The Return of the Village Fete
The judgin’ o’ the veggies. Yes, they really do this and yes, they take it very seriously.
One particularly hilarious category was swiss rolls, where some judge or judges wrote detailed critiques on index cards for each entry, explaining why they voted the way they did, what issues that particular swiss roll had and how to make it better next year.
BTW, red ribbon is first place here and blue is second. Make brain hurt.
There was a point I was sure the village fete would never return. So many of them were teetering on the edge even before the lockdown, and I thought the lockdown might’ve broken some people forever.
I still think there are some permanently damaged people out there (they all seem to hang out in Twitterland), but we went to two village fetes this weekend alone, and they were *packed*.
No masks, no distancing, no elbow-bumping, no fear. It was absolutely, 100% the old normal. But busier.
These were the middle classes, they who listen to the BBC, trust the government and no doubt had every recommended shot at its appointed time. They weren’t being defiant. They weren’t even thinking about covid. They were just done.
I wonder if that’s how Klaus Schwab saw this going at this point in his project.
August 3, 2022 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 14
Chicken selfies
Teej pointed to this site a couple of threads ago: chicken.photos. Yes, .photos is a top level domain now. From the about page:
The system consists of a Canon 7D, a speed flash, a Raspberry Pi, and an ultrasonic motion trigger.
Whenever a chicken (or any other animal) passes in front of the motion sensor, the Pi snaps a photo on the camera, which in turn fires the speed flash. Once the photo is taken, the Pi downloads the photo from the camera’s SD card and uploads it to our website. The photo is then tweeted and potentially minted as an NFT.
Everything is protected in waterproof housing and uses custom designed PCBs for power and signal routing between the components. It uses the gphoto2 library to interact with the camera, and CircuitPython for the firmware on the Pi.
I still do not understand NFTs. As far as I can tell, you’re buying…bragging rights?
So, they’re motion-sensor selfies. I like the sort of milky, porn-y soft focus. I reckon that’s damp on the waterproof housing. It gives them an otherworldly look.
It’s worth reading their About page. Oh, and looking at all the lurrvly chickens.
August 2, 2022 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 11
Beans!
One night last week, I woke up in the middle of the night with a stinking headache. Hasn’t happened to me in years and years.
It occurred to me next day – my boss has been away for a week. I usually go down to the coffee house on the corner and get us both a good, strong cup of joe every morning, but on my own I haven’t bothered.
Man, I didn’t think I got caffeine withdrawal. I’ve been caffeinating like nobody’s business ever since.
So.
We did our weekly supermarket run today. We hit two different stores and both were unusually badly stocked. That’s probably down to Monday and poor planning, but I’m getting jumpy. All this gloomy prognostication is getting to me.
Are you seeing shortages (yet)?
August 1, 2022 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 20