Spontaneous ∂erivation

Unless you are crazy (like me), you likely don’t have your very own Zojirushi hot water pot to boil, dechlorinate, and then upkeep the water temperature at specific temperatures necessary for brewing different teas—for instance, brew a green tea in too hot a water, and you get a bitter tea; or brew a herbal tea in less than boiling water, and you get a weak tea.

Sadly, the hot water spout on the coffee machine/water filter in most offices offers at best a bit 200º water—usually a bit above that, enough for herbals, black, and red teas; but it spoils white and green teas most awfully. Silver Needle is supposedly better at weathering too-warm temperatures, but I find that it goes a bit green-bitter at such.

However, there is a method to brew up white and green teas fine in the office without a Zojirushi pot:

1. Put the strainer, tea ball, or tea bag with the Silver Needle leaves into an empty mug. A clear mug works best, though is not necessary, because…

2. … you’ll want to fill the mug one-third of the way with cold water. And then,

3. Fill the mug the rest of the way up with hot water.

The cold water (which should touch the leaves at least partially) helps insulate them from the shock of the hot water coming in; and of course, the cold and hot water become more temperate.

In this manner I was able to brew a Silver Needle cup that showed up a delicate white tea, instead of what I thought of as the missing link between green and white teas. It does seem that Silver Needle holds up better to hotter temperatures, in that it doesn’t become extremely bitter—but it does go green-tea-bitter.

Currently I have on order the most expensive green tea in the Mighty Leaf catalog—Gyokuro, which requires 140º temperatures, and goes bitter pretty easily. I think I might need to resort to the Zojirushi in that case.

Chocolate Mint Truffle Rooibos

Oh my gods, this tea is so good. I’ve never had a better dessert tea. Never. Plus it’s not a caffeine tea (apart from the chocolate), so it’s safe after dinner.

I miss this tea so much, I regret not buying a bag of it.

I also got the Chocolate Truffle Tea Collection. It comes with tins and includes the Chocolate Mint Truffle.

More

The Mint Melange is somewhat similar to Celestial Seasonings’ overpowering peppermint tea, but it takes a lot of the edge off for a more delightful and subtle drink. If you want a digestive medicinal, go for the Celestial Seasonings’ peppermint, which excels at that.

I was surprised by the Ginger Twist, which was like what I imagine a high quality ginger ale (like Canada Dry) would taste like in a parallel universe where every drink is a tea. It leaves a similar, but not that similar, odd aftertaste, as ginger does.

I have no idea what to do now. I surely can’t buy the entire Mighty Tea tea rack.

Calming moon and Kyoto rice are in the mail, along with a supposedly better mug infuser and suchlike.

AKA, I can too enjoy life! (That will have more context tomorrow, when my newest Tor.com post goes up.)

Here are my absolute favorites:

Chamomile Citrus

Lots of herbal teas I’ve tried are disappointing in their “full leaf” forms: often made from spindly little shattered herbs, rather than the broader leaves of most other teas. And quite a lot of herbal teas seem to insert “citrus” flavors via dipping the herbs in some kind of orangey liquid.

Chamomile Citrus is different. It has actual bits of citrus peel in it, for one thing. It’s the best chamomile tea I’ve ever, ever had.

Organic Hojicha

The Republic of Tea has a version of this they call “chop wood, carry water” tea, and my, it’s a wonderful tea to drink while working—less caffeine, even less than normal green tea, but with a roasted and nutty flavor. It’s how I always wanted coffee to taste.

The Mighty Leaf version is made of pure awesome.

Green Tea Tropical

I’m usually not a fan of fruity teas, particularly not “tropical fruit” teas, but I make an exception for Mighty Leaf’s Green Tea Tropical. If you want a sweetish green tea that actually does taste a bit like real tropical fruit has touched it, this is a definite improvement on more pedestrian green tea when accompanying meals.

Although “meals” for me are still rather Asian in nature, so I dunno if it would work well with, say, a Big Mac¹, but the thing is I could see it working. But I’m not going to try to find out.

Orange Dulce

I was always fond of Earl Grey (including Twinings’ Lady Grey and the Republic of Tea’s Earl Greyer), especially with milk. That’s a bit dangerous for me, because I’m lactose-intolerant.

However, Orange Dulce from Mighty Leaf is rather like drinking a good Earl Grey with something sweeter, but not too sweet, mixed in—i.e., the bergamot oil is present, as well as sweeter orange notes and a good dose of vanilla. I’d call it milkish, but vanilla does that to me these days. I haven’t had real milk in years.

So, Earl Grey with the milk and yet without the milk. Also, Mighty Tea does a good Earl Grey.

African Nectar

I’ve been experimenting with rooibos tea a bit ever since I tasted Republic of Tea’s Little Citizens Strawberry Vanilla Tea, and have found it wonderful for holding sweet tastes, like vanilla and chocolate and, well, really desserty stuff. Way better than black tea.

However, sometimes I want an actual non-dessert rooibos tea, and so far, African Nectar is like… drinking African Nectar. I like it in the afternoons, when I’m not drinking the Hojicha.

Hmmm, More?

More teas I want to try include Calming Moon (which has been commented by some to be like Celestial Seasoning’s Sleepytime, but prepared by the gods), more Chocolate Mint Truffle (the sample I just had was excellent as a chocolate tea and, of course, based with rooibos), Kyoto Rice Green Tea (i.e., popcorn tea), and… I don’t know. More!

Mint Marrakesh and Bombai Chai are for next evening. Or sooner. I think I’m going to have a cuppa of Chamomile Citrus though.

1. That somehow seems wrong. [↩]

I’m still recovering from the weekend. No more foggy mornings of petrified time-misplaced terror, but still a bit discombobulated.

In the meantime, I discovered this jolly little Republic of Tea tin:

It’s called “Little Citizens’ Herb Tea: Strawberry Vanilla Tea”, from the Republic of Tea, which has a lot of neat teas, both in little tea bags, like this one, or full leaf. You can buy refills from their website instead of buying a whole new tin, but you can buy the tins too.

It’s a rooibos-based tea, which I’d not tried before, but it’s a very pleasant change from black and green teas. Rooibos is technically not a tea, actually, but a herb; still, it makes a nice base for sweeter teas. The strawberry vanilla tea is a subtly-flavored tea, with just enough of a hint of strawberry for a shadow of its sweet tang, and just enough vanilla to make you feel mellow but not make the tea washed out.

The other Little Citzens’ teas are also based on rooibos, including Tangerine and Cherry Apple. I’m not fond of cherries, so I tried the tangerine—it’s much more strongly flavored, and very definitely a fruity tangerine taste, in case someone thinks the strawberry vanilla is too weak.

Anyways, I think I will hug my Strawberry Vanilla Tea and read old mysteries—some of which are new to me, actually; for the first time I read a Lord Peter Wimsey book—Whose Body?, which I enjoyed quite a bit. At some point I’ll also read Father Brown, somewhere after the Sherlock Holmes (which I have obviously read).

It is frustrating that there’s no more legal Wimsey available for the Kindle; nothing else in Sayers’ cabinet with regards to the nobleman detective is being sold on the Kindle, nor had its copyright expired.¹ I’d have to move to Canada to read Wimsey legally on my Kindle (or, apparently, simply jaunt up to Victoria if I want to read any Wimsey from Project Gutenberg Canada).

Of course, there are lots of reasons to move to Canada these days.

I’m not sure Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey would have seen eye to eye for a while. Holmes always did bloody hate nobility.

1. I know there’s a couple copies of Clouds of Witness being sold in the Kindle Store, but it’s… not copyright-expired in the States, so unless these are publishers with actual real ties to the Sayers estate, I would avoid them. [↩]

The Legitimacy of the Blog

I’m amazed how much I still learn about blogging, even simply as a writing medium over a marketing one. A lot of my older prejudices have been stripped away or reformed of late.

I know a lot of people don’t really respect blogging as legitimate writing—how can something that’s so informal be such and all that—but I don’t see it as being too different from writing an amusing column in the newspaper. There are some sports columns that would really make it as blogs, for instance. Dave Barry columns in the past would have done well as blog entries. And some serious political editorials, that manage nonetheless to expose humor as well, also would have done well online.

And nowadays they do.

Like anything, there’s the 90% rule in blogging as well: there are good blogs, mediocre blogs, and bad blogs out there. But the other thing about blogging is that you can have fun anyways and still get your stuff out there (and at little cost, or at least less cost). Blogging captures so well both great and not-so-great writing, both the serious and really informal.

I think that’s where most of the lack of respect comes from. But dude, there are some really awful novels published every year, and many more awful manuscripts submitted around the More Srz Bizness, so whatever.

