December Days 02024 #31: Community: People Who Cook and Bake Things

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

It's the last one for December Days, and it's been a good trip throughout the month. And I'm glad the randomizer left this one for the last, because this is a note to end on that's about accomplishment, confidence, and having to admit to myself that I might know what I'm doing in some of these situations.

( What do you cook and bake? )

I would have liked to have picked up this knowledge earlier on in life, looking back on it now, but I'm not sure that the person I was at the appropriate age would have been sufficiently interested in learning how to do cooking for any of it to stick. (Or, like so many other things that I tried not to learn in my childhood, it would have stuck perfectly in my head and resurfaced when there was a need for that knowledge many decades down the line.) Thankfully, there's no lost opportunity or other such things, and I can continue to keep collecting knowledge and practicing my skills even at my middle age without worry that I have somehow missed the boat on learning and mastering the skills that are relevant to the question. It's one of the skills that the youngest can learn as soon as they can see the pans and move them without hurting themselves or dropping everything in the interim. This society is not as much like the Roman one, which seems to have thought of eating out, or grabbing something from the corner store, as the regular way of doing things, rather than staying inside their own houses and cooking the food for eating. (Admittedly, it would be interesting to have a personal chef, only because that chef would probably spend an awful lot of time widening my palate and introducing me to food that I would never have considered for myself, much less eaten and enjoyed.) I'm also glad to have a person that's willing to teach, and that I get the opportunity to participate in the cooking and the baking, and to eat my own work, when I have put it into practice. Learned helplessness on this is not something that I want, nor to encourage in others.

And that's it! Another thirty-one subjects covered, loosely wrapped around a theme. I hope that it's been interesting reading, at least, even if the subjects haven't always been appealing or interesting to you. They'll start the Snowflake Challenge tomorrow, likely with the housekeeping challenge to make sure that everything is in order for the rest of the month. (And if you've enjoyed the Snowflake Challenge, they've been in need of people to help leave comments and develop later instances. I thought about joining up this year, and ultimately decided against it, because I wasn't sure what my schedule would have been like at the time, as well as trying to figure out what a different commitment of mine was going to require of me, but if it stays consistent, then perhaps next year I can be more involved in that item as well, or possibly see if we can get the sunshine variant back up and running around the June/July frame.

We've cleared out another year's worth of material - Last of December 02024

Good morning. Let's begin with a story of finding a book which contains a story you remembered strongly, the librarian who found it, and eventually, the relative of the author who confirmed the story and had documents to show about it. What I find interesting about this is that the librarian who manages to bring this story to fruitful conclusion does what all librarians do when someone is trying to remember a book or a story they once had - through professional training, they can sometimes tell which parts of the remembering are more solid and which ones aren't, and when they need to introduce a certain amount of fuzziness into what's being sought, and sometimes they just happen to know that a thing is the one and not the other. Still, happy times to everyone for finding a story that had eluded for decades.

We put this next to an exhibition of imaginary books in New York, which admittedly, is objects as they might be envisioned, or as they were described in other books, and is not the defictionalization of those materials. Not really. But it's a good gag.

Substack is not a platform to support, with their monetary support of known -ists and their defense of why they are platforming those people should sound extremely familiar to anyone who runs into librarians that believe in keeping things on the shelves because of their free speech value and a decision that what the person wants to read is their choice and not anyone else's.

Spotify also has significant problems in relation to paying their artists, but they've begun including in their playlists works created specifically to be used as background music that are farmed out to companies tryng to make music that sounds exactly like itself, rather than including other artists or curating their playlists, because they figure that if you're listening to music as background noise, you'd rather have something generic than specific.

( There's not much here, but what is here is good. )

Last for this year, A broken piano, an accomplished musician, a late-night session, and what would be an exceptional album. Here's hoping that you have an excellent year next year, one better than what this one was by at least a factor of two.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)