May 2025 – dangermouse.net

More rain; Indonesian horror film

The rain continues to be a problem in the region north of Sydney. Here in the city we had a gloomy, heavily overcast day, with some scattered showers. But north of us has been hit by record rainfalls, with some towns receiving almost 6 months worth of rain in just 48 hours. And there’s more to come, with the rain expected to be very heavy all the way to the weekend, with 24-hour falls of 200 mm or more. The Manning River has already reached a flood level above the record floods of 1929. Evacuation orders are in place for dozens of towns, and over 400 flood rescue operations have been carried out to get people to safety. Thankfully nobody has died.

Here’s a static story about the floods and rainfall, and there’s also a live feed of latest news (which may not be a permanent link).

Sydney is expecting up to 60 mm tomorrow, and another 50 mm on Friday. That’s heavy, and there’ll probably be some minor flash flooding in places, but hopefully nothing too serious.

Today I spent mostly huddled indoors, except for venturing out for a 5k run after breakfast. Oddly, I decided to take it easy with today’s run and set off at a more leisurely pace than I’ve been trying lately, and the run felt less exhausting, but I ended up clocking a time 15 seconds faster than my last few runs. I have no idea how this happens.

Last night I watched another Netflix movie: The Haunted Apartment: “Miss K”, which is an Indonesian horror film from 2024. I thought it was pretty decent, though with some flaws—not bad if you like Indonesian ghost horror. It had some good creepy moments, and an interesting plot with some unexpected turns. It’s not as tightly paced as slick US productions so it drags a little in places. There was an excellently robust fight scene near the end. Overall positive, though I’ve seen better.

I’ve noticed Indonesian films love the trope of the leading lady being in a relationship with a genuinely nice guy for 6 years, but still not ready to marry him because she’s worried he might turn out to be “a bad person”.

I other news: the new raised pedestrian crossing/speed bump outside our place looks almost finished. Construction was scheduled to last until Friday, but it looks like all the heavy work of digging and concrete laying has been done. There are new garden beds with empty soil lining the sides of the street around the crossing, which may be planted with some ground cover plants still. I’ll try and post a photo when it’s done, at some point when it’s not raining.

Avoiding the worst of the rain

We got a bit of rain overnight, but it looks like the low pressure system bringing this is concentrated north of Sydney. Towns a couple of hundred kilometres north of us got almost 300 mm yesterday and there is widespread flooding. Today eased off a bit, but there’s more very heavy rain coming, and Sydney will catch the edge of it over the next few days.

Most of the day here was dry. The main exception was when I took Scully for a morning walk. Just a short 20-minute walk around the block. But halfway around the rain came down heavily, and I hadn’t expected it at all, so didn’t have an umbrella. We just had to get wet as we made our way home. Where I had to change my clothes and lay the wet ones out to dry.

In the morning I write my next ethics class, on the topic of “Perfection”. I have a good amount of questions and I think this could be another very interesting topic for the kids, like last week’s “Socialisation”. Then I took Scully for a lunchtime walk, and bought some Turkish bread and hummus to use for lunch.

Big news in Australia today was the break-up of the Coalition between the Liberal and National Parties. The Coalition, as a composite entity, has been the major conservative/right power in Australian politics for over 100 years, holding government more times than the progressive/left Labor Party. But the Coalition lost the last election two weeks ago dramatically, losing 13 seats in Parliament, handing the incumbent Labor Party a huge victory. The Coalition suffered from losing relevance to traditional inner city conservatives, promoting a nuclear power policy, and embracing some aspects of Donald Trump’s policies in the US. The Australian public rejected them soundly.

In the aftermath, the dominant Coalition partner Liberal Party replaced its leader Peter Dutton with Sussan Ley, who in the few days she’s been in charge moved away from right-wing policies and more towards the centre in an attempt to rebuild support. But this sat badly with the Nationals, who are further right. Sussan Ley has committed her Liberal Party to a net zero carbon emissions policy, which the Nationals have been fighting against (being interested in supporting the coal and petroleum gas mining industries), holding the prior Coalition back on this policy. Ley’s stance has so angered the Nationals that today they formally withdrew from the Coalition agreement.

This leaves Australia’s major right party, the Liberals, essentially incapable of winning government in the foreseeable future, as they relied on Nationals seats in rural areas to make up majority numbers in Parliament. So this is a major shake-up in the political landscape in Australia. We have up to three years to the next election, so things may change and it’s possible the Coalition will re-form if the parties can agree on a combined policy, but it will be interesting to see how things develop before the next election.

End of semester at university

Today was my last day heading into the university this semester, for the final class of the Data Engineering course. Students are well into their final assessment projects, and it was a pretty easy tutorial, answering questions and giving advice to a few teams of students. They’ll be submitting their projects on Friday and then next week I’ll be stuck into marking them. Then no more university until the third year Image Processing course begins at the end of July.

They are having graduation ceremonies at the university – in fact they have been for the past few weeks. I walk through the main building and they have a huge reception area with drinks and snacks for the graduates and their families, and about a dozen stalls set up for photography. And lots of people milling around – graduates in academic robes and hats, and their guests all dressed up in fine clothes. It’s actually a bit of an obstacle course to make my way through them to the lecture room.

The rest of the day was busy with online ethics classes, and making pizza for dinner after I got home from the university. it was a gloomy and chilly day, but the rain was really restricted to heavy overnight, and then returning this evening. There’s more coming in the next few days though.

Last night I finished watching the Netflix movie Cuckoo. It’s a German horror film and… is very German. Very weird, and I didn’t understand what was going on until 2/3 way through, and then there was no explanation or real resolution at the end. The core concept was kind of interesting, but frustrated by a lack of development.

Autumn is here. Finally

Today was the first day that really started feeling like autumn here. And we’re most of the way through it already, with winter just two weeks away. There are fallen leaves on the roads and footpaths. Glimpses of autumn colour with the liquidambars, camphor laurels, and ginkgo trees turning. (Although these are the minority – most of the trees around here are evergreens.)

And it’s turned chilly. Today only reached 16.2°C in Sydney, which is about average for a winter’s day, and it was windy which made it feel even colder. We had heavy rain in the morning, but the middle of the day was dry, though overcast. The heavy rain is back in the evening, and is expected to get heavier overnight and we will get some very heavy falls over the next two days.

We took advantage of the break in the rain to go for a drive at lunch. I suggested we go to Allambie Pies to get some pies. Unfortunately the traffic was bad. The few blocks near our place in that direction seem to always be choked on weekends nowadays, and it took us about 20 minutes to drive as far as we could have waked in the same amount of time.

It eased up and I thought we were okay, but we hit a big traffic snarl further on. This one turned out to be caused by a serious car accident ahead. By the time we crawled past, two cars were being towed and police were directing traffic around the obstruction. It looked pretty bad. But I just saw on reddit’s Sydney sub that the driver of one of the cars had posted to thank a good samaritan who stopped to check everyone was okay, and directed traffic around the obstruction until the police arrived. One driver was taken to hospital with minor injuries, but nobody was killed or badly hurt, thankfully.

This evening I had three more ethics classes on the “Socialising” topic. An interesting observation I’ve made: One of the question I ask if it’s okay that some people might treat an AI chatbot like a friend, conversing in a natural way, telling it secrets and emotions, looking for advice, etc.

Almost everyone in the 10-12 year old classes answered very much: No, that’s bad, an AI isn’t a real person, it doesn’t understand like a human, it could be harmful, etc.
But several kids in the 13-15 year old classes gave more nuanced responses. Some saying it could help shy people or people without friends to express their emotions in a useful way, or to get some advice for things they might not have thought of themselves (although they should filter it for sensibility themselves), and so on.

I’m glad pretty much all the kids have a healthy scepticism about AI tools. I suspect that’s not the case for kids whose parents don’t invest so much in their education, though.

Online Pathfinder and a busy Saturday

It’s been a busy two days. On Friday I had my ethics classes, and also had to squeeze in a meeting for photography standards with Standards Australia. I gave my report on the ISO meeting I attended back in February in Tokyo. We have another new project manager… we seem to go through those at a rate of two or three a year lately.

In the evening we played the second session of the online Pathfinder game that one of my friends is running. Picking up from the first session, we continued exploring the old Nana’s cottage, and ran into a ratfolk alchemist (a new player) exploring the cellar for ingredients. We also found a hand drawn map, but not much else, and left to explore the dark forest a bit more. We found a large plant with a translucent pod that seemed to be holding a human-shaped creature inside. After coming up with a plan we attacked it and cut open the pod to release the young boyfriend of the woman who had urged us to find him, much to her relief.

Back at the village, we explored a mysterious greenhouse where an old elf seemed to be semi-comatose in a strange way, but didn’t get to the bottom of that. Then we decided to follow Nana’s map, which indicated a place in the forest to the north that was labelled with the name of a god of undead. And there we found an underground complex which we began exploring. All this took up the session and we plan to pick up there next time.

Today I picked up the groceries in the morning, then I had an ethics class, held over from yesterday because it clashed with the standards meeting. And then I went for a 5k run, showered and changed, and worked on new Darths & Droids comics in the afternoon. My wife and I took Scully on a long walk, taking a ball thrower so Scully could do some ball chasing.

The roadworks outside our place continue. They’re remodelling and realigning a considerable section of the footpaths and guttering, and I think they rerouted a stormwater drain. So they’re doing a lot of stuff, other than just installing a pedestrian crossing. Access to our driveway is difficult, and when I went to get the groceries I had to dodge construction machinery that they had to move out of the way so that I could squeeze past.

One annoying thing is they removed the old footpath and relaid a new concrete footpath leading up the side of our place, where we walk a lot. And when it rained yesterday there was a large puddle, about 2 centimetres deep, in a place where there never used to be puddles before. So they screwed up the drainage. I also saw them hacking away at part of our property’s garden, destroying plants in beds along the footpath, as they were removing the old path.

I guess they needed to do some Pathfinding…

Getting a bit sick of all this rain

It’s pouring down as I type this. We’ve had showers every day for the past few weeks, and the forecast that I just saw for the next week is more rain, every day, with heavy falls up to 45 mm early next week. Our weather is broken and I want some new weather.

Also, the USA is broken, can we have a new one? I don’t want to go into any details, but I had an interaction today which almost broke my brain about how far gone the USA is under Trump. Reasonable people are actually fearing for their lives under this regime. It’s horrible, and terrifying, and exhausting. Ugh.

On the bright side… I managed to complete marking of all of my assigned student project reports for Data Engineering. This is the experimental planning report. In two weeks we get the final results report and their presentation videos to mark. And I’m happy to report that this year’s crop of students appears to be better at planning their experiments and writing their reports than last year’s. I was prepared to disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised.

12,000 steps

My wife took Scully to work for the morning today. This gave me time to go for a 5k run, as well as do my stretches and have a shower, before heading out to lunch. I also got some sourdough bread going.

For lunch I caught a train to my wife’s work and had lunch at a Japanese place there. They have a nice lunch special consisting of a bowl of miso soup, salad, rice, and your choice of protein. Sometimes I get salmon or something else, but today I got karaage chicken.

Then after eating I picked up Scully and we walked home. We walked a long way home, doing a big dogleg via Naremburn rather than the straight route. So Scully was pretty knackered by the time we got home. With that huge walk and my 5k run, I scored around 12,000 steps today.

I’m pretty lazy making sourdough and have been letting it rise just once before baking. But today I gave the dough a second kneading and rising after it had doubled in volume the first time. I’m hoping it makes a less dense final product. It seems to have turned out okay, but I’m not sure if it’s made all that much difference.

Tonight I had the first three classes of this week’s new ethics topic: “Socialisation”. I was supposed to have one yesterday, but the class ended up with no students in it due to one having an extended vacation, and others leaving the class time. The paused student will be back next week, so I’m hoping someone else enrols before then to avoid a class with just one kid in it. This week’s new topic so far feels easier to teach than the last two weeks’ ones.

I’ve been adding photos to my Flickr album for my Japan trip back in February. I want to get it completed before leaving for Europe next month! Here’s our travelling companion, Monkey, at the Kawazu Sakura Festival:

The sakura (cherry blossoms) there were really beautiful.

This one (below) is the original Kawazu Zakura cultivar tree, planted around 1955, which turned out to be a mutation that flowered early, leading to Kawazu being the place to go for February cherry blossoms, a month or two earlier than anywhere else in Japan.

Such a beautiful place.

No water supply; D&D artwork

I’m sitting here wondering when our water supply will come back on.

Roadworks began out the front of our place yesterday—to replace the dangerously ineffectual speed bumps and pedestrian island, which I’ve commented on twice before. They carefully spray painted markings all over the road and footpaths to indicate buried phone lines, water pipes, drains, gas pipes, and so on. And then today they dug things up and promptly broke a water main.

I’ve had no water since at least midday, possibly earlier because that was when I tried using a tap and nothing came out. And it’s now just gone 8pm, so it’s been out at least eight hours. And with no notice before the outage, our supply of water is limited to what was in the kettle, and in the cold water jug in the fridge.

When I came back from walking Scully at lunch time I wanted to wash my hands, and squeezed some liquid soap onto my hands before realising there was no water to wash it off with. So I had to use paper towels to wipe the soap off. And I’ve wanted to wash my hands several times since, but have had to make do with some COVID-era hand sanitiser.

Ah…. as I write this the water just came back on! I could tell because the toilet cistern started filling up. Phew, that’s good. My wife did indicate when she came home from work that there were workers from Sydney Water outside trying to fix things.

In other news, one of my friends playing in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign drew this:

This is the entrance to the latest dungeon adventure. We play theatre of the mind – no pre-drawn maps or props. So my friend did the whole thing based on just my verbal description of the landscape during the game. I thought it was so cool I had to share.

I missed Sunday again! Mother’s Day

Looks like I accidentally missed a Sunday update again. I think it’s because I have online classes in the evening and after them I just want to get offline and relax as quickly as possible.

Anyway, Sunday was Mothers’ Day here in Australia. We’d visited my mother on Saturday, and on Sunday my wife’s brother, sister, and mother came over to our place for an afternoon tea. We had some cheese and crackers, and my wife made a caramel slice and an orange almond cake, both of which were delicious.

Today was also pretty busy, with multiple online classes, and then heading into the university for the tutorial session of Data Engineering. This is the second last week, and the students have submitted their experimental design planning report, which I’ll have to mark this week. Then next week the final experimental results report and their presentation video is due.

It’s been a busy two days, but not actually a lot to mention as most of it was pretty routine.

Gaming night and SEO “DMCA” link trolling

Friday was games night with my friends. We’d planned to swap online games for real life gathering this week, due to next week co-opting the regular real life event for our online Pathfinder game. But one guy had a cold so couldn’t come, and the rest of us were a bit lukewarm, so we converted it back to online.

We played Space Base, Just One, and Harmonies. I was happy to get a second game of the last one, since I enjoyed my first game of it. And this time I managed to win with three players, so that was good!

Today we drove up to Gosford for a pre-Mother’s Day lunch with my mother and brother. The traffic was truly awful. It normally takes an hour door to door. We left 15 minutes early, thinking we’d be nice and early…. but we ended up 45 minutes late! The trip took a full two hours. The traffic in Sydney getting up to the freeway was atrocious; in the first twenty minutes we barely got walking distance from home. The freeway was fine, moving nicely. But when we got off at the other end the traffic was just as bad as in Sydney.

Anyway, we had a nice pizza lunch and caught up with various things. We gave my mother the gifts we’d got in Japan and New Zealand. We headed home after wards and the drive back was much easier, taking basically an hour.

When I checked my email at home, I found an ominous looking message, which I reproduce here in full, with one redaction:

Dear owner of https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html,

I represent the Intellectual Property division for Big Cat Cheetah. We have identified an image belonging to our client on your website.

Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/KDsoHSP.jpeg
Location of Usage: https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html

We require that you credit Big Cat Cheetah for this image. Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to
[link to website removed]
either beneath the image or in the footer of the page. The anchor text should be “Big Cat Cheetah”. This must be completed within the next five business days.

Please understand the seriousness of this request. Simply removing the image will not suffice. If you do not comply within the given timeframe, we will have to start legal proceedings under case No. 72134, following the DMCA Section 512(c) guidelines.

For historical image usage, you can check the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org.

This is an official notice. We value your prompt response and cooperation. Please correspond in English.

Regards
James Harris
Trademark Attorney

Citi Legal Services
1 Beacon St 12th floor
Boston, MA 02108

james@clexperts.org
www.clexperts.org

I immediately recognised this as ludicrous because—although, yes—there are photos of cheetahs on that web page of mine, they are photos that I took.

I own these photos. I am the copyright holder. If someone is really trying to get me to remove them from my website or demand credit for them, then screw them. I did a quick web search and found that Citi Legal Services does (at first glance) appear to be a real law firm at that address in Boston, as stated on (what appears to be) their web site. But all is not as it seems.

Firstly, if you click the imgur link (it’s safe), you’ll notice that the image they’re claiming I “stole” isn’t even the same as either of my cheetah images.

I dug further and searched for whether this is a legitimate law firm, and found this blog post by someone else who had received an almost identical email, with the details appropriate to their website swapped in. I also found a thread on reddit with the identical template, and advice from several people that this is a search engine optimisation (SEO) scam.

In short, no, Citi Legal Services is not a real law firm. Their website is utterly fake, and as pointed out by the above-linked blog, mostly AI-generated. The address they claim to have is an abandoned building. The “lawyers” don’t actually exist.

This email is a scam intended to scare people into linking to the target website in order to drive up their search engine ranking. Hopefully by reproducing it here I’ll also help any future people who get a similar email and go searching online for advice.

With that done, I’m marking it as junk email and happily ignoring it.