Sacrifices for Change of Focus

I’ve lost a lot of audience even in the past year, but have managed to break even (well. Just once) with gaining new audience, though that bit takes longer than the losing bit.

When I began trending away from a personal blog to a More Serious Blog—less personal whinging, more talking about serious stuff, I guess—I lost my personal audience entirely. This loss hurt more than any other loss I’ve had with respect to S∂, but I went on and gained a new audience of bloggers and suchlike (my meta-blogging months).

Then I got tired, and switched over to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Kindle Love, with something of the personal subjects I used to cover (but not all that much), and lost most of my audience again, though that didn’t really hurt. This has been much harder to recover in terms of visitor numbers and views, and I still haven’t managed it.

The Numbers

There are days I’m lucky to get over 70 visitors; back in the meta-blogging days, my visitors worked up to over 300 per day and well on the way towards 400.

When I switched focus in July, I bled visitors at about 80 a week unto the new numbers, which was not the greatest thing to watch on my Mint console in the world (and the Visits Diff doesn’t let me forget it and will do so for the next two years). Mind you, these are very tiny numbers, all of them.

There has been a gain, however: interestingly, though my old audience consisted of bloggers, my new audience is far more enthusiastic about the RSS subscriptions; that has more than doubled, from 30 to a bit over 100 in three months. So it’s not all bad.

Some say worrying over numbers is a bad thing to do. Sure, not everyone should read the numbers—family blogs do not typically head into 1000 visits per day range, but they still accomplish what they set out to do more successfully than I—but I write to be read. My goals in blogging are a bit different from personal blogging. (And some will scold me for having such goals, and how impossible such goals are, yadda yadda yadda. What can I say? I’m too damn stubborn to die? That sounds about right.)

Social Media

For a while I didn’t know how to feel about it. One thing I have learned is that blogging is personal; yardsticks and methodology differ from blogger to blogger, and it’s rare that you find more than one with the same personal, ah, configuration. Measures of success also differ, but even among the bloggers with the same measures of success they differ. It’s interesting to examine.

How people use social media effectively is also pretty individual.

Some will say the differences don’t exist, and they’ve been doing the same amount of examination. All I can say is that when I look at a beach, and when an artist looks at a beach, we see two different scenes. I can try to see all the detail I like, but an artist will see the details that let them create art. And sometimes it’s a forest-for-trees thing, and sometimes the opposite. Plus, y’know, I’m not necessarily the artist here. You may be the artist, and I may be the unconditioned observer, but our observational differences still exist.

Observations on Twitter and StumbleUpon

Anyways, I’ve settled on certain observations about social media, particularly on Twitter, and expect them to change anyways in the future. Learning is very much about change; learning that doesn’t change you isn’t deep. For some time I’ve settled on

1. Twitter is about conversation, sharing experiences, and trends. It’s blogging on speed and meth. I like this, other people also, some not so much.

2. StumbleUpon is about sharing. It’s also one of the more useful of the social media bookmarking services out there, with a huge audience, nice features (not necessarily the most or the greatest but still), and much opportunity for additional blogging.

You can see my approaches to Twitter and StumbleUpon down the wider sidebar. So far I’m pleased, and it makes a difference in my online conversations. Some of my conversation is more appropriate for Twitter versus StumbleUpon versus my blog. So mote it be.¹

Prospects of Pay

Observation #1: It’s changed my outlook on what I blog for free and what I want to blog for pay. The difference is already there.

Observation #2: This means I’ve been both cutting looser with the Spare Bits and focusing closer on the Kindle Love.

Note #1: Yes, I plan quite a bit in advance, so I see the future some four weeks down the line, in a fuzzy kind of way.

Observation #3: I’m probably going to be doing deeper reviews and articles on the F&SF bits, because it matters more in terms of audience.

Observation #4: The above points make me a bit nervous, but I’ll get over that; right now I’m doing some extra writing to see how well I’ll fare if I go this way or that way on schedule.

Note #2: Schedule is totally mine to decide. This is very nice and not always obtainable.

Observation #5: Damn, this is a good blogging jobbity to have, based on the market I’ve seen.

Pondering #1: I wonder if a friend of mine ever got that totally tea geek blogging position.

Note #3: He’s ambitious with tea experiments, which is sometimes good and sometimes leaves you with a headache and Victorianish fainting spells.

1. Strangehaven where are you? [↩]