the color of storms, shadows, and rain

um. It is remotely possible that some of you may remember that I am pretty sure I once voiced (well. in text) a question about whether a type of val dal that is not a lima is in fact the dry bean of Dolichos lablab Lablab purpureus, known fresh or ornamentally as hyacinth bean.

well, a few days ago while looking up what varieties of refried bean Goya (much as I disagree with them about certain powerful people...) makes, I happened to click over onto their varieties of ordinary canned beans, and lo and behold, what happened to catch my eye but something called "Green Rock Beans"? aka Feijão Pedra... which I thought was also the phrasing on a package of dried beans in the Portuguese section (ish. technically it may have been the Spain section but I could tell it was labeled in Portuguese) that I noted resembled the val dal in question.

What do these look like? Well, behold a blog post that informed me that Cape Verde, in Africa, has a feijoada, which is made with rock beans(!!!!!) You can see pictures of the dry beans being soaked there if you scroll down a bit.

Inspired by this, albeit obliquely, I tracked down the Portuguese Wikipedia page on the Lablab botanical genus and, YES, it says there that they are known as feijão pedra!

...not to mention that the English language article has I think improved from when I posed that question, and its note that hyacinth bean is known as val papdi in Maharashtra is probably suggestive in itself. (this is directly beside the article's mention of the name "surti papdi" in Gujarat, and I believe that is a name I've seen on frozen pods at the Indian grocery)

For the first time, I tried bleaching part of my hair--the end of my ponytail, which I habitually keep doubled in a sort of quasi-bun--with the intent of putting unnatural color in (intending to attempt bright yellow, but...). It's kind of a weird feeling to look at the tail of my hair if I put it over my shoulder and see that it's lighter than it's been all my life. I didn't achieve a super light result, and in some lighting I have thought there's a bit of gingery orange albeit not very dark to it (but then I think in sun sometimes my brown hair has coppery undertones), so I'm not sure how the intended yellow, or a different prospective color, some turquoise I happened to get on clearance, will turn out...

but honestly I think the results could still be decent? and they're semi-permanent colors so will in theory eventually wash out. (manic panic vampire red on my unbleached hair persisted for MONTHS despite no special washing care, but it was a very subtle thin streak so wasn't a big nuisance)

it looks rather odd when my hair is down because turns out that when [I don't want to talk about how long ago] I last er, hacked off some of my hair from a tangled mess, it wasn't even round the bottom, which I knew but failed to really consider here...

I am half-contemplating whether I should consider recreating something akin to a historical queue bag for containment of dye during sleeping...

Why does the pretty basic formatting of the one relevant duck duck go result from the NPS site for Morristown National Historical Park induce ~nostalgia for some of my earliest roamings online, circa 2002 (I turned 8 that year), when I spent most of my computer time playing kids' games and a lesser fraction dabbling in ~historical searches?

The plan is to get a haircut whenever I tire of having colored ends--possibly as drastic as down to a Fourth Doctor or hobbit-y cut, which I will probably let grow out again, as I have had it cut so rarely I doubt I would have the patience to get frequent cuts to maintain it... but then the shortest it's been (12 years back) was still more or less early Sarah Jane Smith length so I don't actually have experience with that short of hair...

(...my maternal grandma, all my life, had quite short hair, and my mom and her sisters as long as I've been alive have also had relatively short hair. I think even my paternal grandmother had short hair when I knew her at the end of her life, although I have little idea of my paternal aunts' hairstyles; my uncles (and grandfathers) are not of the disposition to have particularly long hair. Thus I have been the outlier in the family for having hair well past my shoulders most of the time. But: I don't bother about cutting it with any frequency, and while tangle-prone, it's very easy to pull back and get out of the way!)

I intend, after that cut, to finally fulfill my aspirations, first conceived of in high school (albeit then intended for college once I would no longer be living with my dad...), of dyeing a blue streak in my hair...

by circumlocutional means, have slowly gotten to tonight's brainweasels' point:

by evidence/metric of who makes an active effort to interact with me¹, I am less lovable than Darth Vader (*as seen in the plethora of "LukeVader" fics)

by the same evidence, I'm less lovable than how I write Palpatine²...

...

and a lot of it is surely because I have isolation instincts fueled by an abusive parent who was acting based on paranoia³

I don't even mean romantic love. i mean just. friendly

¹: i.e. only my... parents. sort of. I have gone basically no contact with my dad, however, and I ...live with my mom, so...
²: I believe my old therapist once suggested that possibly my great redemption attempts toward villains I identify with was an exercise in trying to... demonstrate that I deserve? love? I don't think he was entirely wrong about this.
³: and underdeveloped social skills due to ...isolation, social anxiety related to an unpredictable and delusional abuser, etc...^4
4: and people are busy with their own lives and I'm not a particularly important person to anyone so...

eurgh I can't tell how much not feeling good is ...physical and how much is depression creeping on (nor how much of that is ...seasonal? well, how much is attributable to day length in particular, mostly. There are definitely bad memories for me about this season.)

Mind, last week I was in my almost-inverted schedule state, but that usually results in somewhat insufficient sleep even when I am not grasping at the straw of "just staying up through it" to try to readjust it, so I may also be experiencing accumulated tiredness. :/

Went for a walk ~yesterday (well. Sunday. it's technically Tuesday as I write this but I'm still in Monday's wakefulness), which was nice, but a) I think I may have gotten slightly too much sun to my face or something, as there was very little shade, and... I scratched some of it and now it... kind of hurts, and b) [I've been struggling to get up the courage to go in for a significant dental issue which in the meantime has the side effect that] I've been having trouble eating and haven't been walking a lot which combination I think caused the otherwise moderate walk to deplete my energy and that also made me feel blah.

other minor slightly gross issue

And I think I have a small boil, again, near where a bra band would normally sit... which isn't quite where it's been the couple times before when this has happened, but pretty close, and is also slightly painful :P

Tonight we made tomato-based beef-vegetable soup again and it tasted pretty good... I have been very grateful for soup in recent times due to the teeth issue.

I've watched a few somewhat older movies I had never seen in the past few weeks (Mean Girls, Labyrinth), although they are... not new favorites. I may have gotten distracted from the latter by the thought that a certain terf may have used a line (someone messing up Hoggle's name) to name a major thing...

( project details )

And I don't think I've really mentioned here but I'm taking a few online classes via the local community college and they're ...sort of going well (one has finished thanks to being an eight week session but I haven't managed to get signed up for the following class as I had meant to...), although I have my annoyances (one instructor hasn't posted any grades for over a month 😐) and I am running up against the gauntlet of mid-semester bureaucracy, due to things I need to do (including that following class) that are not going as smoothly as I would've liked. 🙃

tbqh the prospect of trying to get back and finish my bachelor's degree at the four year university has felt scary the past few days

*GNU Terry Pratchett*

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I've ended up thinking tonight, on the occasion of missing an online bardic circle due to sleep issues (having zonked out earlier, my ability to sleep on recent nights troubled by anxiety, and still hoping to go back to sleep in a bit) but half wanting to sing "All the Little Angels" in company, unfortunately, about how the way we memorialize The Glorious 25th is largely directly borrowed from the book and probably seems esoteric and meaningless to those unacquainted with it despite, I think, being quite meaningful to the ones memorializing it.

(It's also another Star Wars day and Towel Day re Douglas Adams, and idk, much as I have, after a fashion, loved Star Wars, it feels right now all too easy for a celebration of it to linger on superficial matters that are ...not, to, me, as meaningful and broadly applicable as the 25th of May.

...which is probably unfair, and another matter on my mind recently has been (regarding music), my propensity to a juxtaposition of serious and earnest music and well... absurdity.

sometimes you do get both.

and I do think Luke being willing to ~redeem his father is a poignant message but I think it's embedded in a very noisy whole signal, where it's easy to get caught up in the question of the significance of being family to this point, let alone the possibility for wandering off into the visually compelling fascist regime weeds ...or, once you include the PT, an on ramp to e.g. stanning a religious order of police... (I don't think the mythological scale of Star Wars renders the nuances of "Are You Tearing People As Things (=doing evil)?" with anything like the force of this era of Pratchett's writing))

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and, while the emotionally devastating effects are largely a result of my own poor practices at the time, this day this year marks the tenth anniversary of the time I lost several thousand words of fanfic, some of it deeply personally important and something like the baring of part of my soul through a ~philosophical meditation (but via an edgy but earnest teenager) to Windows bluescreening on me*, so that's A Feeling...

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...erm, anyway, I bring up the symbols because I think Star Wars is so broadly popular and celebrated (not so much memorialized, really) with obvious and well known symbols that most people are apt to get it, while the Glorious 25th is, say, 90% Night Watch, with a 9% side of the opaque clacks system code from Going Postal, by which we mean to say that a man is not truly dead, so long as his name is still spoken...

*...due to neglecting to save in a writing setup lacking an autosave

On a completely different note, I recently had a dream (probably yesterday but maybe as long ago as Saturday morning) involving these areas (in something vaguely like a mall and vaguely like an all ages interactive museum) where you could alter things like gravity and then physically interact under those conditions within a space. The *physics* one required supervision, but I think Matt Parker (of Stand Up Maths) was ~staffing the "math" one, which was safer for some reason?? I don't really remember what it did as versus the physics one (hopefully not Bloody Stupid Johnson stunts)

(I think the concept may have been inspired by specifically some stuff in the Star Trek Voyager: String Theory trilogy of novels (about which I honestly have mixed feelings) but they also could owe something to "creative physics" in a TOS novel (might possibly be The Wounded Sky but idk) and bear a slight but non-sinister resemblance to some of the concepts of the hexarchate)

I belatedly watched Oppenbarbie earlier this year and initially found the Barbie film disappointing, which I partly blamed the tonal shift between the films. But I viewed it again Friday due to deciding to write a fic idea I had (I promptly had another which is the one that is actually up) and I still have some issues...

( Read more... )

(oh, by the way, I enjoyed Oppenheimer—although it was slightly different than I expected—and don't have major complaints. The last line particularly was chilling and perfect.)

via ursula; list of foods originally provided by brainwane

• oatmeal: I have mixed feelings about it. I grew up eating the packet kind (of which bananas and cream is probably my only unacceptable major flavor) on a semi-regular basis and based on something in some childhood book I tried eating plain oatmeal with sugar and cream, which was only sort of good--the texture is tricky for me if it doesn't taste "right". Unfortunately my willingness to eat packet oatmeal has now become somewhat inconsistent, particularly if I'm trying to make it with hot water instead of in a microwave. Steel cut oats and oat groats are sort of more tolerable on a textural basis, but I'm not always in the mood for such a chewy breakfast. Currently I will have quick oats now and then with mandatory peanut butter and either banana or cocoa powder and sugar (or all three)--the peanut butter much improves the texture for me. I've also done a somewhat pared down version of Edward Lee's chile oatmeal, via the Liana Krisoff book Whole Grains for a New Generation, which involves almond butter that similarly improves the texture. (I do love oats in cookies (even if I'm not always in the mood for raisins) and bread though!)    
• miso (soup or otherwise): I didn't grow up eating miso, and I've still only had miso soup proper a handful of times, but I am generally favorable towards the flavor. I've committed and enjoyed a couple of miso sauces from Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu, and I am pretty sure that I enjoyed the results from a somewhat eclectic suggestion in Bean by Bean (Crescent Dragonwagon) to flavor the vegetarian version of a fairly plain white bean soup ala the US Senate restaurant with mostly onion, ancho chile, and a finishing spoonful of miso... (I forget if I also added carrots, garlic, or possibly celery as well as those things.)
• licorice (black or red): I used to like strawberry twizzlers, but I don't eat candy as much any more. I have had a couple pieces of a Dutch black licorice that I understood to be salted (admittedly I don't think it was dubbelzoute) and didn't find it as horrible as many Americans say, and I went through a phase of chewing Blackjack gum now and then, but I'm not generally a black licorice enjoyer per se. I kinda like fennel; I think it's the glycyrrhizin in particular that I tend to dislike. (I LOVE dill though and I don't understand why I've seen it described as anise-y)  
• hollandaise sauce: ...technically I'm not sure. I've had it maybe twice, and if I remember correctly I was very unimpressed. Other than melted butter(/garlic butter!) itself, I'm pretty picky when it comes to rich sauces. And Hollandaise is supposed to have lemon in it, but that seemed like a setup for disappointment as I don't believe it tasted like lemon... I have thought sometimes about trying eggs benedict, but I fear it would just result in disappointment. (Eggs are iffy for me, particularly when they are cooked without mixing the yolk and white...but I also don't entirely see the appeal of runny yolks. So poached eggs sound probably bad, and hollandaise doesn't seem like it would improve the experience) If I wanted to give it a chance the best idea would probably be trying it with asparagus or similar. 
• coconut milk: I would say I generally like it, though I don't have much experience trying to drink straight coconut milk, and I'm not sure how well I'd like that?

