A Kickstarter windfall?

This afternoon I got an email from an Australian distributor, saying they have my copy of a Kickstarter game that I backed, and will be shipping it to me soon. I kind of expected this, because this campaign sent updates saying that they had sent a crate of games to their Australian distributor to ship – this arrangement saves on international shipping and makes it more feasible to back something from Australia. Kickstarters that don’t do this are often something like back the project for $50, and then pay $80 extra for shipping it to Australia.

And then I got three more emails in quick succession saying the exact same thing about three other games… game that I never backed and didn’t even know about. Obviously it’s some sort of notification error, but I’m quietly hoping I get all four games!

The most exciting thing I did today was make a trip to the liquor store to restock our supplies of wine and a few other random things. I needed a new bottle of vodka, which I use to preserve fresh ginger so that it lasts as long as I need to use it up without it rotting. I took Scully and was browsing around the shop with her (since they allow dogs inside), and a few people came up and said how cute she was.

It was a warm day, 33°C. But we had a cool change come through in the mid-evening, with thunder and heavy rain, and tomorrow should be cooler.

New content today:

Ethics of dinosaurs

I spent much of today writing my lesson plans for this week’s topics for my ethics classes: Dinosaurs for the younger kids and the closely related but more general Paleontology for the older kids. I get to overlap many of the questions by doing this, so it should have taken me less time than usual to prepare the lesson plans, but I was a bit lethargic today and ended up frittering away a good chunk of time.

I also need to revise my slides for the class on Colour and Human Vision, because I volunteered to give a guest lecture to the university students next week, during their project period. This isn’t part of the coursework, but the lecturer has liked to have someone do a bonus lecture on tangentially related material to the image processing course. Last year I did one on the Science and Engineering of Photography. I was hoping to revise the slides today, but didn’t get to it. Maybe tomorrow!

I made vegetable soup for dinner, so we can have the leftover converted into minestrone tomorrow. And after my three classes in a row this evening I’ve just made myself some sticky rice with banana and cinnamon for dessert, since the soup wasn’t super filling.

New content today:

Monday/Tuesday combined again

It’s tricky doing a Monday evening post now that I have an extra ethics class scheduled, and the current Creative Thinking class has moved an hour later due to daylight saving time. By the time I’m finished my classes it’s 10pm and I don’t feel like blogging anything. So, yesterday I didn’t do much of interest anyway, with three classes taught in the morning, taking Scully for a couple of walks, and failing to get much else done.

I was a bit distracted by a noisy miner chick, which is inhabiting a nest just outside my kitchen window. It was cheeping at a rate of about twice per second, non-stop, for hours. And it’s doing it again today. Ah, spring…

There are also channel-billed cuckoos around again, having returned from their winter migration north. They’re very loud, with a grating raucous call, but thankfully I haven’t heard them too much yet. And the brushturkeys are busy building nesting mounds, scraping huge piles of leaf litter and mulch together, and scattering material all over footpaths and other adjacent areas as well. There are several places where I walk that are covered in layers of leaf litter because of the messiness of these birds.

Today, Tuesday, I have tutoring for image processing at the university in the evening. Before then, I’m making some comics and revising the crystal ball game for the Creative Thinking class after workshopping it last night with the students.

Oh, there’s a weird thing happening at a place that I walk past regularly. It’s an old house which has looked abandoned and run-down for years, with no windows and small trees growing in the copious leaf litter on the roof. It looks like it should be torn down, and has looked that way for the past decade or so. But now there are workers there, and they seem to be building additional alls and rooms directly onto the old building without removing anything. They’re even leaving the mess on the roof. It almost defies belief that they are adding to the existing building rather than tearing it down. I guess we’ll see what happens to it.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

A second 7.5km run

I felt good this morning after yesterday’s run, and decided to press myself up to the 7.5km distance again – the second time I’ve tried this distance, after my first one last month. And this time it felt pretty comfortable the whole way. The weather helped, with a nice cool morning and not too much humidity. And I managed to run a time of 42:58, breaking 43 minutes. (My previous time was 43:16.) I’m feeling like one day soon I can push on to the goal of running 10km.

My wife went to do some shopping with her mother and sister in the middle of the day, and I took Scully out for a walk. It was a really nice spring day (unusually). And the jacaranda trees are just starting to get the first tinge of purple on them as the flower buds develop. In a week or so there will be masses of purple flowers all over Sydney – aways the best time of year in this city. We thought we might miss the peak flowering in November, when we’ll be overseas in Europe, but perhaps it’ll be a little early this year due to the warmer weather.

We also played another game of Root again. We’re still getting used to the strategies, but I think soon it might be good to try another faction.

New content today:

Fancy floral food

This morning I picked up the groceries and then did a 5k run. Today was cold again, with spring back into winter mode.

I printed out a copy of the board/card game that I’ve been working on designing with my class of three kids in my Creative Thinking class (which I mentioned a few days ago). I cut out the cards and Fame counters, and played a couple of games with my wife. The game plays very quickly, in 5-10 minutes. I actually at one stage grabbed a pen and scribbled new rules on one of the cards in my hand – which caused my wife to object about me changing the rules in the middle of the game! But of course this is just good playtesting practice!

Anyway, we came up with a few potential improvements, which I can use as discussion points in the next lesson on Monday night. Apart from those, the game seems to play pretty well! I think with a few simple tweaks we can make it a decent little game.

My wife went to the local farmer’s market this morning and came home with a bag of interesting vegetables, including a small container of edible flowers. So I decided to get fancy with dinner. I made risotto with asparagus and baby zucchinis, and used the zucchini flowers and edible flowers to decorate.

Vegetable risotto

Vegetable risotto

Looks amazing, and tasted pretty good too. There are plenty of the flowers left, so it looks like we’re going to be having fancy dinners all week.

Oh, and here’s a bonus photo of Scully at the park yesterday.

Scully at Badanggari Park

New content today:

Weird weather

Just three days ago we were sweltering in 35°C. Today was so cold that I had to pull out my woollen jumper again (“sweater” for US folks). It was very windy, which made the already cool temperature feel pretty cold.

A friend of mine has said on a few occasions that Sydney doesn’t have nice weather for spring. We have hot and cold days dithered together, early spring having more cold days and late spring having more hot days.

In between ethics classes I took Scully to the brand new park again. It’s a very nice place to sit and eat lunch. And there today I witnessed a Buridan’s Ass moment. A woman came into the park and was looking for a place to sit. She reached a point where there were two empty benches facing each other about 10 metres apart, and she was standing in the middle looking at first one, then the other, then back to the other one… She looked back and forth for maybe 30-40 seconds, before finally continuing to walk, and she eventually found another bench somewhere else.

This evening I had a nice Turkish dinner out with my wife. Hummus and flatbread, grilled haloumi, dolmades, and falafels.

And tonight we were supposed to have in-person board games night, but a few people are away travelling and we would have had three people at most, so we converted to online games and the travellers are joining in.

New content today:

A new patisserie

With 5 classes today I don’t have a lot of time to do other things. But I did take Scully for a short drive over to Neutral Bay for lunch. The day was cool and very, very windy, so I didn’t fancy taking her on a long walk. Instead I found a French bakery that I haven’t visited before and decided to go there and get something for lunch.

La Bonne Bakery had a selection of bread and baguettes, and an array of pastries:

La Bonne Bakery

But they didn’t have much else apart from these. A man entered the shop just before me and asked for a pie, but the staff said they didn’t make pies any more. They did have some croque monsieurs made and ready to be reheated for lunch, so I grabbed one of those, as well as a pain au chocolat, and a slice of pecan tart to take home for dessert later tonight. I took them with Scully to a small park nearby to sit and eat while she ran around on the grass. The croque monsieur and pain au chocolat were both really good. I haven’t tried the pecan tart yet, but it looks amazing.

I’ll have to go back here again and take my wife some day to try it out. It’s also convenient with that park nearby where Scully can be off-lead, with a fence around it.

New content today:

New ethics classes: Crowdfunding and Rationality

I spent most of today writing up my lesson plans for the new week of ethics classes. The topics are Crowdfunding for the younger children, and Rationality for the older ones. This evening I’ve done the first three classes for Crowdfunding, and so far none of the students have been familiar with sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe. Which is okay, as I explain how they work and then we go through questions about the principles and ethics of crowdfunding. It’s been interesting and the kids have some clever ideas about it.

I also planned ahead with my lesson topics, to the point where I have plans up to my trip in November. So I’ve added details of the three weeks of classes that I’ll be skipping to Outschool so parents can see it well in advance.

