January 2024 – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Quick update, no time

I just had three ethics classes in a row on the “Future of Sports” topic. The kids seem to love talking about robots, and all the ways in which they can go wrong!

I’m just doing a super quick update today, so I can finish watching the second half of IT Chapter Two tonight. It’s a long film and I don’t want to end too late.

During the day I worked on some comics stuff, starting writing for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! Nothing much else to report – it was a pretty usual day.

New content today:

Thinking about the future of sports (and D&D)

I spent most of my time today writing a class plan for this week’s new ethics/critical thinking topic: The Future of Sports. Some example text:

People have been playing sports for thousands of years. The Ancient Greeks held the first Olympic Games, which were originally competitions to see who could run fastest. Over time more events were added, such as discus throwing, wrestling, and chariot races. Chariot racing is an example of an ancient sport where technology is used. In modern times, sports have evolved into many different forms.

• What are some examples of how technology changed the way sports are played?
• How has technology changed the way sports are watched and managed?
• Has technology made sports better or worse? How?

Robotic technology is advancing rapidly. Soon we might have robots capable of playing sports as well as or better than humans.

• Would it make sense to have robots play sports against each other? Would humans watch it?

If robots could play sports as well as humans, we could have robot teams playing against human teams. Or teams with some human and some robot players.

• Could it be good if a human sports league has some robot players?
• What problems might robot athletes cause?

There’s more in between, about tech such as video replays, and modern equipment made of high-tech materials that may give athletes advantages, and so on. This is really much more a critical thinking topic than an ethics topic.

I spent a lot of the day writing this because I didn’t concentrate solidly on it, with a lot of interruptions for minor things. Lunch, walking Scully, goofing off browsing the Internet, pausing to read an Asterix book for the library, etc.

Something I realised today too: remember the new active defence combat system I was working on for D&D? I was thinking that it’d be easier to use the Armour Class as a score to roll under in order to successfully defend. But I realised today that if we use this system, then Armour Class has no other uses… it’s not necessary to record a character’s Armour Class at all. It can be completely replaced with defence scores for Block, Parry, and Evade. So why not turn them into a target to roll equal to or higher than? Then every roll in the game is the same – roll equal to or higher than a target number. So I think I’ll just do that.

(Bob P. commented on my original post that there might also be rolling low for saves, but no, I’m using the old fashioned Basic Rules saving throws, which are equal or beat a target number. So it’s all consistent.)

And switching topics again, for dinner tonight I did a “clear out the fridge of old ingredients”. Half a left-over pack of potato gnocchi, fried up with onion, celery, a chopped zucchini, some mushrooms, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. Add a bit of salt and pepper and garlic, and it turned out to be a delicious meal.

New content today:

Here’s a nice photo of Scully

I took this in the park on Saturday evening, before we went to the chai place for dinner. She has a bow tie on because she had a wash and brush at the dog groomer earlier in the day, and they give the dogs a decoration before you pick them up.

Today there’s not a lot to talk about: 4 ethics classes. Making a sourdough loaf. Making pizza for dinner. It rained a bit, so I had to dodge the incoming rain on the weather radar while taking Scully for a walk after lunch.

Last night I started rewatching IT, the 2017 horror film. Because IT Chapter Two was released recently on Netflix here, and I need a refresher of the first film before I watch the second part.

Today I also started playing with Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator, which uses DALL-E 3. I’d been using the public version of DALL-E 2, but getting frustrated at its limitations, while a friend of mine keeps sharing images he’s made with Bing, which look much better. So for some reason it turns out that you can’t access DALL-E 3 directly from the creator without paying a subscription, but if you just have a Microsoft login you can access it via Bing Image Creator. I’m not sure how that works as a pricing model, but who am I to argue? Anyway, I started playing around with it, and it’s a lot better than DALL-E 2. I’m just using the image generation for fun, to do stuff like illustrate scenes from our Dungeons & Dragons games.

Here’s one, for example. You’ll notice it’s not perfect – I specified “wingless”, but the dragon in the picture has wings.

New content today:

Photoshop version upgrade wrangling

The other day I upgraded my Photoshop installation from version 24 to 25. For some reason, my Creative Cloud subscription didn’t offer me an automatic upgrade, which it usually does. It did list the new version as one that I could install, but there was no option to “update” the version over the top of my existing installation like it usually does. So I tried hitting the “install” button and let it install the new version in parallel.

Normally when updating, the new version imports all of my settings and customisations – and for Photoshop there are a lot of these, including things like graphic styles, palette colours, macro actions, keyboard shortcut assignments, new document defaults, tool defaults and styles, and so on. But the new version didn’t have any of these, and I had to spend some time copying them all across from the older version.

When I was finally happy, I tried making a new Darths & Droids comic using the new version. It mostly worked okay, until I got to adding a drop shadow to some of the comic panels. The way I do this is: (a) select the panel layer, (b) hit the custom drop shadow style that I have defined on the styles palette. Done. But even though I’d imported my custom style palette into the new version, the drop shadow style was defined differently! The shading angle and sizes were different! It took me some time to actually notice this – the difference was fairly subtle, but I definitely noticed something was wrong. It took some time to figure out exactly what was wrong, as I had to open comics in the old Photoshop version and examine the style details and compare the numbers, to find they didn’t match.

So even though I imported the styles across version, the details of the styles were different! This was a pain. I had to redefine the drop shadow style from scratch in the new version. And then… well, there must be some larger bug with the styles, because it worked for the document I had open, but when I started a new document and applied the same style that I’d just defined, it produced the wrong result! I don’t see how this could happen, unless the styles are actually buggy. I’m now hoping they’ll fix them in the next point release, because until they do I’m going to basically have to define all the drop shadow panels manually, rather than use a one-click style.

Phew.

In other events today… well, I didn’t do all that much else. Drove my wife and Scully to a lunch that she’d organised with some of her friends. I had some lunch nearby by myself and drove back home, while my wife walked Scully home from there. We played a couple of games of Kingdomino this afternoon, winning one game each. I suggested best of three, but she had other things to do by that time. And this evening three more ethics classes.

Last night I watched Renfield on Netflix. I saw this movie advertised when it was released a few weeks ago, but avoided it because it looked a bit cheesy. But last night I felt like something lighter and watched it, and I’m glad I did. It’s a sort of genre-defying Dracula/gangster/rom-com. Nicolas Cage was excellent as Dracula – a real scenery chewing performance that was hilarious and fun. Honestly, the only thing I can think that would improve this movie is if the young-Hugh-Grant-wannabe lead was actually somehow played by a young Hugh Grant.

New content today:

The one-day weekend

It’s Saturday, my day off, before teaching more online classes tomorrow on Sunday evening. I spent some time working on comics, but also did a 5k run in the morning.

In the late afternoon we all went on a walk to a park near the local library. I’d mentioned to my wife that now I have a shiny new library card, I was keen to go and see if they have any of the new Asterix books that have come out since I last read any, many years ago. So we waked down there and I went in and tried to find them in the children’s section, but to no avail. Then I went to the computers where you used to be able to search the catalogue and find which shelf books were on, but they were all on a screen that demanded your library card number and a password, which I’m not sure if I even have a password.

So I asked for help from a staff member, who explained that those were computers for general use, not the catalogue system, which was now accessed form special white terminals over there. But she escorted me back to the children’s section and said the Asterix books were now in the graphic novels section, not the fiction section I’d been looking in. There were three books there, two of them compilation albums of three stories each, and one of those contained three of the new stories that I haven’t read before. I grabbed them all, because I also enjoy rereading the older ones.

Out in the park, we threw a ball for Scully to chase, and she was very energetic today. There was another small dog who came over to play, and insisted I throw its ball as well!

After exhausting Scully, we went to Ambhi’s Chai for dinner. This is a place that mainly serves African-Punjabi style chai, which is extremely spicy, but for dinner time they also do small plates of food. My wife had the chick pea dish while I had the spicy chicken one, both with roti. I wanted to try a chai, but when I asked which ones were made without caffeine they said they could do decaf, but I said I didn’t actually want any tea, and they said the only option was the turmeric milk, so I had that. It was all good, nice and spicy, though the meal size was a little small. So when we got home I had some cheese and crackers to round it all off.

New content today:

Inter-seasonal treat time

It’s that in-between period after Christmas and before Easter, when both fruit mince tarts and hot cross buns are on sale. So it’s time to make one of my favourite seasonal treats!

Yep, that’s a fruit mince tart, on a hot cross bun, topped with ice cream. I warmed up the tart+bun in the microwave before placing the ice cream scoop on. And then closed the top of the bun on it before eating. It’s delicious, but very filling!

I’ve also taken a couple of flower photos today and yesterday. Some crepe myrtle flowers that had fallen on the ground:

And some gum flowers and nuts:

During the day I had 4 more ethics classes, rounding off my busy few days. Took Scully for a walk. For dinner I made another new recipe from a TV show: spanakopita toasties. They turned out pretty good, a nice easy dinner for Friday night.

And it’s online board games night now. Last time I won three games of Jump Drive in a row, but tonight I had awful luck with the cards and lost horribly. We’re now deep into a game of Castles of Burgundy.

New content today:

Working on a new combat system for D&D

Today while doing my daily Italian practice, I learnt that in Italian you don’t walk in the rain (nella pioggia). The proper expression is that you walk under the rain (sotto la pioggia).

It was a busy day with ethics classes. Thursdays are still my busiest with 5. At lunch I walked with Scully up to the shops, though I had lunch at home and didn’t buy anything other than restocking some medication from the pharmacy. It was very windy and when I got into the area near the shops where there are London plane trees my hay fever went berserk. I didn’t stop sneezing until we walked halfway back home into an area with different types of trees.

This afternoon I worked on a new combat system for my Dungeons & Dragons game. I’ve been thinking for some time about making all combat dice rolls player-facing. This is a term meaning that the players make dice rolls instead of the Dungeon Master. To explain:

Normally in the D&D rules (specifically the Basic/Expert Set rules that we are using, from 1981), during combat the action proceeds as follows:

There is an initiative roll to determine which side acts first, the adventurers (played by the players) or the monsters (played by the DM). (I’m not messing with this bit; I mention it only for completeness.)
Let’s say the heroes go first. Each one chooses a monster to attack and makes a die roll to see if they hit it with their weapon. This die roll uses the armour class of the monster as a target number to roll. Roll equal to or higher than the number and you hit the monster. (Note: this is a variant “ascending armour class” system that differs from the canonical rulebook version in what numbers are used, but the result is statistically identical. Many modern players use this variant as the bookkeeping is somewhat easier.)
Now the monsters get their attack. The DM chooses which hero each monster attacks, and rolls dice for the monsters, trying to hit the target armour class number of the defending heroes. Note that this is essentially identical to what the players do when they are attacking, except now it’s the DM rolling dice.

The system I’m working on is identical in the first two points, but modifies the third one, the monster attack. Instead of the DM rolling dice for the monster attack, I want to change it so that instead it’s the player of the defending hero who rolls to defend themselves against the attack. This way, the players get to roll more dice (which is fun for them) and the DM doesn’t need to roll for the attack. The DM will still roll for damage if the player fails the defence roll.

I ran the numbers, and it works out statistically identical if a defending player needs to roll under their own armour class to defend successfully. I also converted it to a roll-equal-to-or-higher system, but this requires recording a “defence target” number for each hero (which is equal to 22 minus their armour class), so it adds another complication. Overall I prefer the simplicity of just using the armour class, even if it means for attacking requires rolling high while defending requires rolling low.

Now I have the basic system, I want to break up the defence into different types:

Block – you block the attack with a shield.
Parry – you parry the attack with a weapon.
Evade – you evade the attack by moving out of the way, or in such a way that the blow lands harmlessly on your armour.

I’m modifying these ideas from GURPS, with the intention that they will separate into different tactical choices. The base die roll chances will be the same, but may be modified – for example a dwarf character might get a bonus to blocking with a shield, and a penalty to parrying, while elves get the opposite. Some weapons might be better at parrying, but cause less damage (a rapier) or worse at parrying but inflict more damage (a 2-handed sword).

It’s still work in progress at this point, but I think I have the essentials of a workable system. I’ve discussed it with my players and I think we’ll try it in our next session, to see how it works in actual play. And then we’ll decide if it’s more fun than the old system.

New content today:

Back to the ethics grind

Today was back to work for my wife, off to her office first thing in the morning, and for me, with three ethics classes online tonight.

During the day I went for a drive with Scully. I had two destinations planned – one a petrol station that had fuel at a significantly lower price than any of the stations near me. It was $1.91 a litre, compared to $2.23 a litre for all of the stations near where I live. Given I put over 30 litres in, that was a saving of over $10. But it wasn’t really out of my way, because this station was on the way to my planned lunch!

I intended to go to Allambie Pies, which has very nice meat pies. But when we got there it had a sign on the door saying they were closed for Christmas holidays until 15 January! But fortunately I’d found just a couple of days ago another pie shop nearby with excellent reviews. So close to the other one that I could almost have walked there, although I did drive as it was pretty hot and sunny. This was Crispy’s Pies, and the pies were pretty good. I had a pepper steak and a chicken in white wine sauce. They were good, although honestly not quite as good as Allambie Pies. But the woman who served me was very friendly and came out to meet Scully. I’ll put this down as a pie place to go back to some day.

Ethics tonight was on the topic of Etiquette. I got an interesting range of answers on questions like what a world with no etiquette would be like. Some kids said it wouldn’t be much different, as people would be used to the fact there’s no “please” or “thank you” or other niceties, while other kids thought it would essentially be the end of the world, as people would be much less happy and more hostile to one another.

New content today:

Last day off for holiday period

Both me and my wife return to work tomorrow – her to the office and me with a bunch of online ethics classes. So we just spent today in relax mode, made moreso by the fact that the weather was hotter.

My first task however was to drop the car off for an annual service. I was booked in for a 7:50 drop-off. Normally I’d just walk home – it’s about a 25 minute walk – and then walk back later in the day to pick it up again. But I decided to make use of the fact that I’d be out early and did a 5k run on the way home. This is not an area I normally run in. It was along a highway and then I did a few laps of a cemetery to make up the distance without having to cross a road. The course was a lot flatter than my usual one, and I managed to smash my best time. My previous best was 26:28, and today I ran 25:59. I had a long term goal of breaking 26 minutes, but thought I might never get there. But all it took was a less hilly route! So that was pretty cool.

The car was ready by 11:30, so I walked back to pick it up. When I got home, we went on a walk with Scully and stopped at a cafe to get some lunch. It was a hot walk in bright sunshine, but there was a strong breeze and we sat outdoors in a shady area with the breeze blowing through so it was pretty nice. I tried a menu item I’ve not had before, a teriyaki barramundi fillet with fried udon noodles, broccoli, and enoki mushrooms. It was good and very filling.

This afternoon we played the board game Root again. I tried the Woodland Alliance faction again, and did significantly better against the Cat Marquisate, but it was still an easy victory for the cats. Looking up a bit of info about 2-player set-ups for the game, it seems the Alliance is not a great fit for a 2-player game, but could be helped by the hirelings that are included in the Marauders expansion, which I got the other day. So maybe next time we’ll try that.

New content today:

New Year’s Day relaxation

There wasn’t much on today. I slept in again and then just did some comic writing, worked on a lesson plan for my next ethics class for the older kids on the topic of “Learning”, and took Scully for a couple of walks. In the afternoon I played a few more games of Kingdomino with my wife.

For dinner tonight I tried another new recipe: beetroot curry (from this site), and I made home made flatbread to go with it.

It was good, but I think I chopped the beetroot a bit coarsely and it was a little on the firm side. Next time I’ll cut it more finely and hopefully it will cook a bit softer.

New content today: