The Mad Schemes of Dr. Tectonic

TomSka and Friends

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 05:38:17 GMT

Right about a year ago, in September of 2022, the almighty YouTube Algorithm suggested a video to me.

"Here," said The Algorithm, "I think you might like this."

And thus began a Journey.

( In which I get really, really into something new. (5000 words plus links, pics, & video) )

So that's a big chunk of what I've been up to for the past year. I found a new fandom and got really into it and put the whole thing into my brain, and I made some art and had a magical adventure, and I got to meet some of the people from the thing(s) I'm a fan of, and some of them know my name now. It's weird and wonderful and it has made me very happy.

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Weekend downtime

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 05:28:45 GMT

I keep intending to do a bunch of backposting on the weekends, but then I get done with all the other stuff and I'm just tired.

I took a break from work around 4 on Friday with every intention of going back to finish off some things after an hour or so, and then a bit later my brain informed me that no, it needed more of a break than that. So Jerry and I played some It Takes Two, which we have been enjoying together. And then I got a text from Joe and Bill asking if anyone wanted to play board games online. And they answer to that is always yes, so I joined them and we played a couple rounds of Kingdom Builder on BGA. I think I had played this long ago (maybe even with a physical copy?) but didn't remember anything, so I lost the first one by a fair chunk but did much better the second time around. I like it; it's got a good luck/strategy balance. Then we played 7 Wonders: Architect, which is new. It doesn't have the drafting aspect of regular 7 Wonders, but otherwise has a lot of the same feel. Floyd hopped on and joined us for a final round, which was excellent. And it was very nice to see friends I haven't seen in a while, even if only over video.

Yesterday we went axe-throwing with Matthew and (differnt) Joe. I was doing terribly for most of the two hours, but then the others were tired and I got to just throw over and over with no pauses for a couple minutes and all of a sudden I was good at it. So I think I need a dozen or two throws in a row to be able to calibrate power and range, and then I can actually do it.

Afterwards we grabbed some snacks from H-Mart, went home and walked the cat a bit, and then went over to Matthew's to play board games. We started up a game of Charterstone, which seems like it will be fun. I won, but I think I will have some catching up to do next game. We also played a game of Quarriors, which I enjoyed a lot more than the last time I played it. It's kind of deckbuild-y, but you can't get too invested in combos because you have to both draw the appropriate dice and have them roll correctly for that to happen. This time I was just opportunistic and didn't think too much about it, and I had a lot more fun. (And also won.)

Today was training day. Jerry has started teaching Matthew kung fu, and I have been joining them. I am still awful at learning physical movement things, but I had the realization that I can do just fine if I'm not actively trying to learn or remember anything. If I'm just following along and mimicking the motions, I can do it. And weirdly, some of it does end up sticking. I still have to have Jerry show me moves over and over, but today we did kicking and I remembered more than I expected to about how the pieces come together. (Like, for a back-leg roundhouse kick, you have to turn your lead foot first, and that kind of automatically gets your pelvis moving which translates into bringing the rear leg up and around, and once I remembered the bit about the foot, I had the rest of it in place.) I can't remember the names of any of the moves, and I think my ability to use words degrades significantly after the first half hour, but show me and I can follow along.

This afternoon I went grocery shopping and realized that I had made the tactical error of going to the store shortly before Superbowl time, because it was very crowded with people getting chips and suchlike at the last minute. But I checked the clock and realized that the game was starting soon, so I just filled my cart at a leisurely pace and by the time I was done the rush had subsided, so that made me feel clever.

I'm going to make beef stew because I realized that I didn't need to find sorghum or buckwheat groats to substitute for barley to make it gluten-free, I could just use wild rice and that should be fine. I chopped up all the veggies and browned the meat and threw everything in the crock pot and put it in the fridge, and I will do the actual six-hour cooking tomorrow. The new ceramic frying pan did a lovely job browning the meat. I'm still getting used to it, but it seems like a good replacement for teflon.

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Mail Theft

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 07:13:39 GMT

So a few weeks ago, I had a prescription refill coming from the mail-order pharmacy that went astray. The package was sent via USPS with tracking, so when I realized after several days that it still hadn't shown up, I was able to check the tracking and see that its status somehow changed to "forwarded" before it got lost in the system.

So I called up the pharmacy and explained that it had gotten lost in the mail, could I get a new refill? And at that point I still had almost two weeks' worth of pills left, so I had no need to go pick them up at my local pharmacy, so I just had them re-send the refill. I figured it's the mail, sometimes things go wrong, it was just a one-time glitch, right?

It was not.

So last week I'm checking the tracking for the replacement, plus a couple other packages that are coming in the mail: a book I kickstarted, part of an Amazon order, and my free COVID tests from the government.

And it happens again! The package makes its way to my local post office, get sent out for delivery, and then get returned and forwarded. And by now I can see that the first package is showing as delivered to someplace in Las Vegas. There is definitely something fishy going on.

So I got all my information organized for the different packages, and Wednesday morning, bright and early, I called the USPS customer service line. I talked to a very helpful fellow (probably in India) who said that, yes, that is very strange, and he opened up a case for it, and told me to call my local post office and also to call the office of the postal inspector. So I called the postal inspector first (since the post office wasn't open yet), and got a second case number and a promise that they would investigate.

Which I guess they did, post-haste (ha), because an hour later, after I'd had breakfast and was just getting ready to call the local post office, they called me!

And it turns out that someone had fraudulently submitted a temporary forwarding request on my behalf to have my mail forwarded!

They immediately canceled the forward once establishing that no, I had not requested that my mail be forwarded, nor had I received a confirmation postcard about it. So that's all sorted out. And the COVID tests arrived a couple days later, so I think it's resolved.

Sadly, it was too late for the other packages, whose tracking statuses I watched change to Forwarded before vanishing into the ether. But I was able to get replacements for all of it at no cost to me. I picked up the prescription from the local pharmacy after all, and the author is sending a second copy of the kickstarted book to a friend's address to pick up. And Amazon sent a replacement, although when I called them on Thursday to try to explain that it definitely would be showing up in my mailbox no matter what the tracking status was, it turned out to be much easier to just wait until it passed the second promised arrival date on Saturday, at which point they sent it with next-day delivery.

So yeah, that kinda sucked, but I guess all's well that ends well. (I did call up both the bank and the credit reporting agency and had them put flags on my accounts to watch for unusual activity, but it appears that it was only packages going missing, not normal mail. So I think it was simple theft of mail-order goods, not a prelude to attempted identity theft. But I'll keep an eye on things.)

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Borden Doesn't Melt

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 05:15:06 GMT

Borden American Cheese doesn't melt.

(This is a ludicrous topic with which to attempt to end a months-long journaling hiatus. I have a vast backlog of entries to post. But a highly random post is better than no post, right?)

How has it come to pass that I know this?

Well. My standard breakfast (since completely abandoning any attempt to eat low-carb at the inception of the pandemic) is a bowl of ramen with a couple fried eggs and a handful of baby spinach. The time it takes the water in the ramen pot to come to a boil is just enough time to get all the packets emptied into your bowl, melt a knob of butter in the frying pan, throw in the spinach to steam, add the eggs, splash some water in, and put the lid on. You pour out the noodles into a strainer and let the water fall out, then put them in the bowl and mix thoroughly, and by the time you're done with that, your eggs are all done sunny-side up and the spinach has steamed, so you scrape it out onto the noodles and slide the eggs on top. Perfect.

Note here that when I say "packet of ramen" I'm not talking Maruchan or Top Ramen -- I mean the good stuff from an Asian grocery store. With little packets of dehydrated vegetables and flavored oils and spicy pastes and so on. They cost several times what the cheap stuff does, but it's totally worth it.

Anyway, one of the types of instant ramen that I like is kimchi flavor. And I read that one of the things that Koreans do with their ramen is to throw a slice of American cheese in there. So, having previously tried and enjoyed Ottogi cheese-flavored ramen, I thought I'd give it a shot.

And it. Is. GREAT.

The cheese doesn't just melt, it vanishes completely, dissolving into creamy, savory goodness that permeates the whole dish and bumps everything up by at least two notches. So I have started occasionally buying a stack of American cheese singles to melt into my kimchi ramen egg spinach breakfast.

UNLESS IT'S BORDEN!

For some utterly inscrutable reason, Borden has decided to make a special "melts" version of their American cheese that melts quite well, and to formulate the regular American cheese so that it... does not. It get warm and kinda comes apart into smaller pieces, but it doesn't dissolve into creamy goodness. What, I ask you, is the point of that? The entire purpose of American cheese is to be melty! You wouldn't eat it otherwise, because as cheese, it's terrible! It exists only to melt atop your burger or between two slices of bread or amongst your noodles!

And now I have almost finished the big 16-slice package and I still have an entire nother one to go, because it was on sale, so I bought two. Uuuuuuuugggh! Caveat emptor caseum.

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Re-entry

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 04:34:26 GMT

Now that we are both fully-vaxxed, we have started Doing Things! With people! Outside the house! It's amazing!

Three weekends ago, the first weekend we were both two weeks post-vaccine, we went to the Butterfly Pavillion with fineplan. We hadn't been there in ages, and there were a lot more butterflies in the air than I remember. I'm not sure if it's because we usually go more in the winter (when light levels are lower, maybe?) or if it's just my lousy memory. Matthew took lots of pictures; Jerry got harassed by a butterfly that landed on his crotch. Afterwards we got lunch on the patio at R Taco, then froyo from the place a few doors down. It was lovely.

The weekend after that we got lunch at Domo with Channan and Patrock, who had never been! We waited a good while to be seated, and it was windy enough that we had to pick a couple leaves out of our food, but the garden was lovely as always. The menu has been reduced and revamped because they're under-staffed, but hopefully they'll be able to get back to where they were in time. Afterwards, we went back to their place and just hung out for a while. (Other people's houses! Amazing!) We shared Eurovision performances and other goofy videos with each other. I got to pet Midna after plying her with some tuna nibbles.

And then last weekend, on Saturday we had our first in-person Star Wars session since teh Before Times at the Nevilles'. I had to put a bunch of my stuff in a backpack and bring it with me, which was weird because I hadn't done that in a year.

Then on Sunday, we went bowling! Which I haven't since a long, LONG time before the pandemic started. We met up with the Eaton boys (Jon, Gene, Brandon, and Matt) at the bowling alley at 92nd and Harlan and bowled a couple games while it rained buckets outside. Wandered through the arcade and determined that we are now Too Old for arcades; it's all either flashing-lights gambling, giant-screen virtual snowboarding, or old-skool video games done on walls of LEDs that hurt my eyes to look at. Alas. But the bowling was fun, and it was great to hang out with those guys, and also we got to see strangers' faces!

And all of it was just lovely. Lovely lovely lovely! We have a long list of Things To Go Do on our whiteboard, and I'm looking forward to checking things off.

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Tieflings

Tue, 04 May 2021 05:29:05 GMT

In the biweekly online D&D game Neal is running, our party is 80% tiefling (half-devils). Not for any role-playing reason or anything, it's just during character creation, there were a couple different people thinking about it based on stats and abilities, and somebody said "hey, wouldn't it be fun to have an all-tiefling party?" and now our characters' homeland is officially majority tiefling.

So anyway, I was poking around with the subrace options from one of the books and got dissatisfied with them because they didn't seem like they were very thematic or consistent with lore, and long story short, I got carried away and ended up redesigning all 9 of the existing options and adding 18 more. Not that I actually care about the official lore or even knew it before I started, but you know how it is, sometimes you start fiddling around with a thing, and then it grabs you, and before you know it, you've sunk a whole bunch of time and effort into it? Yeah. That happened.

Anyway, I was also poking around on various subreddits for D&D and homebrew content, and it turns out that there are websites that let you lay it out all pretty and official-looking using just a bit of markdown, so then I had to play around with it some more to make it all fancy and nice and share it online, because upvotes.

Which is to say, I made a thing, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/b8DOvJS2hrFk

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Immunized

Tue, 04 May 2021 05:17:26 GMT

As of today, I am officially fully immunized against SARS-CoV-2.

I'm still working from home (and will be for a while yet), and I'm still wearing a mask in public (because we don't yet know whether being immunized prevents you from being an asymptomatic carrier), but last night I went grocery shopping and just... didn't care about how many other people were in the store and whether they were staying away from me, and that was a huge relief. Not feeling like I needed to be vigilant the whole time was really nice. I am looking forward to switching back to shopping based on convenience rather than when the stores are mostly empty.

Jerry is still only a few days after his second shot, so we're not yet attempting to socialize with people again, but we are making lists of things to do.

I think I'm going to go see a movie this week - Scott Pilgrim is back in the theaters.

I feel like the last few weeks have been busy, but I struggle to come up with anything to report. I think it's mostly that I ticked off a bunch of tasks that had been looming for work, like submitting revisions for one paper and finishing all my contributions for another. Still haven't finished my taxes, though.

Oh, and I made some D&D 5e fan content about tieflings. But I think I'll put that into a separate post.

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Milestones

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 03:49:22 GMT

On Tuesday two weeks ago, I gave the talk that I was scheduled to give a year ago before the conference I was giving it at was cancelled. It's still weird giving talks with absolutely zero feedback from the audience, but I had several people tell me later on that they really enjoyed it, so I'm counting it as a success. Especially since it was a talk about philosophy of science stuff at a conference on improving scientific software, so people weren't automatically going to be interested in the subject matter.

I then took half of Thursday, all of Friday, and all of Monday off, because I had been pushing hard on a lot of different projects and was feeling frazzled.

Which was good, because on Thursday I got email from Kaiser saying I'd reached the front of the line and could come get my first vaccine shot on Monday!

I got a mid-morning appointment up at Rock Creek. It was down in the basement, and the line stretched down the hallway (largely because everyone was distanced six feet, of course), but they moved people through at a good clip. I didn't even feel the needle, but later on in the day I had a little soreness and then my energy levels plummeted ("I was very busy on a molecular level," as the Daves say), so the vague wonder if maybe the guy missed or something vanished.

I have another appointment in three weeks, and then two weeks after that I should be fully immunized. It's weird to think about all the things that have been forbidden that I'll be able to do again. I am trying not to anticipate too hard, lest I get itchy and impatient, but I can't help but look forward at least a little. Weirdly, one of the biggest ones is just being able to go to the store whenever, without having to think about whether it will be crowded or if it's an unnecessary trip.

And then this last Thursday was my and Jerry's 20th anniversary! Spring of 2001 was when I flew out to Oregon and we put all his stuff in a moving truck, drove back to Colorado, moved in together. It's hard to pin an exact date on it, so a few years later we decided to just call April 1st our nominal anniversary, since it's about halfway between our birthdays. We got takeout from Afghan Kabob and watched some TV together and played a few rounds of Earth Defense Force, and it was lovely.

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Snowpocalypse 21

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 04:40:45 GMT

It was cloudy and snizzling most of the day Saturday, but the snow didn't really start until Saturday night, and then it kept going all day Sunday. It was also pretty blowy, so it's hard to get a precise measure of how much total snowfall we got, but I went out onto the front porch and stuck a tape-measure into the snow, and it read 14 inches.

That's a lot, but not as much as the forecasters were doomsaying. ("Two to four feet! Aiiieee!") They've over-predicted the last few big storms we've gotten; I guess they'd rather be over and have people rolling their eyes than be under and have people yelling at them.

They had the roads clear enough in our subdivision that I decided to do the weekly grocery shopping this evening rather than later in the week. (After calling to check how bare the shelves were; they didn't get a truck this morning, but got one Sunday morning and had hardly any customers yesterday or today, so stock levels were fine. There was only one thing on my list they didn't have.)

More interesting is what we got up to during the storm. Somebody anonymously sent us a couple escape-rooms-in-a-box for Jerry's birthday, so we did one of those (The Mothman Prophecies!) yesterday afternoon. It was fun; we took a bit longer than the allotted time, but there were only two of us. Lots of sealed envelopes, good production values, interesting theme, nice use of website for puzzle validation. A couple of the puzzles were a bit abstruse, but we only needed a few of the hints.

Even better, though, is that I have a husband who said "I want to have a lightsaber fight in the snow." So we did! We got bundled up and tromped around in the snow for an hour slashing at one another with light-up toys. It was delightful. Key observation: lightsaber hilts are terribly un-ergonomic. And they really, really, REALLY need crossguards of some kind.

Best of all, he took video with his camera-glasses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3NFmdbS-Ds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZSMBCkteOM

(Yes, the time codes are off by a day; it was actually the 14th.)

Highly recommended as an activity if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

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Going to Work

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 06:30:45 GMT

I went in to the office for the first time in almost a year today.

I put in the request for permission to enter the building a couple weeks ago because I wanted to get some notes for a talk that I'm going to give in April. Currently, they have to keep the building at less than 10% capacity, so you have to sign up in advance so they can coordinate who'll be present when. (Plus you have to do a training session on how to avoid spreading germs, but I did that back in October.)

I discovered shortly after I signed up that I already had the notes (I brought them home with me last March), but I figured since the opportunity was limited, I'd go in anyway and see what else I wanted to bring home.

Jerry came with me, and we were hoping to have lunch together outside on the Tree Plaza, where we got married, but alas, it was all closed off. Plus even it had been accessible, it was SUPER-windy up on the hill today, so that was a bit of a bust.

I brought home some folders for sorting out all my notes, and my work credit card so I can pay for things like online conference registration myself. More importantly, I was also able to grab MORE NOTEPADS for taking notes! I finally ran out and the only ones they had at the grocery store were little. aw yus office supplies

I also brought home my workout gear to wash. Our climate is dry so it didn't get gross or anything, even after sitting abandoned in a locker for a year, but I figured it would be nice to have clean workout clothes when I finally go back.

Finally, my co-worker Rachel asked me to get a chair out of her office for her, which she'll come pick up this weekend.

Even though it's only 20-some minutes, the drive there and back felt notably longer than when I was doing it every day. I think I'd like to continue working from home some of the time once the pandemic is over.

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Dominion

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:31:43 GMT

Dominion, if you're not familiar with it, is a deck-building card game. You start off with a deck of ten cards; each turn you draw five cards, play them, and buy a card to add to your deck. Some cards give you the coins that you use to buy more cards; others do things like let you draw more cards or buy an extra card. Your ultimate goal is to buy cards that have victory points on them, because that's how you win the game.

The base game has 26 different "kingdom cards" in it. You pick ten of those to play with each time you play the game, so there are a lot of different ways to play the game. You play with one set of cards and get to know how they interact, and then you swap out half of a really good combo, or one card that countered another card, and now it's a very different game. So it has a lot of replay value.

There are now thirteen expansions, most of them as big or bigger than the base set. And you can use cards from any of them.

I did the math. There are 208,693,818,083,123,000,000,000,000 (2.09e26) configurations of the game.

That number is 208-some septillion, which is about 3,000 times the estimated number of stars in the entire observable universe.

So what I'm saying is, if you're looking for a pastime, it's got a lot of replay value.

( Details under the cut )

This post brought to you by my desire to post something just to break the long dry spell, even if I haven't mustered up the wherewithal to post about life in general. (Short version: things are fine, better now than before the change in administrations, but the pandemic still sucks.)

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Virtual AGU

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 07:51:37 GMT

I'm done with work for the year! I'm taking today and the rest of the week and all of next week off, so I won't be going back to work until January 4th. (Work has been encouraging us to take PTO, because nobody's been using it and it's messing up the budgets...)

I spent, golly, almost the last 3 weeks doing AGU online. Which was... fine, overall.

I mean, there's no way to do a 25,000-person conference virtually and have it be anywhere close to as good as the normal in-person version. But given that, it was not bad.

Posters were done in this "e-lighting" format where there are up to 6 boxes in a standard configuration, and you click on each box to expand it, so presenters can put as much information as they want into each box. I haaaaaaaate this format in person (presented on touch-screens), because it's so slow and clunky to click on each box, wait for it to expand, scroll through it, then back out and click on the next one, plus you can't scan quickly to see if there's anything you care about, and it drives me crazy. But then I discovered that viewing them on the web, there's a "print" view that just dumps everything onto a single long page, and that works just fine. (I think the lack of length and layout constraints in the e-poster format encourages people to make bad posters with poor information flow and organization, but honestly most people make bad posters in paper format, too, so it's not that much different.)

For talks, everyone giving an oral presentation had to pre-record their talk and upload it about a week before Thanksgiving. The videos were available to watch whenever you wanted, and then there was a scheduled zoom session for Q&A where the speakers each gave a brief 3-slide summary of their talk before answering any questions. Not all that different from a live presentation, and there's one thing I would take from the virtual conference back into the real world if I could: the ability to change the playback speed. Most presenters speak WAY too slowly, and being able to speed people up to 150% was fantastic. Plus you can pause and rewind if you need to.

With no time conflicts and the fact that I didn't have to spend any time going between things or waiting for things to start, I actually go to see a whole lot more AGU than normal. They have an electronic program where you can tick a box to add a presentation to your schedule, so I go through and add everything that looks interesting (based on keywords, people I know, and skimming through the session titles in the Atmospheric Science, Informatics, and Global Change secsion), and normally what happens is that I then have a jam-packed schedule for five days and I end up triaging away at least half of it on the day. But this time, I ended up skipping only a handful of things, and by the end of it, I had seen almost 260 talks and posters. (I exported my schedule and made a spreadsheet...) There were plenty of things that I spent about 30 seconds glancing over before writing "meh" in my notes, but most of what I saw was good.

The thing that I missed out on, of course, was people. I only went to one live poster session (for a friend from grad school, not even in my field), and I didn't run into anyone in the poster hall or the lobby or have any good post-talk conversations or meet anybody for lunch. So that was disappointing. But I don't think that was because it wasn't run well, I think that's just a limitation of the virtual format.

My only major complaint about the conference was the scheduling. Following some asinine reasoning about trying to be a "global scientific society", they tried to make the schedule friendly to Europe and Asia. Which means it was quite UNfriendly to all the North Americans making up the vast majority of the attendees. The oral Q&A sessions were all scheduled early in the morning or late in the evening. My talk was at 5:30 in the goddamn morning. I had to get up at 4-bloody-30-A.M. in order to be presentable and conscious on zoom from 5-6 (because I needed to be there for the whole thing, of course), speak for less than five minutes in the middle, and have time to get asked one (not particularly relevant) question near the end because the moderators didn't do a great job watching the clock. I was less than thrilled. (And I went straight back to bed afterward.)

But overall, it was pretty useful. I saw a lot of good stuff about machine learning, which has moved from "we think AI techniques might be useful for this kind of problem" to "we used deep learning for this process and got it to work well." So I've got my student assistant working on some ML stuff.

And this year I had the time to sit down afterwards and go through my notes to distill out the best stuff, so I'm hopeful that I'll put more of it into use. Not a bad note to end the work year on.

I still miss getting to go somewhere for it and see people and all that good stuff. Next year.

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Thanksgiving

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 01:43:16 GMT

We stayed home for Thanksgiving this year.

We'd been planning to anyway, but then the week before my Mom & Larry had a potential exposure from Leslie, who's working at a group home. Everyone's tests came back negative, happily, but we all agreed that it was best to just stay home.

I took Wednesday off, so had a full five-day break, which was nice. We did a bunch of cooking Wednesday and only had a few things to finish off Thursday. Ate dinner at around 2, and otherwise just had lots of downtime.

I made a pork roast instead of a turkey because we had one in the deep freeze, neither of us is all that enthused about turkey, and it takes a lot of effort to do turkey well. It was a little over-cooked (the recipe said two hours in a 250-degree oven to get to 140, and when I checked it after an hour and a half it was already up to 150. :-/ ) but otherwise good. I made very satisfactory gravy from the drippings to go along with the mashed potatoes Jerry made. He also roasted up a bunch of Brussels sprouts.

I also made sausage-apple-walnut-sage dressing, which was great, and swankified green bean casserole. (Use frozen instead of canned green beans and cream instead of milk; add some wine and fry up some extra mushrooms and garlic.) We had the traditional log of cranberry jelly, and I also tried out Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish, which is frozen and has cranberries, onion, sugar, sour cream (sub Greek yogurt) and horseradish (sub wasabi). It was good and packed a punch. I also make the cranberry curd tart from Cook's Illustrated, which was (as is often the case) a lot of work but produced a really good result. I liked it a lot better than pumpkin pie.

We did a couple evenings of online gaming with Joe Z and Chris. And a zoom birthday gathering for Ian a week ago. Otherwise, mostly just a lot of downtime. I read two books! (Books 2 & 3 in Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse.) Which warrants an exclamation point because 2020. I'm feeling better since the election, but still run out of mana a lot.

We still have snow on the ground from... Wednesday, I think? Poor Panthro only goes on brief walks before his little feet get cold. Also, sunset is before 5 pm, which I hate.

Overall, it was not a bad holiday. There are a lot of things I'm missing, but I still have a lot to be thankful for.

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How Things Are

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 21:06:12 GMT

Some time a while back (going on twenty years ago? Yikes!) I went to the Renaissance Fair down in Larkspur with some friends.

I decided to go in period costume.

Not the correct period, mind you. I went for late 1800s cowboy drag: boots, jeans, long-sleeve shirt, vest, jacket, cowboy hat. Except for the shirt, every stitch of it was black.

It was late summer, clear and sunny, with temperatures in the mid-90s.

It was amazingly hot.

But I discovered a neat little magic trick (of necessity, because I was too stubborn to do anything sensible like changing my outfit), which was that, although I kinda felt like I was walking around inside my own personal oven, if I focused my attention on other things, I could ignore the heat and pretend that I was comfortable. And after a little while, I would be. Not that I wasn't still hot, but it didn't bother me.

As long as I didn't move too quickly. If I made any sudden movements, the illusion would shatter, and I would become abruptly and acutely aware of just how incredibly unpleasant it was to be walking around in a near-zero albedo outfit and a mile less of air shielding me from the sun's radiant fury, and I would be quite unhappy until I managed to refocus my attention and restore my phantasmal comfort.

But when I was able to keep it going, the illusion became real, and I was fine.

* * *

This is my current answer to the question "so how are you?"

I think. I mean, time has no meaning during a pandemic, why should words? Am I okay? I seem to be, in general, except when I'm not. What does "okay" even mean?

Everything is terrible and on fire -- literally, for large chunks of Colorado -- I desperately miss parties and travel and going to movies and restaurants and people's houses and making long-term plans, and the near future is a vast and terrifying unknown, but on the local scale, in the local universe of the people and things I actually interact with on a regular basis, everything is... fine?

I scraped together enough gumption to start running my Star Wars game again. Work's going pretty well, and my to-do list no longer feels overwhelming. Online gaming is not as good as in-person but way better than nothing. We voted early and I'm still doing local policy stuff, so I've given myself permission to disconnect from everything political as outside my control. We have cats.

We drove out and spent the weekend with my Mom & Larry a couple weeks ago. It was really easy to avoid contact with everyone but the two of them, and it was really good to see them. The air was clear and not smoky, I made a tasty new mushroom and cauliflower recipe that's getting added to my regular repertoire, and Mom sent me home with lots of homegrown tomatoes.

Oh, and back in early September we saw goddessdster when she was in town, and had a nice picnic dinner and visit outside, so that was really good.

I'm getting ready for AGU, which instead of an opportunity to travel and see people will be a lot of deeply unsatisfying video-watching in my office at terrible times of day (there was no way for it to be anything other than lousy, given the pandemic, but the schedule is deeply sub-optimal and I'm not happy about it), but I got an oral presentation instead of a poster and I have cool science results about a very timely subject (wildfires), so that's neat.

And I'm a co-author on a paper where the research indicates that climate change may rescue a lot of bat populations threatened by white-nose disease, and that got me all choked up when I first read the results section.

So I dunno. I'm in a weird quantum superposition of chipper and depressed, calm and stressed, okay and not-okay.

I'm fine, I guess.

As long as I don't move too quickly.

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Ethshar

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 06:12:33 GMT

There are a number of books that I have stalled out on reading over the last several months, and I was worried that maybe the internet had crippled my attention span or something, but then I took a few days off, and during my downtime started re-reading some old favorites, and ordered some new book in the series I didn't have yet, and over the course of a little over two and half weeks I read twelve and half full-length novels.

So what I conclude is that while Everything Is On Fire (Sometimes Literally), I really can't handle reading anything that requires emotional engagement if the payoff is not guaranteed. These were mostly re-reads, but some of them I'd only read once before, and for others it'd been so long that I had forgotten vast swathes of plot, so it's not like it was all well-trod territory. By the time I got to the new ones, I felt confident about how they would go, so they were safe, but new fiction by authors I don't know is a lot more iffy.

Herewith, some thoughts about Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar novels:

The Misenchanted Sword
The interesting thing about this book is how much epic fantasy happens entirely off-screen. There's quite a bit, and sometimes it's even things the main character is involved with, but the focus is instead on his very mundane concerns and how he deals with them while also managing the complications associated with the titular premise.

With A Single Spell
This one pretends to have a Hero's Journey shape to it, but keeps going off the rails. I'm not sure I'd call it a full-on subversion, but it definitely fails to go in expected directions in a very intentional way.

The Unwilling Warlord
I wasn't sure this was the book I thought it was until about two-thirds through, when it takes a hard left turn into a totally different storyline which has more of the details that stuck in my brain. Probably the most "somebody totally out of their depth just trying to be clever enough to get by" book of them all.

The Blood of A Dragon
The main character is stubborn and kind of unlikable for most of the book, and most of his problems are due to his own bad judgment, but he's also twelve years old, so at least he's got a good excuse. A decent ending that probably isn't really deserved, but I didn't mind it.

Taking Flight
The only one I didn't re-read completely; I skipped about half of it, because the main character is a self-deluded dope who spends all his time pining after someone who's just awful and I had no patience for it.

The Spell of the Black Dagger
Lots of firsts in this book: first book with multiple viewpoints, first female protagonist, first female antagonist, first book that builds on previous ones at more than just the cameo level. It's interesting how much the good guys are shown having incorrect hypotheses in their investigations.

Night of Madness
Goes back and builds out lore that has been referred to in previous books. Also has probably the most heroic protagonist.

Ithanalin's Restoration
Much lower-stakes than the previous two, with a teenage protagonist. Still fun.

The Spriggan Mirror
The Ethshar books are mostly stand-alone, though I expect the world-building is probably better if you read them in publication order. This is the first one where I think you'd seriously miss out on things if read before the books it builds on, since it features major characters from a previous book as important secondary characters. Many of the books hand out a love interest to the main character near the end of the book, but in this one it's a little weird.

The Vondish Ambassador
I honestly went through most of this book not remembering any of it and wondering if I had managed to buy it and put it on my shelf without ever reading it, but near the end it hit parts that had stuck in my memory. Another definite follow-on.

The Unwelcome Warlock
The first one that was new to me and not a re-read! This one is the only one I'd call a serious sequel that should not be read until after its predecessors. Builds on The Unwilling Warlord, Night of Madness, and The Vondish Ambassador. Higher-level drama than most.

The Sorcerer's Widow
Quite short and much more stand-alone than all but the first couple books. Took me a while to figure out what the weird names are references to; saying them out loud helps.

Relics of War
Good so far, but it hit a little bit of emotional tension and I got stuck, so that's definitely what's going on with my brain. I think I can restart it, though; I trust this series.

Stone Unturned
Haven't read this one yet.

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Regular Occurrences

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 06:58:37 GMT

Things that have happened more than once over the last couple-few months of pandemic:

Online concerts. Two, both for Abney Park. The first was back at the end of May, the second just last night. They sell "tickets", but it's just donations through a fundraiser website; they livestream the show on youtube and post the link on their website. They weren't taking any more donations by the time we got there for the first one, so it was free; I bought some compilation albums through their website the next day. There is, alas, no live crowd energy, but it's pretty cool to watch from your couch and to be able to pause or rewind the show.

Take-out. We've been getting take-out at least once a week to help keep restaurants near us afloat. We've now hit almost all of our top local non-chain restaurants: Yak & Yeti (no buffet, alas), Jewel of India, Sushi Yume, Mika Sushi, Oscar's Kabob & Gyros, Ho-Ho, Thousand of Wok, Two Sticks Cafe (in H-Mart), Pho 78, plus of course the occasional fast-casual chain like Chipotle & Smashburger. We got Ethiopian from a food truck the other day (the HOA has them come on Thursdays). We should probably start cycling through soon.

Cautious outdoor socialization. Our first venture out of the house was to Eaton Street for responsibly distanced socialization with backyard croquet. (Shades of Hyacinth Bucket's "candlelight supper with riparian entertainment"...) We also spent an afternoon at the Floyds', playtesting Jerry's game with Chris. Lately, we've going over to Eaton on Sundays to practice Japanese on the back patio with Matt & Jon. Oh, and we had a nice picnic supper at the local park with Van (takeout from Wishbone) a couple weeks ago. All wearing masks the whole time, of course, which is annoying, but at least we get to see our friends some.

Municipal Advising The work on policing policy for my municipal advisory board continues. I'm chairing a committee meeting over zoom every week or two, and our last board meeting was dedicated to a discussion with the police chief, which went really well; there were a couple items that I thought might be a hard sell (changes to training and unbundling first response) that it turns out they're completely on board with, so that's pretty heartening.

Haircuts. Two, so far, six weeks apart. It's not so much that I've been pining for a haircut - the trim Jerry gave me back in April was perfectly serviceable - but I like my barbershop and don't want it to go out of business, and since America apparently doesn't believe in safety nets... Masks are required for everyone and there's no waiting inside, plus both times I got there first thing in the morning and was one of the first two people there, so I think it's been acceptably low risk given rates in Colorado over the last couple months. I'll have to see how things look a month from now, though.

Gaming. Neal's D&D game is ongoing, and now we've added Jeff to the group. We've played Dominion online a few times with various folks (Joe, Matthew, Jon, Peter), and done a couple game nights on BoardGameArena. I haven't run my Star Wars game, but I finally have gathered enough focus to start prepping it again. That's still a work in progress, though. I have also played a whole lot of Monster Prom (humorous dating sim), a full playthrough of Arcade Spirits (romantic comedy visual novel), and a fair chunk of Into The Breach (turn-based tactics game, rec'd by Floyd).

Running out of oomph. A while back I just hit a wall, and ended up working half-days for about a week. I've had a couple more days like that here and there, but I'm getting back into the swing of things. Of course, I recently lost about a week and a half to dealing with migrating to a new work laptop because the battery started swelling on the old one, so I still have a pretty full to-do list.

Of course there have also been assorted one-shot things, like walking to city hall to drop off our ballots, and big zoom get-togethers with folks from college (though hopefully that one may become more regular.

We are very much enjoying having the house to ourselves again. I was talking to my mom about it and she pointed out that when something starts out as just a couple weeks and stretches on and on, you don't realize how much accommodation you're doing and how much chronic stress it generates.

So yeah, things may be grossly unacceptable at the global scale, but locally we're making do.

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Walking the cats

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 02:42:16 GMT

We have started taking the cats for walks.

They don't get to roam freely; we put harnesses on them and walk them on a leash, because we're concerned for their safety (we have major streets nearby, plus we've seen coyotes and foxes right outside our door on a couple occasions), plus we don't want them murdering all the birds and other wildlife in a five-block radius.

The first time we went for a walk was not very successful. Panthro was bold enough to over to the townhomes across from us and down a little ways before there was a Scary Noise. He startled, then got freaked out by being held back by a leash, then more freaked by the leash getting caught on a bush, and I had to carry him back to the house. Nico and Mims just hung out as close to the door as they could get, yowling to be let back inside.

Since then, however...

Panthro LOVES going for walks. He will yell at the door at least a couple times a day to let us know that he would like to go out again. (We are trying to stick to a schedule of an hour or two before sunset every two or three days.) He's explored a block or two in most directions from our house, and he will happily go walking for an hour or more before it's time to come home. (Unless there are Scary Noises.)

Nico also has taken to it, and will yowl unhappily if he's left inside. He is not nearly so bold; today he was very adventuresome and went all the way to the street! He also usually asks to go back inside for a minute a couple times per walk. (We've learned not to take his harness off too soon.)

(Mims has not yet gone outside again; she does NOT like the harness, so you have to sneak up on her to get it on, and we haven't successfully done that early enough to let her get used to it in advance of the walk since the first attempt.)

Walking a cat is not like walking a dog. There's a lot more standing around for minutes at a time while your companion is staring into a hole which may contain prey. Or sniffing a plant. Or nibbling grass. Or rolling around on the sidewalk. You have to let them lead and set he pace; cats are not good at following.

We have gotten a lot of people remarking on how cute it is and/or expressing astonishment that the cats don't mind. We've also learned the names of some of the other cats in our neighborhood. And spent a lot of time trying to explain to the cats that, no, we're not going to go explore the neighbor's patio, standing here on their doorstep is awkward enough.

But they are clearly enjoying it, and it gets us out into the fresh air on a semi-regular basis.

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Independence Day

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 06:05:27 GMT

David V. is moving out.

More than two years ago (sometime in the spring of '18, IIRC) he called us to ask if he could stay in our guest room "for a week or two," which has turned into, well, two-plus years.

We have been trading a little light housekeeping for room, board, and a bit of spending money. More as a way to try to inject some dignity into the situation than because we were pining for help with the chores, but we tried to keep the exchange rate fair.

It was suitable for a good while, but we cannot afford to continue supporting him, so at the beginning of May we let him know it was time to start looking for a new living situation. He hasn't really found one, but we just... can't keep doing this. So.

I'm disappointed and embarrassed to be confronted with the fact that my charity is not boundless and unlimited. I really want to be the kind of person who is able to keep saying "oh, it's fine, we've got you covered" indefinitely, and I'm sorry that we can't do that.

I am angry that our society doesn't have a better safety net. He should have better options available, and it makes me livid that people who think gatekeeping benefits to the "worthy" is more important than caring for those in need have been able to destroy or cripple or block all the systems that would provide them.

I feel guilty about how terrible the timing is and that he's not moving on to something better. If I thought it would make a difference, I'd be happy to wait a little longer. But there's no reason to think it would, and days have had a way of extending into weeks and months, and that would not end well.

The whole thing just sucks and I feel bad about it and I wish things were different. I also recognize the necessity if it, because there's a whole host of things I'm not going to get into that I would be even more unhappy about were things to continue on as they are. And then there's stuff like the fact that I feel eager to get our space and our privacy back, but I feel bad about feeling good about that, but should I? Ugh.

I guess that's all there really is to say, is that it sucks and I wish things were different.

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Doing Something About It

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 05:49:42 GMT

I'm on a citizen advisory board for my city. It's been going for a while, but for a variety of reasons it's been hard to really get traction. Back in February, City Council came and met with us and told us how much they valued and wanted our input and that they wanted us to feel empowered and not roadblocked by process.

So when the protests started and everybody started sharing links to all these great resources about the problem of police violence and why it happens and how to fix it, I said fukkit, and unilaterally started drafting a policy recommendation document. Because I went to MIT, and drinking from a firehose is a thing I learned how to do.

And what the hell, I had spent all of that week and the week before reading and reviewing IPCC chapters for work during the day, so my open-your-brain-and-inhale-all-the-words muscles were all warmed up and working anyway.

Three weeks ago I worked on it a bunch over the week and had a draft roughed out going into Saturday. I worked all day Saturday, and ended up starting over and reorganizing it. Ran out of gumption and did nothing on Sunday, then took that Monday off from work and spent all day busting my ass to get it finished before D&D that evening. I ended up with a 14-page document I sent to the chair less than 48 hours before our monthly board meeting.

It was pretty well received, and long story short, instead of spending most of the meeting in group process wringing our hands about What To Do, there are now 8 people signed up for the committee to develop the draft further. We had the first committee meeting last Wednesday (three other people plus me) and got a good start on questions to let us start honing in from general to specific. In writing them up, I found out some useful stuff about our local situation, and I'm pretty hopeful that by the time we're meeting with the chief of police at our board meeting next month, we'll a start on some actual policy recommendations that will result in for-real change at the local level.

So I feel pretty good about that.

The moral of the story being I guess that if you even vaguely approximate being the right person in the right place at the right time, just jump in and Do The Thing. You don't need an official designation or blessing or special dispensation, what these kinds of things really need more than anything else is some kind of movement and follow-through in roughly the right direction. So if you think you can do that, fuckin' Do It.

(The special bonus reward is that all of your angst and anxiety about the situation will immediately evaporate, because now you are Helping and Being Useful at it.)

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Quarantimes Adaptations

Thu, 28 May 2020 05:31:37 GMT

Things I Have Managed To (Sort Of) Do Despite The Lockdown: A Post

Go To The Dentist: The dentist's office has opened back up, and it was time for me to get my teeth cleaned. They're enforcing social distancing, so I had to wear a mask and call them from my car, then wait until they said it was okay to come into the building. Extra masks on the techs, and no ultrasonic waterpik, just old-fashioned metal hooks. Hand sanitizer all over the place. All in all, not too onerous, and also I think is about as safe as you can make a healthcare visit. They also moved into a new (unflooded) building, which is much nicer and only a smidge less convenient to get to. (Though I though the old place was kinda cozy, in that old-house-converted-to-business way.) Also, mid-afternoon appointments are much easier to manage when working from home.

Get A Haircut: My barber has NOT opened back up, but I was more than a month overdue and I couldn't stand it anymore, so weekend before last I got Jerry to cut my hair. We have clippers, and mostly I just wanted the back and sides back to a reasonable length. He did a really good job ("exceedingly adequate," he insists), and shortened the top up, too. I also gave my beard a good trimming, and I felt about a million times better.

Play Games With Friends: Online boardgaming is working out pretty well. I played some Dominion with Matthew and Floyd a couple weeks ago, and we've got more planned for this Friday. Played Puerto Rico with Joe and Bill tonight. The Monday night D&D game is going well, using Zoom instead of Discord for video. I haven't gotten enough prep together to actually run Star Wars yet, but I've made progress, and have reclaimed enough brain to at least think about it.

See A Movie With Friends: Before lockdown started, Alice pointed our "weird movie club" at Extra Ordinary, an Irish horror comedy about ghosts, and we were all planning to go see it in the theater. Not happening, obvs, but it's now available streaming. Rather than trying to literally watch it together, this weekend we all rented it and watched it at home, and on Monday (Memorial Day), we had a Zoom call to discuss it and socialize. Again, not as nice as actually going together in person, but I think we had at least as much conversation about it as we would have had standing outside the movie theater afterwards.

Patronize Restaurants: We've decided to get takeout at least once a week to help out all the local restaurants that we would like to survive. Pho 88 is in fact still open; we weren't sure because the first couple times we tried it wasn't, but I think it's just that there's only one guy working, so if he takes a day off, they're closed. We also got Mexican from Lucero's Tavern one night. Picked up the order about 10 minutes before closing, and when I paid, the cashier accidentally entered in a $100 tip and couldn't figure out how to undo it! She called over the other guy working, who couldn't figure it out either, so he said "Um, can I just give you $100 cash?" and, amused, I allowed as how that would be fine.

Read A Book: I got a copy of All Systems Red (the first Murderbot book) for my birthday, read it in a day, and enjoyed it very much. Worth mentioning because I've got other books that I'm having trouble finishing because pandemic stress makes it hard to focus. This one was just a novella. I think I'll have to get the others.

Not Fall Down Completely On Blogging: Look! A post!

As part of our annual reviews, my boss asked us to talk about how we were being affected by the whole pandemic situation, and my assessment was that overall, I am doing okay-not-great. Honestly, it's been a rough year (I had totally forgotten about how worn down I got at the end of last year), with a lot of course changes and unexpected turbulence to deal with. I rated my performance as pretty darn good, considering -- it's just that this year, there is a LOT of considering.

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Lockdown update (a tiny ancestral rodent going "aaaaaaaaaa")

Mon, 04 May 2020 05:44:14 GMT

I feel comfortable generalizing from a single data point that pandemics are stupid and I hate them.

My birthday was Thursday of last week. (Not this week that just ended, but the one before that.) I worked in the morning and then took the rest of the day off. We got takeout Smashburger for dinner, and played some boardgames online with Floyd, Jon, Gene, Brandon, and Joe Z. It wasn't as good as seeing people in person, but it was still nice. We played several rounds of 7 Wonders and Incan Gold; they play a lot faster when there's a computer enforcing all the rules and you don't have to spend effort figuring out which plays are legal because it just tells you in the UI. Boardgamearena.com has good implementations of a bunch of games, and I paid a whopping $4 for a premium membership, which is worth it even for just one session. Played more games with Neal & Jeff the following Sunday when I didn't have enough brain to prep and run Star Wars. (I also didn't have enough brain for heavy-duty games, so it was Carcassonne and more Incan Gold.)

As I commented on FB, I'm fine, overall. I get tired a lot. A friend (Jeff H) posted a thing about Maslowe's hierarchy and the fact that even if you know intellectually that your lower-tier needs are going to be met, if you're getting signals that the environment is uncertain, there's a chunk of your brain that's going to ignore what you know and be hyper-vigilant about those lower-tier needs, and that burns a lot of energy. And that definitely seems to be where I am.

Like, really, objectively speaking, my life is in good shape. But my focus is lousy, small roadblocks throw me further off-track than normal, and some days I just conk out at a certain point. And I think it's because even though consciously I'm on a fairly even keel, in my subconscious there's some tiny ancestral rodent going "aaaaaaaaaa" all day long.

Yesterday was a good day. I got a bunch of things done and felt accomplished. I got bills paid and decided to get some fresh air, so I walked to the post office to drop them in the mail, and since I was over that way, I stopped by Walgreens for a couple things we needed from there and got takeout from Chipotle. And discovered that Pho 88 is open again for takeout! Called my mom, read some book. So that was nice. Today was kinda meh; dealt with some things (Parks & Rec district voting), bounced off others (state taxes), ran out of mana.

Work has been decent. I finished off a bunch of data production and publishing this last week, and that was good. Now it's back to writing and suchlike for a while. I have a virtual workshop this week that will start at 9 in the morning Tues through Thurs, but as I think I said earlier, it's way easier to deal with when all I have to do is walk down the hallway rather than drive half an hour into work.

We finished Neal's Unmunchkin campaign. Season 2, anyway; we might do a season 3, but not until we can play in person again, we decided. My paladin got to go nova on a young black dragon, which was quite satisfying. Jerry and I are now playing in a procedurally-generated exploration game that Neal is running alternate Monday nights, so we'll see how that goes. Overall, remote D&D works well (easier to make it to game!), but I have to say I'm not a fan of fancy platforms like Discord and Roll20. Like, yeah, the tech is sparkly, but to me what you get is just not enough better than simpler solutions to justify the hassle, quality, and constraints.

I really want a haircut.

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Quarantimes

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 04:43:16 GMT

Quarantine time is weird. On Tuesday, I went to the store first thing in the morning and then I went to the office to pick up my chair (which I can already tell is helping my ergonomics a lot), and then by Wednesday afternoon, it felt like that had happened a full week and a half earlier. But then two weeks have gone by since I last posted and it feels like nothing has happened at all.

Which is kind of because nothing much has happened. Work and bills go on, but everything else is on hold. I'm going grocery shopping once every 7-9 days, and otherwise don't go out. Two exceptions: picking up the desk chair (which I had to make special arrangements for), and on Thursday, the charger cable for my laptop died, so Jerry went and got me one from Target.

I ran my Star Wars game over Zoom this evening, and that went pretty well. Need to remember to schedule breaks, though. Last weekend I played Neal's D&D game using Zoom & Roll20. (It works, but the interface is pretty clunky, so I'm glad we don't need it for my Star Wars game.) We also found some services for playing board games online and played Dominion with Chris Floyd on Saturday of last weekend. We just called on the phone and put it on speaker, and that worked well. Not as good as games in person, but a lot better than nothing.

I have gone for a few walks around the neighborhood and discovered that I think a lot of the bunnies live in the rock wall embankments that run along the edges of our subdivision. I saw one vanish there and realized that there are big holes between and behind the rocks that have plenty of room for a rabbit den.

Work is going reasonably. I have struggled a bit to be productive some days, although not more than other times when I've been stressed out about other things. Overall, working from home 100% has honestly been less disruptive than I thought it would be. Having no commute is nice, as is being able to eat based on when I'm actually hungry and not when the cafeteria is open.

So, yeah. I'm doing okay. The situation is dumb and I hate it, but I'm also less worried now that it's here than I was when it was coming, so at least there's that.

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Staying at home (with some fun beforehand)

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 06:39:56 GMT

So we just finished up our first full week of staying home to avoid contributing to the spread of coronavirus. It's been fine, really.

I brought everything home from the office Thursday before last (the 12th), and the next day they announced that work from home would be mandatory starting at noon on the 17th (the following Tuesday). I actually had to go back in on Monday because I realized that the mac keyboard we have at home is only a little one, and I wanted my full-sized keyboard. I also updated my password (due to expire in 38 days) because that's way easier to do when you're connected to the network there, and I figure there are decent odds that I'll be working from home past mid-April. I also brought home my violets, which seem happy on the table at the top of the stairs, as well as Rachel's jade plant / Christmas cactus combo, which she wasn't able to get back into the office to pick up.

I'm all set up to WFH from the "library" -- the spare bedroom where all my books live. It gets decent light, and I'll get to watch the crabapple blossom, so that'll be nice. It can get a little warm, but that's mostly because I had the halogen torchiere turned on to give better light for videoconferences. And I will say that it is nice to cut my commute down from 30 minutes to 5 seconds.

Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were a bunch of teleconferences that replaced the workshop in Berkeley that was cancelled. They weren't as good for collaboration-building as meeting in person, but they went pretty well, considering. Zoom worked fine, and we had good moderation that kept 20-40 person telecons functional. And then we had some wrap-up and review conferences on Thursday. So I actually got to see a lot of people, despite never leaving the house.

I've gone on a few walks, just to get some fresh air and sunshine. It's not too hard to avoid people on weekdays, but yesterday I seemed to be the only person willing to step off the sidewalk to maintain appropriate distance. I'm wondering if I need to take a six-foot stick with me to keep people appropriately at bay. (Or a polearm...)

Jerry's birthday was two weekends ago. We did an escape room on Saturday; Team More Than Half Librarians (us, Nevilles, Mel, and Matthew/fineplan) successfully beat the Chinese-themed one at the place up on Huron. It was a good one, nice use of RFID tags and maglocks. We had plans to go axe throwing in the evening, but the place was booked up, so we came back to he house and played Mysterium. (A slightly different batch of folks -- Mary, Matthew, Jon, and Neal, I think?) Jerry did another escape room (horror-themed) on Sunday while I went shopping, and that evening we successfully threw axes with Jon, Gene, Brandon, and Matthew again. Kate also showed up and hung out with us. This time we were the only ones in the whole place. The coach had us do some 'pub game' competitions, which were fun and engaging. I remain halfway-decently ambidaxtrous, and was even able todo some double throws successfully. Jerry's mom also came to visit for a few days starting that Monday, and we had a nice visit.

Otherwise, not much is going on. The cats seem pretty pleased to have us home all the time. They have made many guest appearances on my videoconferences, and they seem to like just hanging out nearby and napping in the office when I'm working.

I did go to see the movie Emma before we settled into isolation. It was at the tail end of when I thought it would be reasonable to still go out in public, but it was a 10:30 pm showing of a Jane Austen movie on a weeknight, so I figured it would be pretty minimal exposure. (Indeed, there were only two other people in the entire theater, and I didn't sit near them.) It's a very good movie. Gorgeous and funny, and the reviews say it's a faithful adaptation. Definitely recommended; I gather it's available streaming on Amazon.

So, yeah. About like that.

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The Dependency Principle and the Litany Against Fear

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 05:05:47 GMT

Two thoughts on COVID-19:

First, from Iain M. Banks' Excession:

There was only one problem with the Land of Infinite Fun, and that was that if you ever did lose yourself in it completely - as Minds occasionally did, just as humans sometimes surrendered utterly to some AI environment - you could forget that there was a base reality at all. In a way, this didn't really matter, as long as there was somebody back where you came from minding the hearth. The problem came when there was nobody left or inclined to tend the fire, mind the store, look after the housekeeping (or however you wanted to express it), or if somebody or something else - somebody or something from outside, the sort of entity that came under the general heading of an Outside Context Problem, for example - decided they wanted to meddle with the fire in that hearth, the stock in the store, the contents and running of the house; if you'd spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead, or enslaved.

It didn't matter that base reality was petty and grey and mean and demeaning and quite empty of meaning compared to the glorious majesty of the multi-hued life you'd been living through metamathics; it didn't matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the single foundation-stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested upon, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.

It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.

It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…

That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.

Few things are more intensely frustrating than abruptly losing momentum on a project because of something like your computer deciding it has to reboot to apply a software update now. We make grand plans that depend on all these layers of civilizational infrastructure continuing to work as normal, and then something goes wrong and you have to scrap it all, and it's just... tiresome. Very, very tiresome.

Second, the Litany Against Fear, from Frank Herbert's Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

This is my preferred text to recite while washing my hands to ensure that I wash them for the requisite twenty seconds. The only change I make is to the first line: I say "I will not" rather than "I must not" to emphasize that it is a choice I make, not something externally imposed.

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Ultravision

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 18:23:13 GMT

I fell out of the habit of posting while work was so busy last fall, and now I've been feeling like I need to Say Something Important about my life or the world when I post, and don't know what that is so I don't. Which is dumb, so here's a post about something cool I recently learned about.

So it turns out that humans (and other primates) have better visual acuity (ability to see detail) than most of the animal kingdom. Some birds, particularly raptors, have us beat, but we can see more detail than all the other mammals. We can also see more colors: most mammals only have two-color vision, but we have three-color vision.

BUT, it turns out that cats and dogs can see a bit into the ultraviolet range! The lenses of our eyes are a little bit yellow, and screen out the shorter wavelengths of UV light. (Which means that if you ever have cataract surgery, in between when they remove the old cloudy lenses and implant new synthetic ones, you too will be able to see ultraviolet for a short while. Apparently it's a sort of washed-out bluish-purple color.) That's not true of cats, dogs, and many other mammals; their lenses transmit a fair chunk of UVA -- about 60% for cats & dogs. (Here's the paper about it.)

So humans can distinguish more colors (three-color vision), but over a smaller range. That's kinda weird, and it gets weirder. There are two flavors of shortwave-sensitive (blue) optical pigment: one is more sensitive in the UV range, and the other is only goes up to violet. We have the violet one. But the UV-sensitive one is evolutionarily older. Which means not being able to see in UV is actually an adaptation. So the question is, why? Why would it be advantageous to lose sensitivity to a greater range of colors?

And the answer is apparently that there's a tradeoff between acuity and sensitivity. Screening out short wavelengths reduces Rayleigh scatter and chromatic aberration, which give you blurrier vision at the blue end of the spectrum. And all the critters that have yellow lenses are diurnal. Nocturnal and crepuscular critters, on the other hand, are more concerned with absolute sensitivity under low-light conditions, so they have clear lenses as well as features like a reflective tapetum lucidum at the back of the eye, which increases overall light sensitivity at the expense of fine resolution, and a higher rod to cone ratio.

So you can see well in the dark, or you can see a lot of detail, but not both.

Also, cats are apparently kinda near-sighted because they don't have any muscles to change the focus of their eyes. Which would explain a lot, honestly.

(Now I'm thinking this probably means that D&D races that don't have low-light vision should get a bonus on seeing fine details and at distance. And does that mean darkvision is just echolocation? Should we be imagining dwarves and orcs wandering around underground going "meep meep meep" to figure out where the walls are? That's hilarious and I love it.)

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