armadillodarling

[armadillodarling]

[armadillodarling]

The haunting ancient Celtic carnyx being played for an audience. This is the sound Roman soldiers would have heard their Celtic enemies make.

[armadillodarling]

I don’t know how to describe it but this is exactly what paleontologists are supposed to look like

[armadillodarling]

My mom kept complaining that all of a sudden the Beatles are back and they're fucking everywhere and they're so obnoxious and were practically having an orgy in her garden under a cucumber leaf and that's when I realized she meant spotted cucumber beetles and not Paul McCartney

[armadillodarling]

can you guys watch my normal dog for a second I have to run to the bathroom

[armadillodarling]

When you are used to the no-nonsense, no-context approach of medieval Irish stories, trying to read Old Norse saga literature does feel kind of like you're being told a medieval story by Uncle Colm from Derry Girls.

[armadillodarling]

[armadillodarling]

That's a big boy right here. Vent post I did a while ago, finally felt the courage to post it I hope it'll reach the people who needed to read this.

[armadillodarling]

Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....

[armadillodarling]

[armadillodarling]

Anyone got that poem written from the perspective of an English teacher where they know deeply personal things about their now adult students because of the essays they wrote

[armadillodarling]

One of my favorite stories to tell about myself from when I was a kid is the story how my grandma’s “Catching Fairies” game was banned because of me

So when I was really little my grandma had this game she made up, she’d give me and all my cousins jars and containers and tell us that in her garden there were fairies but they were smart and tricky so they disguised themselves as caterpillars and butterflies and as grasshoppers and worms.

Whoever caught the most ‘Fairies’ won but we had to set them all free because they tended to the garden

One summer day my brothers were at the age they were dreading ‘girly’ stuff so I was playing alone

At this point I had met all the fairies in the garden and I was getting bored without any competition and with finding the same old fairies

But then just as I was begrudgingly heading back to my grandma with the same fairies as usual I found a new fairy!

I thought she was so beautiful! She was resting on the sparkly thread in the leaves and her black body gleamed in the sunlight, she had long legs and a cool red spot on her back

Excited I coaxed her onto my hand and was so giddy I found a new one! I rushed back to the farm house to show my Grandma and Dad, gently carrying my new friend.

But when my Dad and Grandma turned around to see what fairy I caught I saw the color drain from their faces and both of them freeze, I could tell something was wrong but didn’t understand

My dad congratulated me and asked me if he could see the pretty fairy, I let him but felt a little nervous seeing how terrified he looked as she moved into his hands from mine.

Slowly he walked back towards the door, my grandma clutching my shoulders then my dad LAUNCHED the fairy back into the garden which I thought was rather rude

Then we had a nice long talk about Black Widow spiders

[armadillodarling]

Okay, another little lesson for fic writers since I see it come up sometimes in fics: wine in restaurants.

When you buy a bottle of wine in a (nicer) restaurant, generally (please note my emphasis there, this is a generalization for most restaurants, but not all restaurants, especially non-US ones) you may see a waiter do a few things when they bring you the bottle.

The waiter presents the bottle to the person who ordered it

The waiter uncorks the bottle in order to serve it

The waiter hands the cork to the person who ordered the bottle

The waiter pours a small portion of the wine (barely a splash) and waits for the person who ordered it to taste it

The waiter then pours glasses for everyone else at the table, and then returns to fill up the initial taster's glass

Now, you might be thinking -- that's all pretty obvious, right? They're bringing you what you ordered, making sure you liked it, and then pouring it for the group. Wrong. It's actually a little bit more complicated than that.

The waiter presents the bottle to the person who ordered it so that they can inspect the label and vintage and make sure it's the bottle they actually ordered off the menu

The waiter uncorks the bottle so that the table can see it was unopened before this moment (i.e., not another wine they poured into an empty bottle) and well-sealed

The waiter hands the cork to the person who ordered the bottle so that they can inspect the label on the cork and determine if it matches up; they can also smell/feel the cork to see if there is any dergradation or mold that might impact the wine itself

The waiter pours a small portion for the person who ordered to taste NOT to see if they liked it -- that's a common misconception. Yes, sometimes when house wine is served by the glass, waiters will pour a portion for people to taste and agree to. But when you order a bottle, the taste isn't for approval -- you've already bought the bottle at this point! You don't get to refuse it if you don't like it. Rather, the tasting is to determine if the wine is "corked", a term that refers to when a wine is contaminated by TCA, a chemical compound that causes a specific taste/flavor. TCA can be caused by mold in corks, and is one of the only reasons you can (generally) refuse a bottle of wine you have already purchased. Most people can taste or smell TCA if they are trained for it; other people might drink the wine for a few minutes before noticing a damp, basement-like smell on the aftertaste. Once you've tasted it, you'll remember it. That first sip is your opportunity to take one for the table and save them from a possibly corked bottle of wine, which is absolutely no fun.

If you've sipped the wine (I generally smell it, I've found it's easier to smell than taste) and determined that it is safe, you then nod to your waiter. The waiter will then pour glasses for everyone else at the table. If the wine is corked, you would refuse the bottle and ask the waiter for a new bottle. If there is no new bottle, you'll either get a refund or they'll ask you to choose another option on their wine list. A good restaurant will understand that corked bottles happen randomly, and will leap at the opportunity to replace it; a bad restaurant or a restaurant with poor training will sometimes try to argue with you about whether or not it's corked. Again, it can be a subtle, subjective taste, so proceed carefully.

In restaurants, this process can happen very quickly! It's elegant and practiced. The waiter will generally uncork the bottle without setting the bottle down or bracing it against themselves. They will remove the cork without breaking it, and they will pour the wine without dripping it down the label or on the table.

[armadillodarling]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?