Intergalactic Summit

Not a problem, captain. Just let me know when your schedule permits. I'm on a business trip at present, and my sister tells me that the Frenzy is getting into its early days with somewhat of a bang - a metre of snow in one night fell on Coldhammer a week ago and was then blown up into great rolling drifts at the foot of the mountains. It'll be gone again in a week.



I grew up in extreme weather. Octanneve V has a long orbit (just over 14 earth standard years) and the seasons are immense in grandeur and scale. We're just entering what many planets call the autumn, rendering or fall. We call it the Frenzy, because the thirty odd months it lasts are characterised by astonishing winds, rapid changes of temperature and booming thunderstorms, often with crushing hail and sheet lightning. One day can be brilliant cool sunshine with skies clearer than it's possible to imagine. The next, hell opens up it's maw and threatens to overwhelm you. It's completely exhilarating and I can recommend a visit if you want to see real weather.

Of course, this means the harvest really needs to be in by the onset, so the last months of summer are tiresomely hard work. Thus the Frenzy is traditionally a time for relaxation and family, especially for our Minmatar employees, and we hold a long series of festivals. Hammerfest is our continent-wide celebration centred on Coldhammer, but most villages have their own rituals from home. Serenity (the long season most call winter) is when the work of the Estates turns to fishing and sea-craft as it's much too cold for agriculture (most of the plains are under snow) and the produce of summer is bottled or preserved and readied for export. As the name suggests, its a very quiet, peaceful time of blue ice and profound silence, as the weather settles into a temperature equilibrium.

To those born and raised there, weather seems very spiritual. The Minmatar understand it so much better, and it is a wonderment to listen to their tales of the spirits and legends, especially warm and safe in the pungent dark, the faces of friends lit only by a family hearth fire, with the outside walls being rattled by the raging winds and the echoing cannon-fire of thunder among the black, looming peaks.

Maybe my palate is limited by my dependence on soju and surplus Navy rations, but I can't fathom how an entire race convinced themselves that snails are anything but desperation food.

Nonsense. They are delicious and we eat vast quantities of them.

The amusement derived from tourists is largely from watching them try to use snail tongs and taking bets on how far the unfortunate snail will get accidentally pinged.

Only a savage would eat a mollusc as slimey and disgusting as a snail on purpose, specially when better food sources available. Then again, Gallente culinary has always been strange and alien to more practical minds.

It is absolutely revolting.

Finding mutual common grounds of understanding, even between mortal enemies, is only natural. I'm not so blinded by rage to ignore this fact, and neither should you.

I was told to suck on the snails.

I responded by slowly pushing the snails away from me with a fork.

Claudia, I do not use ounces or inches or any of the 'Imperial Units'. Please convert to grams.

Doesn't suit my palate.

Still won't put it in my mouth.

I tasted it once. The texture is revolting. I won't put it in my mouth again.

Once someone tried to feed me a burger.

With snails in it.

Very well-hidden snails.

We aren't friends anymore.

... I guess I don't have all that much to say to visceral revulsion.

Maybe it's better to stick with:

* slices of dead animal

* microorganism byproducts, liquid or solid

* ground, otherwise undesired bits of dead animal in a sheath of intestine

* poultry ovulations

* cow lactation

* rotted cow lactation, liquid, solid, or semisolid

* water that something has drunk before at least once

... as those are all much more normal and not disturbing at all.


Edit:

Concentrated microorganism byproducts often go really well on shredded vegetable matter. With a little oil.


Further edit:

My home region's kind of deeply into pickling things, sometimes with ground-up sea creatures as an ingredient....


Still further edit:

I'm sorry-- I shouldn't carry on so. It just seems that "revolting" is most often just what we're not used to, and so many things people are used to in Amarr or elsewhere, it seems like someone must have first tried because they were starving to death. Who ever thought cheese was a good idea?

Anyhow-- it's not like I love everything I try or anything, but there's so much universe out there. Not to explore it just seems ... really sad.