Month: May 2024

Working on mysterious beasts

Lego D&D set, stage 10 of construction today, which adds castley bits to the top:

Lego D&D stage 10

Today I wrote the lesson for this week’s new ethics/critical thinking class topic on “Mysterious Beasts”. Stuff like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Yeti, chupacabras, and so on. Much more a critical thinking type class, although there are some ethical questions along the lines of “If such creatures were proven to exist, what should we do about it?” and “Should we take into account potential undiscovered creatures when doing environmental studies for proposed developments?” and “If Bigfoot is intelligent, should we leave them alone?”

I took Scully for a drive today to the Allambie pie shop, and to fill up on petrol on the way there. The cheapest petrol station by far in this area is on the way there, so it’s a good doubling up of reasons to go that way.

And I started work on marking the first student reports for the Data Engineering course. This is the experiment planning report, with the final report and video presentation due in two more weeks.

New content today:

A beautiful evening run

I didn’t do a 5k run yesterday because of the foul weather. Although rain was forecast today, and there were a few showers around, it was mostly pleasant and sunny. My wife came home from work a bit earlier than usual, and I took the opportunity to go for a run before sunset. At the halfway mark the view was so nice I had to pull out my phone and take a photo.

The city from halfway

I now have 6 ethics classes on Mondays, and that takes up a lot of the day. After the first four I had a break for lunch and took Scully for a walk to the post office. There’s usually not much of a wait, but today there was a queue of ten other people there before me, so I had to wait a bit. One guy had a whole hand-trolley with multiple boxes containing packages he wanted sent off. He just kept pulling them out one after the other and was still getting through them by the time I left.

During the afternoon I took a break to assemble part 9 of the Lego D&D set.

Lego D&D set stage 9

This adds a castle tower construction on one end, with a door accessed by the ladder. It’s a prison cell. And inside…

Lego D&D set stage 9

And from the other side we can see a mushroom patch in what looks like it might be an outdoor area.

Lego D&D set stage 9

In other news, I’ve burnt through all of my gems in Duolingo. When they converted to this gem reward system a while back, I had something like 40,000 of them, and I thought it would last me ages. But you need to use them up to keep practising when you make too many mistakes, or to access the mastery review exercises, so I’ve been slowly spending them faster than gaining them. And now they’ve run out. I can’t do any of those things any more without spending money. So it might be time to find an alternative to using Duolingo to keep up with my Italian practice.

New content today:

Friday D&D night, Saturday Star Wars night, Sunday… work

I missed updates on Friday and Saturday due to running games both night. Friday was Dungeons & Dragons at my place, the finishing up the adventure of Titardinal’s Tower. I spent much of the day in between ethics classes preparing the adventure for the evening.

I kid of repeated the dose on Saturday, spending all day preparing an adventure for a Star Wars adventure using Scum & Villainy rules, which I ran at Professor Plums, the local geek shop, for a special May the 4th Star Wars night. The adventure outline was:

Greedo gives the PCs a job to retrieve a Kyber crystal from a Jawa sandcrawler. They get the crystal, but as they leave the sandcrawler, Imperial troopers attack the crawler for some reason. They get back to the cantina to meet their onward contacts, only to discover the alien has had his arm sliced off, and Greedo is lying slumped dead in a booth with a blaster wound to the chest… And then things get complicated.

Ponda Baba was their pilot, but now he can’t fly because of the missing arm. He and Dr Evazan were supposed to escort them to Dantooine to sell the crystal to Rebel agents. So they have to find a new pilot. But then Mos Eisley spaceport is locked down because apparently someone blasted their way out of there, so they have to get through that somehow. When they finally get to Dantooine, the place is crawling with Imperials apparently looking for a Rebellion headquarters.

I had six players, mostly around 12-15 years old, plus one 40-ish woman who was the mother of one of the girls. She was clearly into Star Wars and seemed to have the most fun recognising the plot as the adventure unfolded, whereas a couple of the kids didn’t know the original movie, so it was a bit lost on them, But I think everyone had fun playing. Here’s the flyer the shop used to promote the event:

May the 4th Star Wars RPG night

Today I was also very busy, catching up on things that I couldn’t do the past two days because of prepping for the games. I made another week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! strips, and wrote most of a Darths & Droids strip, but I’ll have to finish that tomorrow.

New content today (I’m not going to list Friday & Saturday’s strips, just click back if you need to):

No more problems with Instagram?

After yesterday’s trouble with Instagram, I tried searching today for what to do if Instagram stops working after you deactivate a linked Facebook account. I didn’t find anything specifically about this problem, so decided to explore a bit more in Instagram itself. And lo, when I opened the app, it was working properly again. So… I dunno… maybe yesterday was just some weird glitch that coincidentally happened after deactivating Facebook. Anyway, it all seems good now. I’m very happy that I didn’t have to troubleshoot or go through some ridiculous series of steps to fix it.

Today was pretty busy. Five ethics classes. There’s a girl in one of the classes, she’s really outgoing and funny. Today I gave a scenario and started asking questions as usual. She said, “You know, whenever we get these stories about someone acting ethically dubious, I think you’re always just writing stories about me.” That was pretty funny.

And in between I was busy making comics. I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and we were again lucky to dodge the intermittent rain that’s been floating around all day. And for dinner I made pan-fried potato gnocchi with pesto. That’s about it for today, really.

New content today:

Problems with Instagram

Okay, so I deactivated my Facebook account a few days ago. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years. Today I wanted to use Instagram and… it wouldn’t show me my normal feed. I couldn’t post a photo. I went into the Account Settings to try to log out and back in again, and it wouldn’t load the account info page.

I figure this must have something to do with my Facebook account being deactivated, because they’re both owned by Meta. But I switched to Scully’s Instagram account (yes, she has one), and that was working fine. But Scully doesn’t have a Facebook account. So clearly Instagram can work without an associated Facebook account. So why is mine now completely broken?

I’ll have to look into this another day, because today was very busy and I’ve just finished three ethics classes in a row, after spending the middle of the day at the university doing tutoring for the Data Engineering course. We’re approaching the end – only two more weeks to go. But I’ll have marking of student reports and videos to do.

This morning I also had to dash up to the post office to mail some more Magic cards to people. The weather was rainy again today, and I got sprinkled on, but it wasn’t heavy. It would have been miserable taking packages there in heavy rain.

In other teaching news, I heard back from Loreto Kirribilli and now that it’s second term of the school year, they have organised a group of four Year 9 students for me to mentor. We’re going to do fortnightly sessions this term, and then maybe organise something different in third term. I go to visit the school to begin in two weeks. I’m looking forward to this -it should be fun, and also hopefully really inspiring for the students.

Oh, and finally, last night I had a big panic when Wednesday’s Irregular Webcomic! wasn’t ready in time for the automated update, and I quickly assembled the comic, uploaded it, and forced a manual update. It was only when I woke up in the middle of the night that I realised it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and I’d therefore manually published Wednesday’s comic just an hour after Tuesday’s one!! So to correct for this, there’s no new comic tonight – since tonight’s comic was actually published yesterday.

New content today: