April 2024 – dangermouse.net

The last perfect day of autumn…

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth… then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

Carl Sagan said this in his TV series “Cosmos”. I’m reminded of it on a day like today, when it’s absolutely gorgeous autumn weather – warm, with a light breeze, and just a pleasure to be outside. Not too hot like summer, and not yet descending into the chill of winter. And with the forecast for tomorrow being rainy and much colder, it will probably feel like the start of winter.

So today felt like the last perfect day of autumn. I had four ethics classes before lunch, but then took the chance to take Scully on a nice long walk in the sunshine, filtered through high cirrus clouds so it wasn’t stinging. We stopped at The Grumpy Baker and I got a spicy vegetable roll for lunch – like a sausage roll but filled with a kind of Moroccan spiced vegetable mix. It’s really good.

Then Scully got to run around and chase a ball on the grass by the harbour for a bit before we walked back home. She rolled in the grass a bit, enjoying the scents, but it was okay because we had planned to give her a bath this evening. We meant to do it on the weekend but time got away from us.

I spent some time making stage 8 of the Lego D&D set. This adds a door and arches around the dungeon level, and adds a roof which looks like a floor of the storey above.

I made pizza for dinner, but didn’t realise until the dough was ready that we’d run out of pizza cheese (a blend of mostly mozzarella with a little cheddar and parmesan for flavour)! So I had to make it with just cheddar and feta cheese. Cheddar’s not the best by itself as it gets oily when it melts, but spreading it sparely on the pizza works okay.

Then two more classes tonight to finish off the week’s topic on “Why don’t we?” questions. Tomorrow I write up the lesson plan for the next week, which will be on “Mysterious Beasts” – like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and so on. That should be fun!

New content today:

Attempting cacio e pepe again…

This morning I did another 5k run. I did the slightly harder route, all the way down to the ferry wharf and back, which has more and steeper hills than my more usual route. But I managed 12 seconds faster, so that was good!

My wife went to the North Sydney Community Centre for a four-hour introductory class on watercolour painting. She took Scully for a bit and then I walked down to pick her up half way through. My wife really enjoyed the class and came home with a decent looking landscape as a first effort.

At home, I finished writing that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, and then photographed the panels for them. I’ll have to assemble some on Monday for the week coming.

In between my three ethics classes this evening I tried cooking cacio e pepe spaghetti for dinner. The first time I tried cooking this dish, it worked beautifully. But every time since that I’ve tried it, the cheese has ended up lumpy and awful, rather than a smooth creamy melted sauce. It’s so frustratingly difficult. I looked up some tips afterwards – there are about a zillion web pages for “lumpy cacio e pepe”. It seems my problem is one or more of: too much heat when mixing in the cheese, too much starchy pasta water, or not enough starch in the pasta water.

No time for Lego construction today!

New content today:

Friday games and Saturday comics

No update yesterday because it was online board games night with my friends. My Friday began with getting up and heading to the supermarket for the week’s grocery shopping. Because Thursday was a public holiday and we went out, I forgot to make an online order for pickup, so I had to do it the old fashioned way and actually walk through the aisles and grab items off the shelves.

One weird thing I noticed, and this has sort of been a thing recently whenever I go into a grocery store, there was no skim milk whatsoever. There were hundreds of bottles and cartons of regular milk and some specialty varieties like lactose-free and stuff, but no skim milk at all. The past few times I’ve gone looking for milk there’s been hardly any – the previous time I tried to buy milk I got the very last 2-litre bottle of skim milk in the whole supermarket. I don’t normally buy 2-litre bottles, but there were no 1-litre cartons at all. I don’t know what’s going on, but it sure feels like there’s a severe shortage of skim milk for the past couple of months for some reason.

After shopping I had 4 ethics classes during the day. In between I used the time to sell some more of my Magic cards. I walked Scully up to the post office to send off two more packages to new owners.

For dinner we drove over to Lane Cove and Four Frogs crêperie to have galettes. I tried one of the weekly specials, a galette with lamb sausage and Moroccan spices, which was pretty good. Normally for dessert I have a sweet crêpe, with chocolate or berries or ice cream of whatever, but I felt like more savoury instead, so had a second galette, with prosciutto and goat cheese, and a drizzle of honey so there was a touch of sweetness there.

After dinner was online games with my friends. We played a new game called Bang! I didn’t like it much – it seemed pretty random and lacking any way to make reasonable decisions about what to do. I don’t think the others liked it much either. We moved on to some of our regular games: Just One, 7 Wonders, 6 Nimmt, and Sketchful. The last one is always hilarious and a great way to finish the night when we’re all feeling a bit silly.

Today I went for my first 5k run in three weeks, since I hurt my back. The back is much better now, and I managed a reasonable time even though I didn’t push myself too hard The cooler weather definitely helps. It was only 16°C when I went out this morning.

My wife went out with Scully to visit her mother, and I used the time to make a new Darths & Droids comic, and write more Irregular Webcomic! strips, in preparation for hopefully photographing the remainder of this current batch tomorrow.

I also did stage 7 of the Lego D&D set. This adds part of the walls to the stage 6 base, which seem to be separating it into an outdoor area and a dungeon-like underground area.

And here’s the rear side, showing the dungeon area, with a bunch of abandoned weapons, coins, bones of adventurers who met their untimely ends here, and a gelatinous cube complete with a skull inside it!!

And finally, I disabled my Facebook account today. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but it was the only way I kept in contact with a lot of people. But I decided that it was getting annoying enough that I had to cut the link. It feels good never to have to look at Facebook again!

New content today:

An expedition to art

Today is Anzac Day, Australia’s public holiday of remembrance for war dead. I still had ethics classes in the morning, and my wife went out with Scully for a bit while I did those.

When she got home and I’d finished teaching, we went for a drive out to Concord to the premises of the Drummoyne Art Society. The reason was to go see an exhibition which included a couple of works by our ex-neighbour – the one who owns Luna, Scully’s best-poodle-friend. She has an Instagram here where she posts a lot of her art. She does abstract watercolours and told us about the show, so we were keen to go have a look.

My wife had called up yesterday to make sure the exhibition was open on the public holiday, and had been assured that it was. But when we got to the gallery, it was closed. She phoned up to see if anyone would answer and got onto someone who was confused when we said we were at the gallery and it was closed. Eventually they worked out that we had gone to the wrong place! The exhibition was not at the Art Society’s gallery in Concord, but instead at the Drummoyne Civic Centre, a couple of suburbs away! So we drove over there.

It was close to the Drummoyne Bakehouse and we were hungry, so we stopped in there first for lunch. Then we walked back to the Civic Centre and went into the exhibition. There were a couple of hundred or so artworks: oils, acrylics, pastels, pencil, watercolours, and also some digital art. We spent time looking at all of them and there were some very good ones in there. We also got to vote on a “people’s choice” award and picked our favourites.

Then we headed back home and I had a bit of time to do some comics work before my evening ethics classes began at 5pm. I made lentils and rice for dinner during an hour break between classes.

Oh! And I also had time to do stage 6 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set build. This is a new section, and so far it’s just the base, which is much larger than the previous building.

New content today:

Busy day at Data Engineering

I had a pretty full day. First thing I took Scully for a walk while my wife left for work (to avoid Scully pining for her as she leaves home). Then I had to pack some more Magic cards to post overseas to someone who bought them. And then walk up to the post office and send it off.

When I got back home I thought I’d have an hour or so to deal with some other things, but I looked at the time and realised I had t leave for the university almost immediately to make it on time for today’s project tutorial session! So I quickly grabbed my things, and Scully, and walked her up to my wife’s work, then over to the station to catch a train into the city.

I grabbed lunch at the university, a halal snack pack again like I had two weeks ago. I tried a different sauce this time, garlic sauce instead of chilli. It’s a delicious lunch, but loaded with meat and hot chips, so not exactly the healthiest thing. I also grabbed a slice of poppy seed cake from a German bakery as a sweet treat for afterwards during the tutorial.

Students are now working on their Data Engineering projects. They have until the end of next week to write up their planning report, then two more weeks to execute and report on the data analysis part. Most of the teams were in a pretty good position, having settled on a topic and done some preliminary work to either organise data collection, or download data and begin to think about analysing it, and working on their planning reports. But one team had already finished their report and moved onto the analysis part! And another hadn’t decided what project to do yet. There are always a few outliers.

Some teams stayed most of the three-hour session, utilising it to ask us questions and get guidance on various things. I didn’t get home until approaching 4pm, and my three ethics classes began at 5. Now it’s after 8… and I really should think about what to eat for dinner!

