July 2024 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Frigid cold snap

We’re in the middle of another nasty cold spell for this winter. The temperature is actually not as low as it could be, but it’s extremely windy. We’re having averages around 60-70 km/h with gusts up to 100 km/h. A lot of Saturday activities today—such as markets—have been cancelled because of the high winds. The mountains are expecting blizzard conditions over 1500 metres. It’s bad enough here near sea level.

Yesterday I had my ethics classes and mailed off another package of Magic cards that I’d sold on eBay. The current class topic of Psychic Policing is generating some very interesting discussion among the kids. The older class age group in particular is showing some pretty deep thinking about the consequences of police having psychic abilities.

Last night we went up to the local pizzeria for dinner. It was chilly, but they have a nice cozy “outdoor” area where we can take Scully, which is under shelter and enclosed by fences and a heavy wind-breaking curtain covering the entrance from the outside.

Then after we got home it was online games night with my friends. We played Space Base, and then a new game for me: My City: Roll & Build. This is a roll-and-write type game, where everyone has an identical square grid map with features including a river, trees, and rocks, and you roll random building shapes and have to fit them into your map. You score points for covering empty squares and stones, but lose points for covering trees. At some point it becomes difficult to place more buildings and you can either skip a building and lose points and keep playing, or declare your round over. If you keep going, you may cover more squares and score more points, or you may roll badly shaped buildings and have to skip again and lose more points, so there’s a bit of press-your-luck. After each round, a new rule is introduced, such as scoring bonus points for putting buildings of the same type next to each other, or giving them access to wells, and so on. After a few rounds there are plenty of bonus points on offer, but the criteria are often contradictory and you have to decide the best option to take. It was fun, and also a sort of laid-back relaxing kind of game.

Then we played Just One, and got through the first 13 rounds without anyone making a wrong guess. 15 would have been a perfect score, but it was messed up on round 14 when two of the clues duplicated and were removed, making it too hard for the guesser. The 15th round was guessed correctly, so we scored a record high score of 14.

Today I braved the cold and wind and went for a run. I decided to push myself and go for 7.5k instead of my usual 5k. I took it a bit easy so as not to get too worn out early, and completed the distance in 43:15. I didn’t feel too bad, so maybe I’ll do this distance a bit more often.

Scully had her annual check-up and vaccination today. The vet declared her very fit and healthy, which was good! The vet said her teeth are very good for a poodle of her age.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Lego D&D tower complete

I’ve completed stage 24 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set construction. This completes the tall tower. It’s pretty impressive.

This section of construction adds green-flamed candle details to the upper floor of the previous stage, and builds it up higher to a tower top level with flags.

But all of this goes on top of the previous ground floor room!

That’s a total of five storeys of levels!

It’s pretty impressive. And I haven’t even assembled it next to the previous castle wall and tavern sections, which it connects to horizontally. I’ll try and do that at some point and take more photos. The next stages are all building the giant red dragon which sits atop the castle walls.

I didn’t do much else of note today. Five ethics classes, and two trips to the post office, to get a packing box first, and then later to mail two more packages of Magic cards to buyers. On the way home I grabbed a snack from the pie shop, and they had something new – a spicy vegan roll, stuffed with couscous, tofu, and vegetables. I tried it and it was not bad.

New content today:

Psychic policing

This morning I wrote my lesson plan for this week’s new ethics topic, on psychic policing. There are some tough questions in this one for the kids:

If police can precognitively predict that someone will commit a crime, should they stop them before they do it? (the Minority Report question)
Would it be okay to use mind-reading to interrogate a suspect?
Would it be okay to use clairvoyance to search a suspect’s house without them knowing?
Should someone be arrested and/or punished for planning to kill someone?
For thinking about killing someone?
What effects would psychic policing have on society?
How are these questions relevant for real world technology such as surveillance cameras, or hacking into suspects’ computers?

At lunchtime I mailed off another package of Magic: the Gathering cards to an eBay buyer. Then I took Scully past the pie shop, where the daily special today was a beef & Guinness pie. I’ve had this before—they also do it for St Patrick’s Day—and it’s delicious, so I got one of those. And then after walking back home I worked on a deal for more Magic cards with a person on a Discord server who is looking for some specific cards to buy. (When I say it like that it sounds a bit dodgy, like trading in something illegal! Except it’s not, of course.)

For dinner I made a pot of pumpkin, chick pea, and cauliflower soup. With coriander seed and a bit of chilli for spice. It turned out really nice. And warming, as it was another very chilly day today. I’m not enjoying the cold at all, but at least we haven’t had any rain to speak of for a while.

Tonight I ran the first three classes on the psychic policing topic. I think this is a good one as there was a lot of very interesting discussion with the kids. One very perceptive kid pointed out the contradiction inherent in having a vision of a future crime, and then doing something to prevent it, thus making the vision untrue.

New content today:

Learning about hair conditioner

This morning I finished up writing some new comic scripts for the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! Then I photographed them after lunch. I only managed half of the batch, but that will be enough to last through this week. I assembled some and uploaded them to the server, just in time for the automated update!

At lunch I walked Scully up to the Greenwich shops. On the way we dropped off the last of a series of novels that my wife wanted to get rid of at one the small street libraries. Each time I’ve added more, the old ones have gone, so someone is obviously appreciating them, and probably keeping an eye out for more of the same series.

For dinner I made some roasted cauliflower, cauliflower leaves, and brussels sprouts. I found out a while back that all the green bits of cauliflower are edible, and have been cooking with them. Roasted in a bit of oil and seasoned they’re delicious. Some of the thicker stalks are a bit tough to chew, but the small tender ones and the leafy bits are great.

In other interesting events, out of sheer curiosity I tried using my wife’s hair conditioner a few weeks ago. I’ve never used conditioner before in my life, and didn’t really know what to expect. When I was growing up we only ever had shampoo and I sort of assumed that conditioner was a fancy thing that only rich people used. So I’ve spent my whole life ever since washing my hair daily with shampoo and never using conditioner.

After trying it once, I could feel that my hair was less squeaky clean and more moisturised and silky soft. That seems to be a positive thing, so I’ve kept using it. But just now I decided to do some research and find out if I really need to use it or not. After all, if I’ve lived this long and my hair has never given em any problems, maybe I don’t need conditioner?

Turns out there’s a lot of very conflicting advice on the net. Ranging from “If you shampoo, you have to use conditioner. Everyone. Every. Single. Wash.” to “Anyone with hair less than ear length doesn’t need conditioner.”

Digging a bit deeper, I found some explanations of what conditioner is really supposed to do and how you’re supposed to use it. This old thread from the subreddit r/haircarescience was very informative.

So, apparently conditioner is meant to rehydrate and physically smooth hair strands after shampooing, because the shampoo strips away natural oils and causes the strand surface to roughen. However, It seems to be advised to use conditioner only on the hair strands themselves, and not get any conditioner on your scalp, because the product can build up there, even with rinsing, and cause skin irritation, itchiness, and flaking. The hair strands within “a couple of inches” (five centimetres or so) of the scalp will naturally be more oily due to the proximity of the skin, and so the best method of using conditioner is to apply it only to the hair strands more than 5 cm away from the scalp. This avoids getting any on the skin itself.

Okay, so this is definitely not what I’ve been doing. My hair is not even that long. So… from this research it seems like I should actually not be using conditioner at all. I’ve been using it the past few weeks, but now I’ll go back to not using it and see if it really makes much difference outside of the immediate aftermath of a shower. I’ll report back here, if I remember.

New content today:

Another blast of winter

It was definitely one of the coldest feeling days of winter so far today. The actual temperature barely reached 16°C, but the “feels like” temperature maxed out at 8°C due to a stiff wind that was blowing all day.

My morning was spent inside doing ethics classes, but my hands were frozen. At 1pm I was glad yo take Scully for a walk, even in the cold, simply to get my blood circulating and warm up a bit from the physical movement.

We went up to the shops and I got some sushi for lunch, which I ate at the small park there while Scully sniffed around on the grassy area. On the way back I pondered grabbing some gelato (it’s never too cold for gelato). But when I went into the place I took a good look at some of the baked things they also have there. Iv’e never tried any of them before, but I noticed they had a crème brûlée cronut which looked very attractive with a very brûlée-like glaze on top. So on an impulse I got one of those instead. It turned out to be really delicious, with a custard filling inside the pastry. I might have to try some more of their pastries.

This afternoon I did some more work on new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I didn’t finish writing a whole batch, so I only ended up photographing one strip for tonight. I’ll try to get more done tomorrow, at least to last the rest of this week.

New content today:

Carbonara Sunday

Well, I end my week of food-related headings with an interesting story.

I had two ethics classes tonight from 6-8pm, which is inconvenient for dinner. I’d had a late lunch so wasn’t hungry before hand and my wife wanted to eat before 8pm, so she made herself something while I did my classes. After finishing at 8pm, I made myself some spaghetti “carbonara”, with just the egg and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, no meat. I don’t make this much and found a recipe online to follow. It suggested warming the plates before serving to maintain the warmth in the pasta while eating. And it said you can warm plates by putting them in the microwave….

Now I’m pretty sure that won’t work. But my wife had just made a cup of tea, and I had pulled out a shallow bowl to eat from, so I thought I’d warm my bowl by pouring in some boiling water.

I boiled up the spaghetti, mixed it with some molten butter, a beaten egg, the grated cheese, and a lot of black pepper in a frying pan, and made a passable carbonara-esque sauce. Then I dumped the whole lot from the frying pan into my bowl… Which was still full of hot water.

After a moment of panic I managed to salvage most of it by quickly holding back the pasta with a fork and tipping out as much runny hot water as I could into the sink. But half the sauce went with it. Oh well. It still tasted pretty good.

Around lunch I did a 5k run. It was still very cold then. We’re getting another polar blast which should make the next few days very chilly again.

I also worked on writing scripts for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! I’m approaching concluding strips for a couple of the themes and have figured out the endings for them. Just need to write them up into scripts.

New content today:

Faux Hun Friday; pastie and pizza Saturday

Friday was gaming night at a friend’s place. My lunch was just a falafel wrap that I made with supermarket ingredients. But for dinner I picked up something on the way to my friend’s place. This involves a bit of a story.

When we used to work together at Canon Research, there was a Thai restaurant just around the corner from the office, where we often used to get lunch. It was called Go Hun. And it had some of the best Thai food you could find in Sydney.

When we stopped working there, Go Hun of course remained, but I didn’t have occasion to go out that way very much, except to visit this particular friend who lived nearby for board games night. So sometimes I’d drop in on the way and grab some take-away for my dinner, which was good. But then about a year ago Go Hun closed down! But a new Thai place opened in the same premises. It’s actually named “Charmed Thai“, but we all refer to it as “Faux Hun”.

Anyway, I hadn’t tried anything from Faux Hun yet, so I stopped in on the way and picked up an order of chicken pad kee mao. It was really good!

At the games night there were just four of us. Two of our other regulars both happen to be in Europe at the moment: one on a six-week grand tour with wife and teenaged kid, and the other who popped over to Italy for a week to meet up with his partner who was taking a slightly longer trip there.

We started with Ingenious, which I won. And then played a quick hand of Uno Flip!, which I also won! My friend had found this at a discount store for just $3 and decided to buy it because it was so cheap. It normally retails in regular shops for about $10. Only when he got it home and opened the box, it became clear that it was a Chinese counterfeit version! The box said it contained printed instructions, but it didn’t, and the quality of the cards was awful. They were thin and flimsy, with a weird finish that looked like it’d start peeling off any second, and were already starting to curl. We played a game merely so that he could say he got his money’s worth out of the $3 he’d spent, before he throws it away.

We moved on to the big game for the evening: Architects of the West Kingdom. This is a worker placement game where you choose to place a piece each turn to collect money, collect various building resources, hire workers, build buildings, or round up rival workers in an attempt to (a) restrict them from gaining bonuses and (b) sell them into incarceration for profit. You can also use actions to free your own workers from other players or the prison. The goal is to amass points by building buildings, constructing parts of the cathedral, earning a virtuous reputation, or simply collecting valuables including silver, gold, and marble. The obvious routes to victory involve building a lot of buildings and working on the cathedral. But I got some workers who synergised into a way to collect lots and lots of marble cheaply, and reward me with bonus virtue for marble at the end of the game. So rather than build buildings, I decided to see if I could just collect enough marble to win.

I came last. I think the strategy could have worked if I’d just built another building or two, or found another worker who synergised with the engine and gave me more benefit from the marble that I’d amassed. I didn’t lose by a lot, so I believe the strategy could be viable.

Anyway. We ended the night with a quick game of For Sale. Which I also came dead last in. But I’d won two of the four games for the night, and the other two wins had been split between other players, so I declared myself the grand winner!

Today I cleaned the house up, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and shower, and emptying all the damp absorbers and refilling them with absorbing crystals. Our weather is still far too damp and humid and I dread getting mould growing in things. For lunch I took Scully for a walk and popped in at the pie place, which had a special beef and vegetable pasty

And for dinner tonight my wife and I went out to Organica, which we tried for the first time a few weeks ago. This time we tried the pizzas there, and they were very good. Thin crust blistered by a wood fire, with buffalo mozzarella and toppings.

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New content today:

Savoury danish Thursday

Continuing our food theme this week, I went to Moon Phase for a pastry lunch, trying their savoury danishes for the first time. I selected a mushroom and asparagus one, and one with onion, truffle, and cheese.

They warmed them up for me and I sat outside at the small table with Scully as I ate. They were both really good! Also a lot more filling than I expected, probably because of all the butter in the pastry.

For dinner I made a quick meal of vegetarian “chicken” sausages with microwave “baked” potatoes, and what was left of the broccolini. I only had an hour in between groups of ethics classes, so I had to make something that didn’t take too long to cook.

Speaking of ethics, this evening I asked in one class, “What are some annoying noises?” One student immediately said, “Someone playing the recorder.” I also had two kids today in different classes who said they find the sound of rain annoying. Everyone else said rain is a sound they find relaxing, which was more what I expected. I haven’t heard of anyone thinking the sound of rain is annoying before.

New content today:

Fancy lunch Wednesday

This morning I had a food disaster. I poured out my bowl of muesli, added fresh blueberries and chopped apple and orange chunks. I was about to spoon yoghurt on top when I bumped the bowl and it fell off the kitchen bench, landing on the floor, face down. The entire lot was scattered all over the floor. I had to clean it up and then make a whole new bowl of breakfast.

For lunch I walked with Scully down to my wife’s work. She was having a half day and was free from midday. We walked from there to Rafi, a restaurant in North Sydney. We sat at an outdoor table with comfortable sofa seating and ordered a very nice lunch.

Hummus with crispy chick peas and green chilli (which we had with the home made sourdough pita bread, not pictured):

Crispy eggplant with spices, honey, and herbs:

Jerusalem artichokes with hazelnuts and Grana Padano:

King prawns with chilli miso butter (non-vegetarian, for me):

And after this fantastic meal I wanted to try one of the desserts. Roasted apples with burnt honey and Pedro Ximénez sauce (and crumble and vanilla crême anglaise):

The whole meal was amazingly good, and very filling. It’s now after 8pm and I still haven’t eaten anything else yet. Although I will make something quick and light for dinner in a minute. I just finished my three ethics classes for the evening, on the new Noise topic.

New content today:

Fajitas Tuesday

Today I worked on my lesson plan for this week’s new ethics topic: Noise. With questions like:

What should you do if neighbours are being noisy when you need to study or sleep?
Is it okay to have an occasional loud party, as long as you don’t do it too often?
Can even soft sounds be annoying sometimes?
How important do you think it is to get away from noise and have some peace and quiet?
Should there be more quiet places in busy areas?
Should concerts be softer to protect people’s hearing?
Should electric cars make sound so people can hear them coming? Or is it better that we use the new technology to reduce traffic noise?

That done, I took Scully yup to the shops and got some sushi rolls for lunch. It had rained—again—overnight, but was clearing up as we went out and the sun came out in the afternoon. I noticed a lot of the footpaths are green with moss again, like they were a year ago when we were having ridiculous amounts of rain. There are also an awful lot of mushrooms sprouting from the bases of trees and garden mulch areas around the street trees.

This afternoon I spent some time sorting through Magic: the Gathering cards, trying to collect loose cards and the remains of decks into piles of specific sets so that I can offer them for sale on eBay as coherent lots. I discovered a couple of preconstructed Commander 2013 decks, which I barely ever played with. My friends and I preferred booster drafts and didn’t really get into playing Commander. So I confirmed that these decks still had all of the cards present and stuck them on eBay (Power Hungry deck, Eternal Bargain deck). These items join three lots of old sealed booster packs that I listed yesterday (Throne of Eldraine, Core Set 2020, and 6 mixed boosters going back to Ravnica block). In the next week I’ll start listing lots of loose cards from specific expansion sets, starting with the more modern ones.

In other gaming news, I got an email saying that backer surveys are ready for Goodman Games’s Original Adventures Reincarnated #8: Grimtooth’s Old School Traps. When I backed this, I chose the D&D 5E version of the book, but I’ve since re-evaluated and would prefer the Dungeon Crawl Classics version now. So I sent Goodman an email and asked if my pledge could be changed. Hopefully I’ll hear back in the positive.

For dinner tonight I made vegetable fajitas. Fried up some onions, garlic, julienned carrots, sliced broccolini, cauliflower, and mushroom, seasoned with paprika, oregano, cumin, cloves, cinnamon, chilli, salt, and lemon juice. Served with warm tortillas.

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