once...

Fortunately it was tinned in apple juice rather than in syrup!

Current Music: Sweet Genevieve

I think
a few words
however deep
however heartfelt
do not transmute
by some newline alchemy
into poetry
merely by layout.

(That may be superficially 'deeper' than the sort of tumty-tum doggerel I can also turn out with slightly more difficulty, but it is so trivially easy that I don't believe it counts.)

Splitting your sentence in lines down the page
And calling it poetry fills me with rage;
I admit the existence of blank verse and prose,
But free verse is more tricky than either of those.

Current Mood: annoyed

I bought a date-expiring 6-pint container of milk from the supermarket (where I had gone to buy a fresh bag of sugar) because it had been reduced to 54p, and I thought I could use it to make various recipes. It wasn't until the next day, when I was cleaning out my receipts, that I discovered I had in fact been charged full price for the milk; I hadn't noticed because I was buying two butters and a giant bag of sugar, and wasn't surprised when the overall bill was nearly ten pounds :-(

So I was a bit cheesed-off that I'd ended up buying an expensive item that was going to be a real challenge to use up before it became completely inedible -- the moral being that you shouldn't buy things that you wouldn't normally consider useful just because they look like bargains! The irony being that one reason why I didn't check my till receipt immediately before leaving was that the 6-pint bottle was so heavy that along with the sugar I was struggling to carry it...( Read more... )

We are being deluged in local election literature here, especially by the Liberal Democrats, who have evidently decided to make a big push in this area. And they are driving me up the wall by constantly and presumably consciously repeating the same outright lie and associated graph showing voting figures 'at the last election' -- "together we can stop the Tories from winning here".

( Read more... )The impression I get is that, whatever their national political stance, the local party consists of cynical, opportunistic liars who will do anything to get into power... and as that is the view that the majority of the general public currently holds about all politicians, it is more than a little unfortunate to find them actively living up to it :-(

Why does everyone assume I 'go for bike rides' as some kind of leisure pursuit? I almost *never* set off for no purpose on my bicycle (save for a brief period at the start of lockdown, admittedly, when I had no manuscript in hand and was attempting to exercise myself in as high-intensity a fashion as possible...), and "wasn't it a nice weekend, where did you go" always has the same answer -- I went along the same heavily-trafficked roads as usual to buy urgently-needed supplies and it wasn't much fun.

And when my bike isn't working, that isn't a minor inconvenience to my hobby -- it means I can't get anywhere. Including to bike repair shops located more than two or three miles away, because I have to be able to walk back.

Current Mood: distressed

Thinking about the phenomenon of Young Adult books, plus the angsty I-want-to-see-my-social-problems-represented fiction I've seen so much of among amateur writers of that generation recently... I can't help wondering, when did this need start?

Because when I was their age, the *last* thing I wanted was to see squirmy adolescent behaviour in the books I was reading. I had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in identifying whole-heartedly with the heroes of my favourite adventures, none of whom had much in common with me -- and 'children's authors' like Rosemary Sutcliff had no qualms about depicting protagonists who were functioning adults. ( Read more... )

I was annoyed (and discommoded) to discover that my entire stack of spare teatowels turned out to have what I assume to be mould stains on them where they had been stacked against the external wall. I put them through a two-hour boil wash with a scoop of expensive stain remover (the former quite possibly negating the latter, on second thoughts), on the grounds that they would at least end up sterilised even if still stained, and it does seem to have more or less shifted the marks on almost all of them. I suppose I shall have to find somewhere else to keep the clean but unused ones, now that I no longer have a suitable drawer for storage :-(

I'm rather assuming that the remaining tea-towels, which have been sitting in the ironing pile against an internal wall for about six months, are not similarly afflicted... at any rate I seriously need to do some ironing for further sterilisation purposes. (I have already descended to simply using the crumpled but clean handkerchiefs straight out of the edges of the pile, having run out of ironed ones despite the dozens in my possession.)

Current Mood: annoyed

It's so irritating when people promote urban myths ("Did you know that...") without the slightest attempt to check dates, probability or scientific fact.

"Did you know that Jane Eyre is fanfic of Jane Austen's Emma?" (I traced this one back to a fan conspiracy-theory about similar names published circa 2007, but I've seen it repeated several times recently as proof of academic respectability.)

"Did you know that the only reason vampires have no reflection is that mirrors used to be backed with silver?" (Both mirrors and vampires pre-date the silvered-glass process; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mirrors were backed with tin/mercury.)

I *know*, intellectually speaking, that most people will repeat as gospel truth whatever they read on the Internet, and that the average comprehension age of the great British public is about nine years old. But it's scary to see it in action :-(

Current Mood: annoyed

I've spent the afternoon transcribing one of my letters home from university. All afternoon -- it was seven thousand words long, plus sketches interpolated in the text.

I mention casually on about page seven that writing fiction seems to take on average an hour per A4 page; apparently at that age I was also producing stories at the rate of 500 words/hour. I wonder at what point I lost the ability to write with that complete unthinking facility? The young don't even know they are born :-(

Current Mood: discontent

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Igenlode Wordsmith

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Igenlode Wordsmith

Entries tagged with venting

Speed limit arithmetic

Peach and white chocolate failure

Little Gentlemen (Ch2)

Chapter 2 — A Fresh Start

Political polarisation

Things broken

Publishing

No knitting

Aarrgghh

The wind is in the east

Sexual equality in birds

GP appointment, modern-style

A mess

A rebuttal

A costly bargain

Lies, Liberal Democrats, and statistics

Cycling isn't for amusement

Young Adult writing

Mouldy

Unfounded myth

Verbose