gaming – dangermouse.net

Gaming night and SEO “DMCA” link trolling

Friday was games night with my friends. We’d planned to swap online games for real life gathering this week, due to next week co-opting the regular real life event for our online Pathfinder game. But one guy had a cold so couldn’t come, and the rest of us were a bit lukewarm, so we converted it back to online.

We played Space Base, Just One, and Harmonies. I was happy to get a second game of the last one, since I enjoyed my first game of it. And this time I managed to win with three players, so that was good!

Today we drove up to Gosford for a pre-Mother’s Day lunch with my mother and brother. The traffic was truly awful. It normally takes an hour door to door. We left 15 minutes early, thinking we’d be nice and early…. but we ended up 45 minutes late! The trip took a full two hours. The traffic in Sydney getting up to the freeway was atrocious; in the first twenty minutes we barely got walking distance from home. The freeway was fine, moving nicely. But when we got off at the other end the traffic was just as bad as in Sydney.

Anyway, we had a nice pizza lunch and caught up with various things. We gave my mother the gifts we’d got in Japan and New Zealand. We headed home after wards and the drive back was much easier, taking basically an hour.

When I checked my email at home, I found an ominous looking message, which I reproduce here in full, with one redaction:

Dear owner of https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html,

I represent the Intellectual Property division for Big Cat Cheetah. We have identified an image belonging to our client on your website.

Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/KDsoHSP.jpeg
Location of Usage: https://www.dangermouse.net/travel/tanzania2018/day07.html

We require that you credit Big Cat Cheetah for this image. Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to
[link to website removed]
either beneath the image or in the footer of the page. The anchor text should be “Big Cat Cheetah”. This must be completed within the next five business days.

Please understand the seriousness of this request. Simply removing the image will not suffice. If you do not comply within the given timeframe, we will have to start legal proceedings under case No. 72134, following the DMCA Section 512(c) guidelines.

For historical image usage, you can check the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org.

This is an official notice. We value your prompt response and cooperation. Please correspond in English.

Regards
James Harris
Trademark Attorney

Citi Legal Services
1 Beacon St 12th floor
Boston, MA 02108

james@clexperts.org
www.clexperts.org

I immediately recognised this as ludicrous because—although, yes—there are photos of cheetahs on that web page of mine, they are photos that I took.

I own these photos. I am the copyright holder. If someone is really trying to get me to remove them from my website or demand credit for them, then screw them. I did a quick web search and found that Citi Legal Services does (at first glance) appear to be a real law firm at that address in Boston, as stated on (what appears to be) their web site. But all is not as it seems.

Firstly, if you click the imgur link (it’s safe), you’ll notice that the image they’re claiming I “stole” isn’t even the same as either of my cheetah images.

I dug further and searched for whether this is a legitimate law firm, and found this blog post by someone else who had received an almost identical email, with the details appropriate to their website swapped in. I also found a thread on reddit with the identical template, and advice from several people that this is a search engine optimisation (SEO) scam.

In short, no, Citi Legal Services is not a real law firm. Their website is utterly fake, and as pointed out by the above-linked blog, mostly AI-generated. The address they claim to have is an abandoned building. The “lawyers” don’t actually exist.

This email is a scam intended to scare people into linking to the target website in order to drive up their search engine ranking. Hopefully by reproducing it here I’ll also help any future people who get a similar email and go searching online for advice.

With that done, I’m marking it as junk email and happily ignoring it.

D&D and Election Day!

Friday I had my usual ethics classes, and prepared for a night of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I had five of them over to my place and we played from 6pm to about 10:30.

In the last session they’d started to deal with the curse placed on them by the God of Swords: kill 9 people in 9 days with 9 different swords, or die! Now they had a lead from an old sage who wanted them to recover some magical artefacts from an ancient vault hidden in the hills a half day’s ride from the town they were in. He said there were rumours that the place was now overrun with snake people – suitable targets for despatching with swords if they got the chance.

They reached the hidden vault and found their way in via a ruined lookout tower, and discovered a large chamber almost filled with what looked like a black rectangular block of absolute darkness. They figured out it was solid and highly magical… and there was a giant horned skull resting on top of it. Needless to say there were plenty of shenanigans and some fighting against snake people and some cool magical things, and we all had a great time!

This morning I got up and collected the groceries from the supermarket. Normally I do this on Friday but for the third week in a row something was happening so I had to postpone to Saturday. I went for a 5k run, and I pushed myself and recorded a time of 27:02, which I’m very pleased with. I ran past a polling place, because…

Today is the federal election. We’d already voted back on Wednesday, so didn’t have to head out to a polling place today, which was nice. I read a story that for this election 47% of the electorate had already voted prior to today’s official election day. This is a record number of pre-poll votes. It’s good that we make it so easy for people to vote.

It’s now 2 and a bit hours after the close of polls in eastern Australia and in early counting it looks like our left-leaning Labor government is going to win with an increased majority. There’s a big swing away from the conservative Liberal Party, and it seems certain that their leader Peter Dutton will lose his own seat in Parliament. This is a big change from before Trump was sworn in as US President in January, when the conservatives were leading all the polls. Our swing back away from the conservatives hasn’t been as stark as in Canada at their election last week, but Trump definitely had an effect, causing Australians to react by also rejecting our own conservative party.

We shall see the full results in the coming days.

Games night, games day

Friday I had my usual four ethics classes, continuing the Antarctica discussion. I found this topic a bit tricky to keep the kids engaged, so I rejigged some of the questions to prompt more detailed logical thinking and get their brains working more. Like thinking about what possibilities might happen when the Antarctic Treaty comes up for renegotiation in 2048, which I point out is within their lifetimes so they will get to see what actually happens in real life.

Friday was also Anzac Day, so my wife was home for the public holiday, and all the shops were closed. This pushed my usual Friday morning grocery pickup to today (Saturday). After doing that I did my 5k run.

Last night was online board games night, though a few people were away, so we only had four people. We played a new game, Easy Peasy, which is a fairly simple card game. After one game we characterised it as Uno with more complexity and more luck. It felt like a very random shoot-out. There was an extremely obvious strategy (get rid of your high cards as fast as possible), tempered by random chance deciding if you could manage to do that or not. Needless to say we didn’t bother playing it again. I can’t even recommend it for a kids’ game, as it’s significantly more difficult to learn and understand the scoring than Uno, for no more fun.

After this we played some of the usual suspects: A couple of games of Jump Drive, Just One, It’s a Wonderful World (which I won!).

Today I played a game of Root with my wife. She played the Marquise de Cat, I played the Eyrie, and we used a clockwork bot Alliance, with no Vagabond. We also tried the winter map for the first time ever. It was a super close game. I won, but my wife could have won on her turn before mine if she’d only had a bird card in and, and if I hadn’t won, the bot Alliance would have won next turn.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki, which we haven’t had for a while. Yum!

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.

Chicken fried rice and board games night

Today is online board games with friends. My wife is also out having dinner with her friends, so I’m minding Scully at home. We went out together (me and Scully) for an early dinner before my wife left.

We walked up to the new shops area at St Leonards. I was thinking of trying the chicken place again for a kebab wrap or a burger. But next door was a Chinese place that did noodles and rice dishes. I grabbed a table outside and tied up Scully and went in to order. I tried the satay chicken fried rice. The woman behind the counter was super friendly and came out to say hi to Scully and bring her a bowl of water. The serving size was very generous and not expensive. It was nothing super special, but decent and filling and good value, so I’m happy with that.

Back home and we’re into our online games. I’ve played a couple of games of Jump Drive, then won my first ever game of Marrakech, which was nice. I’ve played this game many times and never managed to win before. I think I was lucky with the die rolls though. Then we played a game of Space Base, which I also won. And then Word Traveler. And Harmonies, which I hadn’t played before, and was really fun. I’ve seen it on the BoardGameGeek hot list and was keen to try it, and yeah, it’s great.

Other than that, not much else to report today. I worked through a few things I needed to do for Standards Australia and ISO work, including applying for funding for my trip to Berlin in June to attend the next ISO Photography meeting there. And I tidied up some random chore-type things in my inbox, dealing with tasks like tax payments and setting up two-factor authentication for a site that’s requiring it soon. All the boring stuff.

Board games night and a nice autumn Saturday

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. I did the usual grocery pickup in the morning, followed by four ethics classes. I’m having fun with the current topic of “An Ethical Society”. One of the interesting questions for the variety of responses is as follows:

Imagine that we could somehow make a society where everyone behaves ethically. Would such a society still need laws?

About half the kids have been saying that yes, you should have laws just in case someone does something wrong, because if you don’t have them, then there’s no way to enforce any way of stopping them. A few said you need them just to remind people, to set the boundaries of what behaviour is okay and what is not—even if nobody is stepping over the line, you still need the line to be drawn there. And a third group said no, you don’t actually need laws, because everyone is (according to the premise) behaving ethically, so nothing can go wrong.

