darths & droids – Page 6 – dangermouse.net

COVID cancellations

A while ago I’d booked a trip away over Easter, planning to do a road trip with my wife and Scully. We found a motel with a pet-friendly room at Mudgee, one of our favourite country town destinations, and a suitable AirBnB in another town making a nice loop from Sydney, with a couple of nights in each place. I also booked a couple of our favourite restaurants in Mudgee. We’ve been looking forward to this trip for a while.

But with the coronavirus situation in Australia getting progressively more serious by the day, and the very real possibility of travel restrictions being imposed, as well as the thought of possibly spreading the disease even if travel is not restricted, we’re reconsidering our plans. We decided to cancel the AirBnB today, but leave the Mudgee accommodation for the time being. Realistically I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to go, so at some point that will probably have to be cancelled too, as well as the restaurant reservations.

It’s a shame because besides having a trip ourselves, I really wanted to help the rural communities by visiting and spending some money there. The good news is that AirBnB announced just today that they’d be refunding all prepaid bookings, including the normally non-refundable fees, and they’d also not be charging the hosts for cancelled bookings (which normally they’d do, apparently). So at least both we and our cancelled host haven’t lost anything because of this cancellation.

Other than that, today I took a longish walk to a nearby suburb in search of some prebaked pizza bases, which we use to make pizzas for dinner at home. I tried to buy some the other day in my local supermarket, but they’d sold out, so I decided to try elsewhere today, and get a bit of extra exercise while at it. I found them, and enjoyed the time out in the warm autumn day.

At home today I mostly worked on writing some more Darths & Droids comics.

New content today:

Market prep, and Star Wars

My next market day is coming up on Sunday, so I’m preparing stuff. Last time a friend gave me and my gear a lift in his large car. My car is too small to pack it in, and my friend is busy this time, so I’m having to make alternative arrangements. It looks like I’m going to have to hire a car for the day – which will add another expense that eats into my profits. But if I make as much as last time, it should be okay.

This time it’s at a different venue. East Lindfield Community Hall, East Lindfield, which is a bit further from my place. But this is this market’s established venue, where it’s been held monthly for almost 5 years, so it has an established customer base and people in the area know about it. So hopefully we’ll see more shoppers than two weeks ago at the first-time venue.

Today I also worked on Darths & Droids comics, doing some writing and then assembling the comics from screencaps. I completed three strips (although I’d done most of one before starting today), which is a week’s worth of comics in the queue and ready to be published.

Oh, I’ve also been thinking about Monday, which is my next school science visit. The coordinator has told me that the older kids (who I’ll be talking to) are studying plants at the moment. I think I’ll do a slideshow on exotic plants from around the world and their various adaptations to their environments. And I still need to find another couple of experiments for the Science Club kids as well. I’ll need to do all this probably on Saturday, since Sunday will be taken up by the market.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to try again on my abandoned sunrise photo expedition. The weather should be better than my last attempt. I’ll be getting up around 5:30 to head off before 6 am, for the sunrise at the beach. Hopefully it will be a good one!

New content today:

Housework Saturday

Yeah, not that much exciting today. I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the house, changed the bedsheets, all that sort of boring but necessary stuff.

I also spent the afternoon writing and making new Darths & Droids strips, for the start of Episode VII. Which I can’t show you because that’d be giving stuff away early.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to get up early and head out to the beach to do some sunrise photography. I’ve packed my gear into the car already. I’ll get up at 5:30, grab a quick breakfast, and head out. I haven’t done a sunrise session for a while, and have been itching to go do one. This is a good time of year because it’s still warm, and the sunrise is getting later as autumn progresses, but daylight saving hasn’t ended yet, pushing sunrise back an extra hour. So sunrise tomorrow is a relatively late 6:49. With no traffic, I should be at the beach soon after 6 am, in plenty of time.

The only wildcard is the weather. Tomorrow is forecast to be “partly cloudy”, which is the ideal weather for sunrises, but of course it could be overcast, or rainy, or clear at that time, none of which is good. And there’s no way to tell at 5:30 when it’s still pitch black. You just have to go and hope for the best.

New content today:

Market readiness

Saturday! One day to the market! So of course I spent time doin last minute preparations. I realised I was planning to go to the bank yesterday to get some change to use as a cash float, and also I needed to get a receipt book, but I forgot. I thought I was in trouble, because banks don’t normally open on Saturdays, but I did some searching and found a few select branches were open, including one a short train ride away.

So I hopped a train a few suburbs over and went to the bank to get a bunch of coins and low denomination notes ready to make change if people buy stuff with cash. And from there it was a 15 minute walk to an office supply shop where I got a receipt book, before walking back and catching the train home again.

This afternoon I spent some more time working on Darths & Droids story planning. And this evening I went out for dinner with my wife and Scully. We drove to a beachside suburb and had a pleasant Spanish tapas dinner looking out at the beach as the sun went down. Very nice.

New content today:

Episode VII story plotting

With this week’s ISO meeting over, I had time today to do other things. This morning I went to the golf course to play 9 holes, hoping not to repeat last week’s disastrous round. And it began promisingly, with decent scores on the first few holes. I even saw an ibis on the greenkeeper’s driveway:

On the 6th hole, which is a short par 3 with a very elevated tee off dropping down to a green far below, I got my tee shot very close to the green. Then I did a “chip and roll” shot to get the ball onto the green, and it stopped about 1.5 metres form the hole. And then I sank the putt, for a par! The first time I’ve pared that hole. It felt really good.

I did well up to the 7th hole, where a tree had fallen over during the recent storms we’ve had.

That’s actually the 9th green in the photo. The 7th green is behind me as I took the photo, and the tree must have fallen right onto the green before they cleared it away with a chainsaw.

Then I hit the 8th hole… Oh dear. It took me four strokes to even reach the beginning of the fairway. The ball kept landing in heavy, dewy grass, and whacking it as hard as I could just sent it 5 or 6 metres dribbling up the course to land in more thick grass. I eventually scored 13 on that hole. Oh well. Even with that, my total for 9 holes was still 2 strokes better than last week, which shows just how much better the rest of my round was.

Back home, I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids. We need to get some sort of storyline planned for the next three Star Wars movies, and finalise which players are playing which characters, and what’s happening in their real lives. So I was busily thinking up plot points and making notes. It’s not quite at a point where I can start writing scripts for individual comics, but it’s a lot close now that it was yesterday.

Tonight, in lieu of our fortnightly Games Night, we had a birthday party event for Steven. It was at a local park, with a barbecue where we cooked sausages, and ate them with bread and salads. It was a nice park, with a lot of cool playground equipment, including a zipline. The kids all had a go, and then I tried it as well, and it was a lot of fun. I also had a climbing race with one of Steven’s daughters up the rope climbing thingy. And I managed to get my hand on the top post a second before she did, so I won!

New content today:

Switching chapters

I did some solid work on Darths & Droids today. Our joint writing group has agreed that we should start work on Star Wars: Episode VII, but because we no longer work together and aren’t able to spend lunchtimes doing the writing work, I am going to draft skeleton scripts that we can quickly go over at our fortnightly games nights. Hopefully we can manage to turn over 6 new strips a fortnight this way, to return to our long-standing 3-a-week schedule, rather than the one per week we’ve been doing since ending our treatment of Rogue One and doing the Muppet Show story as an intermediate story.

Today I wrote and assembled the traditional three intermission strips that we publish between each of our stories. That will give us three more weeks of space to start buffering up strips in preparation for the beginning of Episode VII, which will happen on 22 March.

I also did a few other small tasks related to ISO Photography Standards, and the STEM in Schools program which coordinates partnerships like my one with Brookvale School, where I run the Science Club. Tomorrow I’ll have to get stuck into preparations for my visit on Monday. This is going to be a busy week.

New content today:

Cheesemaking!

Today I made three more Darths & Droids strips, which builds us up a nice buffer in the run-up to beginning Star Wars: Episode VII. I also discussed some of the aspects with the fellow writers online.

One of my friends decided to start a Google Docs spreadsheet listing all of the games that we have in our group, so we can know what’s available for Friday Night Games, and for borrowing from one another. So I spent some time going through my collection and filling in spreadsheet rows.

And the other thing I did today was make some cheese! I got my wife a cheesemaking kit for Christmas, and we decided to give it a go today. The kit makes a few different types of cheese, and we selected feta as our first attempt. It’s pretty easy, but it takes several hours of waiting around for the milk to curdle and the bacterial culture to start working. At the end of the waiting we had curds that could be scooped into cheese moulds:

The cheese is now draining for a few more hours before being flipped upside down to drain even more overnight. And then tomorrow it goes into a brine solution, and voilà, we’ll have feta!

At least I hope we will. I’ll tell you what it tastes like when we try it…

New content today:

A nice dinner out

Today it was supposed to rain heavily here in Sydney. The forecast said up to 50 mm of rain. Which would have been welcome as we need the rain. However it turned out to be nothing more than an intermittent sprinkle all day, and as I type this now the official rainfall figure recorded for Sydney so far today is only 2.2 mm – less than 1/20th of the forecast. That’s kind of been the story for the past few days – forecast of heavy rain, and while we’ve had some heavy showers, the totals have been nowhere near the forecast figures.

Today I worked on Darths & Droids, assembling a couple of comics from completed scripts, and doing some background planning tasks.

And then this evening I had a nice dinner out with my wife, at one of our favourite fancy restaurants. We dropped Scully off with our neighbour for dogsitting, and drove about 20 minutes to Balmoral Beach. We had a lovely dinner, and the walk back to the car along the beach after dinner was beautiful.

New content today:

Games night and comic discussion

Last night was fortnightly Games Night again, which is why this update is a few hours late. It’s really early on Saturday morning, and I’m up because Scully apparently really needed to go out in the rain at 5am to sniff the grass. The rain has been on and off, but that’s definitely better than off for the past 4 months. It’s now so wet that the trees are weeping with joy:

And there are frogs roaming the streets!

I spent much of yesterday sorting and collating a couple of boxes of Magic: the Gathering cards that my brother had lying around. I’m planning to sell a bunch to get some money for him, since I have experience at doing this.

Games Night started early, so we could go over scripts for upcoming Darths & Droids strips. We also had a discussion about the future of the strip, and moving into Star Wars: Episode 7-9 now that 9 has been released. The logistics are going to be very different because we no longer work together, so can’t dedicate lunch hours to writing strips together in the one room. We decided that we have plenty of ideas for Episodes 7-9 and would like to make a story out of it, so we’re going to start on it and see how it goes.

The plan is that I will outline plot action for several strips and try to write skeleton dialogues for each strip, perhaps without punchlines if I can’t think of any. And then we’ll have short discussions, either in person at Games Nights, or via voice chat on Discord or something, to go over the scripts, fill in gaps, write punchlines, and tweak them with suggested changes. Hopefully this will be enough to enable us to go back to publishing three strips a week as we did before. We’re not sure if this will work long term, so it’s going to be a bit of an experiment to start with. But the gist of it is that we’re now ready to start Episode 7 after we wrap up the Muppets episode.

We moved on to games. First up was Werewords, a bizarre cross between Werewolf and a twenty questions type of guessing game. Since each game takes only about 5 minutes, we played several times. The young daughters (ages 8 and about 10?) of our host watched the first few times, and then decided they wanted to play too. They did really well, each one being the critical component of a victory for their side.

After the girls’ bedtime, we moved on to try The Shipwreck Arcana with four players, while another two played Marvel Champions at the same time.

Shipwreck Arcana is a very interesting logical deduction game. You draw two numbered tiles, then play one on a tableau of pseudo-Tarot-like cards which have rules for which numbers you can play on them, and everyone else has to work out what your unplayed tile is, by examining what you chose to play (and what you chose not to play). Everyone’s working together to guess a certain number of tiles before time runs out. We managed to win the game without too much difficulty – I think we got a moderately lucky shuffle of the deck. I can see how it could be a lot trickier.

New content today:

Smoky Sunday

Smoke descended on Sydney overnight, from the ongoing bushfires and backburning operations being carried out in an effort to stop the fires. When I got up this morning and opened the windows, I immediately closed them back up again, because the smell of smoke was so strong. There was a haze in the air, reducing visibility, but not as dramatically as it has been on some days recently.

We needed some groceries, and normally I walk up to the supermarket and back, but today I didn’t want to be outdoors breathing that air for a second longer than necessary, so I drove up. it did give me the opportunity to buy more than I’d normally be able to carry home. And I took a photo of the smoke haze form the roof of the supermarket car park:

Today I made a new Darths & Droids comic, and did some thinking about storylines for Episodes 7-9. And I starting editing some old photos that I scanned from film prints from a trip to Thailand I did back in 2005. These are photos I’ve never had in digital form before, which I scanned a while back, but hadn’t got around to editing yet. I’ll probably start posting some of these to Flickr in the near future.

New content today: