Daily update – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

An ant sting

I forgot to mention yesterday that I got stung by an ant. It was after my 5k run, and I was doing some warm down stretches, and then some sit-ups on the grass area near my home. I was in the middle of the sit-ups and I felt a pain like a needle prick on the back of my upper arm. I finished the exercises before looking, and then realised it must have been an ant sting.

It was nowhere, I mean nowhere near as bad as the jack jumper ant sting I got some years back (around 2017, I think). This time I didn’t see the ant, but I’m guessing it must have been a bull ant. I’ve been stung by those a few times before. I seem to remember them being more painful than this time, but maybe my memory is unreliable.

Today I noticed the sting wound had grown larger.

This is about 33 hours after the sting. The red area is lumpy and the skin scaly. This is a pretty normal reaction; I don’t believe I’m allergic to ant stings at all. Hopefully it’ll go down over the next few days.

Today I had the usual bunch of ethics classes, leaving not much time for other things. There was also a huge thunderstorm which hit just after midday. Parts of Sydney got over 70 mm of rain in 30 minutes, causing flash flooding. Here it was like someone was throwing buckets of water at the windows – very windy, torrential rain, and lots of thunder and lightning. It lasted maybe an hour. I haven’t been out since, but I expect there’ll be branches and maybe trees down all over the place.

New content today:

A close call, and exploring St Peters

After my 5k run and a shower this morning, I suggested to my wife that we could go out for a bit of a drive. She suggested exploring another inner west suburb, and decided on St Peters.

As I drove out of our driveway, I was inching carefully forwards, preparing to turn left into our street (remember that we drive on the left here in Australia, so I wasn’t crossing any traffic). Our street is fairly quiet, but the approach from the right hand side of our driveway comes around a blind corner, so we have to be careful and come out slowly, in cases someone is coming around the corner from the right. So naturally I had my eyes glued to the right as I pulled out…

And another car came racing down our street from the left. You might think this is not a problem, since it would naturally be on the other side of the street, nowhere near me. But not so. It had swerved onto the wrong side of the street at high speed to avoid a speed bump, and so was coming at me from the left. Where (in Australia) you would NEVER expect an oncoming car to be coming from. See the diagram below:

I’m the blue car, edging out of my driveway, peering right in case a car comes around that blind corner on the left side of the map. And the red car came hurtling down the street, swerving onto the wrong side to avoid the speed bump, around the wrong side of the pedestrian safety island, and came within centimetres of hitting me. Fortunately it missed. But sheesh.

Anyway, following this we drove over to St Peters and explored the area. We stopped to get my wife a coffee at a cafe named Copper, which she’d looked up before and was keen to try. Just as we arrived a horde of about 20 seven-year-old-ish boys arrived, with mothers trying to herd them in to the only table inside. This caused chaos in the cafe for about 10 minutes and was incredibly loud, as you might imagine. Eventually we managed to order a coffee and she had it on an outside table, while the kids inside sang “Happy Birthday” and a guy ran out with plates of cake for all the mothers standing outside (since there was no room inside the tiny cafe).

Then we went next door to Fuel Bakery, where I had a sausage roll and a lamb pie, which were both excellent. Then we walked around and explored the neighbourhood.

We found a crafts workshop, which did lessons for people. the woman inside was very friendly and chatted with us for several minutes. The place was in an old factory that used to press vinyl records! My wife took a business card and is planning to go back for a resin jewellery workshop one day.

Further on was a community garden, full of fruit and vegetable plots.

And back near where we had parked the car, there are these old brick kilns.

We also stopped at Miss Lilly’s cake shop in Newtown, just across the suburb boundary of St Peters, where I had a very excellent orange almond cake slice. Like really good – I’ve had a lot of orange almond cake and this may well have been the very best I’ve ever had.

Back at home, this afternoon I wrote what might be the last Irregular Webcomic! strips. I finished off the Stranger Things theme story, which is the last one to be completed. I took the photos, and will start assembling them tomorrow.

Enchiladas for dinner, three ethics classes, and relaxing for the evening…. a busy day!

New content today:

D&D session: dealing with the curse

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. One of our players had to miss out due to COVID, and another had a daughter’s birthday, but we had 4 players (plus me as the GM), so went ahead. Firstly, here’s a map of the campaign locations so far:

Neensford is their home village. The first adventure took place in an old tomb not far away. Then they travelled north to Brandonstead to deal with rumours of a “dragon” terrorising the area. Then back to Neensford before striking east to Benton, the nearest base village to Titardinal’s Tower. After dealing with that they travelled to Sable Ridge to investigate a Spider Temple, and then to Edgewater, near the location of the Temple of Swords, where we last left our intrepid band. They’d just met Spathio, the God of Swords, and ended up getting cursed by him. Now they need to kill 9 people with 9 different swords, in 9 days, or die!

The first thing they did however was loot valuables from the temple that they’d spied on their way in and hadn’t yet carried out. At one point they triggered a trap that they hadn’t triggered before: a huge stone block lowered from the ceiling, blocking the only exit door. This produced the following exchange:

Player: Can I tell with my Dwarven Stonecunning if we can fit our fingers underneath and lift the block?
Me: You can tell with your Dwarven Stonecunning that the block weighs roughly 40 tons.

After dealing with this setback and exiting the temple, they had to decide how to find 9 people they felt morally comfortable with killing. They asked around Edgewater for any leads on “maybe bandits in the area”? Edgewater is a small village, and the residents advised them to head west to the town of Thistlebrook, which sometimes had bandits attack merchant caravans.

When they got to Thistlebrook, I presented them with the town noticeboard:

I made this using some very nice free art assets I found on this Patreon page. As you might be able to see, several of these notices are potential leads to situations where the PCs would have a chance to kill people, more or less justifiably. And some others are just fun flavour. I left it up to them to decide what avenues to investigate.

The result was they spent the rent of the session chasing leads all over Thistlebrook. They thought hunting down the bandit gang was a good likely solution, but decided first to check out the executioner job. The magistrate had three of the bandits in custody and needed an executioner, since he said nobody in town wanted blood on their hands. They at first thought this was a good start on their curse, but then they talked to the innkeeper at the place where they were lodging, who revealed that the bandits were actually heroes to the poor of the the town, standing up against persecution and taxation by the nobles (i.e. they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men). This threw the players for a moral loop and they had to reevaluate their plans. At one point they made a plan to contact the bandit leader and get him to agree to have some of his men pretend to be captured, so the PCs could turn them in for the rewards, and then they’d break them all out of prison!

They checked various other leads and eventually stumbled across an old sage who was looking to hire some adventurers for an expedition to a nearby ancient vault where ancient wizards had done magical research. He said it had recently been found by snake people. Now this was something that they could investigate and hopefully kill some snake people, who they’ve tangled with twice before. But by now it was late and we ended the session before any further adventuring.

We had essentially zero combats (although they did kill a few “sword fish”—fish literally made of swords—by standing on the edge of a pool and stabbing them while in no danger of the fish hitting them), and there were only about three dice rolls in the whole evening. 95% of it was pure roleplay and discussing decisions, and it was great fun!

Today I got up and went for a 5k run. It was warm and very humid and so I again went fairly slowly. It’ll be nice when autumn hits and the weather cools down a bit. I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids comic writing and planning.

For dinner, my wife and I walked up to a new restaurant we haven’t tried before: Dozo, a Japanese place. It was pretty good, and for what we had (mostly vegetarian) not very expensive.

New content today:

Apartment for sale next door

Okay, I made an error two days ago when I said that new neighbours had moved in to the apartment next door. Yesterday I saw a woman in business dress come in with a man carrying a tripod and a big bag of gear. I wondered if it was actually a real estate agent photographing the place to produce a sale listing, and the furniture being moved in the day before was only temporary decoration for photography and to display the place to prospective buyers.

Today in our letter box was a flyer advertising exactly that. They had photos of the interior with the furniture I saw being moved in on Tuesday, and it was announcing that the apartment is now up for sale. There will be an open house inspection for prospective buyers this Saturday, and the place will go up for auction on 8 March. (I don’t know about other countries or cities, but here in Sydney almost all homes are sold by auction these days rather than a fixed price sale.)

When I last talked to the neighbours who just moved out, I was in their place as they were removing the last of their furniture. I mentioned that each time people moved out we were tempted to knock down the adjoining wall from our place and claim the second bedroom, and brick up the bedroom’s doorway into that apartment. And ta-da! We’d have another bedroom! And my neighbour was very encouraging and said we should totally do it. 😁

In other events today, I had my usual bunch of ethics classes. In the afternoon I drove wth Scully up to the liquor store to stock up on wine (since we have virtually none left) and also get some beer for Dungeons & Dragons tomorrow night. And around 5pm I took her for a walk up to the local shops, where I bought some eggs, since we were low, and the supermarket is perpetually empty of eggs these days so I can’t get them in the usual weekly grocery shop. Bird flu is affecting poultry farms here in Australia too, and we’ve had egg shortages in the supermarkets for months, although small independent grocers still have supplies from smaller farms that the supermarkets don’t use as suppliers.

New content today:

D&D prep and a Italian treat

Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?

So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.

It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.

At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.

This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳

New content today:

A beach break for lunch

Today I had to refuel the car, and decided to take Scully on a drive to Collaroy and Fisherman’s Beach, next to the golf club there. Of course I stopped for a couple of pies at The Upper Crust, one butter chicken, and one Mexican beef. Excellent as usual.

It was hot and sunny and I expected to sit on the grass under the shade of a huge Norfolk Island pine tree that grows there. You can see it on the left edge of this photo:

But when we got there, there was an older couple already sitting there, with their dog. The patch of shade is fairly small, and Scully didn’t like the look of their dog, so we had to move along the beach a bit to the other side of the golf clubhouse and find a shady bench for me to sit on.

At least this spot gave me a good view of some Australian pelicans who were sunning themselves and drying off their wings. Among a swarm of silver gulls.

I also saw Australian ravens, masked lapwings, noisy miners, common mynas, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, rainbow lorikeets, and one grey butcherbird, all of which I recorded in eBird.

Back home, I worked on my ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Prizes and Awards”. I have questions like:

Why do people or organisations give out prizes and awards?
Do prizes sometimes get given to the “wrong” person?
Why are some awards, like Nobel Prizes, Olympic Medals, Academy Awards, so famous?
Is it fair that something or somebody that wins an award will become more popular?
Should awards always go to the best performer, or should effort and improvement also count?

Oh, and new neighbours moved into the apartment across the hall from us today, after our old ones moved out just last week. This seems a very quick turnaround given that our old neighbours were told they had to leave because the owner was intending to sell the apartment. We never saw anybody come in to inspect the place or any prospective buyers or new renters. And then suddenly two young women showed up today with furniture. I’m wondering if these woman actually offered a big rental increase and the owner decided to just tell the previous ones that they had to vacate. 🤔

New content today:

Warming weather and secret subjects

The weather here is steadily warming up throughout this week. We had 30°C today, but it’s going to climb slowly as the week progresses. With little respite at night, as the minimums will be around 21-22°C each night. That’s the worst part, really, since it’s difficult to sleep without having the air conditioning on.

So far five people have submitted secret “expert subjects” for my planned trivia quiz night with my friends I still have two or three more to tell me if they want in. Some of them are very obscure from my point of view, so I’m going to have to do some significant research to come up with questions!

Not much else to report today. I had a lot of classes as usual for a Monday. University courses start in a few weeks and this year the Data Engineering course I help teach is on Monday afternoons, 1-4pm. Which clashes with two of my ethics classes, so I’m going to have to reschedule or cancel them. I’ll have to get that sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

New content today:

Preparing a trivial competition

Today I slept in quite a bit. I had a good solid sleep and probably caught up a bit on less sleep on Friday night. After breakfast my wife requested a lift down to Kirribilli Markets with Scully, so I dropped her off before going on my 5k run. These things combined meant I went for my run significantly later than usual, and it was already 26°C by the time I started. Nevertheless, I went faster than yesterday since the humidity was a bit lower and that made it feel not so bad.

I worked on some comics, and I also spent some time thinking about a revived old project. Some years ago a friend ran a trivia quiz during one of our online games nights. I had the idea to run a quiz myself and wrote some questions, but ran out of momentum. But I ran across the half-written quiz the other day and was inspired to work on it again. I mentioned it to the guys and they were all keen. I’ve asked them all to think of and submit their individual “expert subjects”, for which I will research and craft specific questions related to that subject for each of them.

I think I’ll run it as a team event, with pairs or triplets of people, depending how many players we have. Hopefully it’s not a prime number!

I also came up with a couple of new topics for future ethics classes, which I jotted down some preliminary questions for: “Danger!” and “Always Connected”. The latter is about the modern phenomenon of everyone being constantly plugged in to communications networks, no matter where they are, in contrast to a generation or two ago when people could easily get off the grid and in fact were forced to much of the time.

New content today:

Finding Paths, and a new Indian restaurant

On Friday I had a busy day. I was chairing the latest meeting of the Standards Australia (SA) committee on photography, held over videoconference. We normally have three meetings a year, but the last one (supposed to be after the New York ISO meeting in June) was delayed so long because of staff turnover at SA (resulting in us not having a project manager for several weeks) that we finally decided to leave it until the next date, after the Sydney October meeting. And then it was tough to organise it in December like I wanted, so it was pushed to January.

It was a fairly routine meeting, except for a new attendee. One of our current committee members decided it’s time to cull his numerous committee roles and went to the effort to find a replacement to take over his representation of their university. The new guy I had a Zoom meeting with on Tuesday (which, looking back, I see I didn’t mention that day) to brief him on what our committee does and what sort of work he’d be expected to do. That didn’t scare hi off, so he attended on Friday as a guest, before they go through the motions of replacing the retiring member.

