My brain hates me
I woke up at 5 this morning – which, since our clocks went forward this weekend, was 4 o’clock Brain Time – and could not get back to sleep. You want to know what I was fretting about? I knew that Topeka was in Kansas and Santa Fe was in New Mexico, but where’n the heck was Atchison?
Kansas. It’s in Kansas, dear reader.
So, while we’re here, “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” was written in 1944, climbed the charts in 1945 and was used in the film The Harvey Girls in 1946, where it won an Oscar for Best Original Song (though if it had been around for two years, it’s hard to see it was original original.
If you’re looking for the earworm, here it is in the movie version with Judy Garland, which sounds curiously sluggish to me. I think it must be the Andrews Sisters version I remember.
Naturally, I don’t remember remember it.
April 2, 2024 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 6
Tea time’s over
I had a wonderful Easter. I spent the sunny hours – of which there were many – sitting in the garden watching the new lambs gambol.
I spent the less sunny hours – of which there were also many – wearing my magic spectacles and playing games in VR. Specifically, the Hogwarts game. Yes, I got the plugin working that makes non-VR games into VR.
It’s an astonishing piece of work. I’m not a fan of the books, which were derivative as hell, but the visuals and the scale of this thing are amazing.
There’s a sort of giant junk room in it that contains thousands of individually-modeled items – I know they are because they animate as you walk past them. That’s the room in the picture above, but it’s many times larger. There weren’t any loading screens, either. How they fiddled the memory management for that, I do not know.
It should have been Game of the Year but wasn’t because JK Rowling.
Sadly, though, I have to run it at the game’s lowest resolution. In VR, games have to render three times: once for your left eye, once for your right eye and once for your monitor (I think there’s a way to turn off the monitor render, but I haven’t found it yet). My five-year-old rig coughs and wheezes at the prospect.
April 1, 2024 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 1
Mugged by a lamb
We had to help our neighbor fix her wifi, a trip that included a drive across a sheep field.
This one little lamb was in the near end by himself. His mother was some yards away not paying attention and the rest of the flock was way down the far end. He came bounding up to the car like it was the most awesome thing he’d ever seen in his life. It probably was, but lambs are usually shy wee beasties.
I got out to shoo him away and he walked me backwards around the car shouting “MEHHHHH!” in my face like he had to tell me something RIGHT NOW. It was honestly adorable. Weird but adorable.
Sooner or later, though, we had to go home and I had to run him off. Pictured above. Excuse quality; it was dusk.
Happy Good Friday. I’ve got three more days of this!
March 29, 2024 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 3
The lambing has begun
This little scene was at the end of the drive as I went to work this morning. These two are very, very fresh.
Not pictured, just off camera to the right, a very weary, panting ewe had a lie down in the grass. The babies were hopping all around her going, “MOM! MOM! MOM! MOOOOOM!!”
I love this time of year.
I always forget Easter is a four day public holiday here. Then I have to explain why it’s not in the States and then I’m always asked how we get away with Christmas as a public holiday and I have to admit I don’t know.
Do you?
Anyway, four days off – w00t!
March 28, 2024 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 6
Git offa my land!
The latest howling controversy in gaming has been over a consultancy firm hired onto gaming projects to make them more woke. It turns out their fingerprints are all over several recent big-budget flops.
I won’t go into it. Gamers make up a tiny number of my readers. It just made me think what a tiny, underrepresented identity group I belong to: old lady gamers.
As far as I know, it’s just me and Shirley Curry. (Seriously, check Shirley out. She’s an 87 year old grandma from Ohio who plays Skyrim. She’s a hoot).
And I was thinking how *I* wasn’t bitching about my identity group not being represented in video games. And then I thought hang on, that would be kind of awesome.
I can see a crabby old lady NPC with a sniper rifle who shouts at you and plinks you from a great distance. Kind of like Bette Davis in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. Which, if you’ve never seen it, is the most fantastic old horror film featuring an enormous cast of famous scene-chewing old hams. It’s all Oscar-winners and low-budget gore.
Only in 1964.
It was originally supposed to star Joan Crawford against Bette Davis. Check out the making of for some hilarious behind-the-scenes drama.
When I was a kid, we watched it strictly for the “head rolling down the stairs” scene.
March 27, 2024 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 9
O fabulous world!
If you guessed this was an hour-long video of an Amana washing machine doing a complete cycle taken from a channel about washing machines, you’d be completely correct.
The comments. Lordy.
If you click on the link, fair warning, you are apt to find other appliance channels appearing in your sidebar.
That’s the thing that chaps my hide: this video just appeared in my timeline. Surrounded by game demos and cat videos, up pops this Amana Direct Drive Washer – Full Casual Cycle + Extra Rinse out of the blue.
The algorithm – it knows too much.
I was promised flying cars and robot servants, but I suppose this will have to do.
March 26, 2024 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 9
Trust me.
This is a lime Uncle B grew in his own greenhouse. It is – and you’ll have to take my word for it – bright yellow.
That’s perfectly normal. It takes a hit of cooler weather to make limes turn yellow and fall off, a thing they don’t get in the warm places they’re grown commercially.
I also imagine it’s easier to store and sell if lemons and limes look different. Fully matured, yellow limes are supposedly sweeter, too – although there are also varietal differences in color.
When I start poaching gardening photos from Uncle B’s Google, it’s a sure sign I have nothing to say for myself. That cold I had a few weeks back is still kicking my ass.
March 25, 2024 — 7:58 pm
Comments: 8
Stop making me learn stuff, dammit!
Still struggling with VR technology. Specifically, UEVR – a mod that supposedly lets you play existing games made with the Unreal engine in VR. Which is lots of games, including lots I own and like. So it’s really, really worth it.
Most VR games suck, because they count on the VR wow! factor to distract you from shitty graphics. (I’m lookin’ at you, Gorilla Tag).
All the cool YouTubers say it – just plug it in and WHEEEEE!…it doesn’t work.
The mod operates by injecting itself into the running code. That is also what viruses do. So Windows Defender slapped it out of my hands as soon as I tried to download it, and at every step along the way.
Anyhoo, that was Obstacle One. I won’t bore you with the rest. I’ll get there in the end, but’s it’s all so tiresome and it’s Booze O’Clock. I wish they’d stop making me learn stuff. I’m too old for it.
Have a good weekend!
March 22, 2024 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 2
Cursed, I tell you
Last night’s post has vanished without a trace. It was just a boring thing about trying to get the Hogwarts game to run in VR, but that’s not the point. It’s not in the database; it’s not in drafts. It’s just…gone. Uncle B saw it, so I’m not nuts.
This afternoon, I was Googling around, trying to find out how to draw a page border in Google Docs, and I clicked on a popup I really shouldn’t’a. My ‘cookie warning’ reflexes took over and I batted it away carelessly.
Sure enough, I caught a dose of the “You’ve visited illegal infected website” scam.
It’s fairly harmless. It just makes that or a similar message pop up every few minutes in hope you’ll click on the link (where the real mischief would happen).
To my surprise, Malwarebytes couldn’t find it. I gather it acts like some kind of…fake browser plug-in? I deleted the most recently installed program and rebooted, but no. In the end, I had to reset the browser. Which closed all my tabs. Which really bummed me out because I keep, like, thirty open tabs as reminders of things I need to do.
I wonder if the missing post will ever float back in…?
March 21, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 8
Where will I get my conspiracy theories *now*?
Looks like my Twitter is borked. No idea why. If I were suspended, I would expect it to tell me so. My work account seems okay. Is yours working?
I’ve had a technology day, whether I liked it or not. I bought the Hogwarts game in the Steam Spring Sale and I’ve spent my day trying to mod it to work in VR.
Just a couple of clicks! say the YouTubers enthusiastically.
Feh. There was a time in my life when I loved figuring out a new piece of software. Now I just want it to shut up and work.
March 20, 2024 — 6:55 pm
Comments: 8