Had it about an hour ago: a sort of one-pot pasta and lentil stew thingy, made in our slow cooker. I wouldn’t call it it a particular favourite of mine, but it has the advantage of being dead easy and surprisingly substantial.

Thanks for the update and for the work in building the new instance!

I’ll be keeping my eyes open for further news.

Jona Lewie - Stop The Cavalry. Apparently not originally intended as a Christmas song anyway.

That good eh?

Hopefully the weekend will improve things.

I’m going through Robert Brightwell’s Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier’s Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist’s uncle.

They are very well researched (as were GMF’s) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison’s War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman’s Waterloo, which shouldn’t have that problem.

I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy’s-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.

Working from home today - or supposed to be. I finished a couple of Big Things at the end of last week and am really struggling to get stuck into any one of the dozen other things that are on my list now.

I’ve deleted a lot of photos and sorted the recycling though. I’ll be sharpening pencils soon…

I did get out and do a bat monitoring session last night - part of the national waterway survey in August each year - without getting wet. There were a few pipistrelles about and a couple of noctules and serotines passing by, but no Daubenton’s which is what this particular survey is looking for.

Today will be getting the chores out of the way then - if the rain shows any chance of dying down - out to an open air Shakespeare this evening. It will be ‘Exit pursued by a very damp bear.’ I expect.

Tomorrow: third attempt to get these shelves up. It has been postponed twice so far.

Sounds blissful to me. I can’t recall the last time I had a complete weekend reading.

They always say that you should stack up everything that you think you’ll need and then put half of it back in the wardrobe. The problem is working out which half, of course.

Hope it all goes well anyway and that you have a good time.

You say that you found out that lemmy.world had disabled downvotes. Where did you you find that out? I’d certainly seen nothing myself here - I know that some instances have - and can certainly see and use the downvote arrows.

I’m on lemmy.world. This thread is on lemmy.world I have just downvoted you successfully as far as I can see.

Another week to recover - yes, I often feel the same!

The play is A Winter’s Tale so a bit odd for the time of year, but the weather might be fitting…

Hope that you get through the day OK one way or another.

I have seen them, but a while ago, whilst binging through all of the show to S11, which was airing at the time. I’d say, yes - go and watch them, but I don’t recall them as particularly stand-out from the rest of the show.

Too early to say yet. The best part of the show is the Empire arc, IMHO. If you don’t care for that in S1, I doubt that there is anything tp grab you so far in S2. Personally, I think that it has some interesting ideas and some good character beats. The rest is merely OK.

Right now Strange New Worlds which has been extremely good this season following the merely OK first episode; Foundation which seems to have improved the weakest arc - the actual Foundation arc - from the first season; and Futurama which, on the evidence of the first episode, I can best characterise as being ‘back’.

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Rosetta Stone …or Shibboleth???

The issue with being poor is that you don’t get to save a lot - if any - whilst you are paying for rent and the basics. That is a large part of the reason that the housing co-op that I mentioned has housed so few after so long.

Yes, in the right conditions it will work, but there are a lot of situations that don’t leave people with access to those conditions.

My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren’t many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.