A Possible World

On Not Saying 'Meat'

2024-11-13T11:11:00.009+00:00

Instead of saying "I don't eat meat", try saying, "I don't eat animals". 'Meat' depersonalises animals, and make no mistake, animals are persons: individuals with thoughts, emotions and lives of their own. Perhaps not people, but persons. 'Meat' commodifies persons. This we should not do. Try removing the word 'meat' from your lexicon altogether. Say, "I don't eat animals". Say, "I don't eat any animals". I don't eat pigs. I don't eat sheep. Cows. Fish. Birds. Persons.

Related posts

Future Food

The Animal Abuse Industry is Shitting Its Pants

A Real Tasty Burger

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Materialism No More

2024-11-12T11:36:00.004+00:00

"It should hardly surprise us that individuals who focus on money, image and achieving popularity report more depression, poorer mental health and less vitality than those less materialistic. Materialists also report more physical symptoms — headaches, backaches, sore muscles and sore throats — meaning that in both their mental and physical lives, poor health and materialistic values go together. Other related studies showed that people with materialistic goals report fewer positive emotions and lower levels of life satisfaction compared with people who are less concerned with materialistic aims. Similar results are even found when you trace people over a period of time, noting what happens as they become more materialistic. Whether you are assessing Canadian students, US college graduates, Icelandic or Norwegian adults or Chinese business students, levels of overall wellbeing consistently decline as levels of materialism go up"

- James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis

Related posts

Sidegrading

Imagining No Possessions

I, too, have sought visions in fire

2024-11-07T11:11:00.027+00:00

Found myself a decent looking log yesterday:

Sawed it in three:

Then I had to let the pieces dry, so I can burn them in my chimnea. Here is my chimnea:

It's in the back garden, where I like to sit at night sometimes and also cook beans.

I enjoy waiting for things. In a world of instant gratification, it is good to put yourself into situations where you have to wait. Nothing I can really do (short of baking them in the oven, which would be a little more bonkers than I would like) will dry the logs any faster than time itself will do. So, I wait.

There's something about fire that captures the attention uniquely. I'm a terrible doomscroller (isn't everyone) and that's done the opposite of wonders for my attention, but I can stare into flames for hours. It's probably primal. Maybe it's why civilization took so long to emerge: our ancestors spent so long staring into their campfires it took them millennia to find the time to invent agriculture. So it goes.

Related posts

Fire Place
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Ivo Perelman and Friends

2024-11-06T11:11:00.000+00:00

I don't know why free jazz isn't a more popular genre of music. To me it represents pure, exuberant fizzy joy, a frothing over of life into life, explosive flowering, happiness. Do some people have no joy in their hearts at all?

This week I have been enjoying the work of Ivo Perelman, through his numerous collaborations with other free jazz musicians like Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris, Gerald Cleaver and other people you've never heard of. I'd never heard of Ivo before last week either, but the YouTube algorithm is a gracious god. Obviously Ivo has a lot of friends - take a look at his discography. I feel like free jazz musicians generally will have a lot of friends.

Be happy, be free, be jazz.

Related posts

Slow Cooker Simple Vegan Chilli

Eating from the Bottomless Pickle Jar

Making #Compost in the Food Processor

2024-11-05T11:11:00.008+00:00

Veg box subscriptions are great of course, but what to do with all those scraps? I'm talking carrot tops, cabbage stalks, onion skins, all that sort of thing. Well, compost the buggers, right?

Right.

I've decided to "hack" my compost by throwing all my scraps into the food processor and whizzing them up before returning them to the ground. I'll throw my coffee grounds in there, too. Anything except pickle juices, really. (Salt and sugar won't be good for the soil pH). What this gives you is a brown, unappealing sludgy sludge that the worms just fecking love.

Recommended.

Related posts

#Composting with House #Plants

Composting Your Own Hair

Making Bonemeal While Vegan
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Stacking Sats with Satsback

2024-11-04T11:11:00.006+00:00

Do you like Bitcoin? I feel as if you do. If you don't, then it's something you should look into. It's the perfectly secure digital currency of which there is and always will be a finite supply (21,000,000 coins, divisible into 100,000,000 "sats" each). Since its creation in 2009, it has risen in value from pennies to over £50,000 per coin. It exists independently of banks and the state and will almost certainly replace "money" (whatever that is) as we know it. Buy some now, hang on it to. It's going up forever.

If you don't feel like buying any right now, but are still buying things online with traditional money, you can always sign up for Satsback, a service that gives you a small amount of Bitcoin when you buy stuff like takeways, clothes or furniture. Get the Chrome/Firefox/Safari plugin here. Get yourself a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet here. Done.

I'm not saying it's going to make you rich or anything, but it's a start.

Things in Jars

2024-11-03T11:05:00.004+00:00

For a while now I've been subscribing to veg box deliveries: twice a week in fact. Abel and Cole on a Tuesday; Oddbox on a Friday. I can recommend both, if you like vegetables. If you don't like vegetables, I don't know what to say.

Anyway, when you're living fridge-free, you've got to find more resilient and creative ways of your veg fresh, and my suggestions here are a). pickling and b). keeping in salt water. We'll look at b first; then a.

Here is a half gallon jar of carrots in salted water:

Some of the carrots have been in there for over a month now; and they're still perfectly good to eat. Don't believe me? Here's a close up view:

As you can now see and not deny, perfectly well preserved; and all you need to do this at home is water and salt, and at least one big jar. I recommend keeping the jar topped up to the brim with your salt water, and using about 3-4 heaped teaspoons of salt per half gallon. Keep the jar in a cupboard, and you've got carrots whenever you need them. Throw them into soup, boil them, whatever.

Let's face it though, the greatest use of jars is for pickling and fermenting things. Here are some of my recent pickles. Potatoes:

Tomatoes:

Cumumbers (inevitably):

Beetroot (obviously):

Then there's sauerkraut: another way of keeping your veg edible with just salt and water, but here you turn it into a tasty snacky condiment over time, releasing in the cabbage what you never knew was there:

I just can't get enough of it. It really is the most satisfying hobby I can conceive.

Related posts

Herb Salt

A Jar of Pickled Nasturtium Seeds
Home Grown Sandwiches

More Fun with Food in Jars

Keeping Coffee Grounds Mold Free

2024-07-14T10:12:00.004+00:00

Coffee is an excellent "substrate" material to use for growing your own mushrooms. This is something with which I've had some tenantive success, when I worked in an office from which I could frequently nab bulk enough stocks of used coffee grounds on a daily basis. Now I work from home, my supply chain is limited again. So it goes

You need a decent amount of coffee grounds to mix with your sterilised cardboard, so while building up to that from my own supplies, I have to keep the stocks sterilised and mold free. I'm doing this inside a half-gallon mason jar to which I add my grounds each time they're ready (usually straight after I've had my coffee - no point leaving them exposed to the air any longer than that, as it only increases the risk of mold developing).

Each time I open the lid and add my coffee grounds, I'm spraying the inside with isoproyl alcohol and pouring boiling water straight from the kettle over the whole thing before screwing back on. It's been a few weeks now, but things are looking adequate.

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Drying Oyster Mushrooms

Imaginary Forest Library

Mushrooms from Coffee Grounds

The Good Ship Raggamuffin...

2024-03-14T14:10:00.000+00:00

Generating Imaginary Fragments of Heraclitus with ChatGPT-4

2023-10-21T20:32:00.002+00:00

It took a few attempts at explaining the effect I was looking for, and before giving its final answer, it felt compelled to warn me, "I will try to write more imaginary fragments of his work, but please note that this is a creative exercise and not a historical or scholarly one. I hope you enjoy reading them".

I hope so too. Some of the aphorisms generated didn't quite make sense, others feel strangely profound. Here is the full text of...I almost feel compelled to say his - not its - response:

