Beyond Selidor

Friday open threads are back for now, and this week's one is inspired by a great Shetland fanfic I read recently. It's wonderful for many, many reasons, but one thing that I particularly enjoyed was its incredible specificity of place: having been to Shetland myself, it was like walking around Lerwick again. The crowning glory: it even managed to work in a reference to a specific waterfront cafe which (in my opinion) has the best coffee in town.

( Link to the fic behind the cut if you want to read it )

So, here is this week's prompt: what is your favourite tiny real-world detail in a work of fiction (original or transformative) that makes it clear the author has genuine experience of the place being depicted?

This week's prompt is brought to you by a convoluted game of telephone (misshoijer told lauropea, who told Matthias, who told me) through which I discovered this morning that one of the alumni from my MPhil and PhD programmes (he was doing his undergrad degree in the same department at the time; the department was so small that postgrads and undergrads all hung out together) has subsequently gone on to become a comedian and actor, with his current major role apparently being to do impressions of Keir Starmer on the UK version of Saturday Night Live. Matthias and I were so flabbergasted by this, as we had no idea that he was involved in the student theatre scene at all during his time in our degree programmes, so although he's apparently been part of the UK comedy circuit for many years, the whole thing was brand new information to us.

So the prompt is as follows: are there any people from your university (or school) social circles who ended up in surprising or unexpected lines of work? If so, what?

Obviously if you're going to post about real people's identities, it's probably best to limit this to genuine public figures — hopefully you're able to use your own judgement about this.

( More answers here )

What about you?

This week's prompt was sparked by an interesting conversation with hamsterwoman in the comments to a previous post, in which we were discussing the extent to which we felt our childhood environments influenced our interest (or lack thereof) in playing board games as adults. And so:

Did you grow up regularly playing board games (either with your family, or in other contexts)? Do you feel that this affected the prominence (or lack of prominence) of board games in your later life?

( My answer )

What about all of you?

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!