sawall

Fantastic job! I have screen caps of 8 ascensions, my max lumens was 12. At least one of those runs was with a highly enchanted staff of conjuration. Once you get over the mid-hump with it, it can get really overpowered because it's such a wonderful counter to anything that fires magic as well as invisibles.

I'm on Facebook because I know a bunch of people who are online there all the time. It's the only vector for some parties and other events amongst my local community. I absolutely hate it.

Kids these days are actually texting much more directly with each other. Sure they are on tiktok and instagram, but I'm seeing them with a lot healthier small friend groups in some ways.

All of the social media is poisonous in one way or another, based on the old adage that if it's free, then you are the product. I went to check on an event invite earlier and ended up spending 15 minutes getting outraged about some idiot country singer's song when I could have been doing something way better with my life.

I like the idea of Mastodon for extended friend groups, and I haven't really seen it used quite that way. I really do like the sort of ephemeral text world but people who are constantly online fill those spaces with tons of spam. Maybe I want a highly rate-limited twitter where people can only post once a day? Do I just need to go back to BBSes? You can run them over telnet!

I watched the first episode of Secret Invasion and, after it, I just sort of tapped out of everything Marvel. Maybe I need a break? I feel like they have been storybuilding and setting the stage forever and at some point we'll actually get around to whatever they have been building up actually playing out.

... Hugh Grant as an Oompaloompah???

Glad to hear your positive review. I've been sort of in denial that this is even a thing. Maybe I'll check it out! The theaters are sure to be empty with everybody at Barbie.

11 hours ago, Al. said:

Seems fairly on track.

They had a new hottest day ever every day for a week.  Ireland is pretty rainy and gray at the moment but we'd some scorchers in June and currently large chunks of Europe are hitting 45c.  This is fine.

Austin's been hitting 40C routinely and doesn't get much lower than 37C at night. I am choking every night from Saharan dust that keeps floating in every summer for some weird reason. WIldfires are filling the country with smoke, it seems like no place is safe anymore. My land up in Washington State is looking pretty good, it's definitely changing there as well but is way less worse. Most of my friends here in Texas say things like "it's getting worse, but it's getting worse everywhere so WHO KNOWS WHERE TO GO." Maybe not in fucking Texas.

I've been a bad reader for years now. At some point I shifted the vast majority of my reading to when I was on airplanes, and I was on airplanes enough for that to mean that I was going through a few books a year. Flash forward to 2020 and I basically entirely stopped reading, meant to pick it up again as a habit in some context at home, and didn't really get back to it again until I started flying again.

I'm now occasionally reading books around the house but I feel sometimes I need that flight to kick it off. Pretty sure it has a lot to do with the fact that there is no internet (I try to avoid acknowledging the increasingly common availability of free wifi) and nobody is trying to talk with me for several hours in a block. I got to about the 85% point in Three Body Problem then didn't finish until another flight a couple of weeks later. I started The Peripheral on another flight a few weeks ago, got maybe 1/3 in, was quite enjoying it, and have maybe managed to get in another chapter since then.

Some of it's that I am constantly reading content on the internet for work and fun and I don't feel as much of a desire to read for fun anymore. Some of it's that I feel like I am constantly watching for messages from work or friends and can't quite relax in the isolated way that reading requires, and a lot of it has to do with habits. It may also be that it's been replaced for me by bingeing television - a lot of what I enjoy about fiction is also what I love about some of these big prestige television shows. Succession is something I probably would have read, and Severance is DEFINITELY something I would have read. I go back to TV shows multiple times just like I used to with books.

it's amazing how "edgy but tongue in cheek with a bit of bad taste" internet humor circa 2005 has become "weaponized by the political right as 'saying the quiet part out loud' to create a space where incels, bigots, and racists can feel acceptance." in the context of when some of this stuff was posted it was perfectly acceptable, in the context of now, wowza.

one of my early reactions to gamergate / thedonald / whatever was "wait, some of these people really BELIEVE this style of humor?"

Three Body Problem is great hard science fiction with the backdrop of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It jumps back and forth between some events that happened in the 60s and 70s and some events around present time with characters related to the first step. It's beautifully written and a fascinating story. It's pretty slow burn but explores some interesting concepts that take a different perspective than most (Western) science fiction that I've read. It's hard to say much more about it without spoiling how the story unfolds, but I recommend it.

Wrapped up SXSW a couple weeks ago and I've been playing catch up on everything else. This year I tried out a music festival wristband which is for locals and up to 5 of their friends. The deal with the wristband is that you can get into any official SXSW Music event that a badge can get into, but in some cases you end up in a deprioritized queue. Joke was on them because, while Interactive and Film seem to be getting back up towards their old populations, Music was still fairly sparsely attended and I could walk right in to almost anything at 1/4 the cost of a badge.