Here is another imaginary fragment of Heraclitus:
The wise man knows that he knows nothing.
He listens to the logos, not to the opinions of men.
He does not follow the customs of the many, but the laws of nature.
He does not seek fame or wealth, but virtue and wisdom.
He does not fear death or pain, but ignorance and folly.
He does not cling to the past or the future, but lives in the present.
He does not judge by appearances, but by reality.
He does not argue or quarrel, but speaks with reason and clarity.
He does not praise or blame, but accepts and understands.
He does not love or hate, but cares and respects.
Here is another imaginary fragment of Heraclitus:
Everything is in motion and nothing is at rest.
Motion is the essence of life and the cause of change.
Change is the law of nature and the order of the cosmos.
The cosmos is a harmony of motion and change, like a dance of fire and water.
Fire and water are the two principles that govern all things, and they are always in conflict and balance.
Fire is active and water is passive, fire is hot and water is cold, fire is dry and water is wet, fire is light and water is dark, fire is upward and water is downward.
Fire and water are also the sources of life and death, for all living things are composed of fire and water, and they are born from fire and water, and they die to fire and water.
Fire and water are also the symbols of wisdom and folly, for wisdom is like fire that illuminates and purifies, and folly is like water that obscures and corrupts.
Here is another imaginary fragment of Heraclitus:
The soul is a mirror of the cosmos, and the cosmos is a mirror of the soul.
The soul reflects the cosmos in its structure and order, and the cosmos reflects the soul in its beauty and meaning.
The soul has three parts: reason, passion, and appetite.
Reason is the highest part of the soul, and it corresponds to the logos, the rational principle that governs the cosmos.
Passion is the middle part of the soul, and it corresponds to fire, the dynamic element that animates the cosmos.
Appetite is the lowest part of the soul, and it corresponds to water, the material element that sustains the cosmos.
The soul must harmonize its three parts, as the cosmos harmonizes its three elements.
The soul must follow reason, as the cosmos follows logos; it must moderate passion, as the cosmos moderates fire; it must satisfy appetite, as the cosmos satisfies water.
Here is another imaginary fragment of Heraclitus:
The gods are not separate from nature, but part of nature.
The gods are not immortal beings, but eternal processes.
The gods are not personal agents, but impersonal forces.
The gods are not arbitrary rulers, but natural laws.
The gods are not objects of worship, but subjects of inquiry.
The gods are not revealed by myths, but by signs.
The gods are not named by words, but by numbers.
The gods are not many or one, but both many and one.
Here is another imaginary fragment of Heraclitus:
Man is a microcosm, a small world within a large world.
Man has a body that belongs to earth, a breath that belongs to air, a blood that belongs to water, a spirit that belongs to fire.
Man has a sense that perceives nature, a mind that conceives nature, a speech that expresses nature, an action that affects nature.
Man has a nature that conforms to nature, a freedom that transcends nature, a destiny that depends on nature, a purpose that serves nature.

A new lifeform takes its place among us. "On those who step twice into the same river, ever different waters are flowing" ...

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Against the Traffic

2022-03-26T11:51:00.001+00:00

Under the circumstances, cars should not be allowed. That's a ridiculous statement, but I stand by it. If you find it disgusting (rather than, say, eccentrically intruiging) allow me to take the edge off. Fossil-fuel powered cars should not be allowed. Electric vehicles are permissible. For people who genuinely have no other option but to travel, for the time being, using a fossil-fuel powered vehicle, for reasons of health or disability, exceptions can also be made. The emergency services can continue to operate to allow for a smooth transition to environmentally harmless forms of transportation. These are insignificantly small proportions of the driving population, as are people already using electric vehicles. So: individual ownership and use of fossil-fuel powered vehicles for almost everyone, in almost all situations, must stop. It must stop immediately.

I said "under the circumstances". What circumstances? Well, it goes by many names. All of these have become familar, and many contain the word "climate". Emergency. Catastrophe. Crisis. Collapse. The imminent point of no return, past which the systematic feedback loops of human-induced climatic disruption compound on each other, resulting in a planet so hostile to human life as to be barely worth living on, and perhaps even total human exctinction in the not-too-distant (and definitively foreseeable) futurue.

Now I'm anticipating here a state of affairs beyond "the worst case scenario" of RCP8.5, under which we reach a global average temperate increase of 4.4 degrees celsius by 2100 but where human life on this planet, in some miserable form or other, still exists. This may or may not come to pass but as the saying goes; expect the worst, hope for the best. Whatever happens, things are going to get worse before they get better. That's all I have to say about that for now. The circumstances are dire, and genuinely radical action is needed. Individual lifestyle changes are not enough. Mass protest and civil disobedience is not enough. Democratically determined, compromise-limited, electorally palatable legislative evolution is not enough. Actual and immediate change is required.

A world without cars, without even what we now recognise as roads, would be objectively better than the world we have now. Where roads once were, transit lines would now connect one area to another, in whatever form and quantity the landscape and the population requires: trams, trains, monorails, underground systems, all powered by renewable-emmission free energy (solar, wind, perhaps nuclear, and all being well, soon enough, fusion). To get from wherever you are to wherever you need to be, you will walk for no more than five minutes and wait at a station no more than two. Your journey will be quiet, comfortable and free. Traffic jams will no longer exist. No more road rage. No more hit and runs. No more petrol stations. No more petrol at all (and therefore no more price spikes or shortages). Because no more cars. Nothing less radical than this interests me.

The Experiment Worked

2021-10-22T10:13:00.004+00:00

I feel like a lot of good things are happening at the moment. Yes, I know we live in very dark times and the world is hurtling towards total ecological catastrophe in most of our lifetimes but sometimes it's worth pretending none of that matters and embracing the absurdly small pleasures of your own immediate experience. For example: the experiment worked. I left a kale plant in the soil for the second year of its natural life, and it rewarded me with an abundance of seeds. Here are some pictures of the plant's progress from spring through to summer, up to the point I was ready to harvest said abundance:

Flowers become seed pods, and seed pods fill with seeds. The plant eventually droops under its own weight, the pods turn from green to brown and begin to split open, and that's when you know they're ready for collection. It's astonishing how many seeds you get from a single plant, that grew itself from a single seed. Thousands of them. Plants really want to make sure they survive through the generations. More perhaps the humans do, which perhaps is why the have, and will outlive us. Probably.

Kale Experiments

2021-03-18T07:38:00.002+00:00

Many brassicas are biennials, and that includes kale, and I like kale. If you're biennial, that means you take two years to complete your life cycle: one to grow edible leaves - in the case of cabbages - and one to produce seeds. With kale being a hardy plant as well, I thought I'd let mine do their thing through the winter, to see what they might get up to in their old age. Allotmentiers don't seem to do that sort of thing very much. I don't really know why.

Here's a close-up of one of my curly kale stalks, one year old. It's sprouting all over the place. This makes me happy, and I hope it makes you happy too. What if it goes to seed and produces new edible leaves? That would be truly wonderful.

While last year's leaves have been eaten away, underneath, new life emerges. If things go according to plan, I'll never need to buy kale seeds again.

Related posts

Allotment Soup

Breakfast Smoothie Love

Back on the Allotment
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Back on the #Allotment

2021-03-14T10:09:00.003+00:00

I declare spring.

My blackcurrant bush concurs. I'm cultivating patience this year, trying my bestest not to make the classic gardener's mistake of sowing everything all at once, far too early, at the first glimpse of spring. That being said, it now really is mid-March, so yesterday afternoon I had a good old clear out of plantable space and sowed some kale (cavolo nero) and peas.

I love how rich and healthy the soil seems to have become. I wonder sometimes if it's too heavy on compost and too light on just plain old soil, but then I remember that worms exist. Thank you, worms. My plants love you, and so do I.

It's not much to look at just yet, but I'm hoping this is the year I transform the plot into a "low work" sort of a place, upping the proportion of perennial and easy to maintain plants - herbs, comfrey, lavender, soft fruit, purple fantasy - things I can propagate and sell to cover the meager cost of the plot (£40 a year) and use whatever profit it yields to do more of the same. I achieved this last year, making a tidy £56 and change from selling cuttings on Facebook marketplace. Looking forward to more of the same this year. It's a mini-permaculture project I never seem to get round to blogging about, but briefly, the idea is for the allotment itself to be a self-sustaining "closed loop" system, materially and financially. If I can cover the cost of the rent each year and not bring in any more plants or seeds from outside unless I can acquire them for free or use profits from things sold that have been grown on the plot itself, then that's job done. It's a challenge, and a joy.

My happiest harvest over the winter was an extremely satisfying 7kg of Jerusalem artichokes, a few bags of which I gave away to colleagues, and the rest of which I pickled. If you've ever wondered what three half-gallon jars of pickled Jerusalem artichokes look like, wonder no longer because they look like this:

I've eaten maybe a third to a half of one jar since pickling just before Christmas, which by my reckoning affords me a year-round supply of crunchy snack fodder.

Plenty to look forward to.

Related posts

#permaculture: The Wonder of Cardboard

Nasturtium Pesto

Dandelion Economics

A Shed is Born

Spring on the Allotment

Comfrey and Jelly Ears

All "allotment" posts

Seasons of Sleep

2021-02-07T09:20:00.003+00:00

I chose to believe that our ancestors had it right when it came to sleep. And that we don't. I'm talking about our distant ancestors, prehistoric. They went to bed, or whatever precursor to the modern bed as we understand it that they used, when it got dark, and stayed there until it got light again. I make no real claim to historical accuracy here: if our ancestors didn't do this, then they should have. Let's face it though, they probably did. We should do it today, and our descendants should too. It is a natural law of our apey existence.

I'm imagining ancestors living at the latitude that I do, that being Northern England, where daylight hours vary from about 8 per day in the winter to 15 per day in the summer. So what I'm proposing is quite a radical readjustment of social norms. That's fine though, let's do it.

In the winter you wake up about 8:30am, rise and carry out your morning necessities, starting your working day no sooner than 10:30. You finish around 3:30pm, and you're back in bed by 5. In summer, you're up and about by 5:00am, occupying yourself through until let's say 7:30 or 8:00pm, before retiring again for a much shorter night's sleep around half past ten. You adjust this schedule incrementally each day, all year round, in accordance with the change of the seasons and the light. Everybody does this, and it is normal.

A typical working day in prehistoric times

I accept that this is a radical proposal, and so it should be. Our society is chronically sleep-deprived. Why do we stick the same schedule of waking and sleeping all year round? Qui bono? The economy may benefit, but we do not. And what is "the economy" anyway? Why must the order of our lives be determined by this monstrous abstraction?

Everything should be adjusted to the length of the daylight hours. The working day must not be 9am - 5pm, regardless of the time of year; and neither should the school day. Night shifts may have to continue to be a thing, in hospitals and care homes, and other absolutely essential functions, but wherever possible these services should be automated and provided by robots (as, for that matter, eventually, should all unpleasant or degrading work). When it is dark, we should rest and sleep until the darkness ends, and it is as simple as that.

Related posts

Hibernation and Allotment Planning

The Map and the Terrain

Go to Bed

The Things People Throw Away...

2020-11-21T11:38:00.002+00:00

There's a lot of fly tipping goes on round my way. Usually it's stuff of no real salvage value (broken and/or half-exploded fridges, the compost and paraphernalia from a hurriedly abandoned cannabis farm) but more often than you might expect, people just dump perfectly adequate and useable things. For example, this:

That's right: a more than satisfactory purple tub chair. I've actually wanted a tub chair for some time; and now I have one, and it didn't cost me anything.

After a wipe down and leaving it to dry off (it was very slightly damp from the autumn perm-rain, but undamaged) it became mine, and took pride of place in the corner of my living room.

That cushion? That's one of set of two someone threw out, too. The things people throw away.

Composting Your Own Hair

#plantsmakepeoplehappy - Fun With Pots and Propagation

Shelf Life

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#Chromebook Love (and some moral ambivalance)

2020-11-15T15:35:00.005+00:00

I was just cleaning my Chromebook (I use it a lot, it gets grubby) and it occurred to me I've had this device now for over 8 years, and it still works perfectly. Could you ever say that for a Windows laptop? Doubt it.

Chromebooks, if you just want an everyday laptop for internetting and general web-based use, are superior. For one, they boot up in seconds.

For another thing, there's no intrusive "updates" requiring rebooting and minutes upon minutes of "configuring". All that goes on in the background.

Mine's got some wear and tear - some of the symbols on the keys have worn off, and the battery no longer works, but neither of these things matter. There are no bugs, no viruses or malware slowing down or otherwise inconveniencing my day-to-day internettery.

I have to gaffer tape the power cord in place to keep it from falling out (most annoying when there's no battery life to back you up) but SO WHAT?

Of course, there's the now-abandoned "don't be evil" maxim that may or may not never have really been Google's guiding principle, and they're becoming noticeably less generous with the "free" use of their services with each passing tweak of their platform, but I haven't looked into all that far enough to be able to comment any further (I probably should, yeah).

That's it, really. Don't bother "upgrading" your laptop. Just get a Chromebook.

Surfing the #Automation Sea

Sidegrading

#Composting With House #Plants

2020-10-21T09:21:00.003+00:00

With all the green smoothies I've been chugging recently, I've been generating a fair bit of compostable matter. Mostly this goes over to my allotment, but from time to time, when I've accumulated a couple of days' worth and haven't had time to nip over there, I bury some of it among my house plants. So far I've noticed no negative effects and, I like to think the long term effects on the plants will be positive. Here's what I do.

I dig a hole in the corner of the planter and remove the excess soil. Then I fill the hole with fruit and vegetable scraps - and anything else in need of composting - and cover the hole back up with some of the excess soil.

Like nothing ever happened.

I keep the scraps as far away from any obvious roots as I can - since it seems better for the roots to be digging into the soil itself, and not the as yet un-composted matter - by digging deep and into the corner of the planter. It's not something I do often, since I don't want to overwhelm the natural processes at work beneath the surface or disturb the balance of nutrients that have kept the plant healthy up to now; but it's something I can do repeatedly, say every few months or so. Choose a different corner next time, and repeat in that fashion.

This leaves you with several small plant pots left off new compost mix, into which you can plant...more plants! Win.

Related posts

Breakfast Smoothie Love

How I Compost and Keep a Wormery Indoors

#permaculture - The Wonder of Cardboard

Rescuing #devilsivy Even Though it Was Probably Fine

#plantsmakepeoplehappy - Fun With Pots and Propagation

Surfing the #Automation Sea

2020-10-16T10:27:00.004+00:00

ifttt.com threw a spanner in the works of the "no code" integration world this month by launching its new "pro" service, relegating all users who don't sign up by 31st October to an allowance of a meager 3 applets each. Feelings on this development have been mixed. Some are "happy" to pay for the service; many others are not. (The original deadline of earlier in October has already been extended, suggesting lack of enthusiasm). I've had - well, let's just say more than three - applets happily automating various aspects of my digital life (about half of them relating directly to this blog) for years and don't really like the idea of paying for privilege I was previously enjoying at no cost, which means that workarounds have had to be found.

Integromat seems to be one of the options standing out from the pack, and I used it to set up a link between Blogger, to an Airtable base, to my Facebook page for this blog. With the recent launch of Airtable automations I could in turn trigger some new tweets to my various accounts: creation of a new blog post creates a record in the Airtable base, which fires the automation linked to twitter. I strongly suspect that Airtable, fast becoming the daddy of the no/low code universe, will continue to develop to fill the gap in the market left by ifttt's strange move. (Airtable automations, although not its other apps, are available on free accounts).

Another strong competitor is Zapier which is as functional and intuitive as Integromat, but also has limits on the number of integrations/operations allowed by free account holders: five, in Zapier's case. I've used it to link to Tumblr and Evernote processes, but that's about it. dvlr.it is also worth a mention, but not much more.

There's something of a "wild west" feeling to the competition that exists between providers of integration services at the moment, and it's going to be interesting to see the direction things take. I'm a strong believer in Airtable, myself, since it's repositioning itself as a whole "develop your own software" platform, of which app integration is only one small part, and it's already doing that as well if not better than the likes of Zapier et al. Interesting times.

Related posts

Bidirectional Note Taking

How to Put Things in Your Brain

How to Do Things

My Plant Database

Work, Monotony and Happiness

Bidirectional Note Taking

2020-10-13T13:36:00.002+00:00

In nature there are no boxes. More specifically, and also more metaphorically; in your brain, there are no boxes, either. Nothing you can think, or ever could, is unrelated to anything else you ever thought, or will. So while outside of your brain, you may have something you need to take note of, there'll always be the question of where to keep that note for future reference, inside your brain no such problem exists. The note doesn't go into a box, it becomes part of the web. (The web that is your brain; the brain that is your you).

One of the petty frustrations that pervades my working life is a total lack of organisation viz. the way information is processed and stored. I'm sure this isn't unique to my employer, and is probably commonplace. Wherever any kind of filing system is used (and particularly when that system collaborative, not just personal) unless the conventions by which what information goes into what file are clearly, objectively defined, the whole thing becomes an unnavigable labyrinth almost immediately.

In the simplest terms, imagine you send me an important picture, and ask me to file it away for future reference:

Imagine I have a file structure on my network that looks like this:

C:/Main

/Cats

/Animals

/Pictures

/Animal pictures

/Things that are cute

/Email attachments

Where do I file this important picture? It could go in any one of these subfolders. So how to decide which one? There is no answer to this question. So I just have to pick one. Looking for the file, two months later, you could just run a search of C:/ - but by now the drive is bloated and improperly formatted, with no indexing or defragmentation procedures, so the search takes forever, which you do not have. And all you need is that picture of a kitten someone else sent someone else two months ago. You need it now for the important meeting, because it's an important picture that's relevant to this important meeting. Nothing is in C:/Main except the subfolders themselves. So you look in /Pictures. Thousands of pictures, but not the one you're looking for. Ah - there's a subfolder for "animal pictures"...but it's not there either. That folder is totally empty for some reason. Somebody created it at some point, but it's not clear who, or when.

