January 2024 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Hottest day of the year (so far)

It’s all about the weather at the moment. Sydney had its hottest day of 2024 so far today, reaching 40°C in some suburbs. But it was cooler near the coast, only reaching about 34°C here, thankfully. Western Australia has been suffering an even worse heatwave, with the town of Paraburdoo reaching a record 47.9°C today, and predicted to be around the same tomorrow.

The other weather of interest is a tropical low system off the coast of Queensland, which is forecast to develop into a cyclone of at least category 3 strength, and will probably make landfall somewhere around the city of Townsville late in the week. This means more torrential rain for northern Queensland, which is still suffering flooding from ridiculous amounts of rain over the past few weeks. It seems like they can’t get a break up there.

Today I basically stayed indoors in the cool of the air conditioning. I took Scully for a short walk in the middle of the day, not going very far. It’s also tricky because the roads and footpaths are baking hot in the sun and I have to keep picked her up to go over areas with no shade, to avoid burning her paws. She’s not keen on that and wriggles to be put down, despite the hot surfaces.

I finished off writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic!, and photographed some of them, but not all of them. I wanted to quickly make enough for this coming week, and will finish off photographing the rest of the batch during the week.

My ankle is still a bit sore, but seems to be feeling better today. I didn’t go running, to give it a chance to recover. Also it would have been awful running in this weather! So in a way it was nice to have an excuse not to.

New content today:

New neighbours and old ankles

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place, so no post yesterday. I arrived just in time to join a game of The Guild of Merchant Explorers, which was new to me. It was a fun game of exploring across a personal hex map (each player had an identical map), establishing towns and trying to connect trade routes to earn coins. I liked it, but I ended up significantly behind everyone else, finishing with about 130 coins while all the other three players were within a few coins of each other around 150.

After this we played a game of Mysterium, at the medium difficulty level. I was going really well, guessing my character and location quickly, but I got stuck on the weapon, guessing wrong 3 times and ultimately being the only player not to correctly get all of my information! Being a cooperative game, that meant we all lost, alas.

Then we finished off with a game of Just One, which I’ve played a lot online, but never with the actual boxed game equipment. That went pretty well and we scored a lot of matches.

Another thing that happened is I met one of our new neighbours, who moved in this week. It’s an older couple, retiree age, and they’re from South Africa. I met the woman and she met Scully, and was delighted to meet her. She said that they had a Maltese terrier and a cat, but they are in quarantine after arriving from South Africa and wouldn’t be moving in until February. When they arrive we’ll have to make sure Scully meets the dog and becomes friendly.

Today I slept in a bit and then went for a 5k run in the relative cool of the morning. Unfortunately at one point I had to step off the footpath to go around a clump of pedestrians and I twisted my ankle on the grass. It wasn’t bad at the time and I finished the run, in better time than my last couple of runs. But through the day it’s gotten more sore and swelled up a little bit. I’ve started putting ice on it to reduce the swelling and inflammation. But I doubt I’ll be doing a run tomorrow. I can walk okay, and in fact we did a couple of long walks today with Scully, but I don’t want to risk running on it.

We went over to Naremburn after lunch for a sweet treat from the bakery – I got a cinnamon roll. And then we went out again for dinner, to a seafood restaurant that we really like. I had mahi-mahi, which was really nice.

I spent a few hours today refining an adventure for next Saturday’s Scum & Villainy game that I’ll be running at the local science shop. I’ve found a one-shot adventure outline for Blades in the Dark, and I’m reskinning it from fantasy to science fiction in the Star Wars setting. It’s coming along nicely, and hopefully should be a lot of fun.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

I’m ready for this humidity to end

This weather is so tiresome… it’s just so humid every day. Temperatures aren’t so bad, getting up around 30°C in the middle of the day, but the darn humidity is pretty much pegged on 100% all night, and only drops to around 70% in the heat of the day. Overnight rain doesn’t help at all as it simply steams up the air the next day when it heats up. I checked the past few days and the humidity hasn’t dropped below about 70% at any time for the at least the past four days. Probably longer, as that’s as far back as the detailed hour-by-hour records go on the Bureau of Meteorology website. So I’m just spending as much time as I can at home with the air conditioner either on cool (in the middle of the day) or dehumidify mode (in the morning and night).

I did take Scully out for a couple of walks, because of course she needs the exercise. At lunch we went up to the fish & chip shop, which has reopened this week after an extended closure over Christmas. I got my usual choice and we went to the high park overlooking the harbour to eat (as opposed to the low park down by the waterside, which is a bit further away).

Apart from that, 5 ethics classes today, and a bit of comics work, and that was pretty much it.

New content today:

Spinal update and heavy rain

This morning I worked on some more Darths & Droids writing. It never ends!

After lunch I had an appointment with my neurologist, following up on the spinal injection procedure I had before Christmas. The numbness in my left leg seems to have been partly relieved by the injection, improving slowly over the past few weeks. I’d say it’s about 50% back towards full sensation now, so a noticeable improvement, but still not back to normal. I told the neurologist this, and she said that this showed that it was indeed the L3 nerve causing the issue. Which is a good thing, because it’s not something else that might indicate more severe problems. She said at this stage the most sensible option is just “wait and see”. It might slowly deteriorate again over the next few years. She also said that if I notice any other symptoms like tingling or numbness anywhere else in the body, I should get it checked up straight away. But for now it seems there’s no serious ongoing issue, as it’s simply minor loss of sensation, with a pinpointed cause, and no effect on any muscles.

And as a bonus, she didn’t even charge me anything for the consultation!

I walked back home via my wife’s work to pick up Scully and take her home. I wanted to hurry a bit because there was incoming rain on the weather radar, to get home before it hit. We made it, and it’s a good thing because it really set in. It’s been raining steadily, sometimes heavy, for the past several hours. It won’t be fun later when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toileting. I use a big umbrella and try to stand over her to shelter her from getting too wet, but inevitably there’s some towelling off when we get back inside. It’s been a ridiculously wet summer so far, and seems to just be rolling on. All over Eastern Australia – there are ongoing flood issues both north in Queensland and south in Victoria, but we seem to have missed most of the major floods so far.

I made fried rice for dinner. We were out of the usual vegetables like broccoli and carrots, so I did it with a lot of celery and some chopped Brussels sprouts, which seemed to work okay.

And tonight was the first three classes of my “Minor Laws” ethics topic. I had some interesting discussion with some of the kids, and quite varying opinions on whether it’s okay or not to break laws that thousands of people break every day without caring about it.

New content today:

Patatas bravas

I tried making something new for dinner tonight: patatas bravas!

Excuse the messy presentation. I mixed the potatoes and sauce in the bowl and didn’t tidy it up afterwards. I basically used this recipe from the BBC. It turned out pretty good! But potatoes really do take a long time to crisp up in the oven, gosh. I got a bit impatient, and could probably have left them for another 10-15 minutes.

I took Scully for a long walk this morning, since I had time and the weather was cloudy and cool.

At home I spent time writing a new class for this week’s online ethics lessons. The topic for this week is “Minor Laws”. Some example discussion points for the kids:

One important difference between serious laws and minor laws is that a lot more people break minor laws. People who commit murder are quite rare, but there are many thousands or millions of people who drive too fast, or litter.

• Why do so many people break such laws?

One thing about minor laws like these is that most of the people who break them never get caught or punished in any way. They get away with it.

• If it’s safe to cross the road when the light is red, and you’re not going to get punished for it, does that make it okay?
• Is it okay to break a law that lots of people break and never get punished for?

(some stuff about enforcement and why minor laws are poorly enforced here, which I’ve cut for brevity)

Unenforced minor laws are sometimes used as a way to punish people for something else. For example, in a city where nobody usually gets punished for jaywalking, the police could set up an operation where they monitor street corners and give jaywalking fines to people they don’t like the look of: immigrants, or homeless people, or people of certain skin colours.

• Could this be a serious problem if we start enforcing minor laws more?
• Is there any way we can ensure that the enforcement of minor laws is fair and unbiased?

This evening I had free so I went for a 5k run after my wife got home from work. It wasn’t hot, but it was very humid (97% according to the Bureau of Meteorology) and that meant a slowish time, although better than the runs I did on the weekend, which were similar humidity but hotter.

Last night I watched The Running Man (1987), which was new on Netflix here recently. I thought I might have seen it before, since I watched many of Arnie’s films in the ’80s, but I found to my delight that it was unfamiliar. I had to laugh at the fact that it was set in the dystopian future of 2017, and that 2017 apparently still had a very ’80s aesthetic, with dancing women in high-cut aerobics leotards and big hairdos, and computers that were no smaller or more advanced than what could be found in the 1980s. It wasn’t especially profound, being an Arnie action flick, but it was a lot of fun. Bonus points for featuring Mick Fleetwood as a freedom fighter. I was really not expecting that!

New content today:

Very rainy cabin fever

Rain came in overnight and it was very, very heavy. It woke me up a couple of times during the night. We recorded over 60 mm in the city centre, and up to 150 mm in some inland suburbs. It continued into late morning, so I didn’t take Scully for an early walk – we just ducked outside quickly for her toileting and then she wanted to run back inside. She’s not keen on rain.

I had 4 classes, and worked on Darths & Droids scripts a bit. For dinner I made pastry for quiche, and decided to try it with finely chopped celery (since we have a lot of celery at the moment) and I also added some nutmeg. It turned out all right.

My wife and I took Scully for a longer walk in the evening, when the rain had stopped, although it was still very grey. Not an especially interesting Monday, I’m afraid!

New content today:

A writer’s block day

I spent a few hours today staring at a text file, failing to write any comics.

Other than that, I did another 5k run this morning. The heat/humidity conditions were just as bad, and I was also silly enough to do my more strenuous route, with more hills, so I went even slower. But still, it felt good afterwards to have gotten some exercise.

Not really much else to say about the day…. OH! I remember. I spent a couple of hours housecleaning. Not that that’s exciting, but at least it explains the time spent without doing anything else interesting.

New content today:

A ferry trip for dinner

The weather continues to be oppressively humid. I ran a 5k this morning at 8am, but it was so warm and close to 100% humidity that I did over 2 and a half minutes slower than my best time. I worked on some comics during the day, staying indoors as much as possible.

But for dinner we had made a booking at an Italian trattoria over in the suburb of Chiswick, which is across the harbour and down the Parramatta River a bit. To get there we caught a ferry, which involved changing ferries at Cockatoo Island. It’s only two stops there and then three more to Chiswick, so it took about 40 minutes overall, including waiting time on the island.

Here’s the ferry we caught to Cockatoo Island:

And the one we caught from there, as it was arriving (it’s a flat “Rivercat” catamaran ferry, because it has to go under a few low bridges):

Here’s Scully getting ready to go on the ferry. She has to travel in a crate due to animal transport regulations, but she doesn’t mind it.

The dinner was very good. I had penne al granchio (with crab):

While my wife had bombolotti with tomato sauce and straciatella:

Then for dessert, the millefoglie:

And the sun went down as we took a leisurely walk back to the wharf to catch the ferry home:

It was a really nice evening out! We’ll have to go back to this restaurant to try their pizzas some time.

New content today:

Another humid day, and games night

Today was another very warm and humid day, similar to but not quite as bad as yesterday. It was very cloudy early, keeping all that moisture in. In fact it rained unexpectedly when I went out to pick up the weekly grocery shopping, quite heavily. When the clouds cleared and the sun came out it just got more steamy.

I did another four ethics classes today on the “Future of Sports” topic. Most of the kids are very sceptical of the idea of robots playing sports with or against humans. Even when I’m very careful to specify that the robots have the same skill as a human player, they often bring up the idea that it’s unfair and the robots will have an advantage.

Tonight is games night. It was supposed to be in person at a friend’s place, but the host came down with a bout of gastro and was vomiting, so we converted it into an online event tonight. I’ve had a poor night so far, losing a game of Ticket to Ride and two of Jump Drive. And I’m currently way behind in a game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal.

New content today:

A record humid weather day

The main talking point today was how ridiculously humid the weather was. The temperature here in Sydney only got up to 30.8°C, but the humidity was so high all day that it was a major topic of discussion with both my friends and also people in the community. We recorded a dew point temperature of 25.9°C, which set a new record for the highest dew point ever recorded in Sydney. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us that dew points above 24°C are considered “oppressive”.

It sure felt that way. I took Scully out for a leisurely 15 minute walk around the block at 8am, not strenuous in any way – we were in fact dawdling along as you do when your dog is sniffing everything. But by the time we got home I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was saturated. It was similar taking her out for a short walk at lunch time. So I’ve been sitting indoors the rest of the day with the air conditioning on, mainly to take the humidity out of the air, not so much to cool it down.

The cicadas have also been going bananas all day, because apparently they love this sort of hot and sticky tropical weather. This is the loudest summer of cicadas I can remember for several years. We don’t have the Magicicada type of periodical cicadas that North America has, so there isn’t a regular cycle of them. I don’t know what controls the numbers but it varies from year to year in an unpredictable way.

I had five ethics classes today. In between I worked a bit on making a new adventure for Professor Plums, the science shop where I’ve been running Dungeons & Dragons occasionally on Saturday nights. But for something different I’m going to run a science fiction game set in the Star Wars universe. But I’m not going to use any of the Star Wars roleplaying games (I have both the WEG d6 one and Genesys system one) – I’m going to use the rules from Scum & Villainy, a Forged in the Dark game system based on Blades in the Dark. The idea is to give the players, who have pretty much done exclusively D&D 5th Edition, a taste of a different genre and a different game system.

New content today: