Golf and games

This morning I got up a little early and headed out to the local golf course. I played two balls again, like I did a couple of weeks ago, keeping separate scores, so essentially two rounds simultaneously – totalling 18 holes since it’s only a 9-hole course.

I started really badly, and thought I was in for a dreadful day, but fortunately my hitting improved as I went on. I ended up recording my second best round with one of the balls, and scored a par for the first time on the par-4 ninth hole. The course was a lot nicer to play today than a fortnight ago, because the mud had mostly dried out after some fine weather.

I was home a bit after 9:30, and then went to the supermarket to get the weekly groceries. And then just kind of puttered around for the middle of the day – doing some photo work, some comic planning notes, some random web browsing, and some Italian practice.

Tonight is fortnightly virtual games night with my friends. I’ve been compiling a huge list of custom words for skribbl.io with contributions from everyone and it’s now about 1.5 times as big as it was last fortnight. Before games I’m going out with my wife and Scully to a local Turkish place for Friday night dinner. I thought I’d write this blog entry before we leave, so it won’t get forgotten during the gaming fun later this evening.

Oh… which means the following links won’t work for a few hours, until the comics get updated.

New content today:

Back into running

After last week’s relative laziness, I returned to doing a 5k run today. I figured after a two week break I wouldn’t be setting a best time today, and I took it fairly easy. But it turned out that I clocked 27:02, my third best time, and only a second behind my second best time. And although I was certainly ready to stop by the end of it, I didn’t really feel like I was pushing myself hard today. I guess my body is getting more used to running that distance!

On the way home I treated myself to a couple of vegetable pies from the pie shop near the sports oval. A “pumpkin, coriander, and cheese” pie which also has a layer of mashed potato inside. The pumpkin is blended smooth and very soft, really like a thick pumpkin soup, and the cheese is a soft creamy sort, a bit like sour cream. It’s a nice pie, but feels a bit insubstantial. The second was a spinach, corn, and cheese, which is more solid and features a feta-like cheese.

This afternoon I worked on some photo processing and updating of some old travel diaries. And took Scully to the dog park. It was a lot warmer out late this afternoon than it had been even at lunch time. I checked the Weather Bureau and the temperature in Sydney was still rising around 4pm – it got up to almost 22°C.

New content today:

Fate and the office

My Ethics class this morning was the second half of the topic on Fate. It’s really getting the kids to think about taking responsibility for their actions, rather than blaming Fate. But one of the boys was adamant in his belief that people’s fates are predetermined and there’s nothing you can do to change them.

One of the stories was about a kid who has a test tomorrow, and reasons that he’s fated to either pass or fail the test, so there’s no point studying and he may as well watch TV rather than study. After reading this story, and asking the kids their thoughts about it, they were all agreed that it’s silly to watch TV and not study for the test – even the boy who thought that our fates definitely are predetermined. I asked him why he would study if his test result is predetermined, and he said because he’s fated to study for the test! Which is kind of okay – if he’s not letting his belief in fate actually make decisions for him and he doesn’t just take the lazy road at every opportunity. But it was a little odd.

I took a long walking route home, ending up covering nearly 10 km by the time I got home just before lunch. The weather was a bit nicer today, though still on the chilly side. I’m looking forward to the warmer weather we’re expected to get over the next few days.

This afternoon I worked on some comics, and I also helped my wife return her office chair to the office. She’d been using it at home while she was working here due to COVID-19, but now she’s returned to the office since the situation is more or less under control around here. The office chair is really heavy – much heavier than it looks. I guess much of it must be made of metal rather than plastic. I’m very glad to have it out of the house, as we had to make room for it at the dining table by moving one of the dining chairs, and it was sort of blocking part of the living room. (We don’t live in a big house.)

New content today:

Veg day

Today was very lazy. After the mental exertions of yesterday, I didn’t feel particularly inspired to do much today, and spent a lot of time just goofing off and browsing websites. It was also very cold again which prompted me not to venture outdoors. I ended up getting very cold just sitting at home and had some mugs of liquorice tea to warm up.

