Lovely bread....
I made the most amazing bread - I've decided to try and do my own baking. So, right now I have a bread that's about half wholemeal spelt, and half wholemeal rye. Apart from that, there's only salt and sourdough, which I made from scratch out of wholemeal rye and water, and a part of which lives in my fridge for the next time.
It's strange, really - for me, this is a step towards healthy living (and it's not as if bakery bread here was bad, compared to what counts as bread in other countries. I read about US bread being sweetened and artificially coloured... poor bread). But the kind of baking I'm doing was perfectly normal here only a few decades ago. Both my parents remember that the villages they grew up in had communal ovens, and if it was your day to bake, you went to the last people who had baked bread and got the sourdough from them. I'm sure that was lovely in times of plague and cholera.
Anyway, it's strange how much of what one tries to do today to protect the environment or to do something for one's health involves going back to the way things were done in the past, while at the same time we do things that no one could ever have imagined. I mean, here I am writing about baking bread in a way that will potentially enable people on the other side of the world to read about it.
A note on the LJ DDoS attacks (which despite all hysteria are not "hacking", and do not appear to endanger people's data): This Time article has some information. And I really wish people would stop talking about "the Russians" and their supposedly being responsible for the whole thing. There is no "the Russians" in this. There's SUP, the Russian site owners, there's the Russian bloggers who are apparently being targeted, there's the Russian government, there's the hackers, there's lots and lots of Russian users on the site, and yes, there's (at least some of) the spambots too. Most of these groups are completely different people, and some of them are deeply opposed to one another.
Some of the comments in News seem to imply that LJ would be a paradise if not for "the Russians". Quite apart from all LJ business consideration those more knowledgeable than I have written about - it seems as if some sections of the English-speaking LJ only need to see Cyrillic letters and conclude that user writing them cannot possibly be a real person who has the same rights to using the site as them. I also find the comments deeply telling that more or less imply that LJ should "put the Russians on their own servers", or that the political bloggers are a nuisance because they keep other people from enjoying their fandom activities. Apparently, LJ should support "freedom of speech" when it comes to writing explicit fanfic, but when it comes to giving people a platform to use express themselves in a place where that is difficult and even dangerous, those rights aren't all that important, because after all those people write funny.
It's xenophobia - and people aren't even realising they're doing it.