A thought experiment
Suppose that you host a party at which you serve soup. The soup consists almost entirely of vegetables, but you add a small amount of chicken stock. During the party, a few of your guests complain that they are vegetarians, and thus find your soup unpalatable.
Assuming that you don’t have some kind of personal vendetta against vegetarians, which of these do you consider to be the more reasonable response?
A. Apologise; offer some kind of assurance that you will remember that some of your friends are vegetarians the next time you make soup.
B. Complain bitterly that the vegetarians are hurting your feelings by making you out to be some kind of horrible anti-vegetarian bigot, when you clearly didn’t intend to offend them, and when everyone knows that you have absolutely nothing against vegetarians and treat everyone equally whether they are an omnivore, herbivore or insectivore. Complain that you couldn’t possibly have been expected to remember the vegetarians, since there are so few of them. (Go off on a tangent in which you contemplate why so few vegetarians come to your parties; conclude that they must have some genetic reason to dislike you.) Complain that the vegetarians are being oversensitive — it’s just a little bit of chicken stock; it’s not like you slaughtered a cow on the table in front of them — and tell them that they should have just shut up and eaten the soup.
Show your working.
Addendum, with actual photos
After a lot of compiling, digikam is working again. Here are the photos from Conclave at Charybdis. And here are some Egyptian geese, if you like that sort of thing.
Better late than never
I’m about to upload my photos of our Dragonfire LARP, which happened only two months ago. This is still less laggy than Hodgestar’s birthday party. In order to upload the photos I am upgrading digikam, so that I can use a non-faily flickr upload plugin. In order to upgrade digikam I need to upgrade the rest of KDE from the kubuntu-backports PPA — this is currently chugging away in the background.
I have embarked on an epic sewing project — making myself and Hodgestar medieval Japanese outfits for Here Be Dragons, the annual SCA away weekend event which is about a month away. I’m making this (except with a maroon hakama because the shop had no red linen) and this kind of thing (except black, because that’s the colour of the hakama Hodgestar already has).
The nice thing about Japanese clothing is that it’s mostly a whole lot of rectangles. The only tricky part of the kimono-type garment is the collar. I think I’ve been having problems because my seams are tiny and all the instructions on the interwebs assume that you’re going to leave enormous seam allowances — so my collars are too wide and too high up on the body and need to be re-sewn. I need to test this theory out on the two very nearly finished kosode I’ve just made. The reason I’m writing a rambly blog post and not sewing right now is that V:TES players have taken over the lounge table.
After a very long wait, my kalahari.net book order arrived, and here is my loot:
- The Never Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack — it’s a DS9 tie-in novel; don’t judge me. I first read Una McCormack’s fanfiction during one of my previous love affairs with Deep Space Nine, and her pro fiction is just as good. This is a stand-alone story about a minor canon character.
- Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Cardassia and Andor (purchased for the Cardassia half, also by Una McCormack; I’m leaving the other half for later) — also good, but (obviously) shorter.
- Kimono: Fashioning Culture by Lisa Dalby — a well-regarded reference book about the history of kimono.
- Seed to Harvest by Octavia E. Butler — a collected edition of the entire Patternist series, except for one instalment Butler really didn’t like. Haven’t read it yet.
- Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany — currently reading. It’s slow going, because of the unusual language, but I’m enjoying it.
- Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks — a fun, short zombie comic. Not much to the plot, but I really like Hicks’ art. (If she sounds familiar, it’s because she did Demonology 101.)
Recently discovered webcomics:
The upgrade has become unexpectedly exciting — I’ve hit some kind of packaging bug. I guess the photos will have to wait a bit longer. :/
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I can't really swim. I did sort of learn in 2007, but I don't know if I remember. :P
- @wizzyct The only thing I've done with it for the past several years is increase the privacy setting on every stupid new "feature". :/
- A petition in An Tir to allow same-sex couples entry into Crown Tourneys: http://www.scatoday.net/node/16930 (SCA stuff)
- Flat international shipping surcharge sucks. Especially when it ends up costing more than the books. No impulse purchase for me today. :P
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