I did write a bit of Darths & Droids with some help from co-authors via online chat. Oh, and the main thing I got done was going through a bunch of emails and documents for ISO photography standards that have built up over the past few weeks. So I had some technical reading to do.

Oh, I got some good news today! An email from a Kickstarter I backed over a year ago for some gaming dice, that estimated delivery of rewards by September 2019. The campaign organiser said that the rewards are now shipping! A year late, but I do have to credit the organiser with providing regular informative updates and assurances that the project had not been dropped. The problem was with their supply chain and not directly themself, so I don’t blame them. And I’m now looking forward to getting my hands on those dice.

New content today:

Huge annotation day

I spent basically all day today working on Irregular Webcomic! annotations. I just finished now, after 9pm. Most of it was one annotation, that I started writing yesterday. I finished it off today, and made a couple of diagrams to illustrate it. It ended up being over 5000 words long. Which is a lot of technical, researched writing to do in a single day, believe me.

I’m exhausted…

New content today:

Double cold weekend

Sunday dawned cold and windy, much as yesterday, although today we managed a degree higher, with 17°C being the maximum temperature in Sydney. Again I stayed indoors for most of the day, only venturing out with my wife and Scully for a bit of afternoon play and exercise in a nearby park. They also visited my mother-in-law for morning tea, leaving me at home to deal with constructing the final few Irregular Webcomic! strips from the current batch, and launch into writing annotations for them.

Oh, but if you were worried about me freezing to death in this horrid 16-17°C Antarctic cold, don’t despair. The forecast for the coming week has our Sydney winter temperatures back up to a comfortable 26°C.

I’m currently in the middle of writing an annotation for one, which requires a considerable amount of work and research. I’ve written 1900 words so far, and am not even really close to being finished. I’ll have to leave it until tomorrow.

Last night to relax during the evening I watch the 1986 movie Labyrinth, for the first time ever. I feel like I was catching up on a bit of my childhood that I somehow missed at the time. It was exactly the sort of movie I would have watched and enjoyed as a child, except for some reason I never did see it at the time. Although in a modern sense the film is very dated and not very sophisticated, I enjoyed watching it – perhaps more for the sense that it made me feel like a kid again than for its own intrinsic quality.

New content today:

Cold cold day

Today was billed as the coldest day of the year for Sydney and much of south-eastern Australia, as a cold mass of Antarctic air made its way up the coast. By coldest day of the year, we mean the temperature only reached a maximum of 16°C in Sydney today. It was also very windy, so it felt colder than that.

Large regions of the inland countryside got snow, but being right on the coast and close to sea level, we don’t get such conditions here. Still, it was cold enough that my wife and I basically did nothing all day but sit inside and try to stay warm. We ventured out at lunchtime to take Scully for a walk and grab some spinach and feta rolls from a nearby pie shop. Although cold and windy, Scully had a good run around in the park, chasing a tennis ball and returning it.

Besides various bits of housework, my wife and I played a game of Deep Blue, and watched some Doctor Who, and I assembled a few more comics from the recent batch. And that’s about it!

New content today:

Late Friday post on Saturday morning

Friday was busy and I neglected to make my daily post, so I’m dong it on Saturday morning.

I began Friday with writing a last few Irregular Webcomic! scripts over breakfast. Then it was off to the supermarket for the weekly grocery shopping. It was a smaller load this week, with not much running out since last week. I got some fresh fruit and vegetables and a few bits and pieces like a bag of lentils and a block of cheese – and some toothpaste since it was on sale for $2 off. There are some products I only ever buy when they are on sale, and just keep enough of a stockpile so that I can wait until next time they are on sale. Ice cream I never buy at full price either, although it often runs out before the next sale and I have to make do with no ice cream for a week or two!

Back home I got stuck into photographing Lego and miniatures sets for the batch of comics that I’d just finished writing. I started at 10:00, after unpacking the groceries, and finished after midday, just in time for lunch.

In the afternoon I took a bit of a break from comicking and processed and posted some old photos from a trip to Thailand back in 2005. Then I got stuck into assembling the comics from the photos taken in the morning, and finished off half a dozen or so before my wife came home from work with Scully. We all went out for dinner, to a nice French creperie. Since it was very cold and we had to sit outside with Scully, I had some mulled cider to wash down my galettes and crepes. Mmmm.

Back home, my friends began an impromptu games night, interstitial to our scheduled fortnightly games nights. We’ve been working on a custom word list for skribbl.io (an online implementation of a Pictionary-like drawing game), since the default word list skews very American. We got everyone to submit a few hundred words and came up with a list of over 1300 custom words to draw. We have things like “lamington”, “echidna”, “Mister Squiggle”, “Circular Quay”, and so on, as well as more generic things. It was loads of fun, and actually a bit more challenging as some of the words we listed were quite difficult to draw.

New content today:

Be very very quiet…

I spent most of today writing – or trying to write – new Irregular Webcomic! scripts. So there’s not very much to say about that.

In the past week I’ve watched a couple of interesting movies on Netflix with a common theme: they’re both horror films in which people need to stay silent in order to avoid attracting monsters that are blind and hunt by sound. The films are A Quiet Place (2018) and The Silence (2019). I recommend them both. They have a lot in common, but a few interesting differences. The following discussion will have some minor details on the premise and set-up of each film, but nothing I would consider a plot spoiler. (But if you’re very sensitive to spoilers and think you might want to watch these films, then you may want to skip the rest of today’s post.)

It’s interesting that both films feature a stable nuclear family with mum, dad, a boy, and a girl, and that in both films the girl is older and more mature, and also deaf, thus justifying the family learning sign language – which is used extensively in both films so that the characters can communicate without speaking (and thus without making potentially fatal noise). Also coincidentally, both films have a running time of exactly 90 minutes.

But it’s what’s different that makes comparing the films fun. The monster designs are very different, apart form the commonality of being blind but with excellent hearing. One film has large, scary, ground-based alien things that basically kill you as soon as they touch you, while the other has small flying creatures that you have some (small) chance of beating off or distracting, thus leaving injured people.

One film is claustrophobic and tense, while the other is more open and a bit lighter. Reviews indicate the tenser film received praise, while the lighter one was criticised – but honestly I enjoyed the lighter one more. I’m not sure I can say why exactly. Maybe I was just trying to relax and looking for something easy to watch. I did enjoy both of them though.

New content today:

Tempting the Fates

I slept poorly last night, with the muscle strain in my side bothering my whenever I lay on either side, so I had to sleep on my back. My normal sleeping position is lying on my side, so it was a bit uncomfortable and interrupted. However during the day today the strain has eased off again. It seems better than yesterday, so hopefully tonight will be easier and it’s well on the way to healing.

This morning was Ethics class at Lane Cove school again. The NSW government has introduced further restrictions on school activities to control COVID-19, but I received an email from my school’s Ethics coordinator to advise us that we were continuing with classes for now, since we can operate within the guidelines. I started a new topic today: Fate. The lesson was mostly telling a story about the Oracle at Delphi and asking the kids what they thought of fate, predestination, and predicting the future. It as a good discussion, and they mostly had fairly sensible points to make and mature views about it. So that was pretty good.

Oh, I found on my phone a photo of the queue at the pie shop that I went to before golf on Sunday:

Pie queue

It was a pretty long queue. The camera compresses the perspective a bit – people were socially distancing 1.5 metres apart in the queue. This is a very popular pie shop, as you can see!

This afternoon I started work on a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I got a bunch of strips written, but need to write some more before I can move on to the photography. That will be the goal for the next few days. If I write fast hopefully I can take photos on Friday, otherwise it’ll be Monday.

New content today: