And again, that thing I don't do

In my dream, we were walking through an unknown city to a known destination, when a Chinese temple float came by us. The novelist Kari Sperring (la_marquise_de_ on LJ) had a brief conversation with a couple of women as they passed, in a Mandarin I could recognise but not follow (she does this also in real life); and she told me that time to the Chinese mind was pulled out of shape by delay, whereas money was always sixteen seventeenths: sixteen in, seventeen out. Money, we agreed, was easier to understand than time.

And then, as we walked on, I realised that this way of thinking about time was exactly what I needed to map onto an alien mind for an SF story I was writing.

And then I wondered if it was appropriation, to take a dream-Chinese concept and use it in a story that didn't actually exist: which was how I knew that I was waking up, even before I heard the sound of Mac under the bed trying to hork up a hairball.

In the same dream, te le - "with knives" - was a suit of handmade downloadable armour up for auction, with such a high potential value that you had to pay (in uploadable tokens) simply for the right to view it.

I can haz Englishness?

I have no idea why, but today has been all about tea and buttered toast. I have drunk at least three pots of tea, and maybe four; I have eaten toast and pate twice, toast and fig jam twice. I may have stopped now, but only because there is no more bread. It's very strange.

To be sure, I had good bread for toasting, excellent butter, fine pate, fine jam and a remarkable tea (Silver Needles white tea, since you ask: it's a costly leaf, but each pinch will make several pots in succession, so); and to be sure I am reading O'Brian and you can't get much more English than Jack Aubrey. Nevertheless. I am a little baffled, and very full of tea and toast. Yo ho, Sebastian. Let's go far away.