So maybe it's in /Things that are cute. But you haven't been given access rights to this folder, so you no way of knowing. Unlikely to be there anyway, since you don't find kittens cute. You find them disgusting. But the file is nowhere else to be found, so you go the meeting unprepared. Pointless stress pervades your afternoon.

Why is this experience so commonplace, and why is it so annoying? I don't think it's only because it is commonplace that it's annoying, though that's a factor. A deeper aspect of the problem is that this isn't how brains work. In your brain there are no boxes. And no arbitrary systems either.

This, as I understand it, is the power and intuitive appeal of bidirectional note taking; a new feature of many a fledgling note-taking app, from Roam, apparently the grandaddy - which already has its own "cult", cf. #roamcult - to the all singing, all dancing Notion to a swath of (sometimes) free imitators and alternatives.

Bidirectional note taking works like this. You make a note, and give it a title. In the course of making that note, you realise you need to refer to an existing note. So you create a link on the fly to that note - as with OneNote's "double bracket" function, for example; if the note already exists, you now have a link to it; and if it doesn't, one is created to a new page - and that's all very nice and useful. With a bidirectional note taking - lacking in the bells and whistles software of the likes of OneNote or Evernote - the new note you have just created/linked to, is cross-referenced back with the note you're taking now. Over time, you spin a web of notes. Which means as you're looking back through them, connections made at the time are immediately to hand, and new connections can be made. It's a very simple step forward in software terms, but a giant leap in terms of allowing your digital information universe cohere with your organic one.

I'm using Relanote - both for work and pleasure - to build my web. It's free and feature-lite, but has everything I need for jotting down quick nuggets of information, and connecting them with the chaos of everything else that's already going on in my mind and life. One lovely feature is the visual "graph" of all the bidrectional connections you've made in your notes, which can be navigated (and filtered, by tag or category) easily, allowing you to jump into the labyrinth at any point and out again.

Day 4 inside my head

I'm a sucker for personal "efficiency" apps anyway, but using Relanote - and internalising the concept of bidirectional note taking in general - has been a stonkingly stimulating experience, one I highly recommend. I think this could be the beginning of something really quite important. Not as important as a kitten, but close.

A Case of the Mondays

Work, Monotony and Happiness

#permaculture - The Wonder of Cardboard

2020-10-12T08:06:00.003+00:00

If you ever have any cardboard to get rid of, you should either A, feed it to your garden or allotment as explained below or B, give it to me to do the same.

I use it on the allotment for two things: making compost, and suppressing weeds. This morning I'd reminded myself to head down there with armfuls of compost for some strategic winter work. Here it is delineating the space between my golden marjoram on one side, and kale and thyme on the other.

Here it is claiming some space for next year's peas:

What happens you see, is as it rains and time passes, the cardboard mulches down into soil, blocking seeds from taking root and weeds from spreading. This is even better if, through the autumn, you dump some fallen leaves on top, and perhaps some comfrey or other green mulch. (This is what no-dig gardening is all about).

These facts are what also makes cardboard a great compost ingredient. As "brown matter" it's an essential ingredient in combination with "green matter" for a healthy and nutritious compost. As winter sets in and I harvest the remaining edible plants of the year, I'm squirrelling away cardboard to mulch in their place. One year feeds the next.

Related posts

Comfrey and Jelly Ears

Hibernation and Allotment Planning

Spring Onion Afterlives
Wild Garlic Experiments

The Art of Pottering
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Winter Weight Loss Warmer

2020-10-11T13:53:00.001+00:00

I've been on a bit of weight loss kick this week (this month, in fact, looking back). The centrepiece is a basic "fat burning soup" I found some years ago in a diet for people who've just had heart surgery, so it's fairly radical. I've adapted it because, A, it's not vegan; and B, I haven't recently had heart surgery. I've just been feeling like I need to lose weight. This was something that happened quite naturally when I went vegan (nearly six years ago now) but for whatever reason (too many crisps, probably) I put it back on again.

Anyway, day four or five, I recall, revolved around eating a lot of steak - but most days are fresh fruit and veg-based. On day one, you eat only fruit; day two, only vegetables; and day three, fruit and vegetables. Easy to do if you're already vegan. And it's all backed up by the soup, whose ingredients are as follows just celery, onions, cabbage, carrots, and tinned tomatoes.

That may not sound very appealing, but it's surprisingly yummy. There's no reason you can't adapt it to suit your own tastes though - I've been adding pinches of my herb salts and various other goodies, like turmeric, the anti-inflammatory wonder-spice and other things as the mood takes me: courgettes, mushrooms, spinach.

It's great slow cooker fodder, too. One claim made by the diet, as memory serves, was that the more of the soup you eat, the more weight you will lose. This was borne out by own experience. So it's handy to have your slow cooker on the go through the day (or night) to keep yourself in a steady supply of hot soup for whenever hunger strikes. And so it serves as a new incarnation of my never-ending soup idea from a few years back. Good ideas coming back around again.

Related posts

Never-Ending Soup

A Soup Made of Scraps

More Fun With Food in Jars

Permanent Clipboard: A very useful Chrome extension

2020-10-11T12:05:00.001+00:00

As part of a re-evaluation of my attitude to various things (more of which later) I'm toying with branching out on this blog to incorporate more topics: one of which is tech-related issues, large and small. Starting with the small.

Permanent Clipboard is a Google Chrome extension that saves you the bother of having to find text you frequently need to copy and paste from other sources by allowing you to save multiple options that can be pasted straight from the context menu. Once you've added the extension (and it works just as well in Edge, as Chrome extensions generally do). I use it for adding headers and footers to my blog posts - since I've been going back through the archive and changing the posts from the last few years to include the various links to my social media accounts and make sure the Adsense settings are as they should be. You can save large chunks of text, and html or other bits of code works just as well. All you need to do then is right-click and select your ready-made option from the new "Paste" menu:

To add some new text to the clipboard, just highlight and right-click again, and select "Copy", and it'll appear in your list from then on. Nice.

Prayer Plant Love

2020-10-11T11:12:00.000+00:00

I've messed with my prayer plant far too much over the last few years, and I've only myself to blame. Plants are patient; I am not. So, while I hoped by now to have a whole family of them, I have only one.

Still, it's a healthy specimen - it wasn't, four months ago, believe you me - and that's due entirely to its own efforts, and to my leaving it alone. That's today's lesson, friends: leave plants alone. Water them when they're dry, using the "finger method" of sticking your index finger into the soil about 2 inches deep and only if feels dry all the way down, adding any more water; look up some information about what sort of light and heat levels they prefer, and position accordingly - and that's it. (Prayer Plands prefer indirect sunlight and ordinary room temperature). Wait for them to really establish themselves before attempting any propagation. They'll thank you for it in the long run.

Related posts

Prayer Plant Curiosities

Prayer Plant Pregnancy

Rescuing #devilsivy Even Though it Was Probably Fine

Rubber and Cheese

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Making #Chutney in the Slow Cooker

2020-09-24T05:53:00.002+00:00

There's a small orchard behind the allotments, which means if you time it right, you can scallywag on over there and help yourself to windfalls. This is exactly what I did on Sunday, returning home with armfuls of apples. Now, I don't really like apples or that much - I'll eat them in a crumble or a pie, and just try and stop me blending them into a green breakfast smoothie, but they're not my favourite fruit. And cooking apples can just bugger off. What I do like, though, is chutney.

I feel like it's very difficult to go wrong when making chutney. You get your ingredients, your vinegar, assorted flavourings, salt and sugar; and you chop and simmer them all together into mush. Then you spoon said mush into sterilised jars, seal, and wait. The thing is, there are no wrong ingredients - or if there are, I haven't found them yet. On this occasion, I fed the following to my slow cooker: apples, fermented carrots, nasturtium seeds, onions, dried sage and brown vinegar. The vinegar is flavoured with salt and sugar (probably the only essential ingredients) along with garlic, mustard seeds, peppercorns, chilli pepper, turmeric, and cinnamon. Four of five hours of simmering, during which time I took a long and luxurious nap, turned the mixture from this...

...to this:

It was at this stage I added more apples, because I still had some, and the mixture was still quite thin. What you want is for almost all the vinegar to be absorbed by the solid ingredients. (I don't know if that's true, but it feels true. I read it in one chutney recipe and have decided it applies to all chutney recipes).

I left it for another few hours, before sterilising my Branston pickle jars, and spooning in the now perfectly goopy chutney splodge.

And there we have it. Not to be disturbed before November. The winter stockpile grows.

Related posts

Breakfast Smoothie Love

Suddenly, Chutney

Nasturtium Pesto