One reason that there wasn't as much attendance is that they really didn't have too many major acts. SXSW is never one to trot out HUGE acts because the biggest venue tops out at around 3000 people but usually there's a few big names. New Order and Macklemore were probably the two most recognizable this year.

The reason I'd recommend SXSW Music isn't the big acts, it's all the small unsigned acts who are there because they want to put on a good showing for all of the label execs who attend the daytime conferences (that's what the extremely expensive badge is for). So I can breeze in and watch new up and coming bands who are putting their best foot forwards in hopes of impressing the right person.

Some fun shows from this year:
- Voka Gentle: they have a really interesting sound, kind of in the direction of Animal Collective. Everything sounds a bit chaotic but it's tightly controlled complex music. Their tracks all sound pretty different so if you don't like one try a couple others before you decide. I'd recommend "Sympathiser" and "TV Bra" to start to give an idea of the range. I happened to standing next to another musician at their show who is under the same management and he said to me "every time I see them they make me want to go home and practice." 
- Enjoyable Listens: Sort of like Roy Orbison crossed with the National and more than a little whack. They sound like a kind of standard melancholy crooner and then the lyrics go weirdly sideways. They are ok recorded but they are definitely worth seeing live because of the strange stage presence for their front man who was really interactive with the audience and it was hard to tell if he was serious or was doing weird performance art on purpose. As an example, there was a woman in a pretty dress standing behind a laptop on stage wearing sunglasses and looking incredibly disaffected. Before very song the lead would say "Florence, start the track" and then she'd reach down and press the space bar. She did literally nothing else. Anyways, a trip to catch if you happen to have the chance at a festival.
- Fragile Rock: I think you might need to go to SXSW to see them but they are an "emo puppet band" which is basically a Muppet rock band. The band itself is really great and the performance was built around lovingly making fun of the kind of small indie bands that come to SXSW. The lead had a mental breakdown on stage and started cursing the audience because we were watching his puppeteer instead of him. They quipped that, because they were playing in the final slot at a comedy club on Sunday night, they were headlining SXSW and that New Order, who played on the first night, was opening for them - then they cut right into one of the better covers of "Transmission" by Joy Division that I've heard. There was some hilarious puppet "crowd surfing". One of the more enjoyable 25 minute shows I've seen. They have a fun tiny desk concert on youtube.

She Hulk was a lot of fun. It is deliberately not really a superhero show, so is probably not for some MCU fans. It focuses more on personal stories, legal stories, and is terribly quirky. It's full of great cameos who play off of She Hulk's surreal world in weird and entertaining ways. 3.5/5

Thor: Love and Thunder doubled-down on everything that made Thor: Ragnarok great and ended up being just a bit too much Taika Waititi for its own good. It could never quite figure out a consistent tone - there were wacky jokes but the backdrop involved a serious cancer story and a mass child abduction. So you'd get Christian Bale being the most doomy broody villain ever (excellently performed, by the way) and then some ridiculous gags. I saw some great youtube criticism of this that pointed out that the basic problem was that Thor works best as a straight man and this time they had him being more of a jokester. All that said there are some truly epic action sequences and amazing effects so it's definitely pretty to look at 3/5

Werewolf by Night is a weird little black and white 53 minute mini-movie that's on Disney+, which is actually part of the MCU. If you've ever been into old school horror films you will love this because it's a send up of all of them. It takes place after the leader of a secret society of monster hunters has died and his disciples are getting together to have a hunt to figure out who will become the lead monster hunter. There are some twists and turns in the plot and I thought it was really well done. 3.5/5

The Guardians of the Galaxy: The Holiday Special is hilarious. Some of the Guardians decide to kidnap an Earth hero to give to Starlord as a Christmas present because they are worried that he's sad to be away from Earth for the holidays. The hero in question is an amazing cameo that really makes the whole thing work. If you like Christmas specials check this out, I've shown it to several people who have all enjoyed it. It's only 45 minutes so check it out. 4/5

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a love letter to Chadwick Boseman. Be prepared to tear up repeatedly as it constantly plucks at your heartstrings. The core movie is pretty great as well and we see a natural progression of Wakanda coping with the loss of its leader while dealing with threats from the world and from a Mayan version of Atlantis. Namor is an interesting new villain with a relatable perspective about colonialists, but I felt like they jammed a bit too much into the film and that the Talokans suffered from too little worldbuilding. It's hard to give this an objective rating with it so tied up with the loss of Boseman. It's not quite as good as the first Black Panther but really excellent, so I'd say maybe 4/5.

Ant Man & the Wasp: Quantumania removed everything I love about Ant Man and transformed it into a cosmic romp through the quantum realm that seemed mostly designed to set the stage for the upcoming next couple of years of MCU properties. Remember Scott Lang's team of wacky misfit security experts, the backdrop of San Francisco life that grounded the fantastical Ant Man stories in reality, and his fun cat and mouse games with the FBI? That's all gone here, along with most of the better humor. From an intellectual and world building standpoint the film is definitely interesting and answered a lot of questions that I have about where the MCU is going, but as a standalone film I didn't love it, which is probably saying a lot given that it's full of actors and characters who I love. Speaking of which there's a weird cameo that may be one of the worst misuses of the actor in question that I've ever seen. I do love the introduction of Kang and Jonathan Majors is amazing in this. This will probably be a must-see from the perspective of understanding what the hell is going on with the upcoming multiverse saga, but it's also not great. 2.5/5

I'm hoping to make it back to Japan in the next year or two. It's really wonderful to visit, one of my all time favorites, even though I haven't been to All The Places I want to go to yet. This year we put a lot of Heather's Japan budget into her training at a couple locations in the U.S. so she doesn't also need a Japan extravaganza this go-around.

highlight from the Ant-Man: Quantumania preshow at the Alamo Drafthouse
 

Ibuprofen and acetaminophen are widely available in the U.S. and treated almost interchangeably by a lot of people. My decision tree is something like: naproxen for mild aches and pains, acetaminophen for aches and mild fever, ibuprofen to thwack a higher fever over the head. I made my purchase choice when I was almost 2 degrees C over my normal so was in a thwacking mood. In retrospect the acetaminophen would probably have been fine.

Neti pot is like a colonic irrigation for your sinuses! You basically put salt water in a little pot that's shaped like Aladdin's lamp and tilt your head back and pour into one nostril and the water flushes through and dribbles out the other nostril. A smallish study a few months ago found that doing that flush 2x a day after a COVID diagnosis may cause people to be 80% less likely to end up in the hospital. I have bad sinus allergies during pollen seasons and already use neti to manage that, so it was a no brainer for me to use it here as well since I already had it on hand for hayfever. My extremely subjective experience was that I felt like it stopped the COVID from getting from my sinuses into my lungs as quickly as it might have otherwise.

Paxlovid is generally only prescribed for high risk here and I was pretty borderline with regard to that. They'll freely give it to people who are over 50 and I'm 47. A past case of really serious pneumonia (~2 months, do not recommend) is also a risk factor, as well as are my extra pandemic pounds. I probably wouldn't have added in paxlovid if the impending flight wasn't a factor; I've anecdotally heard that it may shave a day or two off of the symptoms for most people so I was hoping it would make me an even more responsible flyer. It seemed to work for me (or did nothing and I just bounced back quickly naturally). At any rate, temperature never came back up again after it was down to normal. I skipped a couple of social things this weekend on the off chance that I am in the 20% or so who have a paxlovid rebound, but I seem ok.

I flew back home on day 8, which is sooner than the CDC recommends, but I had not had a fever for 4 days so I felt pretty good about that choice. We were again pretty much the only people with masks in sight in the airport and on the plane. Heather may have had an extremely mild case with a slightly elevated temperature for several days, but no other symptoms and consistently tested negative.

During a youtube hole I found the gem that must be the original video for "It's Raining Men". It's got every single weird effect that you can find in nostalgic low budget 80s TV all jammed into one clip. Halfway through I felt like I was watching a weird Sesame Street outtake:
 

 

I've been taking detailed notes! Overall I have had a rapid recovery compared with most stories I have heard. Never lost taste or smell which I hear is rarer with these newer strains.

As a couple background notes - I've been taking high doses of vitamin D (5000 units/day) due to a mild deficiency that was detected a couple weeks ago. I am fully vaxxed and have had one normal booster and a second bivalent booster in October. I neti pot regularly due to allergies.

On 2/17 I started feeling low energy and warm extremities. I had been at Disney parks the 2 days before and often feel a couple days of effects from too much sun exposure so assumed it was probably that. I also had what I thought were sinus allergy symptoms that had started the night before, which seemed consistent of my prior experience of being in Florida so I didn't think much of it.

I had started taking lamotrigine a little more than 3 weeks previously. It's important to ramp this med up slowly because it has a rare nasty side effect that involves fever and getting rashes all over. Often it starts with a feeling of your extremities being warm. So instead of thinking about COVID, for a lot of the day I was worried I was one of the rare few who gets the side effect since it was right in the time frame when I was supposed to be vigilant about it potentially starting.

I decided to opt out of all of the fun that was planned for the day and Heather went off with our friends. At 18:20 I took my temperature and found it was about 37.7 C. My normal is around 36.5 so that seemed pretty elevated, but I still didn't think of COVID. Then in the next hour I sneezed a few times and then it dawned on me. I hit a 38.4 temperature at 21:45 and took a COVID test and felt a little dumb about not having tried that earlier in the day. Luckily Heather was able to change to stay with our friends while I isolated, and she doesn't seem to have caught it, at least not yet.

I called telemedicine to get a paxlovid prescription lined up and went out to buy some ibuprofen, taking 1000mg, which got my temperature down to 37.3 before I went to bed. I also did neti pot in the evening which seemed to manage some my sinus issues.

On 3/18 I hammered myself with ibuprofen, which kept me between 36.9 and 37.4. Still above my normal and I could definitely feel some confusion and headache from the fever but nothing overly concerning like the night before. After some pharmacy and insurance hijinks I had my first paxlovid dose at 18:30. My fever seemed to initially spike a bit after it, getting all the way back up to 38.1. I also developed a nasty metallic taste in the back of my mouth which is apparently common for paxlovid, I have found that it lasts for 5 or 6 hours after each dose. It isn't too terrible, it mostly just feels like I haven't brushed my teeth for too long. Had a lot of trouble with weird feelings around temperature which seemed eventually fixed with a lot of hydration. I was extremely stuffy that night and did some breathing exercises and wished that I'd bought an oxygen reader. I did neti pot 3x this day, a couple times were really challenging but I've read that it can be extremely beneficial against COVID so I thought I may as well.

My temperature was down to around 37.4 overnight and then all the way down to 36.7 by first thing in the morning of 3/19. That morning I took my very last dose of ibuprofen and haven't had to take it to manage my fever since. All day my temperature was stable - about a couple points above my usual but nothing to worry about at all. I felt fatigued and a little light headed. What had been a mild cough turned into a somewhat more noteworthy cough, but it's never gotten that bad. I think neti's helped with that a bit as well.

Morning of 3/20 I started to feel a lot more "normal". Temperature was back down to 36.5 and hasn't gone above that since then. I'm still taking my paxlovid course. Lots of tiredness and fatigue on 3/20 but nothing that seemed special about COVID, it was just consistent with my having had a fever for a couple of days.

I've been checking my temperature on and off during the day on 3/21 and it's never drifted above my usual (in fact it seems slightly low, I'm seeing 36.3 fairly often). Heather and I decided to stop isolating from each other today using the CDC suggestion that isolation could end after you had 24 hours of no fever without meds. We both realize that there is still a risk but our current travel situation has made the isolation tricky and expensive so we're going to hope for the best. Also she had a a slightly elevated temperature for the two days that were the worst for me, but never tested positive, so we have a suspicion that we were exposed at the same time and she fought it off more successfully than I did.

It's really surreal to have this in America. I was picking up my paxlovid through the drive through at a pharmacy and wanted to get some test kits as well. The woman asked me to come inside, and I went in to find all three people working the pharmacy were maskless and weren't behind glass. There's only one reason people get paxlovid and they didn't seem to care about me coming inside (I was masked at least, but still). The folks in the martial arts group that I was supposed to train with over the weekend told me they didn't mind if I had it and I could still train, and some of them seemed potentially upset with me that I didn't break isolation to go grapple with people from all over the country. Even though I am a regular observer of this mentality and grew up near it, I still really don't understand it.

I am flying back to Austin in a couple days, assuming that Heather doesn't come down with anything and I don't have a rebound. It's not the full 10 days recommended by the CDC but I feel pretty good about it given that I will have been without a fever for several days by then. Also, we were almost the only people in the airport with masks on and a couple of the only people on the plane with masks on. I have a lot of fatigue around trying to behave in a way that I feel is ethical when surrounded with a population that seems to just not care about what I do.

On 2/12/2023 at 9:53 PM, Chimp with a Limp said:

I've never been to a high school reunion and can't imagine ever going. Hopefully your ones would be a lot more pleasant than I imagine mine would. Toothless villagers who've never left the rural outskirts of Dublin

high school GRADUATION... of the young woman who's in the sparkly dress over in the costumes thread. 🙂

Woah, REACTIONS. Some serious Web 2.0 interactivity going on here for sure.

Well, three years in and I tested positive for COVID for my first time about three hours ago. I've been living a lot more recklessly and I think the big difference is that fewer and fewer people have been actually masking anywhere. I still almost always mask in indoor and crowded situations but in America I am a huge outlier now.

So in the last few days I flew to Orlando then went to three Disney theme parks. I was stunned that Heather and I were often the only people masking anywhere in sight. I think I may have actually picked it up from a fellow who was coughing next to me on the plane (unmasked of course), but it's really hard to tell which bit of my plans went wrong. Heather has somehow managed to avoid getting it so now we're in different hotel rooms and will need to figure out some annoying logistics tomorrow.

Well I've got a ticket to Primavera but it messily conflicts with a high school graduation I ought to attend. I'm having an urge to do SOME OTHER Euro fest... maybe Prima Madrid, Sonar, or... something not in Spain? There's that obscure one in Iceland!

I'd say something similar for Maverick. It was amazing on IMAX, I can't see it being nearly as enjoyable on a home screen. I've seen a couple MCU films since the pandemic but that was mostly to avoid getting spoiled ahead of time; they would have been fine to see at home.

Andor is really fantastic. It does some of the best world building I've seen in a Star Wars project on screen, representing the banality of evil on worlds under the influence of the Empire. While mostly about the indoctrination of Cassian Andor into the rebellion from being a smuggler who bends a lot of rules to get by, we also spend a lot of time with various senators, freedom fighters, minor bureaucrats, and the Empire's mid-level security forces, getting to know what makes them tick and seeing how they exist in a world that is far from black and white. Someone from a political podcast I follow said something along the lines of "Forget if you care about Star Wars, this may be the best piece of media I've ever seen on how a resistance movement can turn into a rebellion," and I completely agree with that sentiment.

Unlike other recent Star Wars television a good amount of the effects are practical and scenes are filmed on real sets and in great locations. The main small town that the story keeps coming back to is a fully built out and feels real. Everything feels more visceral and with high stakes as a result. The sound is also really well done - mostly the characters are in quiet and tense situations, so when you do hear a familiar sound like a tie fighter or blaster it can be incredibly unsettling. Music is sparing but also really well done, especially the music used during the credit sequence that slowly grows and changes from episode to episode. The acting is excellent all around, with subtle facial expressions and body language needed to carry a lot of the impact.

If you wanted more politics in Star Wars but done more in the style of the Expanse or the best of Game of Thrones than the awful drek we had to wade through in Episodes 1-3, this is your show. If you loved seeing how a seemingly hopeless struggle played out at the low level in Rogue One and wished they took more time developing everything in it, this is your show. If you want light sabers and a clear cut battle between light and dark without a lot of thinking or talking, maybe give this a pass.

The show can feel a little slow paced at times because the nature of the plot. The episodes tend to work together in groups of 3 with setup, then growth, then a mini-climax. So I'd recommend treating it more like a series of films - Episodes 1-3 and 4-6 are the first two groups, then 7 is a bit of an interlude. 8-10 is the last triad and the finale is 11-12. I've seen some online complaints about the show being boring but what I'd say is that, for example, episodes 1 and 4 are pretty slow but they are setting up the payoffs that you get in 3 and 6.

R&M has been firmly stuck in the "I should watch this to understand the cool kid memes but I don't feel like it" category for me.

I just can't motivate myself to go see Avatar 2. Maybe Cameron should start making fancy screen savers or something?

2022 resolution status:
- I bought 6 acres for my hippie compound that is directly adjacent to my parents' property in Manchester, Washington (where I grew up)! I have been doing some mild forest management but no super specific building plans or anything yet. There are some access challenges but everything looks doable given time, planning, and money.
- Failed at figuring out doing regular strength exercises. I tried some resistance bands that were kind of cool but kind of bunk and gave up on them after a bit. I've had several false starts at bodyweight and yoga. But I did get back into a climbing gym a few days ago and plan to spin up into that again soon!
- I've been doing a ton of backyard landscaping things and have a mildly impressive garden going. There is still a lot to do but it's getting to the point where it's pretty reasonable to entertain back there and most of the heavy lifting has been done by Heather and myself.

2023 resolutions:
- get more fit. I've been keeping on pandemic weight and have been awfully slothy. I need to walk more, keep climbing, and so on. I'm 47 now and def feeling the "use it or lose it" aches and pains everywhere
- wrangle my brain ferrets. I have ADHD or _something_ and I've been able to tell it's been more pronouncedly affecting me over the last couple of years. I sometimes have pretty bad focus at work, as well as some exec function stuff related to decision making. I'm productive enough when I am not ferreting that I can get away with occasional lapses but I've been feeling like it's not as great a way to live. It may be more now due to pandemic trauma or other environmental things, but I've got an appointment set for late January with a psych to assess me. luckily I usually do well at tests!