dangermouse.net – Page 49 – David Morgan-Mar

New shoes

I had a bit of a rough night, trying to sleep with my side muscle strain. It hurt every time I rolled over in bed, so kept me awake more than usual. Today it feels significantly better though, which is good. I didn’t go for a run because I didn’t want to strain myself further.

I worked on some comics in the morning, and then after lunch we went out to do a couple of things. I needed a new pair of casual sports shoes – do people still call them “sneakers”? Just to wear every day to walk around in, not to actually play sports or run in (I have running shoes). We stopped off at a shoe shop on the way to my mother-in-law’s place because we were gathering there for an afternoon tea for my wife’s nephew’s birthday.

I tried one pair of shoes and they fit so nicely that I didn’t bother with the other two pairs the assistant had brought out. They were a narrower fit, but I need a wider fit for my feet, so was happy to stick with the first wide-fit pair. I left the old shoes there to be recycled, though I’m not sure how or how much of a pair of old sneakers they can possibly recycle.

The afternoon tea was nice, with lots of fresh berries which are in season here at the moment: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. There were some sandwiches, spinach rolls and sausage rolls, and a chocolate mud cake. I ate enough that I haven’t bothered with a proper dinner tonight, and will get by with an evening snack.

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An intense game of Root

Yesterday was board games night at a friend’s place. We started with a game of Codenames, which my team lost when my partner and I guessed the assassin word. Always a terrible way to lose.

Then we split into a game of 4 people playing Root, and 3 people who played some Jump Drive and possibly other things. I was in the Root game, playing the Eyrie. The game progressed steadily until we were all about 15 points, halfway to the wining score of 30. Then the Woodland Alliance player suddenly made a big series of gains in one turn, putting him within striking distance of victory. Then the Vagabond player did the same, also scoring over 10 points in his very next turn, setting up potential victory next turn too. And then the Marquisate player played a Dominance card, removing his point score and setting an alternate win condition of controlling two clearings in opposite corners of the board. And then he moved 8 cat warriors into one clearing and 10 into the clearing in the opposite corner!!! This would easily win him the game at the start of his next turn, and it would be basically impossible for the rest of us to stop him.

I took my turn, meekly doing pretty much nothing, as I didn’t have the potential to do anything dramatic on this turn. And then the Woodland Alliance scored the final few points to hit 30 and win. Basically, just a turn ahead of the Vagabond, who could have won next turn, and the Marquisate, who would have won right after that. So all three of my opponents had victory in sight within a turn of each other, while I was stuck languishing in very obvious last place.

Just look at all the cats in the two corners of the board!

Also yesterday I walked past the construction site that is a few blocks from our place, where a slew of apartments are replacing the old houses that were there. It’s making progress, although still in the digging and moving earth around phase.

This morning I went for a 5k run, but I noticed as I ran that I had a bit of a pain in my side. I completed the 5k, then had my shower and also cleaned the bathroom and shower while doing that. Then sat down for a while, and a few hours later my side had tensed up terribly. It’s a muscle strain, and quite painful I’ve been putting an icepack on it to reduce inflammation but I suspect it’ll take a few days to calm down. Which means probably no running tomorrow.

For dinner tonight my wife and I took Scully for a long walk over to the Flat Rock Brew Cafe, which is a really nice place for a late afternoon drink and meal. It has shady outdoor seating. I had a dark ale and a pulled pork burger, which was really good.

Back home this evening we watched the Australian movie The Dry. Excellent film – highly recommended for anyone who likes mystery/crime investigation. I won’t say any more – just see it.

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Thursday’s pretty busy too!

Five classes today on the Artificial Intelligence topic. It’s a fun one, which is good. The kids generally have quite a lot to say about this topic, as many of them are familiar with ChatGPT or other AI tools, having used them themselves.

In between I squeezed in some comic writing and making a simple pasta dinner. And now, with the last class ending at 10pm… it’s time to relax and wind down before bed so I can go to sleep.

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Wednesday is now my busy day

As per title. I made a few comics in the morning to fill out this week, then I had to prepare for the university Data Engineering lecture. I dropped Scully off at doggie daycare then caught a train into the city and had some quick sushi for lunch before the lecture began at midday.

It was a longer lecture today – 2.5 hours with the tutorial breaks. About designing experiments and how to deal with control and independent and confounding variables and stuff like that. Then I caught the train home and picked up Scully from my wife’s work, as she’d picked her up from the daycare place after a few hours.

I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner, before getting stuck into three ethics classes in a row, on this weeks’ new topic of Artificial Intelligence. The first class has three kids who are, shall I say, a bit playful. I showed them some brief examples of ChatGPT in action to set context for questions, including some examples of how easy it is to get it to produce false information. This produced much mirth and the class sort of devolved into the kids requesting me to type in more and more ridiculous prompts to see what ChatGPT would do. I squeezed some serious questions in there, but everyone was having fun, and one of them said at the end that this was the best class ever.

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New old furniture and peanut butter bars

I forgot to mention yesterday that our new neighbours from South Africa finally got their furniture delivered. They moved in in mid-January and shipped their furniture over from South Africa, but it was held up in customs and strikes and so on, and only released last week. So all day yesterday there were movers bringing things in, and causing Scully to growl at the noises in the hallway.

I kind of wondered why they’d go to all the expense of shipping furniture internationally, rather than just sell it and buy new furniture here. From what I saw, I think a lot of it must be antique, so I guess they were attached to it.

Today I wrote my next ethics class; this week it will on the topic of Artificial Intelligence. I had too much to talk about – there are more questions than I can possibly ask in most of the class groups. But that’s better than not having enough material!

I did some comics stuff. And I took Scully for a walk at lunch and got myself a Ridiculously Delicious™ cherry and coconut peanut butter chocolate bar at the grocery store.

I tried this brand some time ago and found they were indeed ridiculously delicious as claimed on the wrapping. They come in three flavours: orignal crunch, salted caramel, and cherry coconut. I think last time I had the original crunch one, which was fantastic, and today’s cherry one was too. They’re not too sweet, and have a very adult blend of flavours, which is better than the overly sweet taste of most chocolate bars.

Oh, and I had a weird dream last night. I was playing some sort of 500-like card game with people. I got dealt a hand and it was like 40 cards or something – so many I couldn’t sensibly hold them and see them all of them in my hand at once. I had a lot of hearts, so I started confidently bidding hearts, and I guess my partner thought I had high hearts so joined in, and we ended up in some huge hearts bid.

Then when we started playing, a few tricks went by, and then suddenly an opponent played something like a 14 of hearts. I was surprised, not expecting to see anything different to a normal deck, since all my hearts were in the range 2-10. And then they explained it was like a 6-handed deck with numbers that go up to 13, except this deck went all the way from 2 up to 25 before the face cards and ace.

I told this dream to my friends on our Discord and two of them immediately said that it couldn’t have been a hand of 40 cards – it must have been 28. Nerds. 🙄

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Unusual pizza and Scully dinner habits

Monday, and it was a lot cooler today and not so humid, which was a nice change. It felt like a preview of autumn, although warmer weather is coming again later in the week.

I went to the post office to mail a Magic: the Gathering card which I’d sold to someone online. A fairly old and valuable one, a few hundred dollars. I’ve decided to start selling some more of my old cards again, so this is hopefully just the start of getting the ball rolling on that.

After getting back from the post office I photographed the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I did six weeks of strips in two hours! Then I had to make tonight’s strip and get it ready for publication. Cutting it close to the bone – but I managed it. Tomorrow I’ll probably get the rest of this week completed and uploaded, and then add the next five weeks over the next week or so.

For dinner tonight I made pizza, and decided we should try something different. So I made a spicy satay sauce and used that instead of a tomato sauce base. And then the topping was broccoli and cashews. I think satay sauce is ideal with chicken, but also great with broccoli, and since my wife doesn’t eat chicken we went with the latter. It turned out pretty good, I thought, though the peanut-based sauce is a bit richer than a tomato sauce, so probably not something we’d want to do too often.

But while I was cooking, Scully needed to go outside for a toilet again. She’s been getting into this habit lately. I think this is now four times in the last eight days (it was three in the past week yesterday). And since I’m cooking, my wife has to take Scully out, and comes back several minutes after dinner is hot on the table. So she’s been having to eat lukewarm dinner several times in the past week. Hopefully it’s just a coincidence and not a conspiracy by Scully!

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Another close game of Root

Not too much of interest to report today – it was mostly a melange of usual activities. I did a 5k run in the morning, which was cooler and easier than yesterday, thank goodness. Made a sourdough loaf for use for lunch sandwiches tomorrow. I did a new Darths & Droids comic strip. Three ethics classes in the evening.

The most interesting thing was that I played another game of Root with my wife this afternoon. This time instead of using the robotic Marquisate (cats) to provide a third faction, we went with the robotic Eyrie (birds), and I played the cats. I raced to a quick lead as the cats are wont to do, but flagged late in the game and my wife’s Woodland Alliance caught up and passed me to within 3 points of victory. But I managed to scrape together 4 points on my next turn and beat the Alliance by one single turn. The robotic Eyrie was a big chaotic and didn’t do very much, so again I think the default difficulty level is a bit too easy (like the robotic Marquisate). Next time we’ll add some of the options to make it a tougher opponent.

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And so into autumn…

Friday was the first day of autumn, and thank goodness we have some cooler weather to look forward to soon. Friday was actually cooler than Thursday, but still plenty warm and very humid. I had four ethics classes during the day and I took Scully on a couple of short walks.

The Confession topic with the older kids is very interesting. It’s mostly about confession for things like crimes, breaking parental rules, or embarrassing secrets. But I touch on Catholic confession as a ritual of the church, describe it, and ask the kids what they think of it. The first two classes I had with this topic the kids all agreed that it is a useful thing to confess your misdeeds/sins and then have to show repentance and think about them, as it makes you more mindful of doing bad things and can make you a better person. But in Friday’s class I asked the same question and both of the kids in the class said it was rubbish, that it’s basically a get-out-of-jail-free card with God, you just get forgiven and go do bad things again without consequence.

Friday evening was online games night with my friends. We played a bunch of the usual suspect board games. My wife went out for dinner with some of her friends, so I had leftover fried rice from the night before, and I went up with Scully to the fish & chip shop to buy some fresh prawns to add to it.

Friday night was oppressive. The overnight minimum temperature was about 25°C, with humidity in the 90s, and a “feels like” temperature close to 30°C. By the time I got up and went for my 5k run, it was basically the same, and it was awful to run in – breathing felt like inhaling hot soup.

Today I stayed inside with the air conditioning and worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts. I managed to get that done, but will have to photograph it tomorrow or Monday.

For dinner we all went out for a short drive to Lane Cove shops and found a Mexican place there. The food was good, but a bit expensive. We were sitting next to a grassy area where lots of kids were playing, and there was a DJ playing music on a small stage. It was kind of fun, but a little noisy with everything happening.

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Last day of summer heat

29 February, leap year day! Also the last day of summer, and Sydney really turned it on for the occasion. We reached over 40°C in some suburbs, although nearer the coast it was thankfully a few degrees cooler. I took Scully for a walk in the morning before it got too hot, but it was hot and humid enough to be uncomfortable. At lunch I just took her out briefly and kept our short walk in the shade of the trees. We went out at the same time as our new neighbour with their dog Sophie, and the two dogs are getting along pretty well, keen to see each other and wagging tails in a friendly manner. They seem to want to play, but so far the neighbours have always kept Sophie on a lead. We let Scully off in the park across the street sometimes so she can play with other dogs, but the neighbours might not be confident enough to do that.

I had 5 ethics classes today, 4 with the younger groups and one on the new Confession topic with older kids. That went well, and generated some very interesting discussion.

For dinner I made fried rice. And I spent a bit of time in the afternoon trying to write new Irregular Webcomic! strips, but I was struggling to come up with ideas and it didn’t go very well. Also perhaps because it was such a warm day and even with the air conditioning on it made me feel a bit lethargic.

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What is data and what is ethics?

Today was a busy teaching day. This morning I wrote my lesson plan for the older group of kids and the ethics topic on Confession. Then I dropped Scully off at my wife’s work and took the train into the city and the university for the second lecture of Data Engineering. Today the lecture was about different types of data: nominal, ordinal, numeric, qualitative, quantitative, subjective, objective, and so on. Th first coding tutorial took place during the lecture and as usual someone asked me a question that basically came down to debugging Matlab syntax, which is always a pain since I don’t use Matlab regularly and always have to relearn the syntax every semester.

The students spent some time during the first tutorial break moving around to find their assignment groups. The lecturer splits the class into random groups of 6 students to work on their final projects. It’s always a bit chaotic since few of the students know each other and they’re assigned to these groups with strangers, and have to work out who they are and find them. It doesn’t help when one student can’t find Group 10 and I go around shouting “Group 10! Group 10! Put your hand up if you’re in Group 10!” and nobody reacts, and then 5 minutes later it turns out Group 10 is right there but they were too busy introducing themselves to have heard me earlier.

After coming home I finished off the Confession lesson, in time to start making some lentils and chick peas with rice for dinner, before the three in a row classes on the “What is Ethics?” topic. This is a pretty deep topic and I can really see the kids are thinking hard about some of the questions. Which means it’s a good one!

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