Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn’t call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

With us, anything that is/would be smelly goes in some kind of container.

Cleaning - I would say once every 3-4 months or so in normal circumstances. Quite possibly longer.

I am not a dog lover. I find them needy, melodramatic and hierarchical: some of the features that I try to avoid in humans.

I work in an office around one day a week which often has more dogs than humans - since one of the regular staff has two dogs. In general, however, they aren’t much of a problem. One frequently nudges people’s elbows to get attention and howls whenever a phone rings. Another gets in the way of the door an awful lot - resulting in the owner installing a child gate at an inner doorway, and another has been traumatised in the past and needs to be taken out whenever a fire alarm test is due. However, this is not more that the needs and quirks of other people, really, and is fairly easy to work around.

I am glad that I do not have to work in that office all the time, but overall it is not a big deal.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

Relay (Pro) when using my phone although most of the time I was using RES on a laptop.

That’s a really difficult one. The book Bond is a snob in a way that doesn’t really translate to the later culture in which so many of the films are set. Plus, I stopped watching the movies after Quantum of Solace - and had only been slightly interested from around Licence to Kill onwards, until Casino Royale.

If I had to say then perhaps a mix of Craig in Casino and Connery in the very early ones. Book Bond was a bit rough around the edges and definitely not dropping ‘witty’ one-liners all the time.

Yes, they are. They are stylish and pacy and all the rest. They are also very much of their time and, as well, are a completely different beast to the movies: they are spy stories primarily - not action adventures (though both of those are still there), and are much more low key overall.

Bafflegab’s Baker’s End series and Radio Static’s Minister of Chance are two excellent Doctor Who adjacent shows. The BBC podcast The Whisperer in Darkness is a great Lovecraft adaptation.

There isn’t a lot of today left here in the UK, but I’ll be getting bed early and listening to an audio drama shortly.

Tomorrow, I have some shelves to put up, and there may be some clearing up in the garden after the winds today.

From an outsider’s perspective it would be the places that I work - which I am not going to reveal in any detail to avoid doxing myself, but include nationally and internationally important historical and archaeological sites.

From my perspective, although they are certainly interesting and I love working at them, it doesn’t play a particularly prominent role in what I do day-to-day, so it would be the wide range of problem solving involved: I lead a team dealing with maintenance, compliance and health & safety for a national charity.

Most recently finished: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher - an enjoyable, but not exceptional, folk horror.

Currently in the middle of: Finnegans Wake, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Flashman and Madison’s War by Robert Brightwell, and a collection of Para Handy tales by Neil Munro.

It was when the third or fourth thing ended up persistently broken after an update and the whole system became too much of a pain to use. I honestly don’t recall if it was XP or Win 7.

I had used a couple of Linux flavours before for a short periods and originally planned to dual boot, but this time, just never got around to putting a new Win partition on and found that I had no need for it anyway.

Total drive space is probably something like 40 to 50 TB.

Around three quarters of that is in use, mostly my Plex libraries: film, TV, music, spoken word.

It was a Sinclair ZX81, which I built from a kit with my brother. I was astonished when it actually worked.

It came with a tape which included about 6 games in BASIC - all extremely simple since they had to fit in 1k of memory, of course. I can’t actually recall what they were exactly though.

My dad would frequently trot out “You’ll eat a peck o’ dirt before you die.” - where peck would be the UK version of the volumetric measure: a little over 9 ltrs.

He had a very laid back approach to contamination due to his old-school farming background. I had a rather more strict approach when young but, with age, I have become much more relaxed and do use the phrase myself at times.

The entire cast begins to chant “You can’t dream if you don’t fall asleep” over and over again.

It’s “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” surely?

And that has a very different meaning.

Personally, I saw the film - and a good deal of the rest of Anderson’s work as a study of the nature of authenticity: the contrast between authentic commitment to the path one has chosen in life (which most of the character demonstrate) and the existentialist authenticity that comes from the realisation that one could make completely different choices at each and every moment - which the compressed, expressionless delivery of most of the lines throws into sharp relief: it becomes so easy to see these characters as being trapped within their chosen roles.

Of course, I am saying “chosen” here, when it seems clear that to Anderson, there is little choice: his characters and worlds are dominated by an external locus of control: they accept their roles - but authentically? Or in an abdication of authenticity?

Finished: T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, which was very easy reading - a folk horror kinda sequel to Machen’s The White People. I read it straight after her The Hollow Places, and although both were engaging, the similarity of protagonists and overall story arc suggests that they are probably best not read in quick succession: too repetitive.

Continued: Finnegans Wake - reading it through the year. Just completed ‘The Night Lessons’ in book 2, which went from slightly comprehensible to utterly incomprehensible and back to slightly again, and added the columnar format with side notes by Shaun and Shem and footnotes by Issey just for fun…

Resumed: Robert Brightwell’s Flashman and Madison’s War - the fifth of his prequels to George McDonald Frasier’s Flashman series. Although entertaining and well researched in general, this is perhaps the weakest of this series so far - which is probably why I had put it aside and not resumed until now, a couple of months after moving house, when I paused. The historical events that Flashy is involved in are scattered and episodic by nature which is probably the root of the problem with this book. Brightwell hasn’t found a strong unifying arc to overcome that.

Started: The Foxglove King by Hannah Whitten, but a chapter in I was not finding anything appealing to me, so abandoned it.

Started: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. A chapter in I am very intrigued at the setup and keen to continue.

Werewolf of London (1935) - a solid werewolf movie for the period, but with no surprises in the plot - and without a lot of the ‘standard’ lore that developed around the time.

Chiefly notable, I thought though, in showing a surprisingly independent woman in a failing marriage (failing due to her husband being a werewolf…) and in portraying a drunken upper-middle class woman (and contrasting that with fairly stereotypical drunken working class women). Warner Oland features in one of his many bizarre yellow-face roles too.

Just prior to that I went to a 50th anniversary screening of The Wicker Man (1973), which was as great as ever.