Otherwise I went through the discussions and progress from both the New York and Sydney meetings. Unfortunately our member from the Art Gallery of NSW couldn’t make the meeting because I especially wanted to thank her for the behind-the-scenes tour she organised for us at the Sydney meeting.

This meeting yesterday overlapped with one of my ethics classes, so last week I rescheduled it to be a day later and told the kids. But without that rescheduled one I still had three more to teach after the standards meeting, which with a break for a late lunch took me up to 6pm.

And then from 6pm we had online games night with my friends. One of them had organised for us to do some roleplaying this time, using Pathfinder 2e rules and a virtual tabletop (VTT). And by 6pm everyone else was ready to play and all waiting for me! So I pretty much had to dive straight in.

It was nice to be a player for once instead of running the game. This was a one-shot test run of the VTT, before the GM starts a proper campaign. There were five of us in the party; I was a halfling rogue who I named Quillby Bramblefoot. We were given a mission to check out a watchtower which had lit its distress fire signal, and told to recover a magical artefact from the tower, although the guy giving us the mission was a bit cryptic about it and wouldn’t tell us what it looked like or what it did. Which in hindsight may have been a hint, because when we got there and after fighting a couple of battles against wild boars and some semi-undead things, we found a cloaked woman who led us to the item and told us a different story about it. We didn’t get much further as it got late and we finished up there.

Today I got up and did a 5k run. It was very tough going because it was 24°C and 75% humidity. I can really see it in my times when the weather is warm and humid; it can make me a minute or two slower than a good time in cool, dry weather. Back home I showered to freshen up and then it was time for the make-up class that I’d moved from yesterday. Three of the four kids showed up, which was a good turnout for moving the class to a different day.

This afternoon I looked at organising more details for our trip to Tokyo in a few weeks. It was time to think about the dinner options and book some restaurants. I went through the vegetarian-friendly restaurants that my Japanese contact recommended for us to meet for dinner. One sounded truly awesome – mid-range fully vegetarian versions of traditional Japanese cuisine, conveniently located, great reviews. I tried to book it for 27 February… but it’s booked out for the whole month! This is another issue with vegetarian places in Japan – tourists book them out well in advance, because there are so few options for all the vegetarian visitors.

So I did some research and found a nice looking izakaya with an extensive vegetarian menu, in a good location. I emailed our contacts there and suggested this. I also booked dinner for me, my wife, and her mother and sister at Sakura-tei, an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku. It’s interesting using a Japanese restaurant booking site. They want to know so much about you! There was a drop-down asking what occasion it is, with about 50 options: Birthday (self), Birthday (spouse), Birthday (friend), Birthday (family), Friends, Women’s group, Welcome, Farewell, Holiday party, Reunion, Tourism, Business meeting, Team drinks, Family celebration, Kids event, Wedding reception, Anniversary, Engagement celebration, Date, Group Date, Proposal(!), Seminar, Music recital, Exhibition, Other. Those are all in the list, and I skipped some other entries. And another asking how many times you’ve been to the restaurant before.

Speaking of restaurants, we tried a brand new Indian place tonight. It’s the new one that opened up where Turka used to be. I checked the Google reviews and… it was very mixed. A lot of 5-star reviews, and a lot of 1-star reviews. People can be very opinionated, so we decided to try it ourselves. Unfortunately our experience was more 1-star than 5-star. The samosas were cold in the middle, as though frozen and not fried enough to warm through. The dosa had a good spicy potato filling, but the pancake around it was a bit tough, not nice and crispy. The malai kofta curry had decent paneer dumplings, but the sauce was fairly bland. So, we decided not to come back. There are a few much better Indian options in the area.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Leftovers and vegetarian Tokyo planning

Not much else to talk about today, so I thought I’d pick a food theme. Because I have ethics classes from 6-8pm, it’s difficult organising dinner for me and my wife to eat together. I need to eat around 5:30, which is too early for her. So we often end up eating individually on Thursdays (and Wednesdays). Sometimes I cook something that will withstand sitting on the stove staying warm for an hour. Last night I made a single pot of lentils ( a mix of red lentils and French lentils), with broccoli and potato. There was some left over, which I kept in the fridge until my dinner tonight, while my wife made herself some eggs later on.

The other leftover was the last few slices of sourdough from the loaf I made a few days back. I made a new loaf today, but it just came out of the oven this evening.

And the other food-related task of the day was going through options for vegetarian dining in Tokyo, to pick places to try and book for our upcoming trip. A contact on the Japanese ISO photography standards delegation sent me some recommendations, and this one looks really good: Saido. I think we’ll suggest this one for dinner with my contact and his wife (we had dinner with them last time we were in Tokyo as well).

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