Daily Finds 2023

13-11-2024

One thing I'm learning from reading books in Russian is that Russian apparently has a lot of words for curtains. So far I've seen шторы, занавески, портьера, тюль... so many curtains!

I tried to play Mass Effect Andromeda recently but gave up on it what seems to be about halfway through the main story. The story just seemed... stupid. Anyway, because of that and Veilguard releasing, I was reading some articles about the troubled development of Andromeda and Anthem. Here they are if you would also find that interesting.

Former Dragon Age lead writer claims BioWare 'quietly resented' its writers (PCGamer.com link)

The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development (Kotaku link)

How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong (Kotaku link)

The story of weak leadership (as opposed to "Casey Hudson’s Mass Effect team as the Enterprise from Star Trek: They all did what the captain said, and they were all laser-focused on a single destination" - sounds cool!), meetings where no decisions are ever made, people leaving and not being replaced... is probably one a lot of people can relate to.

03-11-2024

Here comes the end of the year! Will I manage to make a 2025 page? Who knows!

Game of the day: Unforeseen Incidents (GOG link).

Unforeseen Incidents is a classical style interactive mystery set in a beautifully hand-painted world. When small-town handyman Harper Pendrell meets a dying woman in the street, he unwittingly stumbles into a diabolical conspiracy – a mystery only he can solve. An unknown disease is spreading across the country, and between them a scientist, a reporter and a reclusive artist hold the key to stopping it. A perilous journey awaits, and every step brings Harper closer to a cabal of dangerous fanatics. Before he knows it, he finds himself in a fight for the future of humankind armed only with his trusty multi-tool.

It's very cheap on mobile but well worth the price on PC if you like point-and-clicks! The music and voice acting are great and the puzzles mostly hit the just-right level of difficulty/sanity.

In other news, I did some more Russian reading. Roadside Picnic has a reference to speaking по-тарабарски, in Tarabarski. It's a bit hard to find English pages about this but this Russia Beyond page describes tarabarskaya gramota at the end:

The phrase “tarabarskaya gramota” - denoting something unintelligible, encoded, incomprehensible without a key to the code - already existed in the Russian language. According to the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedic dictionary of 1914, “tarabarskaya gramota” was used for a simple or letter-based code. It was a system of encryption borrowed from Byzantium and known to the Slavs as early as the 13th century.

I found a reference in a different book to "sitting Turkish-style", which turns out to be one way to refer to sitting cross-legged. Several people on this Reddit thread chime in with what it's called in their country. Since I always just called it "sitting cross-legged", it's interesting to see the various people/occupations that that sit is associated with.

I finished the sequel to Ключ от Королевства, Слово Оберона, which felt pretty good since I haven't done any Russian reading for ages! I thought I would have forgotten everything but it came back quickly. My Godot engine change was released in 4.3 (old news by now) and I'd like to do more at some point. That's about it for now!

24-06-2024

Book of the day: Two Years Before the Mast (Henry Dana 1840) (Gutenberg link). Educated guy signs up for a two-year merchant ship voyage around Cape Horn to California to buy hides. There are lots of technical sailing details in here but you can skim over them. The interesting stuff is the men he sails with, including a good number of men from the 'Sandwich Islands' which I had no idea is what the Hawaiian Islands used to be called; the daily life of the sailors and the things they see along their journey; the historical detail of just how empty and undeveloped parts of America were then and, in the afterword, how rapidly those places developed and how rapidly the hide-trade and that whole way of life ended; and various random things like the astonishing amount of cattle the sailors eat and the fact that none of them seem to have a clue what causes scurvy so they resort to eating raw potatoes and onions to cure it.

The history of scurvy on Wikipedia makes this even more baffling since you can see people had some idea since the 1500s that citrus could be a cure, but in the 1700s physicians go back to saying citrus has nothing to do with it. So humanity goes back and forth on this for HUNDREDS OF YEARS, sometimes saying that scurvy is caused by bad hygiene and laziness or bad digestion or too much work, sometimes discovering random foods that seem to cure it, sometimes finding that citrus does nothing (because they've cooked it and destroyed the vitamin C). Dana doesn't mention citrus at all and says it is attributed to "salt provisions, want of cleanliness, the free use of grease and fat (which is the reason of its prevalence among whalemen,) and, last of all, to laziness". TBF if you've been to the doctor for any unexplained illness recently you've probably heard a similar list...

YouTube of the day: Naoki Saito (YT link). Japanese illustrator fixes people's anime drawings and gives advice. He's very kind about the submitted artwork and emphasises the good points of it. It's all anime so might not be to your taste, but it's still pretty fascinating to see him only slightly change things and somehow come out with an entirely professional-looking image at the end. Try correction 57 or correction 153 for a starting point.

10-05-2024

Here's a really funny paper from Game AI Pro:

What You See Is Not What You Get: Player Perception of AI Opponents (PDF)

The aim was to understand how players actually view game AIs - what kind of opponents do they have fun playing against, and what do they see as intelligent AI behaviour? They built various AI strategies for a turn-based game (some actually attempting to use some kind of tactic, and others with 'dumb' behaviour like always targeting the enemy with the longest name) and asked players to explain the AI's strategies and rank them on enjoyment, difficulty and realism.

The outcome is that players are, well, pretty 'dumb' themselves! A completely random AI was rated just as fun as several with 'smart' behaviour and 83% of players were unable to tell that it acted randomly; almost all of the AIs including stupid ones like longest name and alphabetical were completely opaque to players; and players regularly accused AIs of cheating - except for the ones that actually did cheat. In the end, players preferred coming up with odd backstories and personal motivations for the AIs, like that the AI's family was killed by dragons and that's why they target dragons first. The rather bewildered conclusion is really funny and highlights a big gap between game designers and game players which I think is actually quite generally apparent throughout game AI papers. I read some about old games that I had played, and my main thoughts were simply "I never noticed any of that!"

Highly recommend checking out the other papers on the site as many are very interesting.

I can't even remember if I wrote about the cancelled Black and White DS game on here, but I've been interested in it for a while because I liked the really low-poly Creature I saw on a preview image of it. Recently I found this footage of an early build of the game (YouTube link) and these images on Unseen64. The graphics in the video are kind of eerie, honestly. I really hate that 'good spirit' tiger guy - why does he sometimes have so many teeth!? I think they might also have been having some design issues with the creatures being tall, hence why they're in an odd squat most of the time...

02-04-2024

SPIDER OF THE DAY (because we found one in the garden): the woodlouse hunter!


Image from britishspiders.org.uk. Please check out that link for more cool images and info!

They hunt for invertebrates (they don't use webs to catch prey) and they have powerful jaws to tackle woodlouse armour. They can also give you a good bite! It was easy to identify because of the dark shiny brown front, pale bean-like abdomen, and big ol' fangs. There are lots of woodlice in our garden so it must be eating well.

COOL THING OF THE DAY: mammoth bone dwellings (reconstructions - images from Wikipedia)

I don't know much about these beyond the fact that they look cool. You can read some info about them on the Wiki pages for Mezhyrich and Mezine.

20-03-2024

Coincidentally (not actually coincidentally - the algorithm is always listening) I got a tiktok about concept art for Jodorowsky's Dune. It looks familiar from the previous post, right?

The artist Jean Giraud is another Metal Hurlant artist.

Here's all the concept art.

(I actually don't like Dune at all. I've read the book, I've tried the films, I know it inspired things that I do like - but I still find the whole thing excruciatingly stupid and boring. Especially the villains Harkonnen and De Vries, who feel like they were designed by a particularly paranoid mumsnet user. I know I'm supposed to like Dune! I just can't!)

Onto other artists: I was reading about the art of Day of the Tentacle and read that it was inspired by the art of Maurice Noble. Here are two pages about Maurice Noble. who was scouted into Disney, left after striking, made war propaganda cartoons with Dr Seuss (who apparently wasn't a very funny man), and did all sorts of other animation work.

Maurice Noble: Animation's "Old Rebel" (Animation World Magazine 1998)

An Interview with Maurice Noble (1991) (harrymccracken.com)

I like following trails of influence back but the buck stops with Noble, as far as he's concerned:

Somebody asked me, "Who is your favorite artist?" and I said Leonardo da Vinci. They were kind of aghast. But when you think about it, here is a man who was inventive, who could draw, who had a sense of color and drama and composition. He was really ahead of his time in terms of so many things.

I can't say that any particular artist directly influenced me. You take in a lot of material, and then your subconscious takes over. I really do believe that that the designers and people who have worked with animation have created their own genre of art. I'm not trying to take any credit, but I really think we were innovators. We were designing in terms of length. All these other designers and painters were designing a composition in terms of a static viewpoint, and we were teasing the eye with the way the color and the actions and the accents happened in a continuity on the screen, so in the end we got a total composition. This is something that had never been done in the graphic world before.

It's pretty incredible thinking about teams of artists making laborious watercolour backgrounds for Disney animations back then. As he says, watercolours couldn't exactly be easily changed after review!

It's kind of funny that he didn't like newer cartoons, as they were too fast and violent, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (which I never liked myself):

I can't warm up to these [new characters]: smash, bang, pose, blink-of-the-eyes, then zip off and crash offscreen, and shake everything, then you pick up on them and they're crosseyed and stars are whizzing around their head. This type of thing is the cheapest approach. We've had a couple of generations of children that were raised on cruelty and violence. These kids sit and look at it for four hours a day.

You wonder what kind of responses they're developing. I really wonder; I really worry. But when they talk about what they really like - these are the kids that watch all the shoot-up live-action and cartoons - it's Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Mickey Mouse and these gentle things. I think we created some classics, kind of like Aesop's fables.

I think Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a very cruel picture. And it's an unkind picture. There's nothing funny about laughing at a half-wit.

...

My neighbor moved just before Thanksgiving, and I went up to say goodbye. He introduced me to the young moving man, saying I had worked on Snow White and all these various things. The guy was duly impressed, and then he turned to me and said, "Did you work on Roger Rabbit?" Really, almost hostile. I said, "No, I didn't." He said, "I took my little girl to that, and it was a cruel picture."

Coming back to DOTT, two things I thought were particularly interesting from what the lead background artist (Peter Chan) said:

15-03-2024

I was watching this playthrough of a weird old adventure game, Ring:

Ring: A Mind Melting Adventure Game (MandaloreGaming on YouTube)

In the comments someone points out that it has a very Morrowind vibe, which is true. I can't find any official interview or reference to this but it does seem likely that Morrowind's art was inspired in part by this artist, Philippe Druillet, and the comics anthology Metal Hurlant (published as Heavy Metal in the US). Of course Kirkbride himself is a great weird artist; I can't find anywhere he talks about his art inspirations. It's possible he and Druillet are both pulling from something older too.

You can see the similar long-faced character designs in Ring and Morrowind, and also as several people have pointed out on Reddit, Daedric architecture and armour.

The Ring graphics remind me of this pre-release screenshot which I saw in a magazine before Morrowind came out.

Druillet also illustrated some Elric stuff, which you can see in these videos:

ELRIC The Eternal Champion Collection (jimiChaos13 on YouTube)

panellogy 380 - druillet #10 - elric - the return to melnibone (earl grey on YouTube)

Internet Archive does have some copies of Heavy Metal and Metal Hurlant. They're a bit hard to find because the phrase "heavy metal" relates to so many things, but this looks like the best search. Obviously, expect lots of gore, nudity, sex, violence etc... I know there are lots of kids on neocities so be responsible with your clicking, kiddos...

Internet Archive Magazine Rack - Heavy Metal

13-03-2024

I like this page about unused assets in Monkey Island:

The Secrets of Monkey Island’s Source Code (Video Game History Foundation, 2020)

I already knew about the unused cutscenes in MI2 but I didn't know about the various drafts and test stuff in MI1. There's always something spooky about the idea that media could have been different, especially media from your childhood that seems like it's just part of the fabric of reality and couldn't have been any other way. It's also interesting that MI1 went through several iterations with a completely different story and main character, whereas MI2 seems to have been a straight shot from the outset.

By the way, did you know that Monkey Island was originally around $50, which would be about £95 today? You'd have a tough time charging that for a game today! It took 9 months to produce.

In other news, my first Godot PR was accepted and is currently in dev build 4.3 dev 4. It's a simple fix/change to object picking in 2D but I think it will be useful to a lot of people. Here's the bug report with linked fix.

I also made a crummy little game to demonstrate it but I'll post that separately at some point.

26-02-2024

Long time no update. I'm going to use this page for now until I can be bothered to sort out a 2024 one.

Here's an interesting post about cooking rice in Iraq. The second post has an extract from Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's Guests of the Sheikh which you will probably want to read first, and the parent post gives some more context. That sounds like some tasty rice.

Reddit comment on AskCulinary

I got this furikake the other day and I've been absolutely scoffing it:

I got some other types too but this one is so good I haven't moved on from it yet. Highly recommend. I do have a roe one which I'm excited to try though. I also got some kombu to make dashi at home; we already use katsuobushi but there must be a reason to get the kombu involved, right? Will the taste difference be worth it? Let's find out...

22-12-2023

Book of the day: Upsidonia by Archibald Marshall (1915). John Howard finds himself mysteriously transported to a land where the nobility wear rags, servants run the household, and the rich riot to be allowed to make their own beds. A humorous satirical book with a grand total of five (5) Goodreads ratings. Give it a look, it's fun.

Website of the day: toynbeeidea.com. Some guy goes around embedding tiles into the road with a nonsensical message about resurrecting the dead. The method of doing so is quite interesting. Google Toynbee Tiles for more.

12-10-2023

Check out the cool gold cocoon cage of this Urodidae moth (photo from Rainforest Expeditions):

Here's an interesting situation, an ant trying to oviposit into the cocoon of a wasp which parasitised a Urodidae caterpillar (more photos and info on Waspweb):

And for my final bug, here is a beautiful rosy woodlouse from eakringbirds:

corrie beth makes on youtube/tiktok makes awesome paper plants including begonias, pitchers and oxalis (make sure to look at shorts on youtube as well as videos):

And Diana Beltran Herrera makes all kinds of amazing paper sculptures including birds, food and bugs:

I can't get a link to this because it's on tiktok, but Theresa Kadish has a video talking about a paper called Queer Theory for Lichens. The paper is about how lichens are communities rather than organisms and how this relates to human ideas of sexuality and existence. You can find it by searching Theresa Kadish lichens.

28-09-2023

Howards End has this sentence near the beginning:

Why did we settle that their house would be all gables and wiggles, and their garden all gamboge-coloured paths?

Windsor and Newton give a history of the poisonous gamboge pigment here: Spotlight on Gamboge

Gamboge yellow, also known as rattan or wisteria yellow, gummi gutta and drop gum, is an organic pigment. Well known for its transparency, the warm golden pigment derives its name from its country of origin – Cambodia, itself named after the Latin word for pigment, gambogium.

Howards End also has the word backfisch, meaning a teenage girl but literally meaning a baked fish. I will now be looking out for any opportunity to call regressive YA novels Backfischromane.

The Backfischroman is usually told from a first-person perspective, with the main character being an adolescent girl of middle or higher class upbringing. She tends to be an open and friendly person, who pursues her own interests independently of society's norms and later after a learning process makes her own free decision to accept the role for a woman as wife and mother.

18-07-2023

Still on the game guide topic, I saw this book which is a completely fictional game guide: Vermis I by Plastiboo

The setting and writing doesn't really grab me (probably because I didn't play anything like this as a kid so it doesn't have a nostalgia factor for me) but it's such a cool idea!

Also, if I'm being nitpicky, it has a lot of run-on sentences in the preview images...

16-07-2023

I've been replaying Ocarina of Time using Ship of Harkinian. It made me re-evaluate how far I'd gotten in this game as a kid, because I barely remember any of it! (I preferred Banjo-Tooie, to be honest...) The game is extremely cryptic to the point where you pretty much need a guide, unless you enjoy wandering around for hours on end because you didn't realise a very slightly differently coloured wall could be bombed to open a passage. I saw things on Reddit like people completing the Water Temple without the blue tunic because they didn't know that even existed.

Anyway, I enjoyed looking at some old guides and here they are.

Guide and Walkthrough (N64) by Jr_Pikachu (GameFAQS) - GameFAQs was awesome at the time. My sister used to ring me from uni and make me read out game guides to her because many places didn't have internet back then. I would have no idea what I was reading out because I only got to play the game after her, but it was fun to imagine. The guides were often super wordy with lots of personality and sick ASCII art. They were very much like having a big brother explain the game to you. This guide is all the way from 1999 and is charming with its silly comments like "When you get here, go look at the horses. Do you see them? Do you see them? Good. Because you can't have one for a while yet." and "Is it just me, or is the only Zora male King Zora? The rest of them have...well, you know....chests."

Nintendo Player's Guide (Internet Archive) - look at that cute little doodle of Link on the first page! As Miyamoto's message says, this guide tries to hint at solutions so players still have to discover things. It's written in third person like a story.

Ocarina of Time Versus Strategy Guide (Internet Archive) - goddamn, look how busy this thing is! I already blathered in the Cat Hair Mustache post about how much I liked reading guides and manuals but this one would have kept me busy for hours as a kid. There are so many screenshots that flipping through it is like looking through a scrapbook of Link's adventure. Again there are lots of funny comments in here like saying the fairies have lunatic eyes.

One last thing, did you know N64 games were about £50 back then? I still have the Banjo Tooie box from 2000 with that price on it. That would be £90.33 today. So although people complain about new releases costing £60, games have still gotten cheaper for way more content.

28-06-2023

GimmeCat on Creatures Discord shared this link to a gallery of Creatures 4/Creatures Online artwork. The game was never completed.

Creatures Online / Creatures 4 Gallery on ArtStation

I'm not a fan of the super-satured cartoony style, but it makes sense given the target audience would have been chidren on mobile devices (and it wasn't the artist's decision so no shade to him). Creatures 1 and 2 had soft comforting earthy tones and a lot of misty backgrounds and underground areas, giving the impression of a much larger space. In comparison these areas feel claustrophobic and over-busy. (Creatures 3 had some of the same problem - on a spaceship you lose the ability to have that background depth and everything visually flattens to one plane.) You can also see they were planning for typical mobile game mechanics like multiple currencies, energy, unlocks etc. I don't think I would have played this game. I do really like the look of the Master Shee though!

I'm still keeping an eye on Steve Grand's Grandroids virtual life game. Not much activity goes on on the website - Steve works with his head down - but a funny thing he's posted recently is that the only useful thing he's 3D printed is an egg cup. This is pretty Douglas Adams-esque. Give a British man advanced replicator technology and he will use it to create an egg cup.

18-06-2023

I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom, so I've been getting lots of recommended videos about Zelda. Here's one called Why is Link so hot? (Thomas Game Docs on YouTube), which isn't exactly what it sounds like (it's more like a history of different Link designs). What I really like though are the comments that are taking the question literally and discussing what makes Link hot, because this concept keeps coming up: "the quiet helpful hero who always spoke loudest with his actions", "he's a guy... who never talks", "mostly silent", "quiet and stoic", "His silence is definetly a huge factor on why Link is seen as hot", "the fact that he is si quiet all the time", "MAINLY because he is quiet", "Its not just his appearance, its the fact that hes selfless, brave ... while not complaining or really talking at all", "I thought this video would talk about Link's ... mute-ness". This is really funny to me because I don't think it's something that anyone would predict as a big factor. The design decision to make him silent is surely based around letting the player 'become' Link, but it also accidentally made him hot apparently. Could "shutting the hell up" be the next big PUA technique? It's also funny because Link in BOTW/TOTK is a self-centered little jerk in the dialogue options and he's completely getting away with it by virtue of not having a voice! Paraglider please!!!

04-06-2023

At the end of April we found a pupa while weeding the garden. It had no cover with the weeds gone so I put it in a glass with some dead leaves.

After a month of checking the glass every day a moth emerged!

It was a lot bigger than I expected from the pupa size. I couldn't believe something that big came out of there. We released him in the garden and he flew off into the shade. I got a good enough video to ID it as a yellow underwing, a very common moth. The top wings are dull brown with cute black heart shapes, the underwing is bright yellow with a black band. Here's a picture from The Wildlife Trusts.

More bug-related content: I like the pattern that leaf miners leave on plants. It's like someone doodling with Tippex. Annoying if it's on your flowers, but this is just a weed so who cares! Also there's some shepherd's purse in the top center, which is a plant I like pointing out to people because then I can tell them it's named that in reference to the 'heart-shaped' seedpods, since a shepherd's purse would traditionally be made of a sheep/goat scrotum... also you can eat this plant but I've not tried it.

I was looking to buy some begonias and I found this cool page about growing a peacock begonia which is iridescent at certain angles: Begonia pavonina Care & Culture. Picture below is from his page.

There are a ton of really really cool leaf begonia varieties so if you want to have some unproblematic fun online I highly recommend searching some up and spending ages scrolling through cool plant pics. Personally I really wanna get an escargot one!

01-05-2023

I heard this song recently but had no idea what a shellback was.

The Shellback Song - Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl (YouTube link)

Wikipedia handily told me it's a sailor who has participated in a line-crossing ceremony after crossing the equator for the first time. Royal Museums Greenwich describes some more family-friendly line-crossing ceremonies here and here including ceremonies for cruise ship tourists, but the Wikipedia page has some more weird and brutal details.

Charles Darwin had to go through the ceremony but got away with little more than a ducking:

We have crossed the Equator, & I have undergone the disagreeable operation of being shaved. About 9 oclock this morning we poor “griffins” [inexperienced sailors], two & thirty in number, were put altogether on the lower deck. — The hatchways were battened down, so we were in the dark & very hot. — Presently four of Neptunes constables came to us, & one by one led us up on deck. — I was the first & escaped easily: I nevertheless found this watery ordeal sufficiently disagreeable. — Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me & thus lead along, buckets of water were thundered all around; I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. — They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. —a signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. —at last, glad enough, I escaped. — most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. — .”

27-04-2023

More random things!

I've been listening to Hello from the Magic Tavern, which is a fantasy-themed improv comedy podcast. I've tried to get into TTRPG shows like Critical Role and Rude Tales of Magic but I always end up dropping them when they get real storylines and drama. I find all that sort of thing (people straight-facedly pretending to be traumatised goblins and so on) embarrassing to watch. I'm way too susceptible to second-hand cringe. The Magic Tavern episodes I've listened to stick to straight-up comedy and there's not much of a storyline so it's easy to skip episodes that don't grab you.

This 1991 Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine edition has an editorial at the beginning where Asimov describes his lunch with Gorbachev. Just a cool thing to read. I also like The SF Editor's Lament on page 56 which complains about hackneyed SF plots similar to the "Stories I never want to read again" page I put up recently. Some of the hackneyed plots are still going strong today ("rich people buy all the air!"), some of them are very much of the time ("vampires with AIDS").

I enjoyed this video about recreating a lost piece of pixel art: Four-Byte Burger by Ahoy (YouTube link)

05-02-2023

Random stuff I want to plug:

Search Party on BBC iPlayer or HBO Max. I never see people talking about this show. Basically, imagine the Always Sunny gang getting involved in a murder mystery. The series get increasingly absurd and satirical but there are still plenty of fun plot twists to be had. And all the series posters are cool.

Fret Science on YouTube. Why does every other guitar instructor want you to learn a huge pile of mystical shapes for chords and scales? Are they mad or stupid? Fret Science just tells you how the damn instrument works and lets you get on with it.

Paul Davids on YouTube. Yes he's promoting his guitar course in this video, but it gives an overview of what you can do with an acoustic guitar and how, which is something I think is missing from most instructional courses and books. He has lots of free videos with tips, neat chords, advice about how to arrange songs, and how you can take something basic and make it sound good.

GMB Elements fitness course - it's February. You probably already tried to do some yoga videos or something and gave up. I like this course because it has only a few movements that you can get very familiar with, the instructions are clear and tell you what parts of the body to focus on, it includes a warmup and cooldown, and needs no equipment (and I mean REALLY no equipment, not the usual "no equipment... except a yoga mat, yoga block, weights, a bench, and a workout space the size of Australia" BS). Also, crawling around on the floor pretending to be an animal is a very Neocities vibe. You get long timers where you're free to perform the movement, re-check the instructions, take breaks, and experiment freely rather than trying to follow an instructor flying between poses. I found the progression a little too fast and never got anywhere near some variations since I have the arm strength of a toddler, but you can always repeat sessions. It is $95 though. They have some free videos and articles on their main site.

Edit later in 2023: GMB have added gentle/accelerated progressions to Elements, so it's even more accessible!

And finally... you know how when you wake up in the middle of the night with a genius idea and write it down, it always turns out to be nonsense? I dreamed a joke that is only semi-nonsense. Please enjoy.

Q: What did the Russian drag queen take with her on holiday to Krakow?

A: A Ru-Pol dictionary!

Please direct your Fringe Festival invites to my neocities page...

27-01-2023

Today just a random thing I think about all the time. This is an excerpt from Delany's Driftglass. Several men are hunting fish underwater with ropes and spears.

There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot!

The fish, long as a tall and short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned out to sea, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime of the fish's body and hold to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares, I saw them jerked from their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me.

He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on.

Isn't "doffed deep" exactly the sound of the prow going under the waves and coming up again? This is the kind of small detail in writing that makes me want to get up and shout and excitedly show the book to someone else even though I know they won't be interested or know what the hell I'm talking about. Maybe someone reading this knows what the hell I'm talking about.

The start of The Star Pit, the first story in Driftglass, is so pleasing to read that I go back to it far more frequently than I reread the rest of the story. The children have built a large terrarium of plants and creatures on the beach of an alien planet.

The kids would run out before dawn and belly down naked in the cool sand with their chins on the backs of their hands and stare in the half-dark till the red mill wheel of Sigma lifted over the bloody sea. The sand was maroon then, and the flowers of the crystal plants looked like rubies in the dim light of the giant sun. Up the beach the jungle would begin to whisper while somewhere an ani-wort would start warbling. The kids would giggle and poke each other and crowd closer.

Then Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the water, and crimson clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The kids, half on top of each other now, lay like a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks in their hair-- even on little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was black and curly like bubbling oil (like his mother's), the down on the small of his two-year-old back was a white haze across the copper if you looked that close to see.

More children came to squat and lean on their knees, or kneel with their noses an inch from the walls, to watch, like young magicians, as things were born, grew, matured, and other things were born. Enchanted at their own construction, they stared at the miracles in their live museum.

To quote the meme... I want to go to there... someday when I'm older and richer I want to have a home near a beach and watch the sunrise!

25-01-2023

I finished reading Through a Window by Jane Goodall. This is a followup to In the Shadow of Man, published 19 years later. Personally I have an instinctive horror of apes and monkeys (some sort of uncanny valley effect, I guess) but I like reading about them - as long as I don't have to see them! Anyway, here are some notes I made from this book:

A chimp's mother is incredibly important. Uncaring or unskilled mothers tend to lose their infants or raise chimps who can't cope with stress. Skilled chimp mothers coddle their infants. They hug them close when the infant throws a tantrum, respond quickly to their cries, carry them across rough terrain, attack others who scare their infants, and keep them close during danger. Some really tolerant mothers will even let their chldren still climb into their sleeping nest with them when they're too old for it. Unskilled mothers ignore their infants crying and don't always remember to gather their babies before setting off. Mother-child bonds are lifelong, especially for daughters, who stay close to their mothers throughout their life and tend to inherit their mother's parenting skills. (Goodall describes one deranged mother-daughter pair who went around violently stealing other chimps' infants and eating them. Weird.)

Alpha male chimps get there by a combination of social skills, persistence, and displaying skill. They don't need to the biggest or strongest. The more social bonds they form, the more chimps will back them up during a fight. The more impressive their displaying skills are (including the use of props like branches, rocks, and noisy human rubbish like tin cans), the more intimidating and impressive they'll be to other chimps. Goodall describes a young chimp who has some rather embarrassing display failures like failing to rip up a young tree, spending ages trying to do it, and then realising the tree is too big to display with and having to awkwardly abandon the whole thing. We've all been there...

Male chimps try to ensure paternity by taking female chimps on 'honeymoons' away from other males. Males will get aggressive if a female is reluctant to follow them, but the females have worked out their own counter to this: being incredibly annoying. The female will stop to feed every few minutes, forcing the male to wait. This ensures that they barely get any distance from the main group and makes the male so frustrated that he gives up.

I would love a virtual life game that makes you feel like a researcher observing a community like this. (Doing it in real life would be interesting, but I'm not sure I'd want to spend thirty years on it.) Creatures comes close, but their social interactions are minimal since they can't recognise other individuals. I actually think Dwarf Fortress gets most of the way there. I still have to check out the Steam version!

08-01-2023

In the last month I've been learning to play the guitar. I wanted to buy a smaller guitar that's easier to pick up and play than a dreadnought, so I ended up researching various random things about guitars.

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