After classes I drove over to the friend’s place for games. We played three different games, all new to me: [one I can’t remember the name of, where everyone drafts 8 cards from a central pool, and they combo in various ways to score points – the description is so generic I can’t search for it successfully, and the theme was so non-evident that I have no idea what it was; but it was actually fun and we played it twice], Forest Shuffle, and Kingdomino Origins (which I’d been wanting to thy for several weeks, always arriving at games night after the others, just when they’re packing it up).

Edit: As identified in the comments, the mystery game was Faraway.

This morning I did my 5k run, and for the first time since January recorded a time below 27:30, which is what I like to aim for as I can manage it about 50% of the time. The past few weeks have been messed up by high temperatures and humidity, travel, and being out of practice due to the time spent travelling. The cooler autumn weather is definitely making things feel nicer at the moment.

Scully is doing a lot better. Her poops are blood-free, but still a little soft, perhaps due to the antibiotics. So presumably it was some sort of gastro infection, which the antibiotics are fixing up.

A big task accomplished today was booking accommodation for our trip to Europe in June/July. We’re moving around and staying in five different cities, so had a lot of options to browse through and choose and then book. But we managed to book them all. The next step will be thinking about the train trips between cities and working out the best ways to get tickets for those. Some will be Deutsche Bahn, which I’ve used before and have an account with, but some will be with other rail companies as they’ll be traversing countries like Austria and Hungary.

For dinner tonight I made vegetable fajitas. And I’m baking more sourdough rye bread.

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.

Games night and new lights

Friday morning I did the first regular grocery shop since we got home from Japan. It was a big order. When I picked it up from the supermarket, the friendly woman there who always says hello told me that it was her last day working there. She’s moving up the coast for semi-retirement, and working reduced hours at the local supermarket branch up there. I don’t think I ever knew her name, but I wish her well.

After my ethics classes, it was gaming night. I took Scully with me to a friend’s place – my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We played a couple of games of 7 Wonders with the Cities expansion – the first time I’ve ever played the game with any expansion set. It was pretty fun, and I managed to win the first game, though did poorly in the second one. Then we played Azul: Queen’s Garden. I’d brought this game from home, but hadn’t played it in a while and had to refresh myself on the rules. Unfortunately I botched one rule and didn’t discover it until the second round, but from then on we played correctly. I ended up coming a poor third of four players.

This morning I went for a 5k run for the first time since leaving for Japan. I didn’t push too hard, but was pleased that my time wasn’t unusually bad.

After lunch my wife and I walked down to a lighting showroom that is not too far away. I’d been thinking about replacing our old boring light fittings with something a little more stylish, and possibly getting one with an extra bulb for increased brightness in the living room area. Since we moved from incandescents to smart LED bulbs, they’re not quite as bright and I miss the brightness when doing things that require concentration, such as playing games (board or D&D) on the dining table.

Anyway, we looked at hundreds of light fittings that were in display and tried to find the intersection of our preferences. There were some styles that I liked that she didn’t like, and vice versa, but we eventually narrowed things down to some that we were both happy with. The lights need to come from their warehouses, and the guy said that one major warehouse was in Brisbane, which is being affected by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, so it might be some time until we get all the lights. But we’re not in a rush, and they should be available in a couple of weeks or so.

That’s the other big news here in Australia. Cyclone Alfred hit Brisbane overnight and fortinately it lost strength just before making landfall, so wasn’t as intense as initially expected. But it’s moving very slowly and will dump a lot of rain on the area over the next two days. There’s a lot of flooding and fallen trees and power lines, which will take weeks to repair. One man is missing, suspected dead, after being washed away by floodwater.

The tail end of the cyclone will hit Sydney over the next couple of days too, as the tropical low moves south. We’re expected to get heavy rain, mostly on Monday and Tuesday, but no damaging winds thankfully.

Board games and Japan prep

Friday was online board games night with my friends. We played Can’t Stop, Ticket to Ride, Just One, 7 Wonders, and then a game of Castles of Burgundy. I didn’t won any, but came second in Castles of Burgundy behind the guy in our group who usually wins everything, so that felt like a victory.

Before that we went up to the fish & chips shop for dinner, eating casually while we walked home with Scully. I didn’t do much else on Friday, except pick up the groceries that I’d ordered online. But I got a surprise message from the supermarket, telling they were sorry my order had been cancelled because of an error in their online system, and saying they’d refund the full amount and give me a $20 gift voucher. A bit later I did indeed get sent a $20 voucher. I’m now waiting to see if they will also refund the total order which they tell me was cancelled, but which I actually picked up.

While walking Scully at lunchtime I spotted a grey butcherbird sitting on the overhead train wires near the station. We were walking on an overpass over the rail line, so I got the photo from a higher elevation, which is unusual for most birds. Its plumage looks a bit dishevelled for some reason.

This species is moderately common around here, but usually seen high in trees where it’s difficult to get a good photo—or more often heard with their distinctive call but not seen at all—so I was excited to get such a good view of one for a change.

Today, Saturday, I went on my usual 5k run in the morning. My times have not been great lately, because of the warm weather and high humidity. I’m looking forward to autumn and cooler weather.

For lunch we went to a Thai restaurant with my wife’s family for her mother’s birthday. Not a large group, just seven of us. We shared some delicious dishes. We used to eat Thai quite a lot as there had always been very good Thai places near us, but the best one closed down some years ago, and there isn’t one we like much nearby any more. So it was good to have some today.

The other thing we’ve been doing is organising for our trip to Tokyo next weekend. I booked another couple of restaurants. Normally we don’t bother booking any eating places in advance of a trip, but Japan is tricky for vegetarians and places that offer vegetarian food are often extremely busy with tourists, because visiting vegetarians all end up going to the same few places.

I’ve also got some things to print out, like our travel insurance details, hotel booking receipt, and other miscellaneous stuff. And I have to double check I have a usable Tokyo train map on my phone. Although I suppose Google Maps will do for route planning.

New content today:

D&D session: dealing with the curse

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. One of our players had to miss out due to COVID, and another had a daughter’s birthday, but we had 4 players (plus me as the GM), so went ahead. Firstly, here’s a map of the campaign locations so far:

Neensford is their home village. The first adventure took place in an old tomb not far away. Then they travelled north to Brandonstead to deal with rumours of a “dragon” terrorising the area. Then back to Neensford before striking east to Benton, the nearest base village to Titardinal’s Tower. After dealing with that they travelled to Sable Ridge to investigate a Spider Temple, and then to Edgewater, near the location of the Temple of Swords, where we last left our intrepid band. They’d just met Spathio, the God of Swords, and ended up getting cursed by him. Now they need to kill 9 people with 9 different swords, in 9 days, or die!

The first thing they did however was loot valuables from the temple that they’d spied on their way in and hadn’t yet carried out. At one point they triggered a trap that they hadn’t triggered before: a huge stone block lowered from the ceiling, blocking the only exit door. This produced the following exchange:

Player: Can I tell with my Dwarven Stonecunning if we can fit our fingers underneath and lift the block?
Me: You can tell with your Dwarven Stonecunning that the block weighs roughly 40 tons.

After dealing with this setback and exiting the temple, they had to decide how to find 9 people they felt morally comfortable with killing. They asked around Edgewater for any leads on “maybe bandits in the area”? Edgewater is a small village, and the residents advised them to head west to the town of Thistlebrook, which sometimes had bandits attack merchant caravans.

When they got to Thistlebrook, I presented them with the town noticeboard:

I made this using some very nice free art assets I found on this Patreon page. As you might be able to see, several of these notices are potential leads to situations where the PCs would have a chance to kill people, more or less justifiably. And some others are just fun flavour. I left it up to them to decide what avenues to investigate.

The result was they spent the rent of the session chasing leads all over Thistlebrook. They thought hunting down the bandit gang was a good likely solution, but decided first to check out the executioner job. The magistrate had three of the bandits in custody and needed an executioner, since he said nobody in town wanted blood on their hands. They at first thought this was a good start on their curse, but then they talked to the innkeeper at the place where they were lodging, who revealed that the bandits were actually heroes to the poor of the the town, standing up against persecution and taxation by the nobles (i.e. they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men). This threw the players for a moral loop and they had to reevaluate their plans. At one point they made a plan to contact the bandit leader and get him to agree to have some of his men pretend to be captured, so the PCs could turn them in for the rewards, and then they’d break them all out of prison!

They checked various other leads and eventually stumbled across an old sage who was looking to hire some adventurers for an expedition to a nearby ancient vault where ancient wizards had done magical research. He said it had recently been found by snake people. Now this was something that they could investigate and hopefully kill some snake people, who they’ve tangled with twice before. But by now it was late and we ended the session before any further adventuring.

We had essentially zero combats (although they did kill a few “sword fish”—fish literally made of swords—by standing on the edge of a pool and stabbing them while in no danger of the fish hitting them), and there were only about three dice rolls in the whole evening. 95% of it was pure roleplay and discussing decisions, and it was great fun!

Today I got up and went for a 5k run. It was warm and very humid and so I again went fairly slowly. It’ll be nice when autumn hits and the weather cools down a bit. I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids comic writing and planning.

For dinner, my wife and I walked up to a new restaurant we haven’t tried before: Dozo, a Japanese place. It was pretty good, and for what we had (mostly vegetarian) not very expensive.

New content today: