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[jblsmith]

Blackberries covered in cobwebs and frost

[jblsmith]

"Have a good day"! Frosty but pretty indeed.

[jblsmith]

Printworks ceiling giving strong Windows Screensaver vibes

[jblsmith]

My two favourite pics from a trip to Battersea Power Station the weekend it opened to the public as a shopping mall. It's a gorgeous space to behold, although it has an unusual dearth of staircases for a mall.

[jblsmith]

One lesson I've learned from my husband: use more butter.

[jblsmith]

A Picassoesque selection of treats at Fortnum & Mason's afternoon tea. Looked fantastic, but most of these were not delicious! The rose eclair tasted of artificial rose; the white O was an unnuanced mouthful of white chocolate. The tart behind was yummy, but I can't even remember the flavour; it didn't have much.

[jblsmith]

Since the decline of bird site, I've been re-evaluating my media diet. I consume a lot of content out of habit; well, we all do — consumption is habit-forming!

For me, chief among the habits encouraged by social media is media consumption itself (i.e., the opposite of media creation), since when I turn on the fire hose and witness the grand melee of hot takes and take downs, I find I am entertained but also discouraged from participating.

So I'm reactivating my Tumblr. Posting here was always fun and never felt like time ill-spent.

[jblsmith]

Back in Japan, briefly. Glimpsed the Skytree Tower through the haze on the bus. The highly zoomed-in digital photo, manually filtered by the misty bus window, gave a nice flattening effect to the buildings around the Skytree.

[jblsmith]

Belated post of a wonderful birthday gift I received earlier this year: a cornucopia of Japanese snacks!

[jblsmith]

Snickers Crisp is a definite winner among Snickers variants, with crisped rice replacing about half the peanuts. I don’t know why it’s been packaged as 3 mini bars though... It might be shrinkflation, but does this really apply if it’s a variant product? A likelier explanation is that, since the caramel-bound crisped rice results in a much stickier and chewier Snickers than usual, they agreed that bite-sized pieces were preferable to a long bar that would always have tendrils of taffy tracing a ghostly trail from the bar to the biting mouth.

[jblsmith]

The Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham.

[jblsmith]

Serendipitous still life in a planter near Pasley Park: decomposing half-eaten apple and broken flowering tree branch.

[jblsmith]

This bottled iced tea cost about £3 and promised a subtle blend of green tea, yuzu and bitter orange flavours, but the result tasted like nothing more than Lipton’s Iced Tea.

It reminds me of the idea that “molecular gastronomy”—as fancy as it sounds—is just non-mass-produced junk food, the argument being, what distinguishes an extruded morsel of polenta, flash fried and dusted with evaporated cheese powder, from a Cheeto?

Or perhaps the main problem is just what I’ve complained about restlessly since leaving Japan: iced tea shouldn’t be sweet but it always is.

[jblsmith]

Above: a nice shadow at the Tower of London. Below: two stanchions and a wall of variegated brick.

All my other pictures from the Tower are just pictures of exhibited content, and inevitably they are uninteresting as photos.

[jblsmith]

View of three buses, from a fourth.

[jblsmith]

A double scoop of classic flavours from Chin Chin in Soho (Burnt Butter Caramel atop Coffee & Olive Oil) in a cone lined with torched marshmallow. Chin Chin use a flash-freezing process powered by liquid nitrogen, which results in a silky-smooth ice cream. It’s delicious! But this highly Instagrammable, jealousy-inducing, marshmallow-lined cone is not the way the enjoy it. The scoops were dripping down my hand within seconds of taking this photo; I had just enough time to get a plate and allow it to gracefully collapse. It was a hot day, but surely the torched marshmallow contributed to the speedy melting!

[jblsmith]

Persimmon flavour Hi-Chew. Absolutely delicious! Taste quite like apricots in this form.