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soc_puppet) wrote2025-08-10 11:27 pm
Pokémon Friends again: Well, that didn't last long
If I were getting more yarn per try, it might be worth it to me to keep playing. If the timers were more generous, it might be worth it to me. If I could choose which puzzles to play and which yarn to work towards, or if the difficulty scaling were a bit slower, it might be worth it to me. But at this point, I'll probably just play a few more days out of sunk cost fallacy driven hope, and then try to forget I even bought the damn game. Which is a shame, because I'd really love to have some sort of apartment-decorating game with the mechanics from the main room that I loved so much.
Honestly, I'd originally bought this game with the hopes of playing some of the puzzles with my niblings, but with how the game's set up, I'm not sure I'd even be able to reach all of the games, let alone be able to play in a way that didn't leave all of us frustrated in the end.
This disappointment aside, if Nintendo ever decided to put out a simple version of Voltorb Flip that works the same way as it does in HGSS, maybe for $2 or so, I'd buy that in a heartbeat. (They won't, they'd want to microtransaction and dark pattern the hell out of it, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it!)
azurelunatic) wrote2025-08-10 07:44 pm....!!!
From the little I've absorbed about Hazbin Hotel, the creators might just be the correct kind of disturbed to do justice to Homestuck.
kaberett) wrote2025-08-10 10:43 pmvital functions
Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )
... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )
Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).
Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.
Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!
Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).
Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!
Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?
A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!
Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.
Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!
mdlbear) wrote2025-08-10 10:20 pmDone Since 2025-08-03
Up and down. Ame's thirty-fifth birthday, and the atomic bombings 80 years ago. OTOH m's return from the US Wednesday, and for some reason I noticed being in a good mood shortly before bedtime. Possibly from getting out of one of my support groups early. Or it could have been something somebody said in the group. Also, my balance seems to be improving a little after finding a test that I can practice against. But I should also find some exercises.
Not exactly a good week for walking either. I skipped Tuesday because (IIRC) I was running late after helping N give Cricket her meds, and had a doctor's appointment after that. Then I did something unpleasant to my right ankle Friday morning, probably on the stairs with an excessively heavy bag of garbage. (Mostly cat litter.) I went to the end of the block and back this morning but didn't want to push my luck. I have no idea what became of my little plastic bin full of knee, ankle, and wrist braces.
On the gripping hand, I have the old household server, Nova, running again. That's notable mainly (only?) because it's still running Mint version 21.3, so it still has Python 2 installed, so I can run my Dreamwidth posting client on it. (I also have it on Raven, but N is borrowing it. When she's done with it I'll be able to upgrade it.)
Nova is headless. I could ping it, but not ssh to it, which turned out to be because it was on the wrong subnet. Fixable by widening the netmask on Nova and one laptop. That was an interesting exercise, though, because I had to do it over ssh (i.e. without a display), which meant that I had to learn the text user interface for Network Manager. Feeling mildly accomplished from that.
Also, m and I had a good rehearsal of Ship of Stone yesterday. The plan is to do one song per day to use as scratch tracks for the next album. My intended recording hardware was not cooperating -- I seem to be missing one of my large-diaphragm vocal mics. May have to fix that. Meanwhile I used my trusty old Zoom H2, which is perfectly adequate for scratch tracks.
In links, last week Mastodon was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance’s Registry, which is pretty cool. And the World’s first Facebook museum helps users face the future after its hoped-for demise.
fayanora) wrote2025-08-10 01:02 pm"Dying Georg"
Or put into meme speak: "Old timey kids were the 'spiders georg' of dying back in the day, and 'should not have been counted.'"
redbird) wrote2025-08-10 01:10 pmToo hot
So mostly I am sitting in the only air conditioned room in the apartment, reading. This isn’t exactly bad, but it doesn’t feel worth the trip, in terms of either dollars or the hassle of traveling.
runpunkrun) wrote2025-08-10 07:56 amSpeaking of Matthew Goode...
So, the Downton Abbey series finale was an endless parade of reproducing heterosexuals. Though, thanks to Thomas, it still wasn't as unrelentingly straight as the LOST finale, and you know you done fucked up if Downton Abbey is gayer than your time-slippy post-modern science fiction fantasy island show.
Anyway, I'm still super mad that Mary Crawley stole Alicia Florick's boyfriend. Julianna Margulies and Matthew Goode had amazing chemistry, and then he left her for England and an unconvincing romance with the daughter of a lord, though he's still very handsome.
I think I stopped caring about the show somewhere around the part where Julian Fellowes decided to give Anna the gift of sexual assault, but I kept watching out of inertia and love for Dame Maggie Smith.
As for The Good Wife finale, it made me cry to have Will back, even if it wasn't real, and even if it made me worry Alicia was about to have a stroke or something—she really did love him, but she made the choice to not be with him, and that's put her where she is today, still choosing to stand by her worthless husband because of the power and security it gives her and maybe she loses someone else because of it, two someone elses, because Diane is pissed. I liked that the ending was ambiguous. Because maybe Alicia didn't deserve a happy ending. Maybe she had the chance, a couple chances, and didn't take them.
buttonsbeadslace) wrote2025-08-10 08:35 amUpdated Knitting Inventory
- Armwarmers
- Ziprelaxagon socks
- Citrus slice #2
- Citrus slice #3
- Yarn swap purse! The knitting part is complete, but it still needs a lining and a strap. The fabric I want to use for the lining is currently steeping in a bowl of tea & hopefully becoming a less bright color. I'm off to squish all my yarns and decide what I want to make next.
( Read more... )
beatrice_otter) wrote2025-08-10 12:02 am(no subject)
The first two: T'Kok and Suk.
While I think that a very ... interesting fic could be written about T'Kok and Suk, I do not think I would be the person to write that fic.
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-09 09:34 amRandom political thoughts
When I say "random," I mean it: My thoughts wandered from one thing to another.
I learned from one of the language bloggers who I follow on Instagram that the Chinese people have come up with a nickname for Trump: 川建国 (chuān jiàn guó), which means "Trump builds country." I'm sure if Trump is aware of this he's flattered by it, but only because he's not aware that the "country" being referenced here is China, the idea being that by making America look so bad, he's making China look much better by comparison.
Which got me to thinking that no matter what one thought about Biden, at least when he president, I didn't worry about him stumbling us into a war.
And thinking about the possibility of us ending up in a war made me think about my maternal grandfather. Like most men of his generation, he served in the military during World War II. Unlike most men of his generation, he talked about his experience, specifically to complain about what a miserable experience it was. Out of a strong desire not to get shot at, he joined the Seabees (naval construction battalions) before the army had a chance to draft him. Once he had gone through boot camp, the US Navy, in its infinite wisdom, thought it was a good idea to take a young man who had never been more than 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico and send him to Alaska to help build an airfield. And all of this was to be done:
- while wearing boots that hurt his feet (my grandfather had super-narrow feet, and the navy only issued boots in medium),
- without proper medical treatment for his migraines, and
- while being fed food that constantly upset his stomach.
Obviously it was better than getting shot, but the experience was miserable enough that he would still complain about it 40 years later. One day, my grandmother had had enough of his complaining about his military experience, and she asked him "But aren't you proud of getting to do something for your country? Wouldn't you do it again?" He thought about it for a moment, and then, in all seriousness, said "If they were coming from the west, and they made it as far as [a small river about 5 miles west of their house], I might think about it." And thinking about it now, I'm like "Same, Granddad. Same."
chomiji) wrote2025-08-08 10:46 pm
Three Weather Apps: Windy, MyRadar, Today Weather
I'm a weather nerd and have been so since childhood, when I discovered a Golden Nature Guide about weather in our family's home. This is going to be a very brief rundown of the apps I currently have. I have a Android phone, but I believe all three are also available for iPhone.
Windy
Windy is a sort of Swiss Army knife, and it has so many features that there are some I've never learned to use. The app opens to a map showing the winds blowing over a large area, expressed as animated arrows showing the direction of the wind and (by the thickness and length of the arrows) its force. The map can be zoomed by pinching or spreading, and panned by dragging. Coverage is available wolrdwide. A hamburger menu in the lower right gives access to a number of different views for the area shown on the map: weather radar, satellite, rain/thunder, temperature, and more. An interactive bar on the bottom of the map shows date and time; you can slide the bar to display past conditions or forecasts. Windy also has a website with many of the same features, if you want to check them out before downloading the app.
MyRadar
I got this one because Windy's radar map didn't give the level of storm detail I wanted for winter snowstorms or summer thunderstorms (weather in the Washington, DC, area is notoriously hard to predict at the county by county level, and even within our county, there can be crucial differences between the north and the south). MyRadar is good for what it does.
Today Weather
There are lots of general weather forecast apps out there. I wanted a functional on-screen widget, specific local forecasting, and a minimum of ads. Today Weather delivers. The widget is customizable, and the internal display shows your current location's temperature, UV index, etc. in a summary block, followed by a week of brief day-by-day predictions, an hourly precipitation forecast for the next 24 hours, AQI, pollen counts, sunrise/sunset, moon phases, wind, and radar. I usually see only a single inline ad after I bring up the app.
The one thing that's mildly buggy is that the widget takes a minute or two to reappear after you've restarted your phone.
I should note that in the case of a fast-moving weather situation near to home, I still refer to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang feature. As disappointing as the WaPo's recent editorial changes have been, it's still my hometown paper and it still has the best weather coverage for the DC Metro area.
evilwriter37) wrote2025-08-08 09:58 pmDoing Kinktober 2025! (And a Writing Update)
I have a story planned for every prompt. Kind of bouncing around with whatever interests me. I do want to have a fic for every day though!
So far, days 1, 11, and 17 are done, day 2 is almost done (that one got long), day 4 has a first sentence, and day 8 has a document made for it. Very excited about this! It sucks that I can't share the stories immediately. I love sharing my fics!
Also, I currently have 65 ideas on my writing ideas list for HTTYD. I've been feeling really aimless and without goals recently, so I'm just going to have people on tumblr throw random numbers at me, and then I'll write the corresponding fic. I do plan on getting to chapter 19 of Our Time Together at some point. I'm nearing the end of that fic!
kaberett) wrote2025-08-08 11:58 pmvictory of the day
Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."
-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.
So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)
(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)
azurelunatic) wrote2025-08-08 03:44 pmDisbelief, suspension thereof / therein
Suspension in disbelief = a frozen state of constant WTF
redbird) wrote2025-08-08 03:36 pmI'm in Montreal
rysmiel for a few days. The trip up was borin, which is good: anything exciting would probably be bad news, or at least make you late for dinner.It is going to be hot over the weekend, so we went out for a relatively early brunch today, so we could sit almost-outdoors at Juliette et Chocolat and eat crepes. We then walked around Jean Talon market, where I bought plums, blackberries, and a cucumber.
I have np real plans for the next few days, which is fine.