New content today:

Autumn feelings

It was a little warm today, 27°C, but pleasant and not humid. The weather has really cooled down and become drier since summer and the days are really nice now. The few imported deciduous trees in the area are starting to turn – plane trees going their drab shade of brown, while the liquidambars are turning a lovely red and the ginkgos are starting to turn their delicious shade of butter yellow.

I took Scully on a long walk to the Italian bakery at Cammeray for lunch. I had a pizza slice and I looked for any of their delicious pasties, but they seemed to have sold out of most of them. There were some croissants and a cherry danish, but I decided to look in the cake display and found a seasonal item: a “Monte Bianco”, I guess the Italian version of a Mont Blanc. Chestnuts are the classic autumnal treat. So I decided to try that.

To be honest, it wasn’t entirely to my taste, being a mass of soft creamy chestnut puree, with only a tiny strip of biscuit base at the bottom to give it any other sort of texture. The flavour was a bit bland too. I think I like chestnuts more in the abstract than as an ingredient in cooking. it’s the first sweet treat I’ve ever tried at this bakery that I wouldn’t have again – their hit rate is usually very good.

I spent the morning writing my class notes for this week’s new ethics topic, on the question of “Why don’t we?” This is really a more critical thinking exercise this week, getting the kids to think about the reasons—which must exist—why we don’t fix particular problems in the world. Some of the questions:

Why don’t we prevent natural disasters?
Why don’t we give everyone free food?
Why don’t we switch to a better keyboard layout than QWERTY?
Why don’t we ban all pesticides?
Why don’t we keep criminals in prison forever so they can’t commit crime again?
Why don’t we have more bins in public places to reduce littering?

The hope is that the kids will realise the wide variety of reasons behind the questions: some are physically impossible, some are socially unacceptable, some are economically infeasible, some are ethically questionable, some are politically intractable, some are environmentally irresponsible, and so on.

I built stage 5 of the Lego D&D set today. The first building is now complete! It’s the whole tavern, with the ground floor and the bedroom second storey now added, with completed roof.

There’s another new figure, a human fighter/rogue/assassin kind of guy. The roof parts and windows are really well done on this model.

And here’s the interior details seen from the back (there’s no back wall, so you can see inside).

The Lego pieces are in numbered bags inside the box, and you open the bags in numerical order as you build through the instructions. So far I’ve opened the first 5 bags. As I was searching through them all to find bag number 6 (for tomorrow), I noticed bags with numbers as high as 32! SO with 5 bags done, I’ve completed building less than one sixth of this set!

New content today:

Story of a Magic card

I’ve mentioned that I’m in the process of selling off some of my old Magic: the Gathering cards. I started playing the game in 1994, too late to buy any of the Arabian Nights expansion cards myself. But I traded for some of them early on, in a vain attempt to assemble a complete collection of that expansion set. I never managed this, because already by the time I started playing, some of those Arabian Nights cards were considered valuable (like $20 or so!) and it was difficult to find anyone willing to part with them.

I did manage to trade for a City in a Bottle. Here it is, a photo I took a few days ago of my personal copy of this card:

This was one of the difficult rare cards to get, but I was determined to get one because I admired the work of the artist, Drew Tucker. Unlike all the other card artists at the time, he worked in watercolour, and his images were always slightly impressionistic, different to the regular sort of fantasy art of the time. I eventually assembled a complete collection of all of the cards with Tucker’s artwork, as far as the Mirage expansion. But this City in a Bottle was the pride of my collection, as it was so rare.

The reason I took a photo of it the other day is because someone on the Discord where I am selling my cards was in search of a copy to buy. I figured I’m selling my collection, I should let this card go if someone wants it. The current value of this card in good condition, according to recent online sales, is about US$340, or AU$530. I offered a bit of a discount—because the listed selling price is never what you actually get after fees, or the middle-man taking a cut; if you sell direct to a buyer rather than through an online selling site then the accepted practice is to price the card around 15% lower.

The buyer PayPal-ed me some money, and I’ve now sent the card off. I messaged to say it was in the mail, and I hope he treated the card well, because it meant a lot to me because it was the pinnacle of my artist collection of Drew Tucker cards. I didn’t really expect too much of a response, because I know a lot of people don’t really appreciate Tucker’s artwork, preferring more traditional painting media for fantasy art. But the buyer said:

Will do. Drew Tucker is my favorite magic artist by far. I had him do a painting on the back of an artist proof when I was at eternal weekend and it’s one of my favorite cards. This is my first City – very excited to finally get one!

Wow! Now that’s cool. I’m sad to see one of my favourite cards in my collection go, but if it has to go to anyone, I’m glad it’s this guy.

In other news, I’ve scheduled an extra ethics class on Mondays, after requests from parents for more suitable timeslots for their kids. I’m now up to 6 classes on Mondays! I could probably schedule something close to a 40-hour week working on these and get plenty of enrolments, but I still need some time off in between to breathe and get other things done.

I used a bit of spare time today to do stage 4 of the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set. This adds the roof and exterior of the bedroom from stage 3. The roof bits are really nice, with clever angles and construction.

There’s also more details inside. And this new figure of an orcish fighter. Who appears to have bested the bed-mimic from stage 3, and is now interested in this treasure chest that might be full of loot.

But oh no! It’s another mimic!!

This set is so much fun to build.

I also made new IWC comics today, ready for a new update tonight to replace last week’s hiatus of reruns.

New content today:

Selling Blood Bowl miniatures

Besides selling some Magic: the Gathering cards, I’m working on selling a bunch of old Blood Bowl miniatures from Games Workshop. I have a few teams and star players that I bought back in 1994 when I was enthusiastic about the game (3rd edition), and had high hopes of painting and playing with several teams. But these were never taken out of the original packaging and have been sitting in my garage for years. So I thought I’d sell them. They’ve gone up a bit in value, going by eBay sales, but not nearly as much as some of the Magic cards.

I didn’t have any good venue to sell them other than eBay, until I remembered one of my friends is a keen online Blood Bowl player. So I asked him, and he pointed me at a Discord chat for Australian players. I joined up and posted my wares there, and have sold a few things already. So tomorrow I’ll be putting a box in the mail with some of those old gaming miniatures.

It feels good to get rid of old stuff and actually make a bit of cash doing so! My wife and I also cleaned up some of our bookshelves today, and I made space for some of the board games that have been piling up on side tables and things.

And I found time to write some more Irregular Webcomic! strips and take photos, which I’ll assemble for new strips this coming week.

New content today:

Wet Saturday, pizza, Root

It was a cold, wet day today. It’s astonishing how just a week or two ago it was still hot like the end of summer, and now the weather has turned downright chilly. I managed to find a window around 9am to go for a short run, 2.5k. I want to ease back into it a little since my back is still a tiny bit tender after pulling it a week ago. I might try for 5k tomorrow, but we’ll see.

My wife and I played a game of Root this afternoon, this time using all four factions for the first time, with robot versions of the Marquisate and the Eyrie, while she played the Alliance and I played the Vagabond. I’d been introducing new elements of the game to her slowly so she can get used to them, and this is the first time we included the Vagabond. The robot factions did pretty well and controlled a lot of the board until late in the game, but we both overtook them and my wife managed to race to victory.

I also spent some time building the next stage of the D&D Lego set. First, here’s a photo of the enormous box!

Inside are a couple of dozen numbered bags full of pieces, which are constructed in order. Here’s the first stage of construction, a tavern, showing the outside with a dwarven adventurer:

Stage 2 added more to the upper parts of the walls, the tavern sign, and a wizard character:

Today I completed stage 3, which is the upper floor of the tavern, where there’s a comfy looking bed:

But oh no! It’s a mimic!!!

I’ll try to do stage 4 tomorrow.

Tonight for dinner I made pizza – our usual with pumpkin and walnuts and chilli. We had some left over sour cream from Mexican meals in the past week, so I added some of that and a bit more chilli oil onto the cut slices after it was cooked. Very nice!

New content today:

Non-games night

It’s Friday board games night at a friend’s place, but I’m staying home this evening.

I had more classes today on the “Dreams” topic. I’ve had some very diverse views in this topic. Some of the kids are very scientific and talk about dreams being products of our brain biology, based on memories, and that’s all they are. Others talk about possibilities that dreams are our brains trying to tell us something important. Or that they might possibly be glimpses into an alternate world or reality. And a few have said they believe dreams can be visions of the future.

I also did another trip to the post office today, to send two more packages of cards. I’ve sold quite a few this week. But still a long way to go to make a dent in my collection!

New content today: