It came.
It’s a day early, which ought to be a good thing but isn’t. I bought it with prescription lenses and they won’t be here until tomorrow. FedEx swears they’ll be delivered tomorrow, but their tracker dingus tells me the package is in Memphis at the moment.
I almost didn’t even unbox it. I’m blind without glasses and there was no point mucking up my initial experience. Turns out, you can fiddle it to use glasses, cautiously. Glad I did. It spent most of the day downloading updates.
The little mixed reality app that comes with it is fun. You’re sitting in the room you’re sitting in when I spaceship breaks through the ceiling, delivering a ray gun. Then little fluffy tribbles start nibbling through the walls and you have to shoot bubbles at them to trap them.
It’s an okay gimmick that I suspect will wear thin for me, though I gather the zombie game where the undead are trying to come through your actual windows is a bit hairy.
The poor thing had a very hard time mapping my room. The big beams and odd furniture messed up its geometry. It would be happier in a clean modern house.
I hope the lenses do come tomorrow – it’s my day off. Also, I’m coming down with a cold :/
March 5, 2024 — 7:34 pm
Comments: 2
These people are cray-cray
This whackadoo is going to try to stop at all 2,580 railway stations in Britain in six weeks. For charity. His day job, he does in fact work for the railroad. I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse.
He and two friends planned it all out on a big-ass map.
It has been done before in 2017. There were only 2,563 stations then (17 fewer) when a couple managed to do it in 14 weeks, 6 days and 22 minutes.
According to his Twitter, this is day 14.
March 4, 2024 — 6:58 pm
Comments: 3
I’m’a smack somebody in a minute
I made up my mind and I’ve been trying all day to buy a new VR headset. The first try was rejected by the bank, as unusual purchases are. Once I got that straightened out, I got into a loop where I hit the purchase button, it swore it was talking to my bank for a second, then took me back to the purchase screen. Online help chat had me try dropping my VPN, using an incognito window, using a different browser. Eventually, Meta told me I’d taken advantage of too many special offers today and to go away.
I’m pissed.
Anyway, here’s another email that sounds like spam but I actually signed up for it: the Bean Institute. I get their newsletter because I’m from Tennessee and I like beans, dammit.
The title of this one is Love Your Heart with Beans, which sounds too much like a recipe.
Finally went through. I switched from paying by credit card to PayPal. And that worked only because PayPal showed me the error message Meta wouldn’t: it didn’t like my mailing address. Used to be, the house name and parish name was all I needed for a valid address, but lately forms have been demanding the road name as well. If only they had told me that!
February 29, 2024 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 5
I’ve been invited to make a rake
I’ve been invited to join a two-day rake making workshop in Wales. The number of times I get an email like that and think, “that’s a weird spam” and then realize, “oh, wait – I signed on for that shit!”
Well, no, not rake making. I signed onto a website that is all about scythes, back during my brief flirtation with scything. This is the first mailing I’ve had from them in years, so it took me a minute to place them.
People who spend two days and £160 making a rake that you can buy from the same site for £42.50 are will be a type. Wealthy, retired to the country, LARPing as peasants.
You know what? It would probably be a lot of fun.
February 28, 2024 — 8:27 pm
Comments: 7
It meanders, but it has a point
This is the excellent Modern Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. “The Sterling Streamliner car, made in the late-1930s and early 1940s, was the first diner in the nation to be accepted on the National Register of Historic Places.” I used to get a wicked greasy breakfast there of a Saturday, after I visited my gun shop.
But I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for Atomic Pizza, which I think was on the other side of Providence, in Cranston maybe. Very Fifties aesthetic. I didn’t find it – probably long gone – but I discovered there are Atomic Pizzas all over the world. Huh.
Anyway. This morning, I had reason to look up some local shipyards and discovered there was a ship built locally in 1898 called Telephone. Imagine being the captain of the Telephone. Imagine going down with the Telephone. It made me reflect on the hilarious human urge to name things after unrelated cutting edge things that can’t possibly stay cutting edge and will some day sound stupid as hell.
At the end of the 19th C, all kinds of things were marketed as electric that had no electric components at all. It just sounded cool.
Ragtime Gal had ragtime, sending improbable things by wire and the telephone. Poor Daisy just had the bicycle, although it was an extra snazzy one.
The Fifties had atomic and TV. The Sixties had everything space.
When I first started coming over here in the Nineties, everything – I mean everything – was euro-this and euro-that. That got tired fast. I guess it’s sustainable now.
More examples?
February 27, 2024 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 11
Then it got *really* dark
I read tonight that the National Trust has acquired another Detmold illustration to put on display at Kipling’s house. The Detmold brothers did a beautiful series of strangely dark illustrations for the Jungle Book 1903, some of which are already on display in a funny little side room at Bateman’s.
I have posted about the Detmolds before. They were twin brothers born in 1883 in Putney, London. They were both very fine artists, particularly of animals. But the thing that always sticks in my head about the Detmolds is this anecdote:
Their local doctor gave them some chloroform to kill the housecat. Which Maurice did. Then he took the remainder of the chloroform and killed himself.
That’s it. That’s all the detail I’ve ever been able to glean from any source, and I have so many questions. Was the cat ill? Did people routinely kill their cats rather than bring them on holiday? I know people were shitty to cats back then, but that seems a bit much. Was Maurice depressed? Could it have been an accident? Or did he — this is my favorite theory — kill the cat and then feel so awful about it afterward that he offed himself?
This was in 1908. The Wikipedia article on Edward doesn’t mention the cat anecdote (Maurice doesn’t even get his own page – I wonder why). I went looking again for an explanation and found this article. I kind of wish I hadn’t.
According to this, the doctor had given them chloroform before to kill stray cats (I don’t like the sound of this) so he wasn’t suspicious when Maurice asked for more. Maurice was later found dead on his bed, a chloroform rag in a bag tied over his head. Nearby was a box with two dead cats in it. So he was…practicing? Seeing if it hurt?
Er, have a good weekend!
February 23, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 3
Aiiiiiii!
I’m stuck in line for fish and chips. Will post the Dead Pool as soon as I get home and rescue my cockerel from the roof!!
February 16, 2024 — 5:17 pm
Comments: 1
Hooray for us!
Old hands might remember that today is our wedding anniversary. Our fifteenth, in fact. Fifteen is crystal, but neither of us likes crystal and, anyway, we break stuff.
So we bought ourselves this pretty box instead. Dealer thought it was early Victorian. It was once a music box – we didn’t even notice the holes in the front – but it’s just a coffer now. It would have been a damn loud music box.
Oh, and it’s sweasel.com’s birthday. Its seventeenth, in fact. That’s right – I’ve been blogging longer than I’ve been married. Do you believe I’ve been gibbering nonsense every weekday for seventeen years?
Truth is, I don’t know how to stop.
February 14, 2024 — 6:15 pm
Comments: 16
No shit.
Our fancy, computer-controlled, hippie-approved septic system broke down over the weekend and took our electricity with it. Uncle B spent all Sunday morning isolating the source of the power outage.
We didn’t install this thing on purpose. It was a condition of the sale of the house because our waste discharges into a stream. Our neighbors are grandfathered in and don’t have a fancy system *grimace emoji*
It’s been a maintenance nightmare.
Outlet pump this time. We were told they usually last 5 years and ours lasted fifteen, so yay I guess. Somehow it doesn’t feel lucky.
If you’d like an explanation of how it works, you can watch this video on the Septic Tank TV channel. Or don’t. He does a lousy job explaining how waste water gets from the dirty side to the clean side. You will learn the charming old English term “poo water” however.
February 12, 2024 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 9
I’m sorry :(
I nixed the thing I was going to post at the last minute, so I’m postless. I shall use this opportunity to apologize to the Dead Pool folks. I didn’t think about Toby Keith being in the DP. Lavendergirl won it. I realized it too late for a new one this week, though, so the next Dead Pool is next Friday.
Have a wonderful weekend!
February 9, 2024 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 2