Oooh!

It helps SO MUCH. Those countries have really got the right idea in my opinion.

I bought a bunch of Cute Little Bowls specifically so I can segregate salads off into their own crockery and never again have to deal with ESCAPEE SALAD DRESSING doing distressing touchy things to any non-salad foods.

I have extra stupid food issues. I’m great at salad but god forbid a steak and chips and side salad on the same plate touch each other at all ever. I think my brain files salad as One Food but if anything is ever Multiple One Foods oh boy now there’s problems.

It makes no sense.

She’s a beautiful pretty princess and she knows it.

I keep not getting round to reading those and I have increasingly been getting the impression I really ought to bump them higher on the TBR pile.

Rewriting to include a character that Could Have Been There Damn It is always super fun, too.

I’ve always liked before/after photos for this sort of thing. Makes it much easier to tell yourself You Did A Thing in challenging make-it-tidier circumstances if you can play spot the difference afterwards instead of just seeing what still could be better.

It looks quite a bit better, although tbh I felt that you were already doing a pretty remarkable job of keeping it organised considering the many challenges of the particular nature of the things you need to store and be accessible.

Also it provides a plot framework (even if you end up changing x, y and z) so it’s a bit like training wheels for the imagination.

The most recent addition to “idle moment dream project speculations” is a reworking and possibly fusion of The Fatal Dowry & The Fair Penitent. Highly recommend picking Random Classic and working through how you’d, idk, turn it into near future cyberpunk or something. Extremely fun.

A Casablanca remake is one of my idle moments dream project speculations cos it’s near-perfect with like three problems (for instance I feel they could have hired an actor to play Laszlo instead of just propping up a block of wood). Obvs a modern version would never have The Resonance but still fun.

One of my parents went to a private school with an entrance exam and the other one went to a secondary modern after failing the 11+ (largely due to shifting schools once a year in primary and also possibly undiagnosed neurodivergence) so yeah there’s a reason I ended up home educated.

A Casablanca remake is one of my idle moments dream project speculations cos it’s near-perfect with like three problems (for instance I feel they could have hired an actor to play Laszlo instead of just propping up a block of wood). Obvs a modern version would never have The Resonance but still fun.

Yeah, that and the disproportionate-relative-to-height long limbs/fingers was a bit unexpected as a oh-that’s-why.

A photo of me has been hung in the National Portrait Gallery.

I assume there are some people for whom their mental wellbeing works precisely the opposite, which is a good thing too since humanity cannot survive on city dwellers alone.

The whole lockdown thing was a little surreal for me because I started my housebound era a couple of years before that, and to go from “haha must be so nice to sit around all day” to “we are all trapped and GOING INSANE” was quite some whiplash.

Am Londoner born&bred so quite agree Cities Best.

I have lived in a small enough town that the options for fast food are, well, I guess the chippie might count. Not big enough for McDonald’s or Burger King or Pizza Hut etc etc. So I guess there’s also that: Fast food isn’t always an option at all.

… only in an extremely limited and literal sense, +1 caveat that the way we measure calorie content is hilarious. The exciting relative quantities and types of nutrients that you get with those calories & processing thereof is entirely different, and I badly hope they don’t think they’re the same.

I know a couple of people who violently hate cooking, and while I love cooking I can’t always do it, but I have yet to be in a situation where the only and cheapest option was fast food.

(I should admit at this point that I also don’t like most fast food, but even if I did, alternatives exist.)

I have personally missed in-jokes that were made by close friends, for groups I was in, that I had previously made myself. I’ve also missed jokes that required no insider knowledge whatsoever but were obvious jokes. Sometimes a brain just drops the ball. There’s no great deep meaning to it.

Oh god that fucking thing? Lot of people into that show really need a HP style chat about how it wasn’t actually as good as they thought it was when they were 14, and certainly not worth being extremely precious about it. In either direction. Even aside from Whedon’s everything.

And Vampire Diaries.

People always seem to forget that the activist bits of most of the big types of Christianity have a whole lot more to do with “love thy neighbour and feed the poor” than “take rights from women and queers”.

Oh! They’re excellent for things like adding depth to a meat sauce, like bolognese, or to meatballs, and of course you can make/find chicken liver pâté. That’s if you don’t mind depriving the cat, of course.

I wouldn’t consider any of them particularly friendly for beginner *cooks* except maybe liver, and as you say the most famous recipe there has bacon in it and liver flavour is maybe a jump for a starter. And chicken livers, which are easier to use, are more of a complement protein than a main.

Tripe is considered hardcoreish in the UK, but mainly for smell reasons. Liver and kidneys are both fairly normal still, and you do see sweetbreads, tongue and a type of offal meatball I prob can’t name without getting auto-modded for slurs (it isn’t one, but it’s spelt the same) fairly often.

A porcelain figurine of a very pretty little rural red barn, flanked by flowering trees, with a man dressed in a blue coat standing at the open door and gesturing in welcome to a little woman in green shawl, white floral dress and straw hat standing to the left of the barn. In the foreground is a black and white pig on the right and two chickens on the left standing on a field of grass and flowers. There is a written label saying The Red Barn and the integrated stand is dark brown with four clawed feet and little flower garlands around the base.

Red Barn Murder of 1827! There’s a whole wide of Staffordshire commemorative murder pottery (see link for some others) but this is particularly… cutesy. Bucolic. Etc. So it tends to particularly stick in the mind.

www.orderofthegooddeath.com/article/vict...

Red Barn Murder of 1827!

A British murder had charmingly bucolic commemorative pottery merch. Humans like their true crime regardless of century!