I took Scully for a couple of walks. The day was thankfully cooler than yesterday, overcast. And rain has developed this evening, and is quite heavy now. There’s not much else to tell about today. I should have abit more free time tomorrow now I’ve written this week’s classes.

New content today:

Monday/Tuesday combo two-in-one post

Monday I was busy in the evening so didn’t have time for posting. And tonight I’ll be out at the university for the student project kick-off lecture for the image processing course I’m tutoring. So I thought I’d make a combined post for both days. Yesterday (Monday) was a lot cooler than Sunday, but today (Tuesday) is already warming up dramatically again as of 10am. Monday was actually a public holiday here, Labour Day.

I spent some time knocking ideas into shape for my current game design class on outschool, in which I’m working with three students on ideas for a game about crystal balls. I came up with three different possible modes of game play:

  1. Cards list random events that could happen to a person: e.g. “win the lottery”, “get married”, “lose your job”. You lay out a series of cards face down so nobody can see them – this represents future events, which are now fixed by the layout. Players are fortune tellers and can use their crystal balls to peek at a card, thus learning what is going to happen to a client in the future. Here it gets a bit vague – somehow you do this to earn money and/or reputation.
  2. You use your crystal ball to make free-form predictions of what other players will do on future turns. On the given future turn, the player who has had a prediction made can choose to either (a) follow the prediction, gaining some benefit, and also giving the predictor positive reputation for being accurate, or (b) defy the prediction, losing the benefit, but also giving the predictor loss of reputation.
  3. Players are fortune tellers competing for business in the same town. You have a hand of cards with events on them, and “use your crystal ball” to foresee those events happening to your rivals. Some are positive, some are negative, and you choose an opponent and place the card in front of them. The card has countdown numbers on the edges, and each turn you rotate the cards played in front of you to count down the turns, and when they reach 0 the event happens. Your shop might burn down 3 turns from now, losing you a lot of money. But! If you take out fire insurance (using another card) before your shop burns down, you collect a huge payout! So you can use your knowledge of future events to change good/bad events.

The last one is the one I like the most, and the kids in the class all agreed. So that’s what I’ll be developing into a full-blown game over the next few days, in time for the next class next Monday.

When my wife and I went to take Scully for a walk after lunch, we found a film crew filming something right outside our place. A dozen or so people, vans, lighting gear. They were filming something on the walkway from the footpath going around the side of our apartment block property to the rear entrances of some of the units. I stopped and asked what they were doing and one of them told me it was an “independent film project”. It wasn’t huge like a fully professional set-up; more like a film school student project or something. They were still here when we came back about an hour later, filming someone driving a car up our street – we saw it reverse and drive back a couple of times as they filmed it.

In the afternoon I did another 5k run. My times on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were very consistent: 27:20, 27:21, and 27:20. While walking back home through the park from the end of the run, I spotted a king parrot feeding on a tree near the path.

Australian king parrot

I approached as close as I could and it was tame enough that I got within about 30cm with my phone to get these photos.

Australian king parrot

In the evening I had that game design class, and also a new ethics class time for older kids. A parent had signed up a girl for a younger kids class last Friday, and she had enjoyed it so much that the parent wanted to enrol and older sister into a class too, but there were no suitable vacancies. So I made a new class on Mondays. At the moment there’s just the one student, but the class went well because she’s clever and talkative. The parent wrote back soon afterwards to say what a great class it was and how excited the kid was to talk about it. So that’s good!

Today I’ll be working on producing that crystal ball game, and maybe writing some comics, before heading into the university tonight.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

A taste of summer

It was hot today, like a midsummer day. We reached 35.6°C in the city, and over 37°C in some suburbs. Tuesday is expected to be more of the same, although oddly tomorrow is forecast to be only 24°C. We have a cold southerly change coming through late this evening, but it won’t last very long before the heat builds up again. And this with still 2 months to go before summer starts.

I did manage another 5k run early this morning, before it got too hot, but it was 24°C even at 8am, so it wasn’t particularly comfortable running weather.

My wife and I played another game of Root again, this time swapping roles again so I played the cats and she the birds. It’s a game that requires several plays to understand the strategies, so we’re trying to play it frequently and reinforce our knowledge, not letting it fade from our brains.

Oh, and daylight saving started today here, so I’ve moved all my online classes an hour later, to keep them at the same time for all the students who don’t live in southern Australia – which is basically all of them at the moment except one.

New content today: