Beyond Selidor

The birds are singing, the evening light is beautiful, and my salad greens, herb, and cucumber seeds are sprouting in the growhouse. It's a lovely start to the weekend.

Today's Friday open thread prompt is courtesy of a suggestion from lirazel: what are some types of food that only taste good when handmade/made on a small scale (as opposed to the industrial scale supermarket version)?

My immediate response was 'what type of food doesn't taste vastly better when made on a small scale by hand?' but then I thought a bit more, and realised there were quite a lot of foodstuffs where the difference is non-existent (homemade chips where you chop up a potato and roast it in the oven or deep fry it are no more delicious than the fast-food equivalent), or where the effort involved to make it by hand far exceeds any reward in better flavour (condiments in particular: I'm not going to make my own soy sauce, harissa, dijon mustard, etc, you know?).

However, I'd say that beyond the 'too much effort required' category, in my experience most other types of food are better if they're made on a smaller scale. The biggest one for me is baked goods. There is no bread, cake, pie, biscuit, or pastry on Earth in which the mass-produced supermarket (or otherwise industrial-scale) version tastes better than, or even remotely equally good as, the homemade or expensive artisanal bakery version. (I admit to some significant bias here. I worked part-time from the age of 15-23 — the first years of my working life — in artisanal bakeries/patisseries, the first thing I look up in every place I visit is the most highly recommended bakeries/patisseries, and I'm just in general a massive baked goods snob, which is somewhat hilarious in that I'm a very good cook, and comically, catastrophically bad at baking.)

What are your equivalent foodstuffs, if any?

I had to catch the bus home after work on Tuesday, instead of my regular train, but this longer, more frustrating journey was made somewhat enjoyable by the conversation two teenage boys were having behind me. They began the trip updating their respective mothers over the phone that they were going to be late home (with many repeated 'love you Mum! Yeah, love you Mum!' and so on), then pivoted to the epic online sleuthing they had undertaken when one of their friends claimed to have a new girlfriend but only provided photographic evidence of this ('It was so easy! All I had to do was reverse image-search the photo and it was obvious he'd just taken photos of a random girl on Instagram and Pinterest!'), then pivoted to the sort of inane philosophising that teenagers think is deep ('Religion is obviously just a tool for social control ... all wars in history were started because of religion — apart from economic wars'), and finally, having exhausted all other lines of conversation, started talking about how much they loved cheese and just naming different types of cheese ('Halloumi!' 'Gouda!' 'Do you know you can make your own mozzarella?' and so on).

I found the whole thing kind of endearing, and it certainly provided entertainment over the course of the 50-minute bus ride.

I never use headphones in public spaces as I like to stay alert, so I have overheard the most ridiculous things over the years, including:

A woman updating one of her friends about a family member who had just been released from prison

A guy spending the entire hour-long train ride from Cambridge to London instructing his letting agent on how to make a legal case for evicting a tenant from his property

A guy spending the entire Cambridge-London train ride talking through various complex financial market trades he was making

A young guy explaining to his girlfriend (I was sitting across from them on one of those sets of four seats around a table) that his afternoon had involved a) stealing a car, b) being chased by police as he attempted to steal said car, c) crashing the car in the police car chase and getting injured, d) the police attempting to take him to the emergency department at the hospital but refusing to go ('The car owner decided not to press charges, so I said to the police that if they weren't arresting me I didn't want to go with them to hospital') — all at absolute top volume such that the entire crowded carriage could hear every single word

I have also overheard so many specialist doctors call up their colleagues and convey huge amounts of sensitive patient information over the phone, in the reception area of our library, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a person sitting at a reception desk is actually a human being with functioning ears.

I find it absolutely excruciating to talk over the phone in public — anything more than arranging meeting times/places or letting someone know I'm running late and I'll basically immediately tell the person that I'll call them back when I'm at home — so it's always mind-boggling to me the amount of highly personal stuff that some people feel comfortable discussing at top volume in crowded public transport.

So, my question for this week's open thread: what is the strangest thing you've ever overheard on public transport?

I wasn't sure how to title this week's open thread, but hopefully it will become clear what I'm asking.

Today's prompt is inspired by an article I read in my hometown's local newspaper, looking into the history behind Australia's adoption of decimal currency, which happened 60 years ago. They interviewed a woman who works at Australia's national mint (Canberra being Canberra, I — like virtually every Canberran school child — went on a school trip to the mint at some point, and it's also located on the same street as a) the pool where I learnt to swim, b) the location of my gymnastics club (although this moved to another venue two years after I started gymnastics classes), and c) the place where I did first aid training when I was working in child care), and the whole thing is a great snapshot of a moment of fundamental change in the way Australians lived their day-to-day lives.

Similar changes I can think of include Sweden shifting to driving on the right-hand side of the road, Samoa shifting into a different time zone in 2011, various countries changing to the Gregorian calendar, or massive political shifts such as a country gaining independence or having its borders redrawn (e.g. German reunification, the breakup of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, etc), or becoming part of the EU or similar international groupings.

So my question is: are there any similar fundamental changes that took place in your country? Were they within your own lifetime?

I am absolutely flattened by work this week, and next week promises to be more of the same. It's the point in the academic year when all the Master's and PhD students have to hand in literature reviews and project proposals, and all of them suddenly panic and realise that the classes I taught them (carefully timetabled to coincide with the point at which they were meant to start work on their literature reviews and project proposals) actually contained crucial, useful information and they probably should have been paying more attention and doing the suggested follow-up activities while what I taught them was fresh in their minds. Because they haven't done this, they all, of course, contact me at once, now. It's good to be needed — I wouldn't have a job, otherwise — but I wish they didn't all need me so much and all at the same time.

Anyway, let's use another snowflake_challenge prompt for the Friday open thread: Talk about your creative process.

I know a lot of you have already answered this in your own journals, so feel free to link to your posts in the comments rather than writing things out again. Or, answer in the comments if this is a brand new topic for you!

( My answer )




What about you?

It's the first Friday open thread of 2026. In customary fashion, I'm going to use the following prompt, which I feel is the right question with which to start a new year:

What are you planning to leave behind in 2025, and what are you planning to pick up and/or carry forward into 2026?

( My answer )

On that rather fraught note, what about all of you? Do you have anything you want to leave behind, or carry with you?

This is my second time taking a December talking meme prompt and using it for a Friday open thread. Today's prompt comes from thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.

( They looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky )

I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?

December is generally a quietish month for me, and it will be even more so this year as I'm not doing any travelling over Christmas. For this reason, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to do another iteration of the December talking meme.

For those who don't know, the December talking meme involves writing posts (theoretically one per day, although in practice it tends to be less) in response to specific prompts.

That's where you come in! Please suggest topics for me to write about, and I'll assign them to a day in the list behind the cut. I'll use some of them as prompts for the remaining Fridays of the year, as well.

( Available dates )

Please do also do this meme in your own journals if you have the time and interest!

Today's post is low-effort on my part, but hopefully produces some fun things in the comments.

The prompt is: share something wonderful that you've recently found online.

My link, gathered, magpie-like during my wanderings, is this latest video from wisdm. I did test it to check it would display even when not logged in to Instagram, but Instagram links can go a bit funny, so please let me know if you run into issues.

I won't say anything further, except to say that Wisdom Kaye's is one of my favourite accounts on Instagram, and this linked post is (Halloween) seasonally appropriate, and amazing.

Edited to add this excellent new song by Rue Oberkampf.

Good afternoon from my cosy living room, where the sky is grey, the leaves on the trees outside are yellow, the air is still, and I have a steaming cup of tea in my hand.

Today's prompt is brought to you due to the fact I'm attending a ceramics taster class tomorrow: three hours in a pottery studio, learning the basics, to see if I want to attend more classes in the future. This was one of my goals for the year — to do more concrete things outside my house, with other people, that involved creating something with my hands, and I'm glad to have made it happen at last.

Due to this context, my prompt is as follows: what is a long-term goal you've held that you've recently fulfilled? It can be as small-scale as mine (trying a new hobby), or as large-scale and ambitious as you'd like.

I'm a morning person. I have been all my life, to the extent that universalising statements such as 'all teenagers have body clocks that mean they need to sleep in and start school much later in the day,' have been causing me to roll my eyes since back when I was a teenager. In those days, I was getting up at 6 in the morning to do an hour's piano practice, or go to gymnastics classes or piano lessons before school, and that sort of thing! When I was an undergraduate, I used to get up at similarly early hours of the morning, and work a bit on my essays or presentations or Honours thesis before class; on days when I had no lectures or tutorials to attend, I'd stay at home, work on university work and read the books my editor had sent me to review and write the requisite review, and quite frequently finish up everything before lunchtime, after which point I would spend the afternoon lounging on the couch reading novels. Working from home during the pandemic suited me perfectly, because as long as I was around for scheduled meetings and online teaching, my workplace trusted me to manage my own time, so I'd frequently start work around 7am and finish in the early afternoon. I have literally never slept in later than about 8.30am in my entire life — my body doesn't let me.

The drawback to all this is that my energy decreases alarmingly each hour after lunch, and by the time I've got to about 3 or 4pm I'm basically useless. Since I work regular 9-5ish hours, I tend to store up brainless tasks for the last couple of hours of the day, and I've never been able to do much that requires any intellectual effort in the evening. All-nighters — that staple of teenage and university life — are incomprehensible to me, and I'm in awe of people who are able to produce meaningful work in such circumstances.

My prompt today is very much in light of all of the above: are you an early bird or a night owl — or do you switch between both states? Have you always been this way, or did things change at a certain point? How well does this all mesh with your lifestyle?