Jul. 16th, 2025 10:49 pm

some good things

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Really enjoying the redcurrant cake I finally managed to make the other evening.
  2. First of the clothes-for-me from the latest Oxfam order showed up and is in fact more or less Perfect, hurrah. (Cargo shorts. Two pairs of linen cargo trousers due tomorrow...)
  3. Mulberries! [personal profile] ewt informed me that they were starting to come ready, so I took a detour via the local tree and did indeed manage to munch a token handful.
  4. I made a batch of mostly-white-some-rye caraway-and-poppyseed bread, and it goes spectacularly well with the cherry plum and vanilla jam a friend gave me at the weekend. I have been having some Very Happy Breakfasts.
  5. My extremely late-into-the-ground squash are starting to produce female flowers!
  6. And I found some more lurking long bamboo to install for the late-sown beans to maybe make their way up.
  7. AND I might actually break even on peas-for-sowing-next-year if the second flush on one of the plants does what it's threatening to, which I would be extremely excited about because I had been mildly regretting eating (instead of saving for seed) the handful we did eat, when my original intention had in fact been to Just Save Seed this year... (... but they were very tasty.)
  8. We are reading Hyperbole and a Half (the book) together a chapter at a time! They are an excellent short Shared Activity.
  9. I have this evening spent a pleasant ten minutes playing around with the dragons game and enjoying getting some very pretty possible dragons out of it. Yes good.
  10. Read about three elephants graduating to the Reintegration Unit run by the Sheldrick Trust and cried a lot. (Also at the accompanying video.) (Good crying.)
Jul. 17th, 2025 04:22 am

*flomp*

tyger: Vexen's Avatar Kingdom chibi. Text: Vexen (Vexen - chibi)
[personal profile] tyger

Yeaaaah so I slept most of the day again orz orz orz

I DID however cook a proper dinner, so I'm pretty pleased with that. (I was THINKING I'd just have leftover soup, but my brain is bouncing off it pretty hard right now. Because. Of course it is. SIGH.)

Sibling should be here tomorrow, so we'll see how things go! Hopefully most of the sanding will get finished!

estirose: A pixel portrait of a woman (Default)
[personal profile] estirose
I still really have to get these up to my github!

The newest one is Raven's Ore Swapper, which joins my other Stardew Valley mods. It is yet another machine (and the pixel art is basically a colorswapped clone of my giftbox exchanger), but it is set up to take an ore or coal as input. This being me, the ore swapper is rather randomized and only really upgrades your ore if you're trying with copper, iron, or gold; the rest will mostly give the same item back, but have a chance of returning a different ore - some better, some worse - or even occasionally coal. You even have a small chance of getting 2 of the item you put in.

Yes, this is kind of the seedmaker (which has a chance to give you different, better/worse seeds than your input veggie/fruit), except with ores. I thought that was a fun concept so I wrote it. As usual, it is built on Content Patcher and needs that mod to function.

To prevent abuse, I set the processing time to 2 hours; I played around and that seemed to work pretty well - it doesn't take forever to process but it still takes some time, so you won't be mass-loading iron ore to get gold. This is the first one I've written just for fun instead of a problem I thought needed solving in my playthroughs.

(My seed exchanger now also uses colorswapped pixel art for its appearance, so progress!)
Jul. 16th, 2025 02:33 pm

Gaming Update

cyphomandra: boats in Auckland Harbour. Blue, blocky, cheerful (boats)
[personal profile] cyphomandra
Platinum'd Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and then took a break, although I have picked it up again to do a new game plus playthrough to get the other ending. I love the game and the world and the combat style, and I will play it again, but it's too soon to really sink myself back down into it. The new game plus also keeps all my team's final stats and builds, so I'm one-shotting most of the first and second act mobs, and some of the bosses, and while that's good for speed it means I'm not as involved as I was on the first playthrough. I think I just need more time.

I downloaded Balatro (poker rogue-like deck builder) as it was one of the free monthly games with my PS Plus membership, and then of course then discovered I also have it via Apple Arcade on my phone. I've played it for a bit and beat two decks on basic stakes using the same strategy, then put it down a bit, then accidentally got my nephew hooked on it and so started playing it again myself. I've done all the starting decks on white and the blue deck on red. I like it - it really does have amazing variety - and I am experimenting more with different strategies, but it's not something I throw myself into with reckless abandon.

I am still looking for another immersive game. I started playing Death Stranding, because the second one came out to good reviews but random internet commenters said I should do the first one first, and it is an oddly intriguing RPG/walking simulator - after an event that disrupts the boundaries between life and death, people live in isolated cities to protect them from horrific things that roam the land as well as timefall, a rain that vastly accelerates time in whatever living thing it touches. Sam, the protagonist, has bucketloads of trauma, a phobia about being touched, and important vulnerable relatives, and works as a Porter, taking shipments between settlements and helping them reconnect to the newly forming chiral network.

The stealth bits around enemies are terrifying - I got too close to one in the opening sequence and triggered a void-out, flooding the landscape with some sort of black liquid filled with things with tentacles - and in addition you have with you BB, a bridge baby, a fetus taken from a brain-dead mother that is attached to you and will signal enemies by crying when they get close. The countryside, when it's not trying to kill you, is great to walk through, and it also has very good music. The plot - hmm. It's a very cinematic style (when new characters show up they get credits, so I know I am not hallucinating that Guillermo del Toro wants to provide me with semi-helpful advice and shove me out in search of certain danger) and it's very atmospheric, and blends well with the gameplay, I'm just not convinced (yet) that it actually makes sense. Still. Clambering across rocky terrain, struggling to balance the body of my dead mother on my back and desperate to reach a crematorium to incinerate her before her corpse explodes is certainly compelling.

(and then Astro Bot put out more DLC, including a Cloud Strife bot! I determinedly played through all the DLC open levels to get him (and then bought him a Buster Sword so he can do his Omnislash animation) and then failed multiple times to get anywhere with the secret DLC level, which has a lurking Sephibot as the reward. I have got so frustrated doing this that I've actually now gone back and done all the other levels I was stuck on (including the horrendous Splashing Sprint - fight lava enemies with a water spraying duck - and To the Beat - everything is precisely timed except my reactions, woe - and am now trying to do the last core game level, the Great Master Challenge. I have managed to get two obstacles away from the end but it is a relentless nightmare of perfection.)
Tags:
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Specifically I have tracked down a copy of Treatise on Man, which is probably the source of the claim I've seen phrased several ways, most eyebrow-raisingly and also most readily to hand by Steve Haines, attributing to Descartes the idea that pain is

something similar to hearing, it is a fixed signal and measurable response

and it turns out I've got access to a whole entire PDF which turns out to be only 71 pages, including quite a lot of fairly large images, so I suppose I'm going to read Descartes now as a break from working my way through the BBC's Higher revision guides on neurobiology, which is itself a detour from reading the introductory text on nerves aimed at undergraduates...

(The things I've actually been reading today consist of two chapters of Hyperbole and a Half, a partial chapter of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, both as Shared Activities with A, and about half of A Handful of Flour, a recipe book I have owned for quite a while now and am rapidly concluding I might no longer wish to dedicate shelf space to...)

Jul. 15th, 2025 08:54 pm

Portmerion again

lurkingcat: (Default)
[personal profile] lurkingcat
We're on holiday in Portmeirion this week. It was so hot over the weekend that even I was starting to wilt a little and a lot of ice cream has been eaten. We've been for a few gentle walks around the woods here and said hello to the Bristol Colonnade:

PXL_20250714_185457277.MP

This was originally the facade of the bath house at Arnos Court in Bristol. Arnos Court is just down the hill from our home, so this would have been part of the view when our late 1920's house was first built. The bath house was damaged by bombs in the Second World War and was scheduled for demolition by the council in the late 1950s but Clough William-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion came to the rescue and transported the colonnade to the village and had it rebuilt there.

We'd planned an expedition today but the temperature dropped dramatically overnight and the forecast rain and windy was extremely rainy and extremely windy, so we decided to stay relatively local. We got a takeaway lunch from the extremely nice street food kiosk in the village. The weather was so bad that the usual queue was completely absent and the only other customer was a small bedraggled blue tit that was determinedly eating the contents of a mayo packet.

PXL_20250715_120445638.MP

This afternoon we went out to Porthmadog and strolled up and down the high street and visited the maritime museum and the local bookshop. I've been trying to learn Welsh so I picked up a Welsh grammar book and a kids book in Welsh to see if I could translate any of it. The cashier rang everything up, thanked me for the purchase, and I automatically said thank you back while I was putting my purse away. It wasn't until we left the shop that [personal profile] battlehamster said I'd got a big smile from the cashier because her last sentence had been in Welsh and my thank you had been in Welsh too. So, I guess that despite the brain fog, I've managed to pick up something from Duolingo. Which is encouraging.
Tags:
Jul. 16th, 2025 02:59 am

Progress!

tyger: Riku=Replica, quoting Roxas: My heart belongs to me. (Replica - my heart belongs to me)
[personal profile] tyger

Finished off that first long board, and started on the second! Pretty happy with how it's going, honestly!

Less happy with how tired I am - like a fucking dumbass I didn't have a nap but I'm STILL up late. Been awake like 18 hours, which is okay occasionally but not something I can keep up, siiiigh. Self. Go to bed when tired, you idiot.

Anyway ideally tomorrow I'll finish the paint stripping, but more likely I'll finish the second board and start on the last one. Unless I sleep all day, ugh, really hope I don't!

Jul. 15th, 2025 07:41 am

Sunshine Revival '25 #4: Smiles

brightknightie: Girl running into the wind with a kite in summer (Enthusiasms)
[personal profile] brightknightie
[community profile] sunshine_revival '25 Challenge #4: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list...

Some fannish things making me smile, ordered by type, not necessarily by relative smiliness:

  • Rereading the "Penric and Desdemona" series by Lois McMaster Bujold in chronological order

  • Jed MacKay's writing for Marvel Comics

  • Overly Sarcastic Productions in general, and looking forward to both their books coming out soon in particular

  • Superman (2025), in theaters now

  • Fantastic Four (2025), in theaters next week

  • The new half-and-half retelling/analysis approach, specifically for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, on the Sacred Realms podcast

  • Playing Link's Awakening on my Switch 2, especially taking Marin to visit the other NPCs

  • Reading The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom fanfic, now that I've finished the game

  • Season 3 of Babylon 5 (watching 1 episode per week on borrowed DVDs; new to me)

  • Halfway through Grantchester season 10 (watching 1 episode per week on PBS Passport; new to me)


How about you? What's bringing you smiles this summer?

Jul. 14th, 2025 08:09 pm

(no subject)

neekabe: Bucky from FatWS smiling (Default)
[personal profile] neekabe
I thought I had a piece of popcorn lodged beside my front tooth since I saw Superman. It was annoying, and not responding to floss (slipping up beside it), but I could feel it move when I poked just right with my tongue. Went at it with a toothpick today and it turned out it was a filling falling out of my tooth.

So have an appointment on Thursday morning. Not looking forward to it. I remember when this one went in and it involved terrible needle placement requirements. but maybe they won't need numbing? Hopeful, but unlikely.
Jul. 14th, 2025 08:37 pm

But **you did it right.**

catness: (cat_black)
[personal profile] catness
After another round of Coursera peer grading, my conversation with ChatGPT.

Me: Why do I have a feeling that everyone used AI for their homework? ;) Of course so did I, but I changed the code a lot...

ChatGPT: Haha, oh you’re not imagining things — that *sixth sense tingling* is spot on. 😄
You’re definitely not the only one noticing a certain... let's call it *"robotic uniformity"* in some submissions.

Here's how you can often tell if a student just copied code from an AI (or StackOverflow or some tutorial site):

Read more... )
Tags:
Jul. 15th, 2025 03:37 am

Progress??

tyger: The Shounen Tantei (pre-Ai) hiding in a locker, with the text 'We solemnly swear we're up to good'. (ST - Up To Good)
[personal profile] tyger

I did make my soup this morning! It's okay. Needs more stuff in it, I think, but it's got what I had in, and it's not bad!

I also did manage to get out of bed and do some more paint stripping! I think this board needs a third go-over, but at least I got through the second pass today! Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to do that, and start on another board. Will depend on the weather as much as anything else, I think, I am. Extremely unlikely to go out and do some while it's raining, even if I'm technically undercover. Too cold!!!

Anyway, bed now! Yes! >:

Jul. 13th, 2025 10:30 pm

vital functions

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. This week I have mostly but not entirely been reading more murdery bot: Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, Rapport, aaaand I've also immediately launched myself into yet another quick reread of All Systems Red because we finished watching the TV series and therefore I want The Murderbot Of My Heart Thank You.

However! I have also continued reading about nerves! I have now read the entire first chapter of Nerve and Muscle, supplemented by a bunch more Wikipedia, and I think I am starting to have a better mental picture of how all of this works? I am going into way more depth than required by The Project, really, I think, but I will be happier if I know what's going on at least to the extent that I understand a little more about what it means, physically, when it is explained that some migraine preventives target Type A nerve fibre and others target Type C (which in turn is why if you get partial relief from something that targets Type C it's worth at least experimenting with adding in something targeting Type A).

And I have also made a tiny bit more progress with The Age of Seeds, but... yeah, mostly Murderbot.

Watching. Murderbot! I will concede that "I need to check the perimeter" did indeed get me Right In The Feels. I still prefer my book-Murderbot but I am beginning to acquire a better understanding of why folk love this Murderbot too.

The fanvid Bohemian Like You, by [archiveofourown.org profile] kuwdora, via [personal profile] sholio, via [personal profile] recessional.

Cooking. Several new things! Aubergine larb with sticky rice and shallot salad, lavender & honey Welsh cakes out of the Welsh cakes tourist tat mini-book, coconut pancakes. Now officially over two thirds of the way through East (with another Several planned for this week coming).

Eating. TODAY WE WENT ON AN ADVENTURE TO SEE ONE OF MY UNIVERSITY FRIENDS. I don't understand how it has been somewhere in the vicinity of ten years since I last got my act together to see this friend in particular given the part where, you know, we live in the same city, BUT we sorted ourselves out to meet up at King's Cross today and in addition to talking solidly for the entire duration we had FOOD including:

  • Ruby Violet (maxi moo moo with hazelnut crunch & raspberry, rosewater and prosecco on the grass by the canal; hazelnut & hazelnut brittle, salted caramel & almond brittle, hot cross bun, raspberry ripple, and coffee mocha ripple brought home, those last two primarily for A)
  • for lunch I had a funghi ma po tofu from rice guys, and A had a veg biriyani from somewhere I'm not immediately managing to spot on the Canopy Market trader list
  • from Bread Ahead we brought home two doughnuts -- pistachio crème brûlée for me, and something involving honeycomb for A; I think this is quite possibly the first custard doughnut I have ever eaten and actually liked (though were I to buy from them again I'd skip the pistachios)

... and upon meeting up with said friend, they reached into their bag with an "oh before I forget--" and pulled out a jar of jam, which conveniently gave me an excuse to reach into my bag and pull out the jar of jam I'd brought to give them, so I have swapped one blood orange + cardamom for one cherry plum + vanilla, and I've not eaten it yet but I am very excited about doing so.

... also raspberries, gooseberries, redcurrants, jostaberries...

Exploring. We poked around Granary Square a bit to go with Meeting Friends; we came home with lots of stickers (I also got some washi tape from that first one...), a gorgeous bowl (which she was not charging that much for at the market, goodness), and a business card for Creature Crafts by Nat so I could send their details on to Interested Parties.

Growing. ... I spent a whole day at the plot mostly reading Murderbot? (And did also do some weeding, and some harvesting, and some watering, and some general pootling.)

Jul. 13th, 2025 09:36 pm

Holiday

lurkingcat: (Default)
[personal profile] lurkingcat
I'm currently halfway through a very much needed two week holiday and I think I've finally unwound enough from assorted work and family stress to realise how tired I am. We spent last week having a gentle staycation at home.

On Monday we went to Slimbridge Wetlands Centre and ambled around admiring the birds:

PXL_20250707_113852315.MP

PXL_20250707_112016606.MP

There were a truly surprising number of flamingos there:

PXL_20250707_105811800.MP(1)

...and a very odd looking chicken. Not sure what breed that one was:

PXL_20250707_100855010.MP(1)

We pottered out to Weston Super Mare on Wednesday to visit the tiny museum there as they currently have a Paul Kidby Discworld exhibtion. I spent quite a lot of time giggling at the descriptions and I was not the only visitor doing that. The musuem has some exhibition space downstairs and a very nice cafe and the permanent town history exhibits are upstairs. I'm still a little confused about this sign though:

PXL_20250709_103350840.MP

Is a Werechurch a church by day or by night?

Profile

pokestop: the Pokemon Go logo (Default)
PokeStop

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags