As a kid, in the UK, back in the '70s, I was watching Roots and was wondering why they were so keen to get to Scotland. I eventually realised that this was set in the US, of course, and the north there was different.
So I suppose that was my default then but, these days, I typically find myself trying to work out exactly when and where a thing is set, if it isn’t obvious, automatically - before I actually settle into the plot or anything.
That’s nothing. I have no granadillas, rambutans or mangosteens either.
I guess that you might attract some - but it is going to depend where you are as much as the light source. I’m in the UK, for example, and wouldn’t get a lot of moths right now as we are well into autumn.
However, even with glowsticks, I’d expect that you will find something - just not a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortina_d'Ampezzo
Because I became curious about why the car was named that.
I have no idea where you are or how possible it might be, but I’d suggest volunteering for some local thing: soup kitchen, wildlife conservation, charity shop, whatever.
That will get you out of the house, meeting people - basically without any commitment on your part, so you can walk away, potentially learning new skills and making connections that could lead to a job.
I have a selection of natural scenes - some that I have taken myself, other found on the web - that rotate each two hours around the day. Night shots at night etc.
Nope. I still have From LA to New York etched into my brain in bile and loathing from it playing on a cheap crappy clock-radio alarm I had when it was first released in '76 or whenever. Actually waking up to that song probably only happened a couple of times, but it was enough. I found that I preferred the brain-piercing built in alarm to having any other songs or drivelling DJs hypnogogically imprinting themselves.
These days I have either birdsong or Tibetan chimes instead.
I probably wouldn’t.
From the first RSS feeds onwards I have found that anytime I curate a list like this, 6 weeks later I am ignoring the entire thing. Either the individual feeds contained a few items of interest that one time, but basically nothing since, or else there are a lot of interesting items - but they are buried in a tidal wave of uninteresting ones.
I would primarily describe my view as Virtue ethics, but…
On the larger scale, I seek to promote the development of individual virtues and equality within society but, acknowledging that this is always likely to be an aspiration rather than a achieved state then, again, I would look to a deontological approach as a fallback.
I am deeply suspicious of utilitarian arguments in most circumstances, simply through experience of those who tend to promote them. Both egoism and libertarianism seem short-sighted to me.
First name - ultimately biblical in origin and very common at the time of my birth: I went through my entire educational career as one of five with this name (specific people changed, but there were almost always 5 of us).
Middle name: ultimately Germanic in origin. My dad’s middle name too. It has royal connections. I basically never use it.
Last name: the name of a village 30 miles from where I was born. If you look in the village churchyards in a line between the two places, the gravestones show that they moved along about one village per generation. My branch of the family are not great travellers. But, hey, I moved to the next county, so…
Bombastic? Pretentious? Braggart?
In the grand scheme of things I don’t do ‘angry’ that much at all, but the two times when I am most likely to angry at all are commuting to work and then back again. Commuting to, because I will be fuming over the latest environment-destroying, genocidal nazi shit that has hit the news overnight and on the way back because I will be grumbling over whatever nonsense and stupidity has arrived on my desk during that day.
In both cases, I make a positive attempt to get it out of my system by the time I arrive at the end of the travel. I recall a study that concluded that a 16mins commute was optimal for that - which mine was exactly at the time.
I’d always suggest volunteering - be it wildlife conservation or staffing a charity shop or restoring vintage trains in a museum or whatever. Pick something that you have a little interest in and you will already have that in common with the other volunteers and, as a volunteer, you have no commitments and can walk away at any point.
I’m the older end of Gen X, and have never smoked. The major factor in starting is peer pressure and I didn’t have any peers around me at the critical time who did. My family didn’t either.
I seldom drink alcohol and then I have only ever enjoyed cider - not beer, wine or spirits. This is just a matter of the taste for me. I simply don’t like it.
As a kid, I had had grape juice and I had heard adults enthusing about wine as usual and I had a idea what it must taste like.
If you imagine a taste/mouthfeel spectrum with wine at one end and grape juice in the middle, what I imagined wine to taste like was pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum to what it actually tastes like. I had one mouthful and had no desire for any more at all. I have obviously tried wine and the rest at various times since, but my opinion is basically the same.
With cider, I’ll seldom have more that a pint or two a month these days.
I don’t think that I had anything like this from cartoons, but I had read about ginger beer in various childhood books long before I actually encountered it in the flesh and also Turkish delight from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was also one that I didn’t encounter IRL until later.
Ginger beer turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - not a patch on elderflower pressé, for example - but Turkish delight lived up to that passage, and I have thought about the book pretty much every time I have tasted it over the decades since.
The actual reason that we don’t is pretty much because of the invention of sewing machines. Once sewing machines were widespread, making coats became sooo much cheaper than they had been. Coats need a lot of tightly made seams which took time and so made coats very expensive. With sewing machines, making these seams was vastly quicker and more reliable.
Coats win over cloaks in so many ways because you can do things with your arms without exposing them or your torso to the rain and cold: impossible with a cloak.
Capes were the short versions - and intended to cover the shoulder and back without seams that might let the rain in, but with the new machine made seams, they were not needed either.
The really big change was when it became affordable to outfit armies with coats instead of cloaks or capes. At that point all the caché and prestige that was associated with military rank disappeared from cloaks and capes and they were suddenly neither useful not fashionable.
Nowadays, of course, they are no longer what your unfashionable dad would have worn: they are quite old enough to have regained a certain style.
I have read comparisons in the past. I don’t have them to hand, but the conclusion was that dishwashers were more efficient in terms of water use and energy. However, the type of hand-washing that it was being compared to was itself a very inefficient style of washing (tap running continuously? two full sinks for rinsing? I can’t recall, but not the way that we do).
So handwashing the way we do is probably more efficient but it seems that there isn’t THAT much in it either way, and given the time taken and that we cook from scratch almost all the time, we use a dishwasher for the vast bulk of stuff.