Daily update – dangermouse.net

Europe trip eve

It’s the last day before I fly out to Europe tomorrow. I had a busy day with five ethics classes. I started a new time slot and had one student in a new class. Today’s were my last classes for three weeks, paused halfway through the “Old-Fashioned” topic. I’ve been showing the kids a photo of some telephone directories and asking if they know what they are. So far only one kid had any idea what they were. Most of them guessed things like dictionaries or encyclopaedias. And then when I explained what a phone directory was, they were astonished that such things existed, where you could just look up anybody’s phone number and address if you knew their name.

In between classes I did some travel prep, such as printing out train tickets for our various overland journeys between cities, and checking in online for our flights. Our flight departs at 3pm tomorrow, so we’ll have time in the morning to pack before heading to the airport. We have just over 24 hours of travel time from Sydney to Frankfurt, and then we need to get train tickets to Berlin and travel another 5 hours or so to get there. By the time we get t our hotel we’ll be lucky if it’s under 30 hours of travelling time.

Tonight I’m playing online board games with friends. My wife is out having dinner with her friends, and handing Scully over to one of them to take home, to look after her for the time we’ll be away. I cooked myself some scrambled eggs for dinner, which used up the last of our perishable food, apart from half a carton of milk which we’ll use up for breakfast tomorrow.

This time tomorrow I’ll be most of the way to Singapore!

Drinks at the hairdresser?!

My wife went for a haircut this evening. It was also her last day at work before our trip to Europe on Saturday. I humorously suggested that she could begin celebrating her holiday time by asking the hairdresser for a glass of wine while she was having her hair cut. I mentioned those places that have been popping up all over that offer casual painting classes while you drink wine, thinking that the idea of a hairdresser that offers wine would be amusing.

My wife said, “They don’t have normal wine, but they do have champagne.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. I thought she must have been joking, but she was extremely deadpan. I said, “You’re not serious. That was a joke, right?”

And she said, “No, all the hairdressers do it.”

Okay, so she was doubling down on the joke and making the story even more implausible. Not just her hairdresser was unusual in offering champagne to clients, but lots of hairdressers do this.

I said, “Okay. Now I know you’re joking.”

But she said, “No! I’m not! They have tea and coffee too, but yeah, they have champagne for while you’re having your hair done. There’ll be a lot of women there tonight and in the evening some will definitely be having it.”

I mentioned this to my friends in our Discord chat, and they were all, “Yeah, didn’t you know about this? Some barbers offer beers too.”

🤯

I have never ever heard of such a thing: hairdressers or barbers offering alcoholic drinks to customers. It actually kinda makes sense if I think about it: stuck there for 30 minutes, and hour, or more, with nothing to do, and you’re paying quite a bit of money. May as well turn it into a pleasurable experience to keep the customers happy. But yeah, this is totally new to me, and so surprising that I genuinely dismissed it as a joke at first.

Today I had my regular online classes, both in the morning and evening. In between I went to pick up Scully from my wife’s work again. She hadn’t planned to take Scully in today, but her boss said he was bringing in his won dog and wanted the two to meet and play together at the office. So Scully got another half day at work before I picked her up and walked her home.

We used our last fresh vegetable for dinner tonight, a zucchini, and some eggs to make a frittata, topped with the last bits of pizza cheese. Running out of perishable food just before a long trip always means some creative and unusual dishes the last couple of days. We don’t have to cook tomorrow, because my wife is going out for dinner with some of her friends, and I can do my own thing before online board games night.

The time zone shuffle

One thing I’ve had to deal with a lot more than I expected on Outschool is parents signing up for classes in the wrong time zones. I do most of my classes in the evenings, which corresponds to the period between about midnight and 6am in American time zones. I also do a few classes in the mornings, which are good for American time zones, as they correspond to late afternoon or early evening over there.

So my morning classes are mostly enrolled with American students (with a couple in Canada and currently one in Colombia). The evening classes are good for East Asian time zones (corresponding to afternoon or early evening there) or Europe (mid-morning there), but obviously terrible for America.

However, many times I’ve had parents in the USA enrol students into my evening classes. I keep having to communicate with them and point out that they’ve enrolled their kid in a class that begins at 2am or 3am in their time zone, explaining that I’m in Australia and so most of my classes are in the middle of the night for them. The usual response is that they just assumed it was 2 or 3pm. Outschool does time zone calculations and displays quite clearly when classes start in the parents’ local time (they have to set their time zone when opening an account). I have to assume that either they’re not paying attention to the obvious am/pm indicator, or that they are seeing the “am” and then assuming it must be wrong and must actually be pm.

As I said, I’ve had to deal with several cases of this, but I felt compelled to write about it today because I had one last week, and then this morning I had someone else (in the Arizona time zone) enrol their kid in a class with a suitable time (4pm), but then write to me, having changed their mind, and request a transfer into a class beginning at midnight.

This is a good example of a situation where using a 24-hour clock would be immensely useful, to avoid people making the 12-hour mistake. (I myself was guilty of this once many years ago, showing up at San Francisco Airport for a flight home 12 hours early. Thankfully it wasn’t 12 hours late!)

In other activity today, I did a run, for the first time since tripping and injuring myself on Sunday. I was aiming for 5k, but stopped at the halfway mark as I was feeling a bit sore and didn’t want to cause any additional issues.

I also worked on Darths & Droids a bit, starting to get a buffer ahead for after I get back from my Europe trip. I looked up the weather in Berlin, and it looks like being 32°C on Monday, when my meetings start. And my immediate thought was how lovely that will be compared to the cold weather we’re having here at the moment.

Contemplating old-fashioned things

Today I worked on my next critical/ethical thinking topic: Old-Fashioned. I’m going to be talking to the kids about the way we did things back when I was their age, and how things have changed in various ways. And get them to think about the advantages and disadvantages of old-fashioned ways of doing things. Such as buying your music on physical media. Watching broadcast TV and seeing the same shows as your friends at the same time. Kids playing outdoors unsupervised for hours as long as they were home before sunset. Taking photos on film. Stuff like that. Hopefully the topic should be fun!

I took Scully for a couple of walks today. I had to go up to a pharmacy to get some things for my impending trip to Europe, and also some more bandages to use on my hands and knees after my fall on Sunday. I’m changing them daily and going through a fair few. But the wounds look to be healing.

I worked on comics today, writing enough Irregular Webcomic! rerun annotations to buffer over my entire trip. I also did some other trip preparation stuff related to my Photography Standards work, downloading a bunch of documents for the meeting in Berlin next week.

For dinner my wife made pizza dough, since I couldn’t really knead the dough with my bandaged hands, then I finished it off with the toppings and put it in the oven.

Dealing with bandaged hands

After yesterday’s falling accident, I had bandages on the heels of my hands and my knees overnight. They’re a bit sore, but beginning to heal up. I could do most things, but kitchen work was tough without getting my bandages wet.

I did six ethics classes today, finishing off the “Let’s Design a Government” theme. Yesterday and today I had to tell all my students that I’ll be taking three weeks off for my Europe trip and I wont see them until mid-July. I will begin the next topic tomorrow and run it until Friday, then interrupt for my trip and resume on Sunday after I get back in three weeks. So the next topic, “Old-Fashioned”, will be split across the holiday.

Today I also packed up some more Magic: the Gathering cards which I sold to someone online and then shipped them off via the post office. It was about 2 kilograms of cards, making a significant dent in the remaining collection I have left.

Because of my bandaged hands I couldn’t make and knead pizza dough for our usual Monday night pizza. My wife has volunteered to make the dough tomorrow instead. We’re tapering down our perishable food supplies so we don’t have anything perishable left by Saturday when we fly out. So we have specific requirements to use up the remaining vegetables and dairy products (and fruits) over the next few days.

Tomorrow I’ll also get started organising things to pack for the trip. I need to print out our itinerary, train tickets, and the agenda for my Photography Standards meeting in Berlin.

An undignified end to a run

This morning I was doing my 5k run. I reached the 3.8 km mark (according to Strava), right at the end of a long downhill stretch, so I was going pretty fast, when my foot caught an uneven concrete paving block edge. I took a couple of flailing steps and then realised I couldn’t stay on my feet. I fell headlong onto the concrete, but managed to roll myself onto the adjacent grass after initial contact.

It hurt a lot. Probably the most painful thing since I accidentally sliced my hand open five years ago. I was still lying on the grass assessing my status when a couple came up, a bit older than me, to check and make sure if I was okay or not. I was in a quiet residential street and they were the only other people around.

I managed to pull myself to my feet and determine that there were no broken bones, nor any sprains. In fact I felt fairly okay, except for painful and bleeding grazes on both knees and the heels of both hands. The couple asked how near I lived, and I told them it was a walk up the hill and past the railway station. They were going that way and said they’d walk with me. I had to reassure them a couple of times first that I was capable of walking. They were very kind and concerned.

At the station I used a drinking water station to rinse off some of the blood before proceeding home. During the walk I discovered that this couple live in the old converted church that I always admire when I go past it. It’s a small old Anglican church, in the middle of a street of houses, and it’s been converted into a residence. They said they bought the property some time ago and did the renovation work necessary to turn it into a home. Quite a coincidence that these would be the people who stopped to help me.

Once home, my wife helped me as I showered in hot water and with lots of soap to wash the wounds. Then I applied iodine antiseptic to them and bandaged them all up. The bleeding had almost stopped and the grazes don’t seem too bad. And I’m up to date with tetanus shots, so that’s not a worry.

Now, in the evening, things seem mostly fine. The heels of my hands are a little tender and bruised, and the right knee too. My left knee and hand are least affected, because as I fell I tried to head towards the grass on the right hand side, so most of the impact (on the concrete) was on my right knee and hand. It’ll be a few days for the grazes and bruises to heal up, but I don’t expect any other issues. I’m very happy I didn’t break a bone less than a week before flying to Europe.

During the afternoon I worked on more Darths & Droids comics. I now have made enough to cover the entire time I’ll be away in Europe, so there won’t be any pause in regular updates. And then late in the afternoon I had ethics classes. I had something to tell my students during the introductions while waiting for everyone to login to Zoom: I showed them the bandages on my hands and explained what had happened. It’s actually good to have something to talk about, as small-talk with the kids can be tricky sometimes.

And now it’s time to relax and watch some TV before bed.

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!