Is it over? Did you die?
From this side of the pond, it looked like everyone in America was running in circles quacking. Why the overreaction – anyone know? Or was the news deceiving us again?
Photo from NASA.
Yesterday, we had a bumble bee stuck in Uncle B’s greenhouse. We like bees and we’re always being told how endangered they are. We had to try to free him.
Problem was, he’d gotten himself stuck under the bubble wrap that serves as insulation and it was going to be tricky to free safely (female bumblebees can sting, though rarely, the internet tells me).
I know, a soup ladle!
There I am, skipping around the greenhouse trying to scoop up a bee with a silver ladle without breaking any glass and I thought, “I don’t even know why I’m playing the Hogwarts game.”
April 8, 2024 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 11
My TV has a [Magic Explorer] button, y’all
But only when the pointer color is changed to purple, I guess. Another learning curve. Swell.
We got a new TV today. Our old Sony was rock solid, but it was 15 years old – right at the dawn of the smart TV era. It was kinda dumb. We saw an OLED running in a shop and thought…yes, please.
This somehow has a bigger screen with a smaller footprint (the Sony had a thick frame around the outside). It weighs about a third what the old one did and costs £0.19 a year to run all the time on standby.
We spent the afternoon watching 4K videos of cats and forests. Whee!
Have a good weekend. Any smart TV tips?
April 5, 2024 — 6:52 pm
Comments: 10
But I could if I wanted to
It blows me away what you can buy here. These four 18th C glass goblets have come up to auction for guide price, left to right, £300 – £500, £100 – £200, £50 – £100 and £500 – £1000. The engraved ones are naturally worth more because each is a unique work of art.
I can’t say I was even aware of 18th C glass before I moved here, but I’ve developed a real taste for it. Not sure why. If I bought these, I’d only contribute to their rarity by breaking them. I am a very clumsy woman. But it doesn’t mean I can’t window shop.
These four auction lots start here, if you’d like to see them big. Plenty of other things to enjoy in that auction too, if you poke around.
Me, I’ve been fighting technology all. day. long. I am exhaust.
April 4, 2024 — 7:51 pm
Comments: 5
Leaning into it
In contrast to several recent expensive AAA flops – corrupted by the dour influence of blue-haired “story consultants” – an unabashed shoot-em-up leaning into the Starship Troopers theme has been the surprise hit of the year so far. Helldivers II.
Seriously, watch the trailer. It’s funny as hell, in a fascistic sort of way. Is there a word when someone is tongue-in-cheek, but really sort of means it, too?
The motto of the studio is “a game for everyone is a game for no-one”. Sadly, it’s probably not a game for me.
It’s a co-op you play online with up to three friends, and all my friends are frail, elderly Englishwomen. I don’t think I can get them on board. So anons it would be, then.
Also, it’s hard. I avoid any game that requires good reflexes and not completely losing your mind under pressure, especially online where I’m likely to play on a team of anonymous 14-year-old boys. I got a lot of poop kicked out of me before I learned that lesson.
“Managed Democracy” – still chuckling.
April 3, 2024 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 4
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