Tag: irregular webcomic

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.

New content today:

New comic batching

I had a final five classes today on the current ethics topics. But my main achievement was finishing off scripts and then photographing a new large batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I put together the first one for tonight, but I’ll have to start assembling the rest tomorrow.

The weather continues to be warm and humid. We reached 29°C today, and the humidity never dropped below 70%. The next week is looking like being uncomfortably warm, with overnight minimums never dropping below 21°C. In fact we haven’t had any temperature below 20°C since Thursday last week, so it’ll be 10 or 11 days in a row at least. That’s too warm to sleep comfortably, but fortunately we have air conditioning to cool things down a bit further so we can sleep.

I’ve also been organising a Christmas event with my family. My family traditionally does gatherings on Christmas Eve, which is kind of nice because it means everyone can do things with their spousal families on Christmas Day without any clashing. Last year we went to a gathering of extended family, but my mother lives up the coast and doesn’t travel much these days, so she missed out. This year instead my wife and I, and my brother, have made plans to go visit my mother on Christmas Eve. I’ve booked a place where we can go out for a nice lunch, with outdoor seating so we can take Scully as well.

New content today:

Humidity and comic writing

The heading kind of sums up today. It wasn’t nearly as hot as yesterday, only reaching 28°C, but it was very humid, with a cloudy overcast locking in the moisture. I went for a 5k run at 7:30 and it was 20.6°C with 100% humidity. I did manage a faster time than yesterday though, so that was good, but boy was I dripping with sweat by the end of it.

After having a cold shower I spent much of the day writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I’m planning to photograph a big batch tomorrow, just in time for the new week of strips. Hopefully.

Another thing I forgot to mention yesterday: I played another game of Root (the board game) with my wife. We’ve only been playing the cats and the birds factions so far as we’re both still learning the game, but this time I tried the Woodland Alliance for the first time. My wife played cats and absolutely destroyed me. Final score was 31-14. I can see the Alliance strategy will take some time to learn.

New content today:

Storm fronts and Lego

Late last night, after I’d written my blog post, we had a severe storm hit Sydney. It didn’t last very long, but was incredibly intense, with lots of lightning and loud thunder. My friends and I were tracking the storm radar across the city, and reporting when the rain hit at our various home locations. It hit me about 10pm, and the rain was absolutely torrential, and there was also hail. The hail wasn’t too large, only about pea sized.

And tonight there’s another storm tracking across Sydney as I type this. We just had some heavy rain, but overall it looks less intense than last night.

Today I worked on getting some new Irregular Webcomic! strips written, photographed, and assembled, in time for the coming week. Ideally I’d do a large batch, but I only had time for a week’s worth, which will hopefully give me breathing room to write a full batch for next week. I’m actually planing to wind down production of new comics some time in the not too distant future, as I’m finding it difficult to keep up and it’s providing me with a bit less fun than it used to. But I want to finish off the stories in some sort of way and not leave things hanging. It may take another year or so to do that!

Today there were two nearby Christmas markets on, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. My wife wanted to go check out both of them and do some Christmas gift shopping, so I drove her out to each market, and she walked home with Scully from each of them. She says she’s completed her Christmas shopping now, so that’s good.

And tonight I had three more ethics classes, on the topic of Exercise. Some of the questions I’ve been asking the kids:

  • Can exercise make you feel better mentally as well as physically? How?
  • Do you think people are less fit today than in the past? (given changes in lifestyle from manual labour societies to modern technology)
  • Is it ethical to pressure someone to exercise for their own well-being? If they don’t enjoy it?
  • Is it appropriate for a government to run a campaign to encourage citizens to exercise, as a general benefit to health care?

I’m still a bit exhausted by the end of an evening of teaching, as I still haven’t caught up on my sleep routine after my trip. The past couple of nights I’ve gotten close to sleeping through to a reasonable wake-up time though, so hopefully it won’t take much longer.

New content today:

Seeing into the future: Crystal balls!

Monday morning is the regular end-of-ethics-week final classes in the morning. Morning classes are usually full of kids from North America, because it’s early evening over there. Honestly I was glad to be finished this week’s Energy topic, for reasons I touched on earlier. I tried to revise the plan on the fly to include more open-ended discussion questions, and it worked a bit, but was still not as open as I’d have liked. Never mind, on to the new topic! It’s on Pets, and I’ll write the plan tomorrow.

This afternoon I worked solidly on Irregular Webcomic! I made 10 new strips, using the photos I took a few weeks ago. I now have a full 3-week buffer, which will hopefully give me time to write new strips and take more photos before it runs out.

Tonight was lesson 3 in my current instance of the Creative Thinking/Board Game Design class. This is where the course gets really interesting and fun, as we converge down the brainstorming ideas we did last week and come up with a theme for the game we’ll be designing. After the three students voted, we had two theme ideas on equal footing: Colonising lands, and “a shiny crystal ball”. I did a tie-break and selected what I think is the more interesting option, the crystal ball. So… we’re designing a board game about crystal balls!

We’ve already thought of one possible rules mechanic. During the game set up, you lay out a series of cards face down, which represent things that happen on future turns of the game, and by using a crystal ball you get to look at a future card. So you know what will happen on that turn. Then you can use that knowledge to your advantage. Perhaps the rules require you to reveal or hint something about the future to the other players, or perhaps you can bluff about it. Next week we’ll work on more mechanics and refining the game rules into something workable.

New content today:

Big Lego comics day

After getting three ethics classes out of the way this morning, I worked hard on Irregular Webcomic! today. I had to finish off writing a batch of strips, quickly, so I had time to photograph the whole batch, and then assemble some of the comics for this week, since the buffer was empty. This meant some of the comics didn’t get punchlines as good as I would have liked, but thankfully when I got to assembling the comics I managed to rewrite one of those to my satisfaction. Actually, it’s the one that’s gone up this evening already!

Apart from that, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and then again with my wife after she got home from work. And I cooked a quiche for dinner. And… about to relax and watch an episode of Question Team with my wife.

New content today:

The dreaded comics hiatus

I made a hard call today. I need to take a brief hiatus from making/publishing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I managed to buffer enough to cover my trip to Japan, but at the moment I have an urgent need to upgrade my web server software, namely MediaWiki and PHP, to avoid either breaking my personal note-taking wiki or end up paying an extra maintenance fee to my webhost for keeping an old unsupported version of PHP around. I’ve been spending spare time all week preparing by porting some essential content from wiki to Obsidian as a backup. Once I’ve captured enough of that, I’ll backup the wiki to an XML export and try the upgrades. Some time this week hopefully. And hopefully it’ll all work and my porting/backing up won’t have been necessary. But in the worst case I’ll need it.

Anyway, that gives me no time this week to make new IWC comics. I’m keeping up with Darths & Droids though.

Another thing I mentioned a few days ago:

There’s a large house we walk past regularly, and since we got back from Japan I’ve seen that the brick wall around it has been partially destroyed. It looks like a car went out of control at the adjacent intersection, mounted the kerb, and smashed into the wall.

I walked past it again and took a photo today:

Broken fence

This house is on a Y-shaped intersection, so it could easily have been a car coming down the leg of the Y and not turning at all, and ploughing straight into the wall here. The wall has actually been cleaned up since I saw it the other day – then there were partly demolished sections of the brick wall remaining which made it look more like an accident than a deliberate removal.

Not much else to report today. Weather was fine and sunny and not too cold for winter, but windy, which was annoying. And for dinner I made a pizza with mushroom and eggplant topping. I don’t use eggplant that much, and it might be the first time I’ve put it on a pizza. I cubed it and fried it a little to make sure it cooked enough. It turned out good!

New content today:

An overdue chicken schnitzel

This morning I got stuck into photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I took Scully for an early walk, and it was really chilly today. Then I got the Lego stuff out and spent the rest of the morning building and arranging the sets and taking photos. I finished the batch around 11am, then relaxed a bit before deciding what to do for lunch.

I decided to walk Scully up to the local shops and have lunch at one of the outside tables at one of the pubs. They have delicious chicken schnitzel, and it’s been a long while since Ive had one, so that’s what I ordered. Scully wanted to sit on my lap because it was still a bit chilly and windy, and she gave the schnitzel a good stare. But she’s pretty good and doesn’t try to grab food off plates. And it was as delicious as I remembered, so that was good!

This afternoon I finished up class notes for this week’s new ethics topic: Getting Even. This is a topic I did a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of good questions from then, so it wasn’t much work revising it. I had three classes this evening.

For one question I asked what the kids would do if another kid deliberately stepped on their foot, causing some pain. One girl said she’d feel angry an give them her “angry look”. She said she wouldn’t do it now (over the Zoom video) because it would scare me too much. I laughed and said I really wanted to see it now. So she did it, and yes it looked pretty angry, but in the current context it was really quite funny. I love it when the kids do interesting things and we can have a fun class.

New content today:

Intro to Intro to Machine Learning

Today I worked on a presentation for the university Data Engineering course I’ve been tutoring this semester. I felt there was a bit of a gap in the course material. The first few lectures talk about types of data, experimental collection of data, basic statistics (such as mean, standard deviation, etc), plotting and presenting data, and fitting data (linear regression), and hypothesis testing.

And then the next lecture is a guest lecturer from MathWorks who comes in and talks about using MATLAB to do machine learning. It’s a large jump in complexity and depth of material, and I feel like many of the students are left a bit floundering like they’ve suddenly been thrown in the deep end. There’s no set up of the context or motivation for machine learning, or what it’s actually trying to do with the data.

Last lecture I spoke with the professor about this and he agreed with my idea of adding a bit of introductory context material to set up the machine learning content. We actually have an opportunity to deliver this because for the next three weeks we just have project sessions where the students show up to work in their teams and ask us questions if they need any guidance. We do the same thing in the Image Processing course in semester two, and there we’ve had a “bonus material” lecture at the start of one of those session. (Last year I did this, talking about the science and engineering of photography.)

So today I made a short presentation (just 9 slides), that we can give to the students on Monday. I set up the problem that we want to solve – classifying things by examining measurements—data—about them. I give examples to show how general this problem is and the wide range of important applications. Then explain why it can be difficult and how we can approach it in a data analytical way. And then how we can apply automated algorithms to do it in various different ways. Which leads into the machine learning examples that they did in the aforementioned previous lecture.

I tested it on my wife and it only took about 15 minutes. (And she now has a better understanding of the context of machine learning than most people!)

Also today I started work on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I hope to get that done in time to photograph Lego on Tuesday morning.

The forecast rain hit today – it was much cooler than yesterday. But still we managed to set a new record for number of consecutive days in Sydney with maximum temperature 20°C or more. Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology records, it looks like 193 consecutive days – the last day we had a maximum below 20°C was 17 October, 2022. The forecast for every day in the coming week is at least 22°C, so the streak will probably extend past 200 days.

New content today: