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There's that tumblr post that's probably ascended to an iconique status at this point, which I only took screenshots of so will summarize thus:
[Screenshot of an ao3 comment]
My husband was reading over my shoulder and snorted when he saw, chapters divided in sfw / nsfw / exceptionally nsfw
He says, "What? Does that mean Steve and Bucky hanging out in a coffee shop / Steve and Bucky having all the butt sex / Steve and Bucky organizing a labor union?"

[Comic]
Steve, in uniform, in front of a counter, with Bucky behind it in a green apron. Steve is saying, "you make HOW much an hour?"
Next panel: Steve in a different outfit walking away with coffee, saying over his shoulder, "we have nothing to lose but our chains." Bucky replies, "steeb pls."

[Reply] UNIONIZE 👏 COFFEE 👏 SHOP 👏 AUS 👏
Ever since then I've been noticing when I read workplace AUs (which I like, in general, since I'm the kind of person who has gotten into serious relationships with coworkers in real life... thrice even) is how rife they are with boss/employee relationships. If not outright romantic relationships, managers and business owners are treated on an equal level with workers. Sometimes things about the job suck, and most of the time the things that suck are customers which, realistic, and occasionally businesses are struggling to get by but this is always a struggle for the owner character. What's strikingly missing here is the real power dynamics of a workplace: that we as workers need jobs to be able to eat, we don't just do it for fun. And of course people who own businesses are people, just like everyone else, but they also are taking on a role in our economy that not just means having control over whether someone else will eat, but being incentivized to use that power to their advantage if they want to succeed.

If you have a problem with sex worker/customer AUs because consent issues? Well let's talk about AUs where someone is actually someone else's boss! This isn't just about whether someone can consent to the relationship itself. After 15 years in fandom I'm comfortable with lots of power imbalances in romantic relationships as long as the author acknowledges them. It's that the portrayal of the workplaces themselves are universally fun and lighthearted and do not deal with those power dynamics at all.

More than anything else, workplace AUs, especially service industry ones, seem to be a fantasy of a universe where work is, if not always fun, at least partly fun. And I get that -- I want to live in a world where I'm friends with my coworkers. I've even been there.

Actually, let me tell you a story about that.

Read more... )

So, story over. There isn't a clear conclusion here but I'd love to see a workplace AU where the canonical villain is cast as the owner. Or even where characters have to deal with the dynamics of a manager they like as a person, who wants to be friends and hang out, but who also is in the position of disciplining them. Dealing with the manager wanting to be friends with everyone when what the workers need is time to hang out without them there, to talk about the real stuff before they confront their boss with what they'd like to see changed.

And I'm biding my time for the right juggernaut fandom to come along for me to write the story about the characters unionizing their coffee shop.

krytella: (Default)
Being isolated at home for 10 months with just my two housemates (who also work from home so we're all just always here but not necessarily interacting much) has been... interesting.

In May I wrote the majority of a fic about a teenager/adult relationship very tightly from the teen's point of view. Something about being just at home, at home, at home, doing work like homework and not going to coffee shops or restaurants or bars just took me back. I do hope to finish that story before it goes from few people caring to zero people caring as the fandom moves on...

I started reading first wave bandom (!) fic in December and was mystified as to why I was suddenly so deeply obsessed with a long-dead fandom that I was wandering through lists of bookmarks of fics from 2007 half of which have linkrotted off the Internet with the LJ exodus and then I realized... you know what's really nice... that I was already missing because my only friendships outside fandom people I rarely really talked to were quasi-professional... was like... touching people? Cuddling platonically? My housemates are basically family members and we do hug but they're in a relationship with each other and I'm not with them and we don't have the kind of vibe where more than occasional hug when someone is feeling down. So yeah I'm trapped in a house with people I don't even necessarily talk to that much, is it surprising I want to drown in stories about being trapped in a tour bus with people with whom I have an intense creative collaboration who I can lounge all over and have it be no big deal?

At least I'm in group chats with my buddies in the union organizing world and we're shooting the shit all the time but I can't be in a room with any of them either. I'm doing that thing where I have the idea for a story and write like two scenes and then just keep turning it around in my head as it grows and grows, all these parts moving around and slotting into place, and playing out the scenes as I try to fall asleep, but not writing any of it down, and then what inevitably happens is I eventually get bored and it's never anything and that's that. Basically the inside of my brain is constant words and 99.99% of it never gets shared with anyone else, up from 99% when I could still see people socially.

Fictional characters like this are fun: fun to write but also experienced as fun by the people around them. They're weird, spontaneous, interesting, and mercurial, if maybe a little Too Much sometimes. My constant internal screaming is so self-contained I'm pretty sure it's not "fun" for anyone other than sometimes me when I amuse myself. Maybe my self-perception is off -- it certainly has been before -- but I think of myself as a pretty calm person, outwardly. The actions of people around me rarely upset me. It's like there's this one level of me that's always singing a song (we had a full hour of "I Want it That Way" today, thanks brain) and experiencing 6 emotions and 4 simultaneous thoughts but the part that actually reaches the surface is pretty flat and just trying to get through the day and do a minimum number of things that have some relation to the world outside my head.
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I tweeted a bit about character archtypes in ships and connecting with them across different ships and fandoms:

"Saw someone on DW who’s not on here describe a pairing as “Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman” and now I want to collect all the lovely and evocative names transformative fandom uses to talk about character tropes" (referring to this post)

"I can definitely get down with this ship as long as the uptight one isn’t ridiculous about it but the true ship of my heart, my warm and fuzzy blanket, is charming disaster/competent awkward nerd"

And then there was a little discussion about whether competent awkward nerd/charming disaster is in fact a subset of Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman. When I see people talking about shipping, especially iddy or what they think of as tropey fic that they either love or hate, there's usually a pleasing contrast between the two characters. But we don't want them to be complete opposites on every possible thing, they need something to connect over. So one of the ways I distinguish ship types to myself is which contrasts are being played up. Of course, that can vary within a pairing depending on the author's interpretation of the characters, too.

So yeah, this is basically a taxonomy discussion, and if you feel like this way of looking at things is too focused on binaries then you probably won't connect with it. But it works for me.

To me, Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman is characterized primarily by the character's relationships to rules and propriety, and also usually to how emotionally demonstrative they are. This is the most popular fanon characterization of Arthur/Eames from Inception. Goodposture Ironedshirt can show up by himself as a character who I saw a tumblr post about once that I can't find again: "The Ghost." The Ghost is always a white man who's got a smaller part in canon but gets read into a lot by fans. He's uptight, particular, fussy and possibly effeminate about his clothing and hygiene, and smaller and slighter than any counterpart he's shipped with. Basically, fanon Hux from Star Wars, though he's not paired with a Disreputable Smirkingman. Kylux isn't my bag so I'm not even sure quite how Kylo Ren is usually characterized to be paired with him, but I'm betting it focuses on his physical strength and unrestrained emotionality.

My favorite ship dynamics are contrasting in aspects like outgoing/reserved, active/passive, "smooth"/awkward, stoic/expressive, serious/fun-loving, but not focused on contrasts in competence, gender coding (different from gender expression? This is hard to explain), height, or rule-following (I like characters who feel pressure to fit in but not characters who are deeply internally compelled to order).

Fic and general media fandom has coined some excellent terms for talking about characterization tropes: spacetoaster, the aforementioned Ghost, Golden Retriever Boyfriend. We should keep coming up with more! I don't know how to end this ramble so let's move on to the personal section of the Twitter thread:

"The meta analysis of this is that these are the animus and anima of my own personality?"

"What’s wild about getting older is the number of things you realize were vastly warped about your perception of yourself your entire life, like would it have been possible to embrace my chaos in my 20s and if I did who would I be now?"

Recently, one of my friends that I know through tech activism was shocked to find that I consider myself an introvert. I mean, I do use what I think is a more original Jungian version of the term -- it's about being focused on my own internal world and also being more reflective than active. I am a lot more about not doing things than doing things. I used to think I was "quiet." In retrospect, I have never in my life been quiet, not even when I was a super awkward teenager. But I have a sister who's very, very loud and I grew up comparing myself to her.

So I always saw myself as the awkward nerd, I guess. Yet somehow in my whole life I have had zero relationships with charming disasters. I thought because I was so focused on the intensity of what was going on in my head that I don't usually show to other people, I must be the awkward nerd and to have value I must fill out the rest of the archetype: I have to be together, organized, conscientious. That just because I'm "together" in interpersonal emotional interactions, that should somehow correlate with having a clean house, paying all my bills on time, and being able to finish any fun project I think about.

Reader, it does not.

The avoidance spiral from not living up to that makes it even harder to keep on top of everything, actually. I'm curious to find out what happens if I stop trying so hard.

Something typically associated with extraversion that I appreciate when I see it in other people is being interested in others, focusing on them. It's something that makes someone a pleasure to be around just as much as purely being "fun," and definitely more surely than being full of brilliant ideas which just makes you annoying when it falls flat.

So something I'm going to try to do this year is be a little more chaotic. To forgive myself for dropping things sometimes in hopes that will help me actually do the things that are important with less anxiety. And to be genuinely curious about other people's inner realities so that we can actually connect.
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I have posted exactly one fic this year, so there's not much point in doing a roundup of writing or anything. I do have three Star Wars stories I could still potentially finish -- I thought I'd give up on everything after RoS but now that there's been a little time to process I think I can get away with just ignoring everything about it without explanation, whether it's a story set in the same time period or in the future. I fantasize about a regular Dreamwidth posting schedule in January. We'll see. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I've fallen into a bizarre and embarrassing spiral of reading bandom fic. I don't even go here, I was neither into it when it was an active fandom nor into the music back before then. I'd like to say I was too old and too cool, and maybe I was a little too old (I am... older than half of FOB?) but the only music I listened to was what I could swing dance to. To this day I hate talking about what music I'm "into," those conversations have a magic power to throw me back into feeling like I'm in high school and "what kind of music do you like" is a code for your entire social identity. Anyway this is all the fault of my non fannish friend who's DMing a game of the Witcher tabletop RPG for a group of us and is very sweet and serious about it. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a character, with the party it seemed like we needed a human who could make money and do the talking to other humans so I was like "I'll be a bard I guess" and then I thought it would be funny if I actually played recorder when my character played music, I already have a bunch of recorders, and then I thought it would be even more fun if I found stuff the other players would like, so I went back to a conversation they'd had on our discord server about bands, and there had been a whole long thread about emo, so after I learned a LoTR medley and a Muse song I decided to do The Black Parade, and I was like "I'll just transcribe it myself this time rather than trying to find sheet music and then adapting it" like a person with no sense, so I pulled up the video on YouTube since I don't have spotify or whatever and watched it on repeat for 2 hours while writing it down, and then I was like, hmm, I remember this was like a whole thing, a whole fandom, what if I looked on the ao3 for fic. At least one person sang along to my epic recorder cover over the video conference so I'll call it a win. We won our first fight last session against some wraiths. I'm planning on using the ukulele basics I've been working on during the pandemic and singing The Unquiet Grave next session to celebrate. I haven't performed singing in front of people ever in my life, I refuse to even sing at karaoke, so I'm kind of terrified but also I want to? If I survive that, next it's got to be Chicago Is So Two Years Ago because DM is a sweet boy from Chicago who misses it very much and also he said "dude take this to your grave is all bangers, front to back." This is 10x more terrifying. Also one of my housemates only ever leaves the house to do martial arts in the park and the other one isn't on the same schedule so when she gets back from this monthlong trip and is done quarantining I'm going to have zero time alone in the house to practice. The singing bits, and ridiculous sounding vocal exercises I should probably do because I have no idea how to sing? Everyone in the house plays instruments and is chill about practicing them at least. It's weird to be suddenly back into it and talking to housemate S about music theory. I played clarinet pretty seriously as a kid and also dabbled in piano and sax and since it's not a thing most people do as adults I both forget I used to do it and also forget that not everybody had access to that education at an age where it just sinks into your brain and you don't have to think about it to read music and can just kind of figure out how to play things on any instrument after a basic explanation of the technique.
krytella: (Default)
All my friends are watching The Magicians all of a sudden and I'm just thinking about Riverdale and reading about autonomist Marxism.

At least I did find the Riverdale kink meme which gave me a whole different angle of the fandom than searching on AO3, as usual. And
one prompt from 2017 that's exactly what I would want to write if I was writing which I'm not. I instigated a birthday spanking and pulled someone's hair last weekend and apparently awakened something for him so oops. I like what I like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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 I have been remiss in not posting much at all, especially about non-fandom life, which is kind of... important to make friends, I guess?

Serious ramble ahead )
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Apologies for being gone from the long-form fan networks for so long! I've been sporadically on Twitter but that's all until this week.

I was out of town for a week for Thanksgiving, including 4 days mostly without cell phone service, and I didn't bring my computer. The day after I got back, thanks to a billing issue that was probably totally my fault, our Internet service at home went down. The day after that, my computer went to sleep and wouldn't wake up.

Also, last week I started a new job! As you may or may not know, I'd been taking an extended vacation for over a year and I was just starting to think about going back to work. Someone I knew from my former job got in touch with me and before I knew it he was offering me a position. It's at a small but funded startup and the office is only 2 miles away from where I live instead of on the other side of a large lake. So that's pretty cool.

After a completely ridiculous saga about the Internet connection in which we had to sign up for a new contract, cancelled that when they wouldn't even tell us when it could be activated, then switched to a different ISP and waited for it to be activated and bought two different modems and waited another few days for a technician when the automatic activation didn't work, we FINALLY have it back. And after a moderately but not ridiculously expensive trip to Apple, my 4.5-year-old laptop is back with a new motherboard.

So now I'm going to work every day and have no time, but soon I will have income again, which is nice, and now I have structure, which is also nice, because it was getting pretty depressing having tons of time but never accomplishing anything.

A synopsis of my time away, in annotated tweets )
krytella: (Default)
I've read a lot of articles about dealing with procrastination and none of them have been very helpful. I also read Getting Things Done a few years ago, which my coworkers raved about but I didn't find helpful at the time. I've also sampled productivity blogs, but they usually seem to make it worse. The mindset that one has to be as useful and efficient with every minute as possible is guilt-inducing, and my procrastination is begun by perfectionism and social anxiety and then fueled by guilt.

I spent a bunch of unplanned time today socializing. S (housemate) and his girlfriend invited me to dinner, and then I got sucked into watching an episode of SG-1 with them (and I keep doing this although they're on season 10 and I'm on season 1 and it's all very confusing). But the rest of the time I've been in pretty high gear! Shit I actually did:

* Printed change of address form for internet service and last year's tax forms which I still need to mail in. Now need to fill in change of address and find the things I need to attach to taxes, which of course aren't with the rest of my tax records because I took them out to prepare those taxes three months ago.
* Ordered new hard drive for laptop. This is the end of a long chain that started with a problem installing a package required to run the ao3 site on my own computer, which I want to do to help me develop faster.
* Paid for Lubricus. On the last day for online registration /o\
* Registered for Foolscap, a local SF/F literature con.
* Looked at schedules for Geek Girl Con and the Seattle Lindy Exchange (a swing dance event) this weekend and put them on my calendar. Whether I'll actually dance til 5am AND make it to all con events is still a question.
* Got a price from my friend whose condo I'm using for the con and scheduled when I'm picking up the key. Actually replied to [livejournal.com profile] eternalsojourn's emails in a reasonable amount of time and worked out that she can stay there with me. Still bummed that [livejournal.com profile] adelaide_rain can't make it, and also filled with guilt over not replying to her emails in at all reasonable amount of time. Please don't hate me :(
* Deposited rent checks from roommates
* Emailed friend about dance event we're supposed to go to in Portland next month, in lieu of actually registering
* Gave away some craft supplies on the local Freecycle email list and promptly replied to everyone. Apparently everyone loves polymer clay, I had 6 emails in the half hour between the initial message and posting that it was taken. Person should pick up tomorrow morning, yay!

I've been trying to make sure I follow through on things, do things I can do rather than saying "I'd better do that soon." I remembered something from Getting Things Done about, while going through todos, just doing anything that's quick. I just looked it up and he says to do anything that takes "2 minutes or less." Well, I was doing anything that takes 15 minutes or less, but... my problem is not so much that I don't know the next steps to do on projects, but that I put off the things I know I need to do. And GTD is about getting things on paper so you can stop having to remember them, but that's not my problem either. I couldn't sleep for hours last night because I was stressing over the things I hadn't done, and planning the projects I haven't started on, which I never remember well in the morning anyway. I can write things down all I want but that doesn't stop me getting to bed and wondering "why didn't I just do that thing that would take 5 minutes instead of playing computer games for hours?" I have to read or play games or, at best, clean the house, to avoid thinking about the little stupid things I have hanging over my head.

I've gotten a bunch of them out of my head today and am already starting to feel better. Hope this is starting a trend. I still have about 10 starred emails I need to do something about, including from three recruiters from major companies I don't want to work for but don't want to burn bridges with, but it's a start.

I've made lots of resolutions to myself and I usually break them. I get too ambitious. Second new resolution today is that if I stay up after midnight, I have to be doing something productive, not distracting myself. When I finish this post I'm going to rotate my laundry and work on the little craft project I have out, so I can move it to the "done" pile on my Kanban board, which I finally put things on! So yay?
krytella: (Default)
Like most people, I learned to wash my clothes from my parents. My mom separates colors militantly (light, dark, bright, red), washes all her clothes in cold water, and hangs almost all her clothes to dry.

But I'm having issues with this. Question for people with vaginas: how do you wash your underpants? The internet tells me to wash "underwear" (I guess they mean white men's briefs?) on hot, but "lingerie" on delicate cold. All my nice underwear, including fancy mens' underwear with prints on it, says to wash cold and hang to dry.

tmi? )
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People ask me all the time: "I haven't seen you in a while. What have you been up to?"

I say, "nothing much." I say, "same as usual."

What have I been doing? I signed up for a dance class, read a book, finished a craft project, wrote some code, did my laundry, went to a party, read ten fanfics, saw a movie, hung a picture on the wall.

So why do I say I didn't do anything? After all, some people probably don't do any these things. But they don't feel like the kind of "accomplishment" I'm going to explain to a random person.

Why do I feel like I didn't do anything? Because I'm too full of ideas. Because I thought of 100 things that I wanted to do, and half the time I read blogs or played Civilization instead of doing those things.

I have a massive collection of art and craft supplies. My sister actually does crafts more than me, especially when she was in school, and I don't think there was a single time that she asked me if I had something she could use for X and I said no. Some of these supplies are for projects at the top of my mind. Some of them are for projects I'd like to do someday. Some of them are for types of things I don't care about right now.

I have a clarinet and a tenor saxophone that I hardly ever play.

People ask about my hobbies and I never share, but I have dozens. Theoretically. It's said it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery at something, and that that's 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 10 years. What am I going to master when I can't get myself to consistently do something for 30 <em>minutes</em> every day?

I used to value making things with my hands, because it balanced the other things I was spending so much time on that were indefinite. Dancing. School. Playing music. Processes. Now I have the option of making things that are things I can't hold in my hands but that clearly exist. Products. And I'm questioning why I have this massive collection of crap that exists to make other crap that I will then have to store somewhere. And then I look at it a different way and say I can make things I can wear and hang on the walls. I've done a pretty good job of ditching any pursuit that ends with a thing that sits on a shelf. I have boxes of things that sit on shelves that I can't get rid of. But still.

I'm not good at working at things. I've never consistently, self-motivatedly worked on anything. Ever.

Should I get rid of the physical stuff? Should I give up on the rest, too, pick just one or two things that I'll do and stop imagining the others? The number of things I am succeeding at doing is currently 0.
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I need to break up with both of my partners. I've never been good at this. I don't even... I think the last time I remember deciding to end a relationship and then having to break it to the person, who thought everything was fine, was... when I was 12.

Edinburgh

Apr. 28th, 2012 01:27 pm
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Definitely the prettiest city of the trip. Went to Edinburgh Castle and learned that the site has been continuously occupied for 3000 years, although most of the buildings are pretty new. I spent a lot of the time considering it as an inspiration for Hogwarts.

No one wears heels in Scotland. I saw one other woman in heeled boots in Edinburgh and she had a suitcase. Even women going out clubbing were wearing flats with their short skirts. It was definitely a challenge walking on the cobblestone streets in my boots, and there's no way stilettos would work there. I did buy a pair of flat boots, which I've been wearing every day in Paris.

We walked around aimlessly quite a bit, window shopping and exploring. Then, since we had a long drive to Cardiff, we left early in the afternoon for The SOUTH.

Have I mentioned that the road signs in Britain have reinforced my belief that Winterfell is in Scotland? Going there on the motorway, all the signs say things like:

M6
The NORTH
Glasgow

Now I'm just imagining the signs on Westeros
Kingsroad
The NORTH
Winterfell
The Wall

Inverness

Apr. 28th, 2012 01:25 pm
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At this point I already can't remember anything about what we did in Inverness except that the hotel there had the a) Tartan carpet and b) the most uncomfortable mattress I have ever slept on. I folded a towel and put it over the part of the mattress under my upper body to save my ribs from the springs poking them.
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We drove out to the Isle of Skye and around it. There are a few farms, but it's very wild there, and mostly devoid of trees except where they've been planted in farms. We headed back over the bridge, which the proprietor of our B&B in Fort William told us used to be a toll bridge and people protested for years by not paying and being arrested until finally they made it free. Stayed in a hotel in Kyle, which was a wholly unremarkable little town where we had unremarkable dinner and left in the morning for Inverness.
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I thought I was forgetting something. Between Islay and Fort William we stayed in a "castle" (19th Century manor house). It had pretty public spaces, which we didn't use at all. Also wifi we couldn't get to work, because castles don't have wifi, asshole.

Also had surprisingly excellent seafood in a restaurant in the town nearby.

I think maybe this was the day we went to Easdale a tiny island only a stone's throw from the mainland. One of the Slate Islands, there were quarries everywhere and the gravel on the roads was slate.
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Moving into the Highlands, everything is hillier and more desolate. We did, after a little backtracking, find the bridge that the Hogwarts Express goes over. Other than that, still some sheep. Fort William is right below the tallest mountain in Britain (at 4,400 feet), which although it’s not very high looks pretty impressive because it’s near the ocean so the land around is close to sea level. There’s been a path up the mountain, which we did not hike, for over a century. The fact that they once drove a Model T up it is impressive. The existence of the mountain did not particularly impress me, because I am spoiled and can see a mountain three times as high from the top of my street at home.

There’s a history museum in Fort William, where I finally learned what the fuss about the Jacobites is. Also that changes in the clan system in the 1700s and 1800s, when clan leaders centralized farming, eventually destroyed the old way of life and reduced the population. We saw a lot of emptiness and plenty of old farm ruins.

We went to a pub, had some local beer that K thought was boring but I liked (I suspect he finds anything that isn’t Guiness boring), and listened to some folk music. I don’t think I’ve ever heard bagpipes playing recognizable songs, accompanied by other instruments even, so that was new.
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We drove through many more sheep and took the 2-hour ferry in late afternoon to Islay. It was pretty, but I was viewed out and spent most of it rereading The Shoebox Project (most epic HP fic evar) on my phone.

On Islay we saw the first evidence of agriculture (as in growing plants rather than livestock) that we’d seen in Britain. Turned out to be barley that’s grown to make whisky. There seems to be no shortage of vegetables to eat, but it’s still a mystery to me where they’re actually grown. Drive around the countryside back home and you’ll see tons of planted fields.

That evening, I was almost bested by a steak & ale pie, but I persevered! I still don’t know how you’re supposed to cut puff pastry that’s floating on gravy, though. It’s way too big to put in your mouth at once, and if you try to use a knife it just sinks more and more into the gravy but never reaches the bottom.

We did some research on distilleries and decided to visit Bruichladdich first. It’s the only independent distillery on Islay, owned by a group of local investors. They also happen to be the ones who make Port Charlotte which I now have fic-related feels about.

Their tour was very good and made better by being conducted by a cute guy. They don’t malt their own barley there, they have it done in Inverness, so we didn’t get much about that except smelling the different barleys with different amounts of peat. Bruichladdich is unusual in the fact that they do several different whiskies at different peat levels. They have a lot of old equipment that they still use, and our tour guide said they’re the biggest employer on the island, even though they make less whisky than some of the other distilleries. It’s less automated, and they do their own bottling -- there were at least 8 people working in the bottling room when we went in.

It was fun getting to taste and compare their different varieties. They make Octomore, the peatiest whisky in existence, as well as Port Charlotte which is like a normal Islay and their classic, which is very low peat and light.

In the afternoon we toured Lagavulin. There’s a totally unmarked castle ruin that you can see from the distillery. We walked around it first, having some extra time. I’m still not sure of its historical significance but our tour guide said it was the seat of the ruler of the island at one point. After the other distillery tour, only bits of it were interesting. They had more modern equipment for some parts, although the grinder still looked old, and a lot more automation. They don’t do their own malting either -- no one on Islay does, most use one malting facility that is owned by the company that owns Lagavulin.

Glasgow

Apr. 21st, 2012 10:54 pm
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Trying to catch up...

We came, we ate the best Indian food I’ve ever had, went to a non-exciting museum in a gorgeous building that looks like a haunted castle at night, we left.

Well, there’s a little more, because that day we went with L to the airport for her flight home, rented a car there, and drove from there to Scotland. The countryside was, unsurprisingly, picturesque and full of sheep. Encountered our first castle, which was nicely free of visitor’s center/gift shop/charge but still had a helpful sign with historical information.
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In the morning we went to the Tower of London, which is, you know, interesting and historical and everything. I always imagined it as an actual tower, but it’s actually a big complex of buildings and many historic people were imprisoned there and I’m sure you can read all about it if you’re actually interested.

The Crown Jewels are actually in a row of cases that you stand on a slowly moving walkway to see, by the way. Not exactly depicted as in Sherlock.

Then we went to the Who Shop. It’s far out of the center of London, so it was a 45 minute tube ride, but so worth it! It’s a small shop with almost every piece of Who memorabilia crammed in, including two life-size TARDISes and at least two mini ones. We were about 3/4 of the way through our careful perusal of the store, as the only customers, when a guy walked in. In a full 10th Doctor costume. And practically squealed with glee. Pretty soon he was trying on the Tennant coat reproduction. “But it is my dream!” he said to the woman with him when she balked at the price. I mean, guy walks into the shop in a brown suit, Tennant hair, and the exact white Converse, and you know he’s serious about making sure his coat looks good with the rest of it. We never did get his name, although we took a couple of pictures, so he will be known only as “cute French David Tennant.”

Behind the shop, entered into through a TARDIS, is their Doctor Who Exhibit. The owner is a huge geek and gives a very colorful tour of all the props and costumes they have. There are a bunch of screen-used costumes for extras from the original series, a TARDIS console from the stage show, two Daleks, and what to me was the biggest deal: Tom Baker’s last costume, the reddish-purple one. Photographs are allowed, though the lighting’s not great, and he pulled down a couple of props and let us actually hold them! One was one of the alien weapons that Nine picks up and discards in “Dalek,” which turns out to be a modified stage light.

We also got a lot of information about Captain Jack’s costume. The owner is an RAF veteran himself and had both a vintage RAF coat like Jack wore in his first appearance, and the licensed costume version of his later coat. The original coats are heavy. No wonder they made a version out of lighter fabric for him!

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