ludy

Yesterday I forgot to do the “traditional” autocomplete valentine poem so you can have it for Lupercalia instead…

Roses are my new obsession,
Violets are the best flowers in this universe.
Sugar is a beautiful color(sic) in this photo of my heart,
And so much of this is just pure love from you guys in the comments.
(iPad - which is apparently a big hippo)

Roses are still very pleased with her husband.
Violets are the fandom I think you should get.
Sugar is dissolved,
And so it helped you get your own back.
(Kindle Fire - obviously living for teh drama)


Roses are good for the kids,
Violets are the best jokes on the wall.
Sugar is a bit of a serif but it’s impossible to get the train back from London
And so you don’t need it for the rest of the year.
(Phone - maybe a bit judgmental)



It’s interesting that the iPad and particularly the phone have learned some ludy-speak (and the phone is more aware of subjects I’m likely to be texting about) while the Kindle seems a bit more generic

Managed to make a successful pressure cooker cake (blueberry and lemon) that this time didn’t accidentally taste entirely of too much almond extract.

It’s basically just like cake - it’s prolly a little heavier textured than a baked one but I’m not sure if you’d really notice that of you weren’t looking for differences. And obviously it’s not browned…

Things that seem to be helpful are covering the tin with baking parchment secured with a big silicone “rubber band” before steaming and once you open the cooker letting it cool completely on a wire rack to let the steam out. A thing that’s not helpful are not having the tin completely level on the trivet and ending up with a slightly wonky cake!

There’s also a more general issue of pressure cooking intensifying some flavours and flattening out others which I’ve noticed with savoury cooking too. For this cake that means it turned out more lemony than I expected from the amount of zest in the recipe. I guess it’s just going to need trail and error (and possibly actually remembering to record the results somewhere) before I develop a sense of how different ingredients/tastes respond to “pressure baking”

Today I attempted to make (bake? I’m not sure if that’s the right verb) a cake in the pressure cooker. I’m intrigued by the concept but unsure what to expect the results to be like. How much will the texture be different to oven baking? Will it be more like a steamed sponge pudding? Will I like it?

I’m still really not sure because the cake failed for non-pressure-cooker reasons. I used a new-to-me-brand of almond extract and it is obviously considerably stronger than the brand the recipe-book writer uses. A teaspoon was way too much and I now have pretty much the cake-shaped version of those room scenting wax-chips rather than something you’d want to eat…

(It was at least a sweet almond extract rather than anything too cyanide-y)

This is a screened comment postbox post for you to get in touch with me while I don’t have my mobile.

Also Happy St Nicholas Day everyone - enjoy celebrating everyone’s favourite heretic-slapping, accidentally canibalistic, patron saint of Sex Workers

It’s a very grey, bleak day out there. Let’s have a sparkly song:

Have got my Open Reach appointment to have my phone (land)line switched over to Digital Voice this week.

Asking people who have already been switched - do the engineers typically come into your home or is it like regular phone repair where it mostly happens outside but you need to be around just in case? And if they do come in do they just go to your router or do they need access to every phone socket?

Oooo there’s a bunch of the 1980’s Joan Hickson Miss Marple’s on iPlayer - (re)watching them is happy-making (even though it’s sometimes giving me, intense but mundane, little flashbulb-type memories of watching them the first time round as a child/teen)

(They are SO much better than the 2000’s Geraldine McEwan/Julia McKenzie adaptations (nothing against those awesome actors but the adaptations are just not-great))

In the BeforeTimes people would frequent make a screened comment post after BiCon for people to tell them anything or ask questions (and to have the awkward conversations to match people to usernames - which is sadly less of an issue these days unless we can collectively coax a whole load of new people over here).

You do not have to have been at BiCon to play.

So if there is anything that you would like to tell me or ask me or whatever here is a space for it. Comments are screened and will stay screened (DW works more sensibly than LJ did so the journal-owner can reply to screened comments with only them and the commenter being able to see the exchange)
You can be anonymous if you really want but then you’ll never see your comment again (because it’ll be screened) and the only ways I’ll be able to reply that you can see are if I unscreen my reply here or address it in another post…

In a conversation about internet-ness this morning (specifically the sometimes random amounts of time between A sending an email and B receiving it) I used the phrase “like a wheel within a wheel”. And consequently have had this song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

(There are umpty different versions but I’m particularly fond on this one by the glorious Alison Moyet)

OK, I know I’m prolly having a bit of an Autism about this…

For Reasons I quite often check out books for Smalls (and Mediums and now actual young Grown Ups who have largely grown up in a different cultural and linguistic environment) about Gender stuff and Sexuality.

I’ve just read one that claims that The most commonly used pronouns are she/her/hers and he/him/his !
Obviously the actual most commonly used pronouns are I/me/mine, we/our/ours and you/yours.
(I’m now curious which of those gets used most).
He and she are just the most popular third-person singular pronouns. And even among third person pronouns if you add all the plural they/them/theirs to the singular ones then they must be more popular than the gender-specfic options.

There appear to be a load of grammatical challenged people in the world who think that pronoun means a-word-that-clues-others-into-your-gender rather than a-word-used-so-as-to-not-have-to-keep-repeating-people’s-names