So, over on tumblr lacerotalong is doing a type of lace per month for the year, and I don't dispute that BecomeInspired has a very useful tutorial, but the playlist of the needle lace videos seems to be somewhat haphazardly organized. I'm diving in, I guess, and making some notes about the content covered in the videos--hopefully I will be able to extend this to cover most if not all of her Armenian lace videos, particularly those in the playlist. 

1. Needle Lace for Beginners (Part 1 of 8): discusses thread and supplies/setup briefly--DMC Cebelia #20 is linked in the description; how to begin with a ring; how to do the basic stitch; how to close the first round into a small ring. Pattern covered: Rnd 1 - ring of 12 petals; Rnd 2 - join the petals with small spaces.
2. NLfB (Part 2 of 8): covers the "over" joining stitch, a tightening tip. Pattern covered: Rnd 3 - in each space, *joining stitch, very small petal/"seed", larger petal, very small petal*
3. NLfB (Part 3 of 8): mentions end of round join, brief discussion of spacing, cutting off tails. Pattern covered: Rnd 4 - work ~medium spaces between the petals
4. NLfB (Part 4 of 8): brief petal sizing tip. Pattern covered: Rnd 5 - in each space, *joining stitch, very small petal/seed, 3 larger petals, very small petal*
5. *NLfB (Part 5 of 8): Pattern covered: Rnd 6 - work spaces between the petals--two smaller spaces are needed between the adjacent petals, and then a slightly larger space to connect them to the the petals on the next space over.
6. *NLfB (Part 6 of 8): how to join new thread! Pattern covered: Rnd 7: work small "seed" arcs between each space, but put an extra stitch into the larger spaces. Rnd 8-11(?): Continue working small seed arcs.
7. [NLfB (Part 7 of 8)]
8. [NLfB (Part 8 of 8)]
9. to be continued...

*I am going to review these videos again; summary may be incomplete.

sometimes I think about names that in one context or another I hear a lot, without really looking into what they are or having personal experience with them, beyond a very superficial inference that it's a road/a person/a publication.

the other day I had a therapy appointment at a different location which meant I finally drove on a road that I've seen the exit for probably 50+ times and heard the name of in the context of radio traffic reports (some mostly tied to the exit location rather than the road itself) probably hundreds of times, having lived in the area since the first year of the millennium, yet I'd never actually set eyes on it. A few years back I finally used the Norwood Lateral (back when the Foodbank warehouse was located off of it), and a far longer time ago we first had cause to use the... Ronald Reagan [Cross-County] Highway that I'd previously heard of.

...but I bring this up actually because I have listened a lot to Advent of Computing in the past few years, and I only actually looked into Vannevar Bush and "As We May Think" in probably the past month or two, after hearing about that article as a major contribution in Sean Haas's view of computing history, and it was interesting to gain the actual context of ...kind of a precursor to the prevalent if perhaps underappreciated phenomenon of hypertext. (that is, text with links. And then I felt I needed to add a few of them to this post because well...) Now that aspect has been rattling around in my head now and then while browsing the internet.

(also, most of the time when Sean Haas has said its name, it's evoked in my mind the phrase "as you may think", which is more of a ...rhetorical flourish, and one that could equally be rendered "as you may believe". But on reading about the article, the topic is actually the process of thinking and the nature of memory.)