Tag: irregular webcomic

Booking Tokyo

Today was very warm, 31°C in the city, 39°C in some suburbs. I did a 5k run in the morning, reluctantly, as it was already almost 25°C at 9am.

Back home, I had two main tasks for the day. First I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, based on the scripts I’ve been writing the past few days. This is really getting near the end. I wound up a few of the story themes and there’s not much left to do with the remaining ones. I expect I might be able to finish completely with one more batch of comics, probably made late January or early February.

The second task was to book several of the things we’d planned out for Tokyo at my sister-in-law’s place yesterday. We booked a tea ceremony, in Ginza. And a day trip tour to Hakone to see Mount Fuji. These things will be done by the others while I am working in ISO Photography standards meetings. I also want to book tickets to the Shibuya Sky observation deck, but they only open for booking four weeks in advance, so that has to wait until the end of January.

While booking those, I also booked a car rental for Auckland for our short trip to New Zealand in March. This is only a 3-day trip over the weekend to visit my wife’s nephew and his partner there for their combined 30th birthdays. My wife’s sister and mother are going too, but they are arriving several days earlier and spending a week there. We’re going to collect the car from the airport on Friday and go pick them up at their hotel to drive up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend, before coming back to Auckland for departure on Monday.

I assembled some of the IWC comics. And then spent a bit of time in the afternoon pondering story details for Episode IX in Darths & Droids, discussing with co-authors, and making notes. It’s quite a shift in mode from normal strip writing in the middle of a movie. I have to switch mental gears and get refamiliarised with the new movie. I’ve spent the past two years viewing scenes from Episode VIII over and over again, and now I have to discard all of that and start on the new movie. I’ve rewatched it twice in the past few weeks, including one time through in slow motion, rewinding and pausing every minute or so to catch details and make notes.

For dinner I made pizza, topped simply with potato and rosemary. I used a couple of tips I saw on a cooking show last week. Because I’m using a domestic oven rather than a pizza oven, the temperature is lower and the pizza cooks more slowly (though still pretty quickly as I use the maximum temperature). So one tip is to add more water to the dough, since it has longer to dry out in the oven. I increased the water from a strict 1:2 ratio with the flour, adding an extra 5 mL to make 130 mL of water to 250 g of flour. And I hand-stretched the dough by first using my fingers to delineate a fatter crust around the rim before flattening and stretching the central area. Overall both changes worked well!

New content today:

Massive mail and assembling comics

This morning I took the giant package of Magic: the Gathering cards to the post office. I didn’t want to walk up there with 10 kilos of packaged cards, so I drove there. Unfortunately the post office is across the street from a school and there were tons of parents dropping kids off even at 9 o’clock, so it was a bit chaotic and hard to find a parking spot. I managed to find one not too far away and hauled the boxes over. The big box turned out to be over 8 kg with the packaging, and I had a second box of about 2 kg as well. But they’re now on their way!

I had two ethics classes before lunch, then made some sandwiches to eat before taking Scully out for a brief walk. It was a hot day so we didn’t go too far. When it’s really hot and sunny I have to carry her over sections of sunny bitumen paths, because the black surface gets really hot and could burn her feet. She doesn’t like that and wriggle to get free, but it’s necessary to avoid burns. She walks on grassy areas and that has to be enough.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling the last of the Irregular Webcomic! strips that I shot on Sunday. Then I had to upload them and write annotations for them all. I only managed to complete that this evening, in between more ethics classes.

New content today:

Italian notes are migrated

Today I finished transferring all of my Italian language notes from OneNote to Obsidian. The last two pages of notes were complicated and needed a lot of reformatting, which was why I left them to last. They are my pages on verb tenses and conjugations, and a second page all about the subjunctive tense. I realised they needed a bit of revamping and reorganisation, so it was quite a job porting them across.

I also wrote a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, ready for photographing on the weekend. I’m getting close to finishing off most of the theme storylines. My plan, as it is, is to hopefully write and produce one last batch during the Christmas break, which should hopefully mean that I finish making new comics before the New Year, although the comics will run into January, and maybe slightly into February.

And of course I had some ethics classes. The Alien Invasion topic is very fun and interesting, with some intriguing and amusing discussion from some of the kids.

On TV I’ve started rewatching the original series of Star Trek, which is on Netflix. I watched “The Cage” and “The Man Trap” the past two nights. Tonight I might do “Charlie X”. It’s been too long since I rewatched all of these. And I was somewhat surprised in a class this evening to have a girl mention while we were discussing aliens that she watched Star Trek too, with her parents, and it was one of her favourite shows.

New content today:

Annoyances and comics making

Today I had a few tasks: Write up my class notes for the new week’s ethics lessons, on the topic of “Annoying Things”. I came up with an interesting fun question for the kids:

If you had an annoyance superpower that could make other people annoyed by things, how would you use it?

When I asked it in the first class tonight, the kids laughed and had a great time answering it. They said it probably wouldn’t be good to use it on most people, but you could potentially become a crime-fighting superhero by using it on criminals to distract them when they’re committing crimes.

One of the kids was a new 8-year-old. I’m always a bit worried when parents sign up kids this young to classes meant for 10-12 year olds. But she turned out to be mature and intelligent and have good enough English (not her native language) to participate without problem.

After I completed the lesson plan, I finished writing my latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. By then it was time for an early lunch time walk with Scully. We went on a long walk around to Grumpy Baker and the harbour foreshore. I got a mushroom pie (vegetarian) from the bakery, and then did some ball fetching with Scully on the grass by the water. She was pretty worn out by the time we walked back home. The day was mild and cloudy, but a bit humid.

After lunch I photographed the sets for the new comics and assembled one for tonight. The I switched over to Darths & Droids writing, and hammered out another strip for that.

For dinner it was pizza night. We had a mix of pumpkin and asparagus today. Maybe a bit unconventional, but in my Italian video practice tonight I watched a video with a guy making a “zuccamisu” – a pumpkin spice tiramisu.

So if the Italians can do it to their own food, I don’t see why I can’t!

New content today:

Full on comics writing

Today I mostly dedicated to bashing out a bunch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts, hopefully to do some photographing tomorrow in time for Monday’s update. I got several done, but still want to do another few for the batch.

Before that I did my 5k run. It was really tough going today. I chose the more hilly route, and it was also hotter and more humid than yesterday, so I ended up quite a bit slower.

I baked some sourdough and made fried rice for dinner. And did some ethics classes in the evening. Not that exciting for a Sunday, I’m afraid.

New content today:

Comics batch done!

This morning we had to do an emergency bed linen change and wash, after Scully threw up on the bed. Thankfully this is a very rare occurrence, but it’s nasty when it happens.

I spent much of the day finishing off that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote and photographed a couple of weeks ago. I do batches of 30 strips at once for efficiency purposes, enough to last six weeks. And now they’re all done and uploaded, so I won’t have to do any more until mid-October. Phew!

I actually completed what I think will be the last strips in a couple of the themes, as I work towards winding down the entire comic. It’ll be interesting to see how many readers realise which strips are the last ones for any given theme.

In ethics classes tonight I asked that question I posed yesterday: If there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out?

  • Two kids from Taiwan were both very insistent that you not let the car in.
  • One girl from Australia said you should let them in, but wind down your window and….
    I thought she was going to say “Yell at them.” But she actually said, very politely and meekly, “… tell them not to do it again.”
  • And one kid from Singapore said you should let them in, even though they’ve done the wrong thing, because it’s dangerous to block the second lane.

A friend of mine predicted that the answers would vary by country, and so far he seems to be right.

New content today:

Full day of teaching and Lego

After four ethics classes this morning, I took Scully for a walk to the post office, where I had to mail a couple of things, and the to the fish & chip shop for some lunch. I ate at my usual favourite spot, in the small park on the hill overlooking the harbour. The day was sunny and mild, really nice.

They were very generous with the fish today. Normally it’s one fillet piece, but today the pieces were smaller, about half the usual size or a little more. But they didn’t just give me two pieces, they gave me three!

Back at home I spent the rest of the afternoon photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, that I’d written over the weekend. That took almost three hours of effort. By which time my wife was home from work. She took Scully out for a walk while I finished off photographing the last few strips.

Then I made pizza dough for dinner. While that was rising, I assembled a few strips and uploaded them to the server, ready for the first new update of the week tonight. And then it was time to make the pizza, rolling out the dough, topping it with tomato paste, herbs, cheese, and the regular diced pumpkin, walnuts, feta, and some chilli flakes. into a super hot oven and five minutes later it was ready to eat!

Then I had a shower, before two more classes in the evening. In between those I’m writing this. The first evening class has two kids in it who are very talkative. Either one of them I could probably ask one or two questions and they would be happy talking for the remainder of the lesson. But because there are two other kids in the class as well, I have to keep interrupting them to let those kids have a say too.

I’ve also just done my daily Japanese and Italian practice. I’m using Duolingo for Japanese now, and have moved to listening exercises on YouTube for Italian. I just watched a five-minute cake recipe video in Italian and made note of some new vocabulary words, like mescolare (to mix), versare (to pour), stampo (cake mould), impasto (dough), manciata (handful), dattero (date, as in the fruit), and my favourite new word of the day: sbizzarrire (to indulge) and the related sbizzarrirsi (to indulge oneself).

New content today:

Intense comic writing day

That pretty much sums up my day. I did a new Darths & Droids strip, and hunkered down to complete the batch of Irregular Webcomic! scrip writing that I began yesterday. I still have a handful to do, which I might do tonight, or tomorrow morning (between ethics classes) before photographing them in the afternoon.

Oh, I forgot last night after getting home from the pizza place we gave Scully a bath. Today she spent time out walking with my wife a couple of times while I concentrated on my comics stuff.

Last night I finished watching Apollo 13 Survival, a Netflix documentary on the ill-fated spaceflight. Apollo 13 is one of my favourite movies, and this documentary telling the same story with archival NASA footage and interviews was riveting in a very different way. I really enjoyed it.

I didn’t do much else today. oh, except a 5k run this morning. The weather was a lot cooler than yesterday, and should be milder the coming week after that burst of heat we had last week. The ginkgo trees outside our windows are starting to produce new green leaves, another sign of spring.

New content today:

I totally forgot to make a comic

Oops. Yesterday I was so busy with other things that I completely forgot to make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip. I had a script and the photos were taken ages ago. I just had to assemble it and upload it into the buffer. But I was busy with ethics classes, and in between I had to work on some other Outschool admin stuff, and I also put some lots of Magic cards into eBay. And I took Scully for a walk. And after my last class had a shower and got ready to go out for board games night at a friend’s place.

And making the comic just slipped my mind. And because I was playing board games into the night and went straight to bed when I got home, I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten until I woke up this morning and had multiple emails and forum messages and Discord chat messages telling me and wondering if something terrible had happened to me.

No, I just totally forgot.

So today I made the new comic and buffered it up to replace Saturday’s usual rerun strip. I feel like I need to take a week’s break making new strips though, because I’ve been run off my feet doing other things and I really don’t want to spend all this weekend writing a new batch of strips when I have other things I need and want to do.

Anyway, at last night’s games night we started with The Shipwreck Arcana, a cooperative deduction game which I described once four years ago. Then we moved on to Heat: Pedal to the Metal with 6 players. We played the USA track, and one of the guys tried a risky move on the first turn, double upshifting to third gear and using a stress card to try to get a quick start, and ended up drawing high and overshooting the first corner, thus spinning out on the very first move! It was hilarious and he spent the rest of the game trying to recover and catch up to everyone else who were at least a turn ahead.

After this we played a new game: On Tour. Each player is in charge of a band, planning a tour around the US (there’s also a Europe board in the game). It’s kind of like a travelling salesman problem, except that you roll two 10-sided dice to assign numbers—representing the day of the tour—to each node (the nodes correspond to either a large state, or a group of small states like on the east coast). You can put the numbers where you like, with some constraints specified by random cards that everyone must follow – for example you can only place numbers in the southern half, or western third of the country. The goal is to form a connected route through monotonically increasing numbers, showing how your tour progresses as the days go by, and visit as many states as possible.

It gets hard because the dice are unkind. You might have a node with 15 and a node with 20, separated by an empty node and be hoping the dice roll a 15-20 so you can fill it. (You can do multiple concerts on a single day.) When the dice betray you, inevitably, you end up having to cut off chunks of your optimistically planned grand tour. It was a right mess! When you roll doubles on the dice you get a wildcard number which you can fill in as a star on your board, which would have helped immensely, but nobody rolled doubles for the entire game!! You also get a wild star if the three region cards are identical, which also never happened! We ended the game with no wild stars at all. So my grand 40-state planned tour ended up only visiting about 12. But it was fun and interesting.

Today my wife went into the city to see a matinee performance of Sister Act, the musical. Meanwhile I took Scully for a walk to get some fish and chips for lunch, and spent the afternoon working on Darths & Droids strips. In the morning I did the grocery shopping and a 5k run.

I met my wife at the new Metro station near us after 5pm and we went straight to Salmon & Bear restaurant for dinner. I had a nice fish pie, with vegetables and mashed potatoes. Very filling!

New content yesterday:

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.

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