Big lunch trip

This morning I photographed my latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I was very efficient and done by 11:30, so I decided to reward myself by taking Scully on a drive out to the beach, so I could get some nice pies at my favourite pie shop, and then take Scully for a bit of a walk by the beach.

Scully at Fisherman's Beach

I bought a Thai vegetable pie, a satay chicken pie, and a vanilla slice (the Aussie version of the classic French mille-feuille) for dessert. We sat and ate in a shady spot on the grass right by the beach, looking out at the Pacific Ocean. But as we walked out there from the pie shop, we passed a new gelato shop that has sprung since the last time I was here. I like gelato, so I wanted to try some. So, on the way back after letting Scully run around a bit on a nearby playing field, we popped into the gelato shop.

It was being operated by two girls, about 12 years old, with no adults in sight. It was a small place and there was no door to a back area where anyone else might have been lurking, so I can only assume the girls had been left to run the place completely alone. I don’t know about other countries, but this is not entirely unusual hereβ€”to go into some sort of shop and be served by a childβ€”especially given the fact that we’re currently in summer school holidays.

Phoenix gelato

I’d like to report that the gelato was excellent, but in fact it was decidedly average. Not bad, but not great. At least I tried it, and gave the girls some business. Oh, they were very generous with the serving size, I must say – I got way more than I expected.

Back home tonight I started the new week of ethics classes with a new topic: Buying and Selling part 3. This one is mostly about supermarket tactics to get shoppers to buy more stuff, and opportunistic pricing. I had a couple of new students in the three classes tonight, and they seem good. I hope they enjoyed the class and return next week.

New content today:

Electric power to houses

A thing I forgot to mention yesterday: At the start of one of my online ethics classes, I was expecting two prior students, plus one new enrolment, who I’ll call Barb (not her real name). One of the prior students arrived, and then a minute or so later Barb connected to Zoom. I could only see the thumbnail video until she spoke, and it looked very dark. I waved and said “Hello Barb, welcome to the class”.

The video went from thumbnail to the main window and I could see an adult woman in a dark room. She looked sleepily at the camera and said, “What’s happening? I got a message on my phone saying there was a Zoom on now…”

I said, “You’re Barb’s mother?”

And she said, “There must be some mistake. It’s 1 am here. She’s asleep.”

I said, “Oh… there must have been some time zone mix-up!” I told her to check, in the morning, the time on the class and I’d contact her through Outschool to help work it out. I deduce from the time she said it was that she must have been in the US Eastern time zone. Outschool is supposed to show users all times in their own time zone, so I can only guess that she must have had her time zone set incorrectly in her user profile. So that was pretty strange. I just hope she got back to sleep okay!

Today I finished off the week of classes on the current topics, with four of the age 10-12 classes. In between I started work on writing a new class for this group, for the week after the next one. I’m trying to stay a full week ahead in my prep (as I think I mentioned before). I had a one hour break from 12 to 1, and took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip chop, intending to get some fish & chips for lunch to eat on the way back. But the shop was closed for summer holidays! Some businesses do this here, close for a few weeks in December/January so the staff can have some vacation time over the summer. So I had to walk Scully back home quickly and make myself a quick lunch at home to be done and ready for my class at 1pm.

I took her for another walk again around 5. While I was walking, I did a bird count using eBird, so I was looking around at things, and I noticed an interesting thing with some of the houses I was walking past, and their connections to the overhead electricity wires. The area around here has a lot of older houses, and they generally have the wires supplying electricity strung from the street poles directly to a terminal on the top of the house. Like this:

Wires to house

There are also several properties where the old house has been demolished and a more modern house has been built. And in almost all of these, the wires are not strung to the house itself, but rather to a pole erected just inside the property boundary. Like this:

Wires to pole

Presumably the wires go down the pole and then into the house underground. I’m wondering why this is such a popular choice for new houses. Do the owners make this choice to route the wires this way via a pole on their property, or is it some sort of new requirement by the council? I have no idea. And why string the wires to a pole??

In another interesting piece of trivia, I got talking with some of my friends in our Discord about how many different animals we’ve eaten. We did a survey by emojis, and I thought I’d copy the results here. The number indicates how many of us have eaten meat from the animal in question. This number includes me, except where indicated.

πŸ‚ – 7
πŸ– – 7
πŸ‘ – 7
πŸ“ – 7
πŸ¦ƒ – 7
🐟 – 7 (generic “fish”)
🦘 – 6
πŸ¦€ – 6
🦞 – 6
πŸ¦‘ – 6
πŸ‘  – 6 (’eel)
🐐 – 5
πŸ¦† – 5
πŸ’ͺ – 5 (“mussel”)
πŸ¦ͺ – 5
🦌 – 4
πŸ— – 4
🐊 – 4
🦈 – 4
πŸ™ – 4
🦐 – 4
⭐️ – 4 (sea urchin)
πŸ‡ – 3
πŸͺ – 3
🦒 – 3 (goose)
πŸ₯ – 3 (quail)
🐎 – 2
🦬 – 2
🐌 – 2 not including me
πŸ¦™ – 1
πŸ• – 1 not including me
🦀 – 1 (pigeon)
🦩 – 1 (emu)
🐒 – 1 not including me
🐸 – 1 not including me
πŸ¦— – 1
🐜 – 1
πŸ› – 1 not including me (witchetty grub)

New content today:

Market without being at market

As mentioned yesterday, today I helped my wife organise her market stall to sell dog bandanas. We got up early and drove over to the market with all the stuff we needed. It’s a bit hectic setting up there, as there is very restricted car access near the market, so you have to queue up for a bit and wait for a car/van to leave before being ushered into the tiny parking area to unload your stuff and get out again as quickly as possible.

We did this and I drove back home with Scully, leaving my wife to handle the stall by herself until the market closed at 3pm, when we did the whole thing in reverse to pack up and head home.

So I had much of the day to myself (and Scully). I spent it writing the rest of that batch of Irregular Webcomic! that I began yesterday. It’s now complete and I can do the photography probably on Tuesday morning when I don’t have any ethics classes.

Speaking of which, I had three more tonight: two of the 10-12 age group, and one class of the new 13-15 group, which had three of the most mature students from the previous class who transferred into it for this year. I think my favourite classes are actually on Sunday evenings, as these classes all have great groups of kids in them.

My wife sold some bandanas and was happy with what she achieved, so that was good. She has a different market booked in a few weeks to see how it goes in a different suburb as well.

New content today:

Market preparation

My wife has decided to hold a few market stalls to sell her dog bandanas and bangles. She’s booked a stall at Kirribilli Markets tomorrow – one of the markets where I tried to get established selling prints of my photography a while back. So we have some experience in setting up and running a stall there. We’l be up early tomorrow morning to drive down and get set up. But rather than me manning the stall all day, it’ll be my wife’s project. So today we got organised and sorted out all the things to take, making sure she can use our Square payment device on her phone, setting up a cash float, and so on.

The rain eased off today about lunchtime. We went on a long walk to the bakery for a bit of afternoon tea. Back home we gave Scully a bath. I went out for a run – this time doing 5 km, double my normal distance. I’m trying to do at least one run of this distance each month.

Not much else to report today, really. I spent some time writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I’m planning to photograph a new batch some time during the coming week.

New content today:

Rainy rainy day

Today was very rainy and even colder than yesterday – max 20.4Β°C. I even had to wear a jacket when taking Scully out for a walk.

This morning I picked up my grocery order. Unfortunately there was a missing item when I got home. This has happened to me a few times since I started ordering groceries online. The supermarket has a nice website interface for reporting a missing item, and they simply refund you the price without needing any further verification. Which is nice, but I’ve now had to do it enough times that I’m starting to get worried that the supermarket will think I’m taking advantage of it and blackball me from claiming missing item refunds. Hopefully it’s something that happens enough to many people that they know my instances are within statistical likelihood bounds.

I had more ethics classes today, and tonight is online games night.

New content today:

Ethics for older kids

Today I had my first class of online ethics for older kids (ages 13-15). I just had one student, and it was a kid I’d taught earlier in the 10-12 class. He’d stopped taking lessons several months back, but I contacted his mother to let her know that I had a new class for more mature kids and thought he’d be a good fit, and she signed him up.

The first lesson is on “Crime and Punishment”. We talked a bit about crime and why people commit crimes, and then concentrated on the idea of punishment. Why do we punish criminals? Do we as a society need to punish crime? What punishments are fair/unfair? Should criminals be given a chance to rehabilitate, or to live a life after serving punishment without prejudice? And so on. He really enjoyed it I think, exercising his brain on more difficult questions and ideas than I’ve done in previous classes. So I think it went really well!

The other main thing about today was the weather took a turn for the colder and wetter. It was very wintery, with a top temperature of only 22Β°C, also accompanied by wind and showers. Didn’t stop me going for a 2.5k run though!

New content today:

A nice lunch out

Today was my wife’s last day off before returning to work after the Christmas/New Year break. We decided to have a special lunch out, and we walked with Scully down to Blues Point, where there’s a small area of a few shops and restaurants on the main street running down to the harbour. It’s a little over a half hour’s walk away, but we go there sometimes and have tried an Indian and a Spanish restaurant there.

We wanted to try what I thought was an Italian place, but it turned out to be more generically “Mediterranean”, meaning a mixture of Greek and Italian food.* It turned out to be a little rustic – the sort of restaurant that’s probably been there unchanged for 30 or 40 years. The building looked like it hadn’t been renovated in that long, and the menus were simple folded thin cardboard sheets that looked like they’d been handled by thousands of people, with the edges worn and the ink fading.

We had some pita bread with dips (hummus, tzatziki, and taramasalata), and I had fettuccine with prawns and chorizo, while my wife had the haloumi and watermelon salad. The dips were very generous and the pasta was delicious. It was all really good.

We walked a longer way home by a different route for variety, and to tire Scully out for the afternoon. We made it home not long before the overcast turned to rain and thunderstorms. This is a cool change that’s forecast to turn our 28Β°C days into 23-25Β°C for the next few days. Pretty chilly for the middle of summer.

* It’s an interesting thing that “Mediterranean” food means different things in different countries. Here in Australia, if you say “Mediterranean food” people will assume you mean Greek/Italian. Whereas I noticed when visiting England a few years ago that all the restaurants that advertised “Mediterranean” food were serving what we would call Middle Eastern food – Turkish/Lebanese dishes.

New content today:

Are some things just wrong?

My online ethics classes have restarted for the new year. Today I just have the original ages 10-12 classes. The topic for the week is “Are some things just wrong”? The idea is to talk about whether morals are absolute or relative, by introducing the concepts slowly and building up to that question near the end of the class.

I start with a story about different foods that people of different cultures like eating. Is it okay for some cultures to eat dog meat, or is it wrong for them to do that? Is it okay for some cultures to eat beef, if some other cultures think that’s wrong? Is it always wrong to eat dogs, and any culture that thinks it’s okay is incorrect? Is it always okay to eat cows, and any culture that thinks it’s wrong is incorrect? Or does it all depend on your culture: it’s okay for some people to eat dogs/cows, but not other people?

Is it wrong to criticise someone else’s culture? Always? Or is it okay sometimes?

We move on to discussing things like stealing or murdering. Is it possible for everyone to agree that these are wrong? If someone thinks murdering is morally okay, are they incorrect, or is that a valid point of view?

So… could it be that some things are morally objective, while some other things are morally subjective? How do we know which is which? These are pretty deep questions – hopefully the kids will appreciate the trickiness of them!

Prior to the evening’s lessons, I mostly worked on Darths & Droids writing, trying to build up a bit more of a buffer before I get stuck into the teaching too much. It was warm today, but still not really summery hot. I checked the records, and discovered that the temperature hasn’t even reached 30Β°C here in Sydney since last February, which is extremely unusual. By January we should be having a few days in the high 30s or even 40s. Although I’m not missing the extreme heat – the lower temperatures are more pleasant!

New content today:

More ethics planning

Today is my last day off before resuming teaching online ethics classes on Outschool tomorrow. I think I mentioned that I’m starting a new class for older kids, ages 13-15, adding that to my existing class for ages 10-12. This means each week I need two new lesson plans instead of just one. I have four weeks of brief outlines ready to go, and by yesterday I’d written the first lesson plan for each age group.

Today I got ahead of the game by writing the second week’s lesson for each of the classes, so now I have one of each up my sleeve. I’m going to try to stay a week ahead, to give me some slack in case of emergencies. This year’s second topic for the 10-12 group is “Buying and Selling 3” – the third in a series on this topic because I had so many ideas and questions that it filled two previous lessons with enough left over for a third one. And the second topic for the 13-15 year olds is “Free Will and Determinism”. That one should be really interesting to discuss with the kids.

Apart from that and going on a big walk with Scully and my wife, I didn’t do much other than some house cleaning. I also took down the Christmas fairy lights that had been strung up in the living room. Here’s Scully on the walk today, in the Greenwich Point bushwalk section:

Scully on a bushwalk

One piece of news that I came across today was about something that has strongly influenced my projects over the past several years. The comic Darths & Droids wasn’t the first movie screencap webcomic – it owes its existence to the example set by the first one: DM of the Rings. This is a comic created by Shamus Young as a parody of the Lord of the Rings movies, as if they were a Dungeons & Dragons game. It directly inspired me and my friends to create Darths & Droids, which was the second of what has since become an established subgenre of webcomics with dozens of examples.

DM of the Rings was completed at 150 strips. I have long since had a downloaded collection of the comics on my computer, for posterity and reference. One small thing that bothered me about the comics was the fact that Shamus did his screencapping with software that left the frames vertically stretched in the wrong aspect ratio – so all the characters appeared thinner than they should. Also, being a product of the 2006 Internet, the comics are quite low resolution images.

Unfortunately, Shamus Young passed away in June last year. but today I learnt that his children are working on a remastered version of DM of the Rings. They are taking his original comics and recreating them at high resolution, and with screencaps in the correct aspect ratio. You can read the story about the remastering, and enjoy the first high-res remastered strip here: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=55070

Also check out that awesome page banner!

New content today:

First day of 2023

It felt like a fairly lazy day. I worked on writing lesson plans for my online ethics classes, which resume on Tuesday, and I made a new Darths & Droids comic. But I felt like I didn’t get a lot done and it ended up being late this evening while I still had things I wanted to get done today.

Of course, being New Year’s Day, we got up later than normal, after staying up late last night. And I went for a 2.5k run, the first of the new year.

I spent some time playing Azul: Queen’s Garden with my wife – our first learning game. As is traditional with Azul games, she beat me handily.

We also took Scully for a long walk in the early afternoon. The weather was warm but a bit cloudy, so it wasn’t too hot.

Oh! And we finally had showers again today, after a week of using the bathtub. I let the silicone sealant cure for 72 hours, and we should have been able to use the shower yesterday, but my wife suggested we leave it an extra day just to be sure. Besides using the shower, I also cleaned the stall with disinfectant and cleaned up the glass screen so now the whole thing is sparkly new.

New content today: