magic the gathering – dangermouse.net

Surprise dentistry and massive packaging

This morning first thing I had another visit to the dentist, following last week’s clean and check-up. I left last week with the impression that the dentist today would be repairing a couple of small fillings on two upper teeth. But when I was reclined in the chair, he started poking around the lower teeth and saying he was going to do two new fillings there on some grooves worn into the teeth near the gumline. This was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t had any impression of that last week.

I said I thought we were doing the top teeth, and he said yes, but he wanted to do the two lower teeth first. Being in the vulnerable position of being in the dentist chair I got a bit flustered as I was processing this unexpected news. The dentist agreed to do the upper teeth as I’d expected and then see how I felt about the lower teeth. This gave me enough breathing space to think it through and realise it was probably a good idea and give the go ahead.

The good part was all of the fillings were very shallow and I didn’t need any anaesthesia at all. He did drill a little, but somehow managed to do it without any pain at all, so that was great. I really hate the anaesthesia as it takes about 5 hours to wear off for me and is very annoying. But anyway, the new dentist seems very good like the old retired one, so that’s good. And because of the confusion over the teeth, he only charged me for three teeth instead of four.

My wife had taken Scully to work because of my dentist appointment, so I had some totally free time when I got home and took advantage to go on a 5k run. Fortunately it was a cool morning and a bit less humid than on the weekend, and I actually managed a decent time.

Then I went to pick up Scully from my wife’s work. We walked back via the pub at Crows Nest, where we stopped for lunch. I had a chicken schnitzel. They’ve changed the lunch menu – the schnitzel used to come with a choice of gravy/sauce, and I used to like both the peppercorn and the mushroom sauces. But now it doesn’t come with any. The schnitzel is till good but I missed the sauce with it.

At home, I had to pack up some more Magic: the Gathering cards. The same buyer as yesterday closed a deal for all of my Ice Age set cards. This was the first large set that came out after I started playing, and I got a lot of those cards, and the buyer wanted all of them. None of them are worth very much individually, but… when I’d done inventorying them there were over 4000 cards! I’d hoped to get them into the mail before 4pm, but it was almost 5pm by the time I’d actually packaged them up. So they’ll have to go into the mail tomorrow morning. It’s a very hefty package too… Checking the weight of Magic cards online shows about 1.8 grams per card, so this package is going to be around 8 kg with the box and all.

Tonight I had three more classes on the “Codes of Honour” topic. The flow is coming together a bit more now, after last night’s class was a bit choppy. It’s unfortunate the Tuesday kids always get the “experimental” version of the class, which then gets refined over the next few days.

New content today:

8 kilos of cards mailed

Today I worked on a new Darths & Droids strip in the morning. Then before lunch I had to pack almost 8 kilograms of Magic: the Gathering cards to be mailed off. Someone had bought a huge stack of common cards off me, and a smaller number of uncommons and some rares. It added up to a fair value, but it’s also good to simply get rid of a large shoebox full of cards!

It was too heavy to consider walking up to the post office, so I drove up with Scully. I was hungry so we sat at the fish & chip shop first and I had a chicken burger for lunch. Then I went to the post office and sent the package. I also sent off a copy of each of my two Irregular Webcomic! books to a reader. I still have a few copies of those available (in case anyone reading this wants some).

This evening I had three ethics classes on the new topic of Time Passing, which I started yesterday. I think this is a slightly tricky topic to get the kids talking about, as some of the questions are a bit abstract and open, and their thinking is still a bit limited. As in they’re imagining restrictions to possible answers that aren’t really there. For example, I ask them “What are some things that change over time?” and a lot of the answers are focused on technology, while ignoring other potential avenues such as nature, culture, or societal values. I’m still working out how to encourage broader responses without too much prompting. But hopefully it’s a good exercise in getting the kids to think more broadly, rather than setting their own restrictions.

New content today:

Mailing, sorting, pricing, inventorying

Today I spent several hours doing stuff to sell some more of my Magic: the Gathering cards. I listed a set of common cards for auction on eBay last week, and it sold yesterday, so I had to packaged them and then walk up to the post office to send them off.

Then to finalise a deal with someone online I had to make up a checklist, count all the cards I had from an old set (Fallen Empires), record the inventory numbers, then go through an online sale site to find latest sale prices for all of the cards, and enter them into a spreadsheet to calculate the total value. Despite being several hundred cards, most of them currently sell for less than a (US) dollar each, so the total only came to about $250. But! I have a buyer and hopefully he’ll go through with the purchase and I’ll be $250 better off and have gotten rid of a huge pile of cheap cards.

Then I did the pricing process for another old set (Homelands), which I’d inventoried a week or two ago. The total price for another several hundred cards came out almost the same. Although these are old sets from the 1990s, they didn’t have any really strong/desirable cards in them, and they were printed in large quantities so they aren’t particularly hard to find, thus the low resale prices.

And today another auction ended, for a lot of 285 cards on eBay, which ended up selling for just $26. I’m kind of happy to get anything for some of these cards! None of these are the few rare/expensive cards that I have.

I also took Scully for a couple of walks, and made a quiche for dinner before my three online classes in a row tonight, so my wife could eat when she got home from work, while I was busy doing classes.

The weather today was pleasant, mildly warm, but there was a whiff of smoke in the air from controlled burning of bushland around the city, to reduce fuel load before the summer. It wasn’t so bad where I live, but I could see across the harbour to the centre of the city and the air looked very smoky there. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get a cool change and back to winter-like weather for a few days.

New content today:

Making a will

Yep, you heard that title right. Today my wife and I took the important step of starting to draw up wills. We’d been talking about it for a bit, but today we had an initial appointment with a solicitor to go through the details, legal formalities, and so on. We covered what we want to happen if either of us dies, or in the event we both die at the same time (or in quick succession). We also covered powers of attorney and other stuff. The solicitor will draw up drafts based on what we covered and pending any amendments or errors we’ll get to sign them in the next few weeks.

That appointment was in the afternoon. In the morning I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on the subject of “Hospitality”. I did a first class this evening, but it was abbreviated because the only student had to leave early. I’m hoping there are enough questions and subject matter to sustain a full length class. I think it should be okay.

Weather was chilly again today. But should be back up to 29°C in a couple of days. Spring here really isn’t a “warm” season, it’s more like cold and hot days randomly interspersed.

Also today I collated, photographed, and listed on eBay a big pile of Magic: the Gathering cards. All the common cards and basic lands from the 1994 Revised Edition of the game, 4 copies of each, for a total of 360 cards. If anyone reading this is interested, the eBay item is here.

New content today:

The winds of August

Everyone who lives in Sydney knows that August is the windy month. But this year it’s been an unusual August, with not much wind and unusually high temperatures. Until today, when the wind hit with a fury.

We’ve had wind gusts recorded up to 95 km/h, and it’s been extremely windy basically all day, starting before dawn, and still blowing noisily outside now at 9pm. Trees have been swaying wildly. I had to take Scully out for a walk at lunch time, and we passed jacaranda trees which were shedding yellow leaves in huge billowing clouds. No doubt there are some trees that have been blown down by this wind.

Normally the August wind is cold. But today was hot. 28.1°C in the city, up to 29.6°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow will be cooler but the forecast for Friday is 30°C. This would be warm for summer, but it’s still winter! We may even be in with a chance to break the hottest winter day ever recorded.

Today I spent time writing new Darths & Droids strips and sorting out and inventorying more Magic cards. An unfortunate thing happened with my ongoing selling of cards. There are some junky uncommon cards from the Legends expansion of 1994 that were never worth very much – puttering along at resale values around US$5. Until the release of a new card in June which created a powerful combo with these old cards. Suddenly they spiked to over US$80 each briefly before settling into a new stable price around US$50. I decided this would be a good time to sell these old cards and I put half a dozen of them onto eBay last week, expecting to get well over $300 for them.

But yesterday Wizards of the Coast announced a new card ban, banning the new card from tournaments because it was overpowered. So now this combo is no longer legal in tournament decks. With two days left to run on my auctions. I’d been expecting people to bid the cards up to around $50 each in the last day, as is usual for auctions. But now I’m not sure what they’ll make, and I may end up mailing out a bunch of cards that people buy for $10 each – and it will be $21 in postage if anyone overseas buys them (though the buyer also pays postage, but this may just discourage people even further from bidding).

Oh well… they’re bits of cardboard and they’re only ever worth what someone will pay for them.

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Two extremely busy days

I missed yesterday’s post because I was so busy that I just didn’t have time for it. I had 4 ethics classes before lunch, then spent the afternoon sorting out Magic: the Gathering cards to try and get some more sold and shipped off. This time I went through all the cards from the Fallen Empires expansion released in 1994, and I found I had enough cards to assemble a few complete sets of all 187 cards in the set. These are not expensive cards, and each full set is only worth $130 or so. But selling them as sets means I get rid of a lot of common cards, of which I have numerous copies, and which would be difficult to sell in anything other than bulk lots.

I also had to quickly make an Irregular Webcomic! strip using photos previously shot, because I’d neglected to make new strips for this week on the weekend. And I did some work on new Darths & Droids strips too, to try not to fall behind on those as well. Then I had two more ethics classes lat in the evening to round out the day. And in between I walked Scully and made pizza for dinner.

Tuesday’s have been my day off ethics classes for a long time, and I use the time to write the upcoming week’s topic. But this week I begin teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney, again, in the image processing course that runs in second semester. And this year the class is scheduled for 2-5pm on Thursdays, and the travel time to get home clashes with one of my classes on Thursday evening. So I had to move that class to a new day, and Tuesday was the only sensible choice. So my deadline to get my class written was 5pm today, instead of 5pm Wednesday as it has been.

In addition, I posted those Fallen Empires sets for sale on a Magic Discord server, and got some buyers. So I had to go the post office twice – once to get packing boxes, and twice to mail them off after packing the cards carefully.

And the plumber came today to install a new kitchen sink mixer tap. Our old one had been falling apart, with the aerator coming out back in May so that the water splattered everywhere if turned on beyond a slow trickle, and recently it also began dripping. I’d bought a replacement tap a few weeks ago, and thought I’d give it a go of installing it myself, given my recent success replacing the toilet valve. But I prevaricated and kept putting it off, until finally the dripping got to me and last weekend I opened up the tap box and had a look at the installation instructions. I decided this was going to be significantly more complicated than the toilet valve, so I called a plumber.

So the plumber had to work on it for almost two hours, and he measured the water pressure in the pipes and found it to be fairly high at 900 kPa. He said that was great for nice shower pressure, but too much for a kitchen tap, and indeed the tap was only warranted for pressures up to 500 kPa. So he had to install pressure regulators on the hot and cold water pipes. And then install a bit of copper pipe so the flexible hoses of the new tap could reach. In other words, this was way beyond my means, and I thanked my lucky stars that I just called a plumber and didn’t try to do this job myself.

And then I had to make another new Irregular Webcomic! strip for tonight’s update. I really need to find some time to get ahead and buffer some strips in advance.

Oh, and I had the first ethics class on a Tuesday! Thankfully all of the students who were doing it on Thursday got my messages about the change of day and could make it, so I had three kids, talking about Shapeshifting. I think this is a good topic, because it was a fun and interesting discussion.

Oh, and in other good news, the local council here has sent us a development proposal for public comment. They are planning to build a raised speed bump pedestrian (zebra) crossing in front of my place, to replace a pedestrian safety island which has speed bumps before it on either side of the street. I think this is a fantastic proposal, because the current arrangement means that cars can AND DO swerve across the median line and onto the wrong side of the street, potentially into oncoming traffic, just to avoid the speed bumps. Because the current speed bumps aren’t aligned across the street, cars can do this chicane manoeuvre to avoid them, and the ones that do it are trying to avoid them because they’re travelling too fast. So it’s ridiculously dangerous. So I’ve submitted a public comment, saying words to this effect. Hopefully we’ll see that new crossing constructed in a few months.

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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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Moving cards on eBay

I have a week with no ethics classes, but only because I have the ISO Photography Standards meeting beginning tonight… at 3am.

Without needing to prepare for a new class this week, I spent the morning doing photos and creating listings on eBay to sell lots of Magic: the Gathering and Netrunner cards, all in sealed packs. I bought a bunch of Magic booster boxes some years ago, at the tail end of our regular draft tournaments with my friends, thinking we’d use them to play tournaments. But we haven’t played Magic for ages and I don’t think we’ll ever get to use all these booster packs. So I’ve decided to sell them off. There are sealed boxes from Dominaria through Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance to War of the Spark. Plus boxes of Unstable and Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. And also some loose boosters, dating back to original Ravnica: City of Guilds, and Dissension. I also created listings for sealed starter and booster packs for Wizards of the Coast’s 1996 Netrunner, the original game that later evolved into Android: Netrunner.

If you’re interested at all in any of these, you can see my eBay listings here.

I took Scully for a couple of walks during the day, which was cold and wintery, but dry, thankfully. And did a few comics things to keep up. And then did a little prep work before the ISO meeting tonight. I’m going to try to go to sleep a bit early, although that may be difficult because I’m not tired at all. I have an alarm set for just before 3am so I can get up in time to join the meeting online.

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Marking done

Today I did the marking for the first experiment planning report for Data Engineering. I had four teams’ reports to mark. I think the quality is definitely better than last year, though there was still some significant variance overall.

There was more heavy rain this morning. It’s been raining every day since 1 May, and the forecast is for rain every day until at least 13 May. I needed to go to the post office to try to get them to reroute the lost package back to me, rather then continue delivering it to Canada, as I refunded the buyer all of the money. In the channels where I’m selling these cards, reputation is everything, and I’d rather take the hit on refunding the money than get a negative seller reputation that would make it difficult to sell more cards. But the post office said there was no way they could do that. So, I have to trust that if the buyer eventually does receive the package that he’ll let me know and be reasonable about sorting things out fairly from there. I do have reasonable trust that he will, since as I said reputation is prime in these circles and the guy has a positive rep that he won’t want to tarnish too.

Anyway, I decided to drive up instead of walk in the rain. It doesn’t save much (if any) time, but it does mean about a kilometre less walking in the wet. But by the time I got there, the rain stopped and the sun came out!

Since I had the car out by now anyway, I decided to drive over to Maggios’ Bakery at Cammeray for lunch, where I got a slice of pork sausage pizza and a pistachio chocolate scroll. And tonight for dinner we have minestrone, to round out the Italian food day.

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Magic card sorting II

Another day mostly spent sorting Magic cards, like yesterday. I completed a set of cards and put them neatly into an old shoebox. They fit with a little space left over, so I filled it with basic land cards. I didn’t count the cards, but measuring the piles and dividing by the known thickness gave me an estimate of close to 2500 cards that I’ll be giving to this boy.

This morning I picked up the groceries. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but I’ve been ordering everything but fresh fruit and vegetables online, to make it fast and easy to pick up, but when I get there I grab fruit and vegetables myself. I tried ordering those as well, but found I wasn’t happy with the produce they selected for me. Today I grabbed the usual apples and bananas, and also more mangoes, which continue to be cheap and abundant. So far we’ve had R2E2 and Calypso mangoes, so today I grabbed some Honey Gold variety.

At lunch I drove to my wife’s work with Scully and a large package that we’d picked up at the post office yesterday. It’s for her boss, and it was heavy, full of books, so she didn’t want to have to carry it to work herself. She got to finish work at midday today, being the last day before the Christmas break. So we drove from there over to the Naremburn bakery to ave lunch and pick up a dozen fruit mince tarts – some for us and some for her family.

This evening I did a 2.5k run. I’m now up to a total of 497.5 km for the year, which means my next run will tick the total over to 500.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. I’ve lost badly at two games of Jump Drive, but managed to win the last one. And we’re now deep into a game of Ticket to Ride.

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