The wheels on the bus…
I had an errand to run in the big city. It’s only, like, ten miles as the crow flies but it’s an hour and a half on the slow bus. The one that stops every couple of blocks once it gets to town.
I left Uncle B happily digging in the garden and went for a slow pootle around the sunny countryside on the upper deck of a double decker bus. Most enjoyable. The city was fun, too. All kinds of neat architectural details on the upper floors of the older buildings that you’d never catch from a car.
I never took the bus to school (well, I did but not for very long) and I got a car as soon as I was legally able, so I’ve never had to ride the bus. I have neutral to positive feelings about them. The buses here on the coast are clean, frequent and cheap (they’re also old and rattly and the roads are awful, but you can’t have everything).
There’s even a neat app that shows my bus moving toward me on the map in real time.
I have had a day. I hope you all have a weekend!
June 14, 2024 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 2
Pinched! (I hope)
We have to go out tonight, so I shall fob you off with something short and pointless. I’m not sure I’ve ever posted a picture of my demitasse from the House of Commons.
See the little icon of Traitors’ Gate? That’s their logo.
It was an Ebay purchase. I’d dearly love to think it was pinched, but for all I know they have a little gift shop and they sell Parliament-themed tchotchkes.
June 13, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 7
Huh. You really can’t go home again.
I’m applying for my absentee voting form and it asks for my location when I lived in the States. I don’t remember that question from before.
Even though I had lived in Rhode Island for twenty-five years, when I sold that house to move, the only property I owned was my mother’s farm in Tennessee. So I took a field trip to the farm and registered to vote at the local courthouse in Smithville.
The online voter application tells me if the address I’m giving is a rural route, to give precise directions how to get there. I’ve spent most of my day trying to find the farm on a map. I’m flummoxed.
It’s sixty acres somewhere in that scrubby triangle between Alexandria, Brush Creek and Hearn Hill Cemetery.
I sold it and I suspect the buyer knocked the house down, so that doesn’t help. The road names are different than I remember, so that doesn’t help. We’re talking dirt tracks in a lot of cases, so they may not show up on satellite. There’s a creek and lots of woods and a valley. Maybe a pond, though it dried up some years. I should be able to find the place!
As for giving directions, my mother always told people to turn left on Dead Dog Corner. This was supremely unhelpful to anyone who hadn’t been there before. Though it somehow astonishingly managed to weather the elements for over a year, the dog had vanished by about 1976.
I am delighted to report there is a non-zero chance that I lived off of Opossum Hollow Road.
June 12, 2024 — 6:34 pm
Comments: 14
Aliens
I found these alien pods growing in a small flower bed this weekend. You gardeners might recognize it; I aren’t one. Google lens (which is very good on images horticultural) told me it was cyclamen.
Yep. Uncle B planted some winter-flowering cyclamen in that bed.
Wikipedia tells me the name cyclamen refers to this round structure. It’s not a seed pod, though – it’s a tuber. Leaves and flowers grow from the top of it and roots grow from the bottom of it. Interesting beastie.
I took this snapshot on my old phone, which I use in the garden as a multimedia device. I spent a very angry half hour getting this image off the phone and onto my computer. Bluetooth failed, but wouldn’t tell me why. Email failed, but wouldn’t tell me why. Upload to Google Drive kept dropping wifi partway through and starting again from scratch. I tried two different USB cables and both were non-data cables (did you know there were data USB cables and charge only USB cables? I spent a different angry half hour learning that once).
Has anybody ever gotten that “nearby sharing” thing to work?
I couldn’t use my regular Google Photos because I’ve filled 99% of my allotted space. Every time I want to upload something I have to delete something first. In the end, I got it onto the Google Photos of an account I don’t use very often.
God, technology gets under my skin sometimes.
June 11, 2024 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 6
Er, happy birthday, I guess
If you don’t have Windows 11 yet, the search bar – pictured – has a different colorful, cartoony icon every day informing you that it’s National Frosted Cookie Day or National Ballpoint Pen Day (I didn’t make those two up – they are two of the things people celebrate on June 10th according to this website).
Microsoft would like you to know it’s Hattie McDaniel’s birthday. They pinched the thumbnail right off her Wikipedia page and colorized it.
Everyone knows Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role in that movie you must never, ever, under any circumstances, watch. It must make your brain hurt to be a lefty.
Changing the subject, you know how they’ve talked about using VR to help people get over phobias? Do NOT go there. The last, like, three games have put me in high places and expected me to function and I get wobblier each time. It doesn’t help that my headset responds to signal problems by violently shaking my point of view like there’s an earthquake.
I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for Richie’s Plank Experience.
June 10, 2024 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 7
Important life lessons
Playing 7th Guest has reminded me of something: I really, really hate puzzles. I consider them the cost of being allowed to explore. Fortunately, you’re allowed to spend points to skip puzzles if you’re really put out by one. I’m sure there’s a trophy for not spending any points, but screw that.
One of the funnest bits are the 140 paintings scattered around the haunted house. They all have an alternative version you see if you shine your flashlight on them. Some of them made me bark with laughter.
This guy says he did about half of them (gallery at the link). I don’t think he’s the guy who did my favorites though. The really good ones do a bangup job matching the style of the original art.
Pity. I wanted to get in touch with my guy and tell him, “son, count your blessings. You will never again have this much fun and get paid to do it.”
Have a good weekend!
June 7, 2024 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 3
Like visiting an old friend
They’ve released the 7th Guest as a VR game. And actually, no – it’s not like visiting an old friend. It’s a completely different game. They’re both haunted house puzzle games, and there the similarity seems to end.
The original 7th Guest was released in 1993 and even my non-game-playing readers might remember it. It was a literal game changer.
It was one of the first games to be released entirely on CD at a time when not many people had a CD player. Adding one was hundreds of bucks. The game itself was a Benjamin. Remember when anything to do with computers was stupid money? There must have been significant buzz about the game because, according to this short video about it, CD player manufacturers said sales went up 300%.
It was one of the first first-person games and one of the first to use Super VGA 640×320 graphics with 256 colors. It was stunning at the time, which is hilarious when you see it now.
Doom came out the same year and was amazing because you could move freely in a 3D world. The world of 7th Guest was in a much higher resolution than Doom and you thought you were moving freely in it, but it employed a very clever trick: the motion was accomplished with hundreds of pre-rendered video clips. CD made this approach possible.
So for any given spot in the game, you had stand on A and look left, stand on A and look right, move from A to B then repeat with B until you’d built all the possible paths.
I thought that was a wonderfully clever idea, so I stole it. I built a simulation for work where you’re an engineer moving through a warehouse. And because my simulation could live on the hard drive, it was in much, MUCH higher resolution. Like, damn near photo-realistic. Nobody had seen anything like it.
In the end, the idea came to nothing, but I got to spend several years working on it and everyone thought I was a sooper genius.
Dark, dimly lit warehouse. All linear paths. It was actually very easy to make it look amazing. This must have been after 1995, because that’s when we first got 3D modeling. Also, I would never have spent a hundred bucks on a game.
You can watch a full playthrough here of the original game. The comments are hilarious. I was a grown-ass woman when this came out and it was camp and stupid and fun. A lot of the commenters were little kids and it scared the shit out of them.
June 6, 2024 — 7:45 pm
Comments: 2
Already
Today’s poll results. Reform has already pulled within two points of the Tories, which is remarkable so soon after Farage’s announcement. Extraordinary show of irritation with the ruling party.
Tory candidates have been pushing hard on “a vote for Reform is a vote for Labour” but the math doesn’t work. Even if every Reform voter threw their vote to the Tories they’d still be losing by four. Many voters will think this is an opportunity to spank the Conservatives, who are going to lose anyway.
If Farage hammers the illegal immigration angle, it will pull in some Labour voters. One or two defections to Reform from actually conservative Conservatives and…very interesting indeed.
Probably not going to happen, but a weasel can dream.
June 5, 2024 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 2
Now it gets interesting
There’s a deep, fatalistic belief among Brits that the leadership will inevitably ping-pong between the Tories and Labour whenever there’s a major shift in government. It’s been considered an iron certainty (and polling supports it) that Labour will take control at the general election July 4. Even though their leadership is awful.
The ‘Conservatives’ have been that bad.
Britain is no stranger to extra parties in recent times. The Lib Dems (founded 1988) are the largest of these and they have managed a few seats in government over the years. I honestly don’t know the difference between them and Labour. The Greens (founded 1985 replacing the Ecology Party) almost never win anything, but all their policies get adopted anyway because the ruling class is crazy.
UKIP (founded 1991) wasn’t going anywhere until Nigel Farage took over. Then it managed to win two seats in Parliament and a majority of the seats in the British delegation to the EU. It was almost certainly instrumental in making Brexit happen. This is an extraordinary outcome for a new party.
After the Brexit vote, Nigel threw his weight behind the Brexit Party (2018) which later became the Reform Party (2020), but without him at the helm. It wasn’t going anywhere.
Now Farage has taken the helm of Reform and it’s a kick up the ass. I mean, it almost certainly will split the conservative vote and Labour will get in even more handily, but Labour was going to get in anyway. The Tories have been such absolute shit that a significant number of natural Conservative voters feel they need to be not just voted out but punished. And Farage could pick off a significant chunk of the disaffected working class Left too.
His personality is nothing like Trump’s, but he’s Trumpian in that normies rally to him and the elite hate him with an irrational passion. This could get interesting.
June 4, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 4
I hope he has a bellyache
In case it isn’t obvious in my potatophone pic, you’re looking at a bar of soap three-quarters eaten by the nibbling of tiny teeth. Mouse, we think. Uncle B saw one in the area. In which case, this would represent several times his body weight in soap.
He must be pooping Tide pods.
For all we know, this was happening over a long period of time and we only now noticed. It wasn’t the active bar of soap. Worst part: it’s on the shelf with our toothbrushes *grimace*. Not really a place you want to put down poison. Or a trap, for that matter.
Why do they always go for the soap? My family had a hunting cabin in the Appalachians, and we always turned up to find any left-behind bars looking like this.
June 3, 2024 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 7