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wychwood: John and Rodney making identical hand gestures (have fun!) (SGA - McShep clicky fingers)
[personal profile] wychwood
I have indeed played lots of ME:A (up to 34% completion, apparently). Also done many other things but all while lacking any desire to put any effort into documenting them! However, I have visited the Stourbridge Glass Museum with Miss H last Thursday, which felt more art-gallery-ish than really museum-y to me, but did have some lovely glass things. There's a big historic gallery, which has lots of... glasses and vases and things, mostly in categories by technique and with plaques that talk about the local connections and the like, and a big 20th century and contemporary gallery with lots of cool and fun modern art glass, with some glasses and vases and the like as well. They also have a "hot shop" with actual glassmakers working, which was my favourite part. I bought a ladybird suncatcher which is hanging on my window and looking very cheerful even behind the slatted blind.

Then on the Saturday we went to Thinktank, the science museum, to see the Space Vault exhibition and also TWO shows in the planetarium because we are suckers for a planetarium. Unlike the Leicester Space Centre we did not get to vote on any trivia questions, but we did learn about summer stars and also the Artemis project. The exhibition itself was full of space-and-astronaut objects that mostly weren't actually very exciting (a piece of broken insulation! a manual! some gloves!) but they did a good job of contextualising the artefacts and adding audio and visual components (although the audio was frankly not loud enough to actually listen to, given the volume in the rest of the floor) and I enjoyed myself. Although, as with last time I went to Thinktank, it was obscenely hot and humid, so I started dragging fairly quickly; possibly I am cursed.

Otherwise I have mostly been preparing for GRADUATIONS, mostly the part where I have to be on campus every day. I made what eventually turned out to be twelve portions of pasta bake, now largely filling my freezer, to be eaten for lunches etc, and attempted to mentally adjust to the prospect. Today was the first day, and so far I have done one ceremony (the first of the season!); I'm signed up for a second already, so we'll see how it goes...
purplecat: The Tardis against a sunset (or possibly sunrise) (Doctor Who)
[personal profile] purplecat
Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.


Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.

Polccoyo Mountains

7 July 2025 18:24
purplecat: The family on top of Pen Y Fan (General:Walking)
[personal profile] purplecat
Because of all the mix-ups with permits and so on, we were offered an additional "free" activity. We picked a trip to the Polccoyo rainbow mountain area. It turned out that there are two rainbow mountains in Peru of which Vinicunca is the more spectacular, touristy, and better known. Different mineral compositions in the soil - particularly copper - cause the geological layers exposed in rainbow mountains to reveal stripes of bright colours. Our guide for the day, Olmer, was obviously from the Polccoyo area and felt very passionately about it. He explained that it was being opened up to tourists in a bid to stave off a proposed investment from a Canadian mining company who wanted to establish a copper mine in the area.

It was beautiful and remote and while there were two or three parties of tourists, it was easy to feel alone in the landscape. B. and I were a bit dubious that it could both retain its character and generate enough income to hold off the allure of mining company big bucks.

Photos )

The road up to Palccoyo went along multiple switch-backs from tarmac to dirt track, and past alfalfa farmers on the lower slopes (the alfalfa feeds the guinea pigs which are a local speciality - if you are interested they taste a bit like duck) to alpaca farmers on the higher slopes (alpaca is genuinely nice meat, quite lamby but more restrained). On the way back down I tried to photograph alpaca from the taxi resulting in a lot of blurry photos of alpaca of which these are the best.

Photos from the taxi )

This week...

6 July 2025 20:20
zero_pixel_count: a sleeping woman, a highway stretching out, mountains (Default)
[personal profile] zero_pixel_count
We had a garden party (ok not very garden) for the spouse's birthday. I made an appropriate amount of food. Including something I developed by reading a handful of coronation chicken recipes and ignoring them all because they sounded disgusting (this is partly because I don't even like coronation chicken) which I kind of want to call see-you-on-the-road-to-Küssnacht chicken but may settle for fuck-your-fancy-hat chicken as requiring somewhat less explanation.

Friday's AO3 problem turns out to have been a 'key got too large for the field holding it' thing, which reminds me that one of my databases at work is heading towards that problem, the trick is going to be remembering that on Monday when I'm actually working.

Also I uh. Broken the new laptop they sent me. Ooops.

Generally, everything continues to be Too Much.

Random Doctor Who Picture

5 July 2025 08:42
purplecat: The Sixth Doctor (Who:Six)
[personal profile] purplecat

Book cover for Doctor Who The Shadow in the Glass by Justing Richards and Stephen Cole.  A blue cover with the faces of the sixth Doctor and Hitler behind a transparent globe.  Blue streaks emanate out from the globe.

I've no memory of reading this at all. The back makes it sound both interesting and memorable - a retired brigadier stumbling upon shenanigans from WW2 recruiting the sixth Doctor for help. Richards and Cole are both solid Doctor Who authors who I rate but none of it stirs a memory.