dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

Collecting wizard flowers and booking European trains

Friday was very busy. I had a bunch of ethics classes on my “Let’s Design a Government” topic. In between I cleaned the house in preparation for hosting friends for Dungeons & Dragons in the evening. And did some last minute prep work for the game.

Once players arrived and we got underway, there was a discussion and the party figured that ticking off Spathio, the God of Swords, by getting his curse lifted by the god Orendial might be “better” than fulfilling the condition of having to kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords. Basically thinking that pleasing the God of Peace might be better in the longer term than pleasing the God of Swords.

The party explored some other rooms in the dungeon that they were about half-way through exploring. Some rooms downstairs were shin-deep in rainwater. Then down more stairs was an old bedroom, fully underwater. They used a metal bathtub upside down as a diving bell to explore. There were some shenanigans where Nogge the fighter wanted to be in the diving bell with a lit torch so he could see underwater. Instead they ended up using the elf Timbriel’s mirror set on the steps under water to reflect some torchlight into the bedroom.

Here they found an iron ring, which magic-user Mezza put on, and her face melted off! And her flesh! But she was fine, it turned out to be an illusion, which went away when the ring came off again. And they found some crossbow bolts which seemed miraculously not to have rotted like every other wooden object in the water. They assumed they must be magical and gave them to Fingers the Thief (an NPC retainer, the only one with a crossbow). They also found some loot in the flooded bedroom: silver plates and a gold candelabra.

In another workshop room adjacent to the first (where they ended the previous session) was a minotaur-like creature working on making brass collar things with vertical posts, which turned out to be for attaching skulls to mechanical bodies made of wood, metal, and leather strips. The party fought a group of such constructs, and inside the skulls they found small wizard flowers – smaller versions of the coral-like crystal structures they’d seen in glass orbs earlier. And in the workshop was a giant-sized brass collar and post. And the minotaur, named Korm, said he was (the giant mage) Orlug Broadstaff’s servant, working to resurrect him. This was the giant whose skull they assuemd they’d found last session, and smashed into pieces, finding a giant wizard flower inside.

Nogge pretended to be another servant hired by the snake people, and lured Korm up to the catwalk while everyone else looted the workshop. They found a potion and a wand there. And then Nogge tried and failed to push Korm off the catwalk, and they had a fight, and Nogge ended up running for his life. He rejoined the others and then they had to figure out how to get out, with the wizard flower orbs, without running into Korm again. The session ended with the party fleeing the dungeon with the four wizard flower orbs, trying to avoid running into Korm again on the way out, since people were low on hit points and spells. They managed to get out without seeing Korm, and fled into the gloomy sunset under heavy rain.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning, despite the cold and some showers. I went to buy some new shoes to wear on our trip to Europe, since my current daily shoes are getting holes in them. I’ve had very bad luck with shoes falling to pieces while overseas, at least three pairs over the years. So I wanted some new ones to avoid it happening again!

This afternoon I booked a bunch of train trips around Europe: Berlin to Prague, to Vienna, to Budapest, back to Vienna, to Salzburg, and to Munich. I had an account with Die Bahn before, but it seems that in 2021 they updated things and old accounts vanished, so I had to register for a new one. I booked the German ends of the trip, and then started doing Austrian ones, which I discovered I could also book starting from Die Bahn, who processed payment and forwarded tickets from the Austrian train company ÖBB. I checked the prices on ÖBB’a own website and they were identical, so I figured I’d just book them all via Die Bahn. But then I tried to do another train and found that Die Bahn couldn’t process the best price ticket, while ÖBB’s site could. So I did the rest there.

Anyway, that’s another big chunk of trip organising completed. We leave in one week, next Saturday!

D&D prep minimisation; planning to sketch

Tomorrow I am running the next session of my current Dungeons & Dragons game, so I used some time today in between teaching online ethics classes to do some prep work. I’ve recently read a friend’s copy of Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, which I found really awesome. It gives advice on how to prepare for a D&D session in a very fast but effective way, concentrating on things that will have high impact at the table and not end up being wasted effort. I liked the book and its advice so much that I went and bought my own copy.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to do a lot of prep anyway, as the party are currently partway through a dungeon, and I have the remainder of the adventure to get through, which will probably take up most or all of the session. But I also did a bit of work on codifying my own variant of Dungeon Crawl Classics‘ Mighty Deeds of Arms that I mentioned two days ago. And I glanced at another adventure which I’ll be ready to run in case the party gets through the current one in quick time (or potentially chooses to flee in fear and seek out something easier to do…).

The weather continues cold and dry. Scully was very insistent about lying in my lap for most of the day to keep warm. Normally she’s content to do her own thing, but not today.

I also talked with my wife about getting a sketchbook to take on our trip to Europe. She’s taking a watercolour book and some watercolour pencils and paints to do sketches and paintings, as she’s come to love her new hobby. I thought I may as well take a sketchbook and do some drawings of scenes in Europe while she’s painting – we can spend some time sitting al fresco at cafes or whatever and draw our surroundings. I said I could go to the art supply shop and buy one for myself, but she had some suitable A5 size books and gave me one. It’s 150 gsm cartridge paper, not watercolour paper, so is not ideal for her work – she uses 200 gsm watercolour paper now and has bought a book of that for her travel workbook.

I haven’t done much sketching in the past, but I think I’d be at least semi-okay at it. I guess we’ll see! Better to try things rather than die wondering. I’ll share some of sketches, maybe during the trip, or maybe when I get back home.

A cold, cold run and lunchtime walk

As you can probably guess, it was cold again today. My wife took Scully to work and I did a 5k run and it was very cold, around 12°C. But I think the cold weather means I don’t get too hot running, since I managed to clock under 27 minutes for the fourth time in my last six runs, when I hadn’t broken that time for several months previously.

I spent time today working on more advance Darths & Droids strips to buffer over the time I’ll be away on my upcoming European holiday. The script writing today was particularly tricky, though I don’t want to spoil anything by saying exactly why.

After eating lunch (my home-baked sourdough with cheese and tomato), I caught a train up to my wife’s work and met her there at a cafe that i hadn’t been to before. They had home-baked dog treats, with chicken and vegetables in them, and she’d bought one to let Scully try it. Scully is very hit and miss with different dog treats – some she doesn’t eat at all. But this one she really liked.

My wife went back to work and I walked all the way home with Scully. It was a chilly afternoon, but my multiple layers of clothing and the bright sun shining on my back made it bearable. We walked past a bunya pine tree, which had these warning signs posted around it:

The bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) is the large tree at the top left, behind the foreground foliage. It grows enormous, heavy seed cones, from 3 kg up to around 10 kg, which can fall from heights as high as 40 metres. They have caused serious injuries to people. Bunya pines are not very common in Sydney, but there are a few around, and it’s a good idea to be cautious around them during the cone-dropping season. Although that’s January to March, so I’m not sure what the warning signs here were for. I guess the council just didn’t remove them. I wrote a blog entry three years ago about collecting bunya nuts from fallen cones, which had this photo showing how large the cones are:

Tonight I had my first three ethics classes on the “Let’s Design a Government” topic, and they went pretty well. I have tons of questions which we didn’t get through, which is way better than ending up with not enough!

Designing a government

Tuesday means working on a new lesson plan for my ethics classes. This week I’m going to be teaching kids how to design a government!

The premise at the start of the class will be: Imagine we’re setting up a new country. We have land and a few million people, but we don’t have a government yet. It’s our job to decide what the government will be like.

We’ll go through various stages of selecting what sort of leader we want, how we’ll decide who the leader is, what powers should they have. And then think about how to make laws. Figure out what jobs the government should or should not do – should it provide health care, for example, or education, or food and water, Internet, should it regulate business, support the arts, etc. And then we’ll think about how we can ensure that the people in the government don’t become corrupt or authoritarian. This should be plenty for kids to chew on and debate about in class!

I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and again with my wife after she got home from work. It was very cold again today.

And I’m starting to plan for Friday night’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons session. I’m adding a new rule, co-opted from Dungeon Crawl Classics (with some modifications), which is highly regarded by many gaming groups: Mighty Deeds of Arms.

When fighters or dwarves attack, they may declare a Mighty Deed of Arms, an additional effect of their attack. e.g. disarming opponent, pushing opponent back, tripping opponent over, grappling, headbutting, blinding attack (picking up and throwing sand, or aiming weapon at eyes), etc., or whatever cool manoeuvre you can think of, like swinging on a chandelier and kicking opponent in the face. You have a Deed Die (d4 at 1st level, increasing in size with levels). Roll your Deed Die with your attack die. If your attack hits and the Deed Die is 4 or more, your mighty deed succeeds! Score normal damage, plus a bonus effect depending on your declaration and the Deed Die result (better results for scores above 4).

The idea is to give fighter types something cool and interesting to do that scales up with level. (We’re playing 1981 Basic/Expert rules, not 5th edition, so we don’t have all the ridiculous bells and whistles of that edition.) Hopefully it’ll be fun!

Cold and busy holiday Monday

Today was very cold. We had the first snowfalls of the winter on the mountains, but of course it wasn’t quite that cold here in Sydney. My wife was home because of the King’s Birthday public holiday, and when we went out to walk Scully at lunchtime I checked the temperature, which was 14°C, with wind chill making it feel like 4°C. It was very definitely very cold.

Apart from that walk I was at home teaching ethics classes. We’re finishing off the Science Fiction topic for the week, which turned out to be quite a tricky one to moderate as the teacher, and some of the questions were very challenging for some of the kids.

I also did some comics work. I still have to make another two weeks’ worth of Darths & Droids comics before I leave on my Europe trip in… less than two weeks. It’s going to come quickly and I’ll ru out of time to do all the stuff I want to do before then!

Cold running and family lunch

It was cold and windy today. I went for a 5k run about 10am, when the sun had taken some of the morning chill away, but it was still pretty cold. I took it easier than Friday, and did the hillier route for variety. This takes me down to the ferry wharf, where I could see the waves on the harbour caused by the wind.

For lunch we went to my wife’s mother’s place, where my wife’s brother and sister also attended, and one nephew. We had pasta with bolognese sauce, and there was also a tomato chilli sauce for my wife, which I mixed in with the bolognese for the added spicy kick.

We came home in time for my evening classes. And that was pretty much the day.

Fixing broadband… and glasses. And some nice food

Friday was online games night with my friends. After a busy day of ethics classes, and going for a 5k run in between.

In one of my classes, since we were talking about the topic of Science Fiction, the idea of AI came up, and what sort of things it might do in the future. One kid said:

Whenever I talk to ChatGPT, I use “please” and “thank you”, to make sure it doesn’t turn against me in the future.

My 5k run was very fast. The day was cold, only 14°C when I did my run around 11am. It meant I didn’t get hot and sweaty, and I managed my second best time ever for the distance, with 26:18. I was very pleased with that.

After lunch I went to pick up my new prescription glasses for use when working at the computer. I mentioned on Tuesday that they’d put the wrong prescription in, making them for close reading instead, and had to change them. I tested them out at the optometrist and they felt better, being good for reading something held with my arm fully outstretched. But when I got home I discovered that they were still focused too close. I had to lean forward uncomfortably in my chair from my regular posture to see the screen clearly. I used a tape measure to measure the distance from the screen to my eyes. The optometrist had said that screen-reading glasses are set for focus at 60cm. Which I discovered to be roughly true, in fact it was closer to 55cm where I felt my vision was clearest. But then I sat in my normal computer posture and measured the distance from the screen to my eyes, and it was 70cm. By the time I figured this out, it was after 5pm and the optometrist had closed for the day.

We stayed in for dinner and I made frittata with mushroom and tomato. After that I played online games. We played Knarr, Welcome to the Moon, Jump Drive, FLip 7, CodeChains (a game one friend invented and implemented on a Discord bot; it involves linking pairs of words into chains and then everyone trying to guess the same word that is being clued by both words on either side of every link), Just One, and Word Traveller. A lot of short games for variety.

First thing this morning I phoned the optometrist about my glasses and explained the problem. I said I didn’t want the second pair that I’d left there yesterday made with the same prescription – I needed it balanced to focus an extra 10-15cm away. They asked me to come in so they could check my eyes with the proposed correction to ensure right distance.

So after my wife returned from the gym with the car, I drove over to the optometrist. They remeasured my eyes to make sure and got the same refractive error, then wrote a prescription for new lenses to set a focal distance at 70cm as I requested. They said they’d get my second pair made with the new prescription and when they are ready I can swap the first pair back for new lenses. Fortunately this is under warranty so it won’t cost me any extra!

On the way home I stopped off at the Italian cake shop to pick up a cake to take to my mother’s place this afternoon. I got a chocolate and hazelnut torte. And then after my wife got home with Scully from her dog grooming appointment, we bundled into the car for the long drive to my mother’s place.

We arrived just before 3pm. My mission was to configure their broadband Internet and VOIP phone, which had stopped working when we deactivated their previous ISP account, as I mentioned on Thursday. I prepared by printing out a bunch of configuration info from the new ISP.

When we got there, I checked the ports of the modem/router. The phone was plugged into the only VOIP socket. The broadband was plugged into the second of 4 LAN ports. I moved it to the first LAN port, and bingo, the Internet came on! I could browse websites and access my mother’s email. That was easy.

But the VOIP phone still wasn’t working. I had some configuration information to enter into the modem, changing the old ISP server and proxy settings and entering a new VOIP password. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to work. I fiddled around a bit with it, but after a few minutes decided to contact the ISP phone tech support. I chose the new ISP for my mother because I’ve been very happy with their support on my own account, and they were brilliant again.

I got a very helpful guy who did some remote diagnosis stuff and then asked what router I was using. I said it was one supplied by the previous ISP. He said it’s possible that the VOIP was locked to that ISP and I’d need to get a new router, but he’d try a few things first. After changing some settings fruitlessly, he put me on hold while he contacted a co-worker with more experience, and together they did more diagnostic stuff and we explored the modem/router’s advanced settings. Eventually he tried turning off the firewall and lo! The phone started working! Aha! The other guy said the router’s default firewall settings were extremely restrictive, and it wasn’t letting the VOIP port through. They asked if I was okay leaving the firewall off, and I sort of hemmed and hawed and said I’d feel better if it was on. So they went back into the configurations and set up a firewall pass-through for the VOIP port, turned the firewall back on, rebooted the modem, and voilà!

We tested the phone, dialling out (to my wife’s mobile), and in (from my wife’s mobile) and it worked with no further problem. Phew! The tech support was really good. They had two of them on my call for over an hour, and they were determined to find a way to get it working without me having to go buy a new router. So kudos to Aussie Broadband – highly recommended if you’re after an Australian ISP.

We left my mother’s place later than we’d expected, and got hungry on the way home. We decided to stop at a place soon after we got off the freeway and back into Sydney’s outer suburbs (still half an hour drive from home). We went to Kipling’s Garage Bar at Turramurra, a place we’ve been to a couple of times before. We had a few tapas-style dishes to share, including arancini balls, and pulled duck with sesame chips:

And roasted cauliflower tacos:

Also some backed haloumi and for dessert a sticky date pudding. All really good. Then it was a drive back home for the evening.

Remote diagnosing broadband

Today was mostly routine. Ethics classes in the morning and evening. I made pasta for dinner in between the evening classes – just a simple pesto with broccoli and pine nuts. I took Scully for a long walk at lunch time. Thankfully the weather was much nicer today than yesterday, with sunshine and temperature almost up to 19°C.

Here’s a view from the walk, looking over the HMAS Waterhen navy base, out over the upper harbour and Parramatta River:

Down by the water, on the nearby civilian marina, I spotted this little black cormorant:

They’re moderately common around the water regions here. Further along the cove was this damaged yacht, which is definitely not common. It wasn’t here last time I walked the same way. I presume it must have been damaged in the heavy rain weather last week. I don’t expect it’ll be here for long – the authorities like to keep this area pretty clean.

In other news, I got a call from my mother, using her neighbour’s mobile phone. Her Internet and VOIP landline were down. I recently switched her to a new ISP to save money, and the old account was cancelled yesterday, and now I’m thinking that the fact that it was working for the past week was only because it was still connected to the old ISP, not the new one, an I need to go over and reconfigure the modem or something. Which is inconvenient since she lives an hour’s drive away. So I’ve made arrangements to go over on Saturday. It’ll be easier than trying to talk her through the configuration over the phone.

Coldest day of the year so far

It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.

I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.

This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.

The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.

Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶

A decadent dinner out on a school night!

Today I spent most of the day marking university assessments for the Data Engineering course. I started a few days ago and wanted to finish it off today. I had a report to read through and then three presentation videos to watch and assign marks for. It took much of the day.

I had a break at lunch to take Scully out. I didn’t mention that last Friday I went for an annual checkup to the optometrist, and I got a new prescription for glasses to wear while using a computer screen. I left one pair of glasses there to get new lenses made, and they said this morning they were ready to pick up. But when I got there and tried them on, it we immediately clear that they’d been made for book reading distance, not computer screen distance. They checked and sure enough the wrong prescription had been used. So I had to leave the glasses there and take my second pair back home again. I’d intended to swap them and have the prescription updated in the second pair as well. Oh well.

I grabbed some sushi rolls for lunch and sat with Scully in the nearby park while I ate.

In the afternoon I realised we didn’t have enough fresh vegetables at home to really cook anything interesting. So I took Scully out for another walk and we went to the local neighbourhood supermarket. On the way we walked past this vacant lot, where a house was standing just a week or two ago:

They demolished and removed that sucker really quickly! Presumably a new, more modern house will be built there soon. It’s a nice bit of land, on the top of a hill with a view south towards the city. The centre of Sydney is just out of sight behind the other house to the left, but you’d have a good view of it from a rear balcony on a house on this block.

I bought mushrooms from the supermarket, but when my wife got home this evening, I was feeling a bit uninspired to cook anything and I suggested we do something wild, that we never normally do: eat out on a mid-week night! I suggested we drive over to our favourite French crêpe and galette place. She liked the sound of that, so we hustled over there. Being a Tuesday night, it was nice and quiet. I had a “terre et mer” galette, with chorizo, garlic prawns, cheese, and cherry tomatoes:

With a traditional cup of French cider. It was delicious, and felt really decadent, having a fancy restaurant meal on a weeknight. We also shared a salted caramel sauce crêpe for dessert, which was also great.