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ravenMostly, today has been Novemberish. Notes and queries:
1. It's November 5th, and I am slightly wistful on this account; I am very tempted to buy sparklers and run around writing rude words in the air, but possibly this would like slightly silly just on my own. I do have a proper bonfire and fireworks to go to at the weekend, but waaah, don't want to sit in on my own tonight, want fireworks. Also a pony and a job, shut up self. I really ought to get down to work in a moment.
2. Signing up for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide from SCHOOL! That was a genius idea. And then I could sign up in Firefox 3.5 and not break all my add-ons.
Of course, it would have been more of a genius idea had I not a) not thought of it, and broken all my add-ons; and b) buggered up my sign-up twice running anyway. It's not like I'm offering thirty fandoms or something, I'm offering five and this year they come with handy tickboxes. Sigh.
(One thing that always makes me surprisingly happy is that according to the participants list, I am the only person in these parts of fandom writing under "Raven" or a variant, despite ff.net having appended "25" to mine when they outlawed non-unique usernames. It sounds silly, but I have written approximately 300,000 words of fanfiction over eight years under that name, and it's important to me now.)[1]
3. Sitting up on Headington Hill while drafting Baby's First Deed of Transfer, I had a very good view of the sunset. I reckon it was too dark to read outside by 4.10pm. Am I the only person who forgets, every year, that this happens? That it's not something you read about in books, it actually is only going to be light for six hours and you're going to spend all of those in school. It was a depressing realisation when there is still almost six months of winter to go. To be fair there are things about winter I love - sharp cold, woodsmoke, the sense of things coming - there is still an aura of decrepit Novemberishness about the place today.
4. On a slightly sillier note, Google have discovered a town that isn't there. On the whole, I think towns that aren't there are very interesting. Pripyiat is a town in Ukraine that isn't there, and Centralia is a town in Pennsylvania that isn't. They are both fascinating places.
However,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hathy_col and I have driven through that field. Mostly, we have driven through it at seventy miles an hour singing. The not-thereness of the place can hardly be over-emphasised. I am vaguely impresed.
5. Other interesting thing from today's news: increasing numbers of people who aren't vegetarian, but eat very little meat. The article isn't very profound, but I have always wondered why this is never talked about - talk about vegetarianism in the media always seems to be framed by this odd (possibly Western?) model that people who eat meat are carnivores and people who don't are vegetarians, and there is no continuum between the two, and no complex reasons for why people eat what they eat, or anything.
There is no number six. I need coffee, and I need sleep, but I only get to have one of those. Into the breach again, I s'pose.
[1] Admittedly I do exclude the possibility that the name is not used because I have taken it.
1. It's November 5th, and I am slightly wistful on this account; I am very tempted to buy sparklers and run around writing rude words in the air, but possibly this would like slightly silly just on my own. I do have a proper bonfire and fireworks to go to at the weekend, but waaah, don't want to sit in on my own tonight, want fireworks. Also a pony and a job, shut up self. I really ought to get down to work in a moment.
2. Signing up for
yuletide from SCHOOL! That was a genius idea. And then I could sign up in Firefox 3.5 and not break all my add-ons.Of course, it would have been more of a genius idea had I not a) not thought of it, and broken all my add-ons; and b) buggered up my sign-up twice running anyway. It's not like I'm offering thirty fandoms or something, I'm offering five and this year they come with handy tickboxes. Sigh.
(One thing that always makes me surprisingly happy is that according to the participants list, I am the only person in these parts of fandom writing under "Raven" or a variant, despite ff.net having appended "25" to mine when they outlawed non-unique usernames. It sounds silly, but I have written approximately 300,000 words of fanfiction over eight years under that name, and it's important to me now.)[1]
3. Sitting up on Headington Hill while drafting Baby's First Deed of Transfer, I had a very good view of the sunset. I reckon it was too dark to read outside by 4.10pm. Am I the only person who forgets, every year, that this happens? That it's not something you read about in books, it actually is only going to be light for six hours and you're going to spend all of those in school. It was a depressing realisation when there is still almost six months of winter to go. To be fair there are things about winter I love - sharp cold, woodsmoke, the sense of things coming - there is still an aura of decrepit Novemberishness about the place today.
4. On a slightly sillier note, Google have discovered a town that isn't there. On the whole, I think towns that aren't there are very interesting. Pripyiat is a town in Ukraine that isn't there, and Centralia is a town in Pennsylvania that isn't. They are both fascinating places.
However,
hathy_col and I have driven through that field. Mostly, we have driven through it at seventy miles an hour singing. The not-thereness of the place can hardly be over-emphasised. I am vaguely impresed.5. Other interesting thing from today's news: increasing numbers of people who aren't vegetarian, but eat very little meat. The article isn't very profound, but I have always wondered why this is never talked about - talk about vegetarianism in the media always seems to be framed by this odd (possibly Western?) model that people who eat meat are carnivores and people who don't are vegetarians, and there is no continuum between the two, and no complex reasons for why people eat what they eat, or anything.
There is no number six. I need coffee, and I need sleep, but I only get to have one of those. Into the breach again, I s'pose.
[1] Admittedly I do exclude the possibility that the name is not used because I have taken it.
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no subject
on 2009-11-05 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-11-05 07:16 pm (UTC)The flip-side of the economic factor is that while you need quite a high income to be able to eat lots of meat, I guess you also (unless you are somewhere, like areas with a lot of strict Hindu and Buddhist people, where not eating meat is relatively normal and catered for) need to have quite a high income to refuse available food? Which would exaggerate the difference further. Er, does that make sense/do you agree?
no subject
on 2009-11-05 07:34 pm (UTC)Another point comes to mind - my cultural background equates food with love and with identity. Okay, it's more complicated than that, but, you know, that's the gist of it: Indians use food as offerings like prasad, and langar, and alcohol isn't as normalised, so food serves as a social lubricant in addition to playing such a major religious role (and then, as my cousin Sunny says, our parents are just one generation away from scarce food and tell us to eat constantly because they love us - because they were not students/young adults who had as much food as they wanted, and they want us to be).
So, refusing food - even for reasons which seem quite mundane, like vegetarianism - isn't something that can be done as easily as it could be here, I think. There isn't a mental background against which you can place vegetarianism in the Western sense, because an individual's food choices are so heavily intertwined with the cultural structure.
omg tl;dr. sorry.