Five Things Make a Post
Nov. 2nd, 2020 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. The Rep Club has begun rehearsals for our annual Christmas show, which this year will be a version of Sleeping Beauty. (The coronavirus is pretty much under control in this part of the world, and theatres are allowed to have audiences although there are still requirements in place for socially distanced seating.) I'm playing the butler/chamberlain/dogsbody, who I would describe as the comic relief except that this is the kind of show where everybody is the comic relief at some point. It's more that most of the other characters are also necessary to the plot in some way, while my character is only there for comic relief and the occasional bit of exposition. I'm enjoying it immensely.
. Our roleplaying campaign has brought us to a town where there's currently an election campaign going on. One of the candidates is a big-spending jerk who's whipping up prejudice against non-humans. (I haven't asked, but I'm pretty sure all of this was actually in the campaign sourcebook.) Despite this, he's been friendly to our adventuring team the couple of times we've encountered him, and even offered us work, even though none of us are human: the cleric is a tabaxi (cat-person), the ranger is a verdan (a goblinoid race specific to this campaign setting), the rogue is a halfling (like a hobbit, but less trademarked), and the fighter is a warforged (a kind of magic-powered robot). During our second conversation with this guy, we figured out why: he's apparently never heard of warforged, and is under the impression that our team is led by a human warrior in an unusually elaborate set of armor.
. I've given up on the discipline of wearing work clothes on work days: I decided to make an exception one time because I was behind on the laundry and didn't have any work clothes to wear, and my everyday clothes were so much more comfortable that I extended the exception indefinitely.
. One of the things I've been doing to pass time this month has been working through back episodes of the Youtube channel Marie Clare's World, where a fan of 21st-century Doctor Who is watching and posting reaction videos to the original series. Part of what makes it interesting to me is that she's managed to go into it not knowing anything except what she's picked up from references in newWho, so she knows roughly how many Doctors and what they look like, but not when or how they enter and leave the series, and that the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master and Sarah Jane are in there somewhere, but again not exactly when, and basically nothing else. So she's going in knowing that this is the kind of thing she likes, but as unprepared for the plot twists and such as the original audience would have been (or even less, in some cases where the original audience would have seen it splashed over the papers beforehand). She's enjoying it a lot, too; she's appreciating the old special effects on their own merits and finding something good to say about nearly every story, even the ones at which Received Fan Wisdom tends to turn up its nose. And she's been devastated by some of the companion and Doctor departures.
. A little while ago I made toad-in-the-hole for a family gathering, using the old recipe we used to make it all the time when we were children. I think this is the first time I've baked something from scratch basically on my own; the sibling whose house we were gathering in kept an eye on me but didn't intervene except to tell me which cupboard things were in, and the one time when the batter went weird. The trouble was that the recipe starts "For batter, use the pancake recipe with half the milk and twice the eggs", and then the pancake recipe requires the milk to be added in two stages, half before beating and half after -- and then on top of that we were doubling all the quantities to make enough for the whole family -- and I lost track of how many halves that made and ended up with too much milk in the mixture so we had to improvise to get the proportions vaguely right again. In turned out pretty good, and I'm open to the idea of trying this baking thing again at some point.
. Our roleplaying campaign has brought us to a town where there's currently an election campaign going on. One of the candidates is a big-spending jerk who's whipping up prejudice against non-humans. (I haven't asked, but I'm pretty sure all of this was actually in the campaign sourcebook.) Despite this, he's been friendly to our adventuring team the couple of times we've encountered him, and even offered us work, even though none of us are human: the cleric is a tabaxi (cat-person), the ranger is a verdan (a goblinoid race specific to this campaign setting), the rogue is a halfling (like a hobbit, but less trademarked), and the fighter is a warforged (a kind of magic-powered robot). During our second conversation with this guy, we figured out why: he's apparently never heard of warforged, and is under the impression that our team is led by a human warrior in an unusually elaborate set of armor.
. I've given up on the discipline of wearing work clothes on work days: I decided to make an exception one time because I was behind on the laundry and didn't have any work clothes to wear, and my everyday clothes were so much more comfortable that I extended the exception indefinitely.
. One of the things I've been doing to pass time this month has been working through back episodes of the Youtube channel Marie Clare's World, where a fan of 21st-century Doctor Who is watching and posting reaction videos to the original series. Part of what makes it interesting to me is that she's managed to go into it not knowing anything except what she's picked up from references in newWho, so she knows roughly how many Doctors and what they look like, but not when or how they enter and leave the series, and that the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Master and Sarah Jane are in there somewhere, but again not exactly when, and basically nothing else. So she's going in knowing that this is the kind of thing she likes, but as unprepared for the plot twists and such as the original audience would have been (or even less, in some cases where the original audience would have seen it splashed over the papers beforehand). She's enjoying it a lot, too; she's appreciating the old special effects on their own merits and finding something good to say about nearly every story, even the ones at which Received Fan Wisdom tends to turn up its nose. And she's been devastated by some of the companion and Doctor departures.
. A little while ago I made toad-in-the-hole for a family gathering, using the old recipe we used to make it all the time when we were children. I think this is the first time I've baked something from scratch basically on my own; the sibling whose house we were gathering in kept an eye on me but didn't intervene except to tell me which cupboard things were in, and the one time when the batter went weird. The trouble was that the recipe starts "For batter, use the pancake recipe with half the milk and twice the eggs", and then the pancake recipe requires the milk to be added in two stages, half before beating and half after -- and then on top of that we were doubling all the quantities to make enough for the whole family -- and I lost track of how many halves that made and ended up with too much milk in the mixture so we had to improvise to get the proportions vaguely right again. In turned out pretty good, and I'm open to the idea of trying this baking thing again at some point.
