dangermouse.net – Page 54 – David Morgan-Mar

A writer’s block day

I spent a few hours today staring at a text file, failing to write any comics.

Other than that, I did another 5k run this morning. The heat/humidity conditions were just as bad, and I was also silly enough to do my more strenuous route, with more hills, so I went even slower. But still, it felt good afterwards to have gotten some exercise.

Not really much else to say about the day…. OH! I remember. I spent a couple of hours housecleaning. Not that that’s exciting, but at least it explains the time spent without doing anything else interesting.

New content today:

A ferry trip for dinner

The weather continues to be oppressively humid. I ran a 5k this morning at 8am, but it was so warm and close to 100% humidity that I did over 2 and a half minutes slower than my best time. I worked on some comics during the day, staying indoors as much as possible.

But for dinner we had made a booking at an Italian trattoria over in the suburb of Chiswick, which is across the harbour and down the Parramatta River a bit. To get there we caught a ferry, which involved changing ferries at Cockatoo Island. It’s only two stops there and then three more to Chiswick, so it took about 40 minutes overall, including waiting time on the island.

Here’s the ferry we caught to Cockatoo Island:

And the one we caught from there, as it was arriving (it’s a flat “Rivercat” catamaran ferry, because it has to go under a few low bridges):

Here’s Scully getting ready to go on the ferry. She has to travel in a crate due to animal transport regulations, but she doesn’t mind it.

The dinner was very good. I had penne al granchio (with crab):

While my wife had bombolotti with tomato sauce and straciatella:

Then for dessert, the millefoglie:

And the sun went down as we took a leisurely walk back to the wharf to catch the ferry home:

It was a really nice evening out! We’ll have to go back to this restaurant to try their pizzas some time.

New content today:

Another humid day, and games night

Today was another very warm and humid day, similar to but not quite as bad as yesterday. It was very cloudy early, keeping all that moisture in. In fact it rained unexpectedly when I went out to pick up the weekly grocery shopping, quite heavily. When the clouds cleared and the sun came out it just got more steamy.

I did another four ethics classes today on the “Future of Sports” topic. Most of the kids are very sceptical of the idea of robots playing sports with or against humans. Even when I’m very careful to specify that the robots have the same skill as a human player, they often bring up the idea that it’s unfair and the robots will have an advantage.

Tonight is games night. It was supposed to be in person at a friend’s place, but the host came down with a bout of gastro and was vomiting, so we converted it into an online event tonight. I’ve had a poor night so far, losing a game of Ticket to Ride and two of Jump Drive. And I’m currently way behind in a game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal.

New content today:

A record humid weather day

The main talking point today was how ridiculously humid the weather was. The temperature here in Sydney only got up to 30.8°C, but the humidity was so high all day that it was a major topic of discussion with both my friends and also people in the community. We recorded a dew point temperature of 25.9°C, which set a new record for the highest dew point ever recorded in Sydney. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us that dew points above 24°C are considered “oppressive”.

It sure felt that way. I took Scully out for a leisurely 15 minute walk around the block at 8am, not strenuous in any way – we were in fact dawdling along as you do when your dog is sniffing everything. But by the time we got home I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was saturated. It was similar taking her out for a short walk at lunch time. So I’ve been sitting indoors the rest of the day with the air conditioning on, mainly to take the humidity out of the air, not so much to cool it down.

The cicadas have also been going bananas all day, because apparently they love this sort of hot and sticky tropical weather. This is the loudest summer of cicadas I can remember for several years. We don’t have the Magicicada type of periodical cicadas that North America has, so there isn’t a regular cycle of them. I don’t know what controls the numbers but it varies from year to year in an unpredictable way.

I had five ethics classes today. In between I worked a bit on making a new adventure for Professor Plums, the science shop where I’ve been running Dungeons & Dragons occasionally on Saturday nights. But for something different I’m going to run a science fiction game set in the Star Wars universe. But I’m not going to use any of the Star Wars roleplaying games (I have both the WEG d6 one and Genesys system one) – I’m going to use the rules from Scum & Villainy, a Forged in the Dark game system based on Blades in the Dark. The idea is to give the players, who have pretty much done exclusively D&D 5th Edition, a taste of a different genre and a different game system.

New content today:

Quick update, no time

I just had three ethics classes in a row on the “Future of Sports” topic. The kids seem to love talking about robots, and all the ways in which they can go wrong!

I’m just doing a super quick update today, so I can finish watching the second half of IT Chapter Two tonight. It’s a long film and I don’t want to end too late.

During the day I worked on some comics stuff, starting writing for a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! Nothing much else to report – it was a pretty usual day.

New content today:

Thinking about the future of sports (and D&D)

I spent most of my time today writing a class plan for this week’s new ethics/critical thinking topic: The Future of Sports. Some example text:

People have been playing sports for thousands of years. The Ancient Greeks held the first Olympic Games, which were originally competitions to see who could run fastest. Over time more events were added, such as discus throwing, wrestling, and chariot races. Chariot racing is an example of an ancient sport where technology is used. In modern times, sports have evolved into many different forms.

• What are some examples of how technology changed the way sports are played?
• How has technology changed the way sports are watched and managed?
• Has technology made sports better or worse? How?

Robotic technology is advancing rapidly. Soon we might have robots capable of playing sports as well as or better than humans.

• Would it make sense to have robots play sports against each other? Would humans watch it?

If robots could play sports as well as humans, we could have robot teams playing against human teams. Or teams with some human and some robot players.

• Could it be good if a human sports league has some robot players?
• What problems might robot athletes cause?

There’s more in between, about tech such as video replays, and modern equipment made of high-tech materials that may give athletes advantages, and so on. This is really much more a critical thinking topic than an ethics topic.

I spent a lot of the day writing this because I didn’t concentrate solidly on it, with a lot of interruptions for minor things. Lunch, walking Scully, goofing off browsing the Internet, pausing to read an Asterix book for the library, etc.

Something I realised today too: remember the new active defence combat system I was working on for D&D? I was thinking that it’d be easier to use the Armour Class as a score to roll under in order to successfully defend. But I realised today that if we use this system, then Armour Class has no other uses… it’s not necessary to record a character’s Armour Class at all. It can be completely replaced with defence scores for Block, Parry, and Evade. So why not turn them into a target to roll equal to or higher than? Then every roll in the game is the same – roll equal to or higher than a target number. So I think I’ll just do that.

(Bob P. commented on my original post that there might also be rolling low for saves, but no, I’m using the old fashioned Basic Rules saving throws, which are equal or beat a target number. So it’s all consistent.)

And switching topics again, for dinner tonight I did a “clear out the fridge of old ingredients”. Half a left-over pack of potato gnocchi, fried up with onion, celery, a chopped zucchini, some mushrooms, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. Add a bit of salt and pepper and garlic, and it turned out to be a delicious meal.

New content today:

Here’s a nice photo of Scully

I took this in the park on Saturday evening, before we went to the chai place for dinner. She has a bow tie on because she had a wash and brush at the dog groomer earlier in the day, and they give the dogs a decoration before you pick them up.

Today there’s not a lot to talk about: 4 ethics classes. Making a sourdough loaf. Making pizza for dinner. It rained a bit, so I had to dodge the incoming rain on the weather radar while taking Scully for a walk after lunch.

Last night I started rewatching IT, the 2017 horror film. Because IT Chapter Two was released recently on Netflix here, and I need a refresher of the first film before I watch the second part.

Today I also started playing with Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator, which uses DALL-E 3. I’d been using the public version of DALL-E 2, but getting frustrated at its limitations, while a friend of mine keeps sharing images he’s made with Bing, which look much better. So for some reason it turns out that you can’t access DALL-E 3 directly from the creator without paying a subscription, but if you just have a Microsoft login you can access it via Bing Image Creator. I’m not sure how that works as a pricing model, but who am I to argue? Anyway, I started playing around with it, and it’s a lot better than DALL-E 2. I’m just using the image generation for fun, to do stuff like illustrate scenes from our Dungeons & Dragons games.

Here’s one, for example. You’ll notice it’s not perfect – I specified “wingless”, but the dragon in the picture has wings.

New content today:

Photoshop version upgrade wrangling

The other day I upgraded my Photoshop installation from version 24 to 25. For some reason, my Creative Cloud subscription didn’t offer me an automatic upgrade, which it usually does. It did list the new version as one that I could install, but there was no option to “update” the version over the top of my existing installation like it usually does. So I tried hitting the “install” button and let it install the new version in parallel.

Normally when updating, the new version imports all of my settings and customisations – and for Photoshop there are a lot of these, including things like graphic styles, palette colours, macro actions, keyboard shortcut assignments, new document defaults, tool defaults and styles, and so on. But the new version didn’t have any of these, and I had to spend some time copying them all across from the older version.

When I was finally happy, I tried making a new Darths & Droids comic using the new version. It mostly worked okay, until I got to adding a drop shadow to some of the comic panels. The way I do this is: (a) select the panel layer, (b) hit the custom drop shadow style that I have defined on the styles palette. Done. But even though I’d imported my custom style palette into the new version, the drop shadow style was defined differently! The shading angle and sizes were different! It took me some time to actually notice this – the difference was fairly subtle, but I definitely noticed something was wrong. It took some time to figure out exactly what was wrong, as I had to open comics in the old Photoshop version and examine the style details and compare the numbers, to find they didn’t match.

So even though I imported the styles across version, the details of the styles were different! This was a pain. I had to redefine the drop shadow style from scratch in the new version. And then… well, there must be some larger bug with the styles, because it worked for the document I had open, but when I started a new document and applied the same style that I’d just defined, it produced the wrong result! I don’t see how this could happen, unless the styles are actually buggy. I’m now hoping they’ll fix them in the next point release, because until they do I’m going to basically have to define all the drop shadow panels manually, rather than use a one-click style.

Phew.

In other events today… well, I didn’t do all that much else. Drove my wife and Scully to a lunch that she’d organised with some of her friends. I had some lunch nearby by myself and drove back home, while my wife walked Scully home from there. We played a couple of games of Kingdomino this afternoon, winning one game each. I suggested best of three, but she had other things to do by that time. And this evening three more ethics classes.

Last night I watched Renfield on Netflix. I saw this movie advertised when it was released a few weeks ago, but avoided it because it looked a bit cheesy. But last night I felt like something lighter and watched it, and I’m glad I did. It’s a sort of genre-defying Dracula/gangster/rom-com. Nicolas Cage was excellent as Dracula – a real scenery chewing performance that was hilarious and fun. Honestly, the only thing I can think that would improve this movie is if the young-Hugh-Grant-wannabe lead was actually somehow played by a young Hugh Grant.

New content today:

The one-day weekend

It’s Saturday, my day off, before teaching more online classes tomorrow on Sunday evening. I spent some time working on comics, but also did a 5k run in the morning.

In the late afternoon we all went on a walk to a park near the local library. I’d mentioned to my wife that now I have a shiny new library card, I was keen to go and see if they have any of the new Asterix books that have come out since I last read any, many years ago. So we waked down there and I went in and tried to find them in the children’s section, but to no avail. Then I went to the computers where you used to be able to search the catalogue and find which shelf books were on, but they were all on a screen that demanded your library card number and a password, which I’m not sure if I even have a password.

So I asked for help from a staff member, who explained that those were computers for general use, not the catalogue system, which was now accessed form special white terminals over there. But she escorted me back to the children’s section and said the Asterix books were now in the graphic novels section, not the fiction section I’d been looking in. There were three books there, two of them compilation albums of three stories each, and one of those contained three of the new stories that I haven’t read before. I grabbed them all, because I also enjoy rereading the older ones.

Out in the park, we threw a ball for Scully to chase, and she was very energetic today. There was another small dog who came over to play, and insisted I throw its ball as well!

After exhausting Scully, we went to Ambhi’s Chai for dinner. This is a place that mainly serves African-Punjabi style chai, which is extremely spicy, but for dinner time they also do small plates of food. My wife had the chick pea dish while I had the spicy chicken one, both with roti. I wanted to try a chai, but when I asked which ones were made without caffeine they said they could do decaf, but I said I didn’t actually want any tea, and they said the only option was the turmeric milk, so I had that. It was all good, nice and spicy, though the meal size was a little small. So when we got home I had some cheese and crackers to round it all off.

New content today:

Inter-seasonal treat time

It’s that in-between period after Christmas and before Easter, when both fruit mince tarts and hot cross buns are on sale. So it’s time to make one of my favourite seasonal treats!

Yep, that’s a fruit mince tart, on a hot cross bun, topped with ice cream. I warmed up the tart+bun in the microwave before placing the ice cream scoop on. And then closed the top of the bun on it before eating. It’s delicious, but very filling!

I’ve also taken a couple of flower photos today and yesterday. Some crepe myrtle flowers that had fallen on the ground:

And some gum flowers and nuts:

During the day I had 4 more ethics classes, rounding off my busy few days. Took Scully for a walk. For dinner I made another new recipe from a TV show: spanakopita toasties. They turned out pretty good, a nice easy dinner for Friday night.

And it’s online board games night now. Last time I won three games of Jump Drive in a row, but tonight I had awful luck with the cards and lost horribly. We’re now deep into a game of Castles of Burgundy.

New content today: