nathanjw | Network

I’ve been rewatching Quatermass and the Pit for the last week, which is apparently something I do every few years and then never write anything about. It’s a black and white BBC serial from 1958, to our eyes science fiction horror though a massive leap beyond genre in its own time, and I love it very much. I honestly think it’s perfect. There isn’t anything I’d change except put more women in it and even so at least it does have one brave 1950s lady scientist academic trying her best. Could be worse if not by much.

So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.

There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.

But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. ( creep creep creep - rather than cut tag the most horrifying bit of the serial, I have simply not included it so this is cut for length not horrors )

I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.

rebeccmeister

I am hoping I remember to dig up the Dark Dahlia this weekend. I should also put away the hoses.

When I came into my office on Monday, I encountered a small surprise: not one but TWO of my office plants are flowering!

Most of the plants in my office are still inside glass tanks, to keep any building mice from gnawing them down into stumps again. It would be nice to have just a couple of larger office plants instead of lots of smaller ones, but I have to keep at least some smaller plants on hand in case the reptile plants die. So far, though, the animal care students have done a fantastic job of keeping the reptile plants alive. So I just have an abundance of things.

If you look towards the back you might be able to see the small, white flower at the top of this hedgehog-type cactus:

I'm also pretty pleased with how the string-of-pearls is doing. I got this one from my sister after George tipped over my last one at home and killed it. There's no point in trying to grow another one at home if the cats are going to get too curious about it. The other succulents are also pretty happy, which is also nice to see.

This leafy green-and-white plant was so cute, and it's even cuter now with its little white flowers.

The other office plants all generally seem pretty happy, including the various pothoses (pothosii?), the curry plant, and the sundew. I'd like to repot the sundew soon, but I'm not sure I have the right soil yet for that project and I'm scared to try repotting it just in sand.

rebeccmeister

The picnic basket on the front of my bike is just too tempting to people. I've been lazy about leaving minor objects in it when I lock up to go inside buildings. When I came back outside at 7 am after a strength training session at the gym we use in downtown Albany, someone had cleaned out all the contents, including a plastic bag full of napkins, along with a bottle of chain lube, a bike cable (lock was in use and untouched), a folding seat cushion with my name and number on it, and the custom fabric cover I sewed to go over the basket. Oh, and one bungee cord.

They didn't touch my bike computer (small, old-fashioned one), nor did they mess with the Safety Donut hanging from my saddle, which tells me this thief is more likely to be on the schizophrenic/hoarder side of the equation rather than someone who knows anything about bikes.

All told, not nearly as devastating as when I lost my toolkit earlier this year, and that loss was entirely my own damn fault. It's annoying and will cost some money to replace the basket items, but life will go on.

By now this basket is over 10 years old. In its very first year, it suffered some structural damage, and recently I've been thinking it's probably time to consider a replacement because the damage is reaching a critical point. Since it has been over 10 years since I obtained the last one from the Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, I'm not really sure I should try and request another exact replacement.

But I'm not sure what else I might do instead. It has been a great basket in terms of its large capacity, sitting on top of an ample Surly 24-Pack Rack. The on-bike basket access has also been super convenient - I can open it while riding.

julian

1) My nephew (who is currently thinking thoughts about either being transgender or non-binary) is now 7. Time flies. We had a brief family party today before the incursion of 20 1st and 2nd graders, which I bailed from to go back to work.

My niece, who is 4 3/4, is reading to the extent that she has conversations with my brother about a pluralization on her cereal box without having talked to him/been read to from it before, so that's ... impressive.

2) We have a very nice washing machine (LG, but not "smart") which started throwing errors at us today, and which we then fixed. This involved a minor flood because I didn't put one of the three different filters back the right way, but we set up a fan and a bunch of towels and *that's* fine. So: hey, we fixed a thing! On our own!

3) Apparently people in Somerville are seeing the aurora without artificial enhancements; what we got up here was, basically, a faintly green sky, but it was measurably different and pretty cool.

This is currently erroring at me, but will presumably get better soon: NOAA Aurora predictor.

wondermark_feed

Posted by David Malki !

https://wondermark.com/c/1577/

https://wondermark.com/?post_type=webcomic1&p=18441

[ Comment thread on Discord ]
[ Detail view on Patreon ]

https://wondermark.com/c/1577/

https://wondermark.com/?post_type=webcomic1&p=18441

rebeccmeister

I've tried carrying out a web search to learn more, but I can't seem to find any relevant information. Here's the question:

If a person goes to make a bar chart in a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Sheets, and then goes to put error bars onto the bars, the initial default option for doing so adds some form of "fake" error bar. This is kind of a hassle if a person actually wants a specific type of error bar (e.g. one that represents the standard deviation, standard error, or range), or is trying to teach other people to add meaningful error bars.

Why is the default option the "fake" error bar? How did that get decided upon?

(note that in asking about this I am ignoring the general issues with using bar charts to depict means; that's a separate topic).

renay posting in

ladybusiness

I'm pretty stoked that I finished a series I started the same year I started it. Don't look at the fact it's only two books. It still counts, okay!? ( Read more... )

troisoiseaux

Finished the Chiwetel Ejiofor-narrated audiobook of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and it turns out I had remembered way less of this book than I'd thought?? The parts that had stuck with me were the descriptions of the labyrinthine House and the world within, as the narrator understood it, and more or less the mystery of ( spoilers ahoy. ) Makes a very good audiobook!

Read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a 1962 novella following the titular Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a political prisoner, through one day of life in a Stalin-era gulag. (Solzhenitsyn himself was a prisoner from 1945 to 1953.) A short but slow read, dense with small, compelling details.

Currently reading The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton, a 1925 novel about the return of a prodigal mother to New York and her now-adult daughter after pulling a reverse Ellen Olenska (leaving her husband and moving to Europe) almost two decades earlier. It's interesting how much WWI looms over this book, so far, especially because I associate Wharton so much more with the Gilded Age than the 1920s, which is when most of her novels were actually published.

Have just started Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream, a memoir about joining a strict Carmelite order of contemplative (read: silent) nuns in the north of England as a recently bereaved twenty-something in 1989 and - per the opening scene - literally fleeing into the night to escape it twelve years later.

rebeccmeister

For some reason or another I woke up at 3 am last night thinking about the pool table in my grandpa's barn.

Here's a photo of it, from one of the last times I ever set foot in the barn:

Grandpa's barn was known as the Chicken House, because that was its primary function. But at some point, well after the egg production operation had ended, part of the upstairs got converted to living quarters.

Here's the kitchen region:

There was originally a wood-fired oven and stove in this section, in the non-carpeted region:

As kids we loved getting to sleep out in the Chicken House when we went out to visit Grandpa. We would make up all sorts of games to play with the pool balls and pool table (rarely actual games of pool!), which would be fun up to the point where someone's finger would wind up getting knocked in between two pool balls as they were flung around. Then there would be some tears and probably some cursing, and we'd move on to some other project, like a game of hide-and-seek. Lots of great hiding places in the Chicken House.

But I'm not sure I know the whole story of how the pool table wound up upstairs in the Chicken House. Did it show up after the living quarters, or before?

There was so much Stuff in that barn.

But it was a beautiful building, made of timber like you can't ever get anymore.

rebeccmeister

The first time I think I really became aware of the challenges of "stuff management" was back in high school, when a documentary called Affluenza highlighted how a lot of Americans wind up getting trapped in a cycle of materialism and overconsumption. That, plus many moves, make me occasionally mutter to myself, "Stuff: Do I own it or does it own me?"

Anyway.

Since my intention this winter is to do a blend of exercising on my own and exercising with the rowing team, I will be spending more time out on the front porch on the rowing machine and BikeErg. Both implements were facing towards a large pile of cardboard boxes and packing supplies, and I have to tell you I really wasn't excited about the thought of staring at all of that stuff every time I went to do a workout.

It was kind of the equivalent of that point in Arizona where all of the stockpiled tupperwares in the cupboard avalanched out onto my head one day: enough is enough! Do we need 4,000 yogurt tubs? No, we do not!

So I sorted out a subset of the boxes and padding to keep on hand for occasions where we want to send out packages, and then broke down the remaining boxes and aggregated the packing material together.

The stockpile had grown so large that I quickly filled up the garbage can and recycling bin.

Here are the remaining items waiting to be thrown away / recycled over the upcoming weeks:

It might take about a month altogether to cycle all of this out.

The three bags in the front of this photo are from a separate stuff management project. More on that in a moment.

That and a game of Scrabble and some laundry were my Sunday morning.

There was rain in the forecast for the afternoon. Originally I'd been thinking I would bike back down to the boatyard for the afternoon, toting Big Mama (big bike trailer), to finish the project of disassembling the kayak rack and to bring home it, its remaining contents, and all of the club's electronics with batteries that need to stay in relatively stable temperatures over the winter.

But rain and carryover exhaustion from taking out the docks on Saturday were a bridge too far. So I drove down instead.

Disassembling the kayak rack wound up being more challenging than I'd hoped. The star-bit screws were really IN the wood, so I stripped a couple of bits again (argh). But I eventually got the whole thing mostly disassembled so it should now be easier to transport the wood home.

I did manage to get S's windsurf board, my single shell cartop rack, and another pair of oars all onto Big Red's roof rack, so those items are now all at home.

Then I worked some more on the neverending boathouse and boatyard tidying for a while.

Here's the main space where a lot of stuff accumulates at the boathouse:

Right now the space is really cleared out; the bags in the first photo in this post are full of the abandoned clothing and water bottles I picked up. I will launder all the clothing and will then probably just go ahead and donate useable items to a clothing donation bin.

I threw away several bottles of partially-used sunscreen, figuring no one would want to touch them next spring (cooties!). I brought home five (5!) other new or almost-new bottles of sunscreen. I'll put most of them back out again in the spring, in the hopes that their presence will deter people from buying and leaving even more sunscreen bottles next year.

I think I can now basically walk away from most of the boathouse projects for a while. There are two tow dollies in need of bearing replacements, but the safety launches won't be going out again anytime soon.

Just about the only thing I might go back for are more dock-related tasks. Here are some of the dock pieces that were pulled out and stacked for winter:

At least 5 pieces were seriously compromised and need to be swapped out because they filled with water - those are what the orange X's are for. But technically the actual swapping can wait until spring.

The project that can't wait is bringing in what we call our "bubble dock," which is the temporary dock on the far right of this photo:

Disassembling it involves use of a specialized tool, but when we searched high and low for the tool on Saturday we couldn't find it anywhere. There's a good chance someone tossed it during one of the boathouse cleanup days. Ugh. So a new one needs to be ordered to ensure we can get the dock out so the winter freezes and ice don't destroy the bubble dock further.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty owned by all the stuff right now, that much is certain.

troisoiseaux

Saw Arena Stage's revival of Damn Yankees, which updates the 1955 musical about a middle-aged baseball fanatic's deal with the devil - his soul for the chance to lead his beloved ~~Washington Senators~~ Baltimore Orioles to victory over the unbeatable New York Yankees, as a younger man of supernatural talent - to 2000, and adds a layer to main character Joe's backstory via a minor league baseball-playing father who was unable to pursue a major league career due to racial discrimination ("Back then, they didn't let you play unless you were Willie Mays"). Fantastic show! The actor who played young Joe, Jordan Donica, has the most incredible voice— now, I feel like this statement is likely to be interpreted as "he has a really good voice" and, no, I must emphasize it is a genuinely, gobsmackingly incredible voice, like, the kind of voice you feel in your chest when he's singing. Pause, watch this video, and come back. ANYWAY. Outside of Jordan Donica's singing, the highlight of the show was Rob McClure as the devilish Applegate, which he plays with a slimy charisma - half salesman, half stage magician, all gleeful malice - and all of the show's funniest lines (a crack about Florida being worse than hell and the exchange "You've got lawyers?" "Millions of 'em, and more every day" got particularly loud laughs from the DC audience)/moments, including (what is revealed to be) a mid-show appearance as the Orioles' mascot to lead the audience in a sing-along of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

This was staged in the round, with a surprisingly small stage space but creative use of, e.g., aisles and trap doors; I don't think a Broadway transfer has been confirmed yet, but it's definitely aiming for one, and I'd love to see what it does with more room for the spectacle of it all. As it is, this had great lighting/sound design and staging— in particular, the use of lighting to facilitate the slight-of-hand swaps between old and young Joe, and between immortal temptress-for-hire Lola* and the aged crone she would have been a few hundred years ago, when Applegate reminds her of the deal she'd made with him to ensure her help in sabotaging Joe's; fun use of video projection (on a low "wall" fencing in the stage) when Applegate first appears to tempt Joe, by popping up on Joe's TV to continue the pitch after his initial confused dismissal. I would describe it as a dance-heavy musical (although, to air opposing views, my friend D. felt that it wasn't especially dance-heavy for a Golden Age musical), with particularly acrobatic dance numbers for the ensemble cast playing the baseball team; those guys were leaping and backflipping all over the place.

* Speaking of the show's updates, per skimming Wikipedia and some other reviews, it looks like this production toned down the character's faux-exoticness and gave her a more developed/sympathetic backstory; the other big plot change was that Applegate's scheme to sabotage Joe was to frame him for doping. Another nice modern touch was that the staging of the opening number about how baseball-fanatic spouses are distracted by the game "Six Months Out Of Every Year" included both a gay couple and a straight one where the wife, rather than the husband, was the die-hard fan glued to the TV.

oglaf_comic_feed

https://www.oglaf.com/rut/

rebeccmeister

I will begin by remarking that today is the sort of day where I feel like I should once again be sitting in my chair, wearing a bathrobe, with a drink in one hand and a fistful of money in the other.

The last occasion where this happened was in 2010 or so. That was the final year that the Arizona Outlaws held an erg marathon. We had connected with a CrossFit rower in the Tucson area who volunteered her Crossfit gym as a host site. It was a super-tough marathon for my teammate KM; just getting to the finish line took a lot out of her.

Because we had to drive down from Tempe, and we knew how exhausting erg marathons are, we had convinced

scrottie to join us and drive us home after the erg marathon. It was a really good thing we did. K and I were both so tired that when we stopped halfway to home at a place for some fries and milkshakes, we couldn't even finish our food.

When I finally did get home, that shower felt so great, but I didn't have the energy to get dressed again. Hence, sitting in a chair in a bathrobe. It was some time after that that someone handed me a drink, and someone else handed me some money (because they owed me money for something or another).

It felt pretty good, sitting there. I definitely did not want to get back up again anytime soon. If you have completed an erg marathon, you can make a pretty good case for holding still after that.

And yeah, today feels a bit like that. We took out the club's docks for the winter, and while things did go as smoothly as they ever go, it was still a very long and exhausting day, because I had to lead the whole undertaking.

spikedluv posting in

smallfandom_nb

Our Thirty-Eighth Fest at

smallfandomfest is now open for prompt submission!

We don’t think we’re the only ones excited at the prospect of getting a bunch of new fanfic and fanart in our favorite small fandoms. By now you know what we need you to do to make that happen: you have to submit loads of prompts to entice others to write fic or create art (including graphics, fanvids, and fanmixes)! And if you know anyone else who loves small fandoms, please point them in our direction.

We’ll be accepting prompts through November 21st. For more information or to submit a prompt, check out the Prompt Submission Post, and then follow the link to the prompt submission form.

Prompts will be available for claiming on November 23rd.

And if you’d like to sign up to pimp out your favorite small fandom, check out the Pimp Your Small Fandom!!! Post and comment there.

We’d love to have you come play in our small fandom sandbox!

wondermark_feed

Posted by David Malki !

https://wondermark.com/i-made-this-video-about-a-puppet-that-i-also-made/

https://wondermark.com/?p=18435

Watch on YouTube

Here is a video of me making a puppet! And then performing a little with that puppet!

Some of you may recognize this technique as a callback to another series of puppet videos I made, some years ago. (As demonstrated here)

It’s been a fun idea to revisit, and I plan to do it some more.

This is, of course, related to my Wondermark-themed card game, Bolted!

Which now has final box art:

If you were part of the game’s launch campaign back in the spring, you may have noticed I just posted a detailed backer update about the final printing and shipping schedule.

You can read it if you want LOTS OF DETAILS about the current status & progress of the game! But in summary:

I’m sending off the final artwork to the printer VERY SHORTLY
The games will be printed in December/January
I expect to receive my copies in February/March!

The time it will take to approve the artwork proofs & samples also allows for a perfect li’l window for me to REOPEN PREORDERS.

So if you missed it the first time around, you will now have a BONUS CHANCE to reserve yourself a copy:

Bolted! is coming to Kickstarter!

My (silly but ambitious) goal in this prelaunch period is to gather the same number of “followers” on the prelaunch page, as we had total backers in the original campaign (436). That seems doable, right??

The plan is to launch mid-next week! That’s pretty soon!!

I’m assuming at least some of you reading this are OG Boltheads who jumped on the train early and have been patiently waiting for me to wrap it all up. I’m super grateful for your initial support!

And now that the manufacturing part of it all is in motion, I’m super pleased that the timing will allow for another chance to get it in front of folks for pre-orders.

Since I’m only likely to print this game once, I want to make sure anyone who’s interested will have a chance to grab a copy. So I’ll be talking much more about this in the days to come!!

https://wondermark.com/i-made-this-video-about-a-puppet-that-i-also-made/

https://wondermark.com/?p=18435

rivkat

Kelli Storm, Desolate: Mia is a witch in a world concealed from but intertwined with mundanes; her ADHD makes her powers unpredictable. When things are going badly for her at high school, she accidentally sends herself back in time, which creates further problems both magical and romantic. This was too YA-ish for me, but I think it could work for an actual teenager who would empathize more with the emotional stakes.

Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You: A memoir-ish thing about surviving covid with a brain injury, dealing with a husband’s illness, and trying to write a TV show based on her previous book Priestdaddy. It conveys the hallucinatory disjointedness of brain fog, but for that reason was mostly inaccessible to me.

KJ Charles, All of Us Murderers: In 1905, the reclusive heir to the family fortune calls his potential heirs to him, offering everything to whoever marries his young ward. One of the heirs has ADHD and thus has found it difficult to keep a job, especially after being discovered in flagrante with his lover—who turns out to be the heir’s personal secretary. Everyone else in the family is a nasty piece of work, and then strange things start happening in the gothic pile in which they are trapped by mists. It’s fast-moving and very (gayly) gothic.

Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association: After her five-year-old daughter is attacked and turned into a werewolf—a severe breach of werewolf law—the protagonist, her daughter, and her husband move to a tony Connecticut suburb full of magical creatures, where her daughter may be able to get an education among people who understand her. But the new school is full of traps—high-stakes testing, Mean Girl moms, financial shenanigans, and a pesky prophecy that might involve her baby girl. I liked the fact that the issues were driven not so much by magic but by people trying to game the system (as rich Connecticut denizens are known to do).

T. Kingfisher, What Stalks the Deep: Another short Alex Easton novel, this time set in America, where a strange sighting in an abandoned mine heralds something very creepy indeed. Avoid if “gelatinous” is a no-no for you.

Deborah Tomkins, Aerth: Novella about an underpopulated, cooling world that discovers Urth, on the other side of the sun, which has similar languages and human beings but is hot and overpopulated. The noninterventionist, consensus-based culture of Aerth seems healthier than the headlong rush to authoritarianism of Urth, but that doesn’t stop its inhabitants from feeling choked by their obligations, and there might be a few secrets in its past too, though Tomkins isn’t very interested in that except as background. It wasn’t for me.

The End of the World As We Know It, ed. Christopher Golden & Brian Keene: A collection of stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand. (They all seem to have agreed to go with the date of 1992 for the plague instead of the initial 1982; there are therefore fewer anomalies/more actual engagement with the world in 1992 than in the revised version of The Stand, though I did note a character who was not online using “FAQ,” for an anachronism in the other direction.) Most of the stories are set during the collapse and therefore don’t add a lot, and more of the stories than I’d hoped are set in the US. There’s one story set in Pakistan that is quite interesting—this is all Christian nonsense to them—and one UK story that really gets the vibe right.

Naomi Novik, The Summer War: Novella about a girl—daughter of an ambitious lord—who accidentally curses her brother when he leaves her behind after renouncing his family because of his father’s homophobia. In her attempt to fix the curse, she allies with her remaining brother and tries to navigate a political marriage, but otherworld politics complicate matters. It’s a pleasant variation on Novik’s core themes: Epic people can be very hard to live with; power must be used to serve others or it is bad; loving other people is the only thing that can save us.

T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver: A king seeks out an expert on poisons to treat his daughter, Snow, who is mourning the deaths of her mother and sister Rose and keeps getting sicker. There are apples and mirrors and magic in the desert, as well as a little romance among the very practical people. It’s nice that the healer was a scientist even dealing with magic, and the imagery is genuinely creepy at times.

Melissa Caruso, The Defiant Heir: Second in a trilogy. Amalia, heir to an Italianate ruling family, continues to fight against the planned invasion of her empire by the neighboring mages. I could wish for a bit more Brandon Sanderson-style working out of the magic system, but it was still a fun read.

Freya Marske, Sword Crossed: Luca, a con man on the run, becomes the sword tutor of Matti, heir to a noble house. (This is romantasy without magic—just nonheterosexist family structures and different gods than were historically in place.) Their connection is problematic because Matti needs to get married to save his house, and he hired/blackmailed Luca into being his “second” in the expected challenge by a disappointed suitor. So falling in love with Luca is really inconvenient. Marske’s best work is handling the arranged marriage—they like each other fine and Matti’s intended has rejected the suitor who won’t take no for an answer. But I wanted magic! If you are fine without it, then this is probably more enjoyable.

Will Greatwich, House of the Rain King: Really interesting, unusual single-volume fantasy. In the valley, when the Rain King returns, the water rises until a princess comes from the birds to marry him (and die), and then they recede. A priest, an indentured servant, and a company of foreign mercenaries all get caught up in the struggle to make the Rain King’s wedding happen. There are also undead guarding treasure as well as fairies and marsh-men, who have their own roles to play.

Nghi Vo, The City in Glass: Short novel about a demon whose city is destroyed by angels; her parting curse sticks with one angel, who keeps hanging around as she slowly decides whether and how to build/love again. Dreamy and evocative.

rebeccmeister

One of my teammates made baclava! And I happened to be wearing my baclava balaclava. Clearly, I was pleased.

schneefink

I found out I have iron-deficiency anemia (again.) Looking at the list of possible symptoms explains a lot about my last few weeks: I thought it was stress at first and then started to get concerned after the exam. Mostly it's reassuring because it's treatable with simple iron tablets, but a little frustrating too because it'll take a while and I would like to be cured immediately, thank you, I'm getting really sick of being so tired and struggling to focus.
And I'm feeling a bit extra whiny today because I got vaccinated and my arm hurts.

The MCSR Midoffs s2 have started and are live right now: the first match was already absolute cinema, so many plot twists in one match. I watched the first two and I definitely want to watch Cub play later, but I took a break to play more Silksong (and other stuff.) I'm practicing the final boss rn a few attempts at a time, very cool fight.

Tomorrow season 11 of Hermitcraft starts! I'm excited. Can't wait to find out what new gimmick they've come up with, who bases with who (fingers crossed for a few neighbors I'm hoping for - mostly Buttercups tbh), all their plans...
(come to think of it, didn't Joe want to post more s10 videos at some point? ^^)
Side effect, this is not going to help my "too many things and never enough time" problem at all.

I finally managed to read a book that's been on my to-read list for a long time: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
( Thoughts with spoilers )
Another book in the category of "if I hadn't had high expectations because I saw so many recs I wouldn't have felt disappointed." I still enjoyed it overall.

rebeccmeister

Pain 1: A sinus headache that started Thursday morning. I took allergy drugs for it last night, and it felt like the headache was on the verge of breaking by around 2 am. But it is now refusing to completely break. I'll probably resort to some painkillers again soon. I just don't like to do that if I don't have to.

Pain 2: Weird shoulder tension, somewhat exacerbated by today's strength training session. Just feels like it's going to take time for that to resolve. Plus maybe a hot bath once I can go home.

Pain 3: I finally confronted a student about the appearance of an overly-involved for{} loop in their statistical code; I definitely don't teach Biology students about how to write loops, that's a programming project not a statistical project. And yes, the rat I smelled was ChatGPT, ugh. The student couldn't explain what that piece of code did, at all. So why is it there, and how do you know whether it has been structured correctly? A colleague commented that the most common topic for faculty to complain about these days is rampant use of AI, so I guess I'm in that category.

After that, in class I made my students watch a short social media post about why they shouldn't try to just use AI tools to read and summarize scientific papers for them, for another part of their coursework. I still refuse to be a police force; it's their brain, their life. BUT - don't waste MY time with that garbage.

But things did make me curious about the cause of that big AWS outage the other week, the one that knocked out our LMS on a rather crucial day. It appears to have been a DNS management system issue. I think that's worth highlighting because I'm not convinced bug-catching could ever be entirely automated, and if bug-catching cannot ever be entirely automated, well, SOMEONE has to know how these complex systems work. Are those Someones some of the 14,000 middle-management people that the Brazilian Jungle River company is just now laying off? I can't say I know.

I also have a pain because I accidentally clicked on something that showed publicly-accessible student reviews of instructors, and there are some terrible Yelp reviews in there. By now I should really know better than to give those things air time. But the counterpoint is that I DO want to keep educating people using best practices, and I'm constantly filled with self-doubt about whether or not that's what I'm actually doing.

And so, back to Pain 1.