On the basis of a challenge by my extraordinary cook book, I bought and butchered a whole hen on Friday.
The free range chooks were on special for $10 each at our local rather expensive supermarket. Butchering is interesting from a biological perspective but also to see the assembly of the parts we so often buy separately. I was so surprised by how much meat we got for that price that today I bought and butchered an additional two. All my adult life I have been paying $10+ for a pair of chicken breasts or a punnet of six thighs. Getting two of everything plus an amazing homemade stock for the same price is a bit of a revelation. Of course we have bought roasting hens pretty often but actually cutting into sections by hand I had never even considered before. If like me you are not squeamish it is well worth a try. Just be very conscious of hygiene and keep your blades sharp.
Tonight we used the thighs from today’s hens and the stock from Friday’s to make a yummy dinner porridge.
Daily
We got to meet our newest nephew by N’s little brother. Fresh home from Dubbo hospital yesterday. He’s a cute squishy thing.
A trip to the tip this morning yielded maybe $300 worth of timber and if I can borrow a ute in the next day or two I am going back for some very nice sheets of marine ply. They are too large for my car. Material for three projects secured.
Creative
Another two sketch evolution cards completed. I plan to do a gallery post once all the sketches are completed. Only another 33 to go. A bit of clerical work to complete tonight, possibly another sketch card as well.
I have a collection of videos that make my palms sweaty, make my heart race, leave me gasping.
No you filthy apes!
Videos like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ8jkZQxyjA
and this
and this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH7bJAMLBYQ
Videos that make me question why on earth would anyone do something so indescribably stupid?
I’ve got tons more.
The comment I make, concerning particularly the latter type involving pointless self endangerment, is that at no point in my entire life have I had such confidence in my own body.
Upon reaching the conclusion that it is that which I enjoy about watching these vids, I have set out to develop such self confidence by degrees.
Rest assured I will never be doing such patently stupid stunts. I do want to feel sure that I could hang one handed and recover. I do want to feel sure that I could precision jump a gap, or balance on a bar if I ever needed to and hell I definitely intend to never need too. This is one of the reasons I set about working out all those months ago. I have made progress but I am not even nearly done.
Daily
Success, the laptop lives again. But for how long we know not. I am hoping it will survive through Europe after which I can build a desktop worthy of the now traditional name for my computers: Hex.
I have two days work with year ones at the local Catholic school starting tomorrow. Feeling rather excited to get back into the classroom.
Creativity
I spent what little time I had off from children today getting the computer going. Transferred working files over from N’s computer, the castle card progress is intact, unfortunately storybook progress has reverted somehow, hopefully a more thorough search will find the current working version, if not yesterday’s labours need repeated.
This link and the discussion around it nearly took top billing for tonight’s post. Automation will wait for another evening, Boston Dynamics latest bot will not.
A workout, another trip to the NSW transport office as they forgot to photocopy the licence they cut a hole in yesterday and a lesson for two brothers this afternoon.
The new solid state hard disk arrived with the morning post. So far three attempts to clone the old drive have failed due to system restarts. A few more tries are necessary before we give up. Investigating things for my ‘Best Man’ responsibilities this evening.
Creative
An hour or two each devoted to the Castle card and my story book today. Found reference images for every illustration page of the book. Sorted out the line weight issue and fixed an area as well as making progress elsewhere in the image.
Media
Watched ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ last night. It was certainly quite funny at times, but I was hoping for better. Maybe I just don’t find that kind of thing as amusing anymore. Plenty of the gags rely on the gruesome nature of vampiric survival and lots of those fell a bit flat with N and I. The rolling set fight scene was pretty impressive and the characters were very well realised. Maybe earlier in the vampire hype train it would have been better received.
I was bullied in school. Specifically I was called ‘gay’ from year 6 until I left to attend Tafe after year 10. That was a pretty miserable time and although I no longer bear a chip on my shoulder about them I have little desire to know or rebuild relationships with many of my high school peers. I know others who still bear the emotional scars from high school decades later. The fact that I am not and have never identified as gay didn’t help matters any at the time. Nor for that matter did the fact that thanks to my upbringing I didn’t consider being gay as in any way wrong, I had gay relatives and family friends after all. The bullies found a label that worked and stuck to it. Nothing, even obvious evidence to the contrary swayed their opinion of me. Bullying wasn’t at the time even acknowledged as a thing schools should be acting on, this was pre-columbine after all. The pendulum has certainly swung on that one. Though having done quite a lot of reading on the topic the best management strategy I know of is “The Method of Shared Concern“. Like many such issues prohibition and punishment doesn’t solve the problem.
Homophobia is still rife in Australian education systems. There has certainly been a growing acceptance and permissiveness for bi, gay and lesbian students within the cities, trans and other students less so. However even at the primary level it is not yet accepted as ‘normal’ and children so desperately want to be just that. Rural areas are seemingly a few years behind culturally.
I now take it as a practical law of nature that the more rabidly homophobic a public figure is the more likely they are to be compensating for an insatiable lust for buggery. I have zero problem with politicians having wild kinky sex in a manner that fulfills them. But I take deep issue with hypocrites who use their positions to hold back social progress and actively limit the rights of other citizens. Someday I feel sure, Senator Bernardi will be exposed and I will toast his downfall.
In the process of researching something for an adult client I stumbled upon this article today. It deals with the creation of Sci-Hub which is just about the most exciting thing in science today, bigger and I would argue of far more global significance than gravitational waves.
Alexandra Elbakyan has solved the problem the extraordinary Aaron Swartz was charged as a criminal for tackling. She has freed the research, her site Sci-Hub, is aiming to create a complete collection of all human scientific research free an open to all and they are well on their way to doing so. Elsevier is of course doing their damnedest to stop Sci-Hub, but the rabbit is out of the hat and it will never go back. The game is up for Elsevier’s business model, of charging researchers to hand over copyright on their -often publicly funded- research so that they can then charge library’s and readers exorbitant fees to access the papers, while also doing their damnedest to stomp on any competing publications.
In other news, progress on the castle card. L’s first day at Pre-School went well.
Three cool artists to share:
The simply incredible doll’s of michael zajkov. Occasionally NSFW depending on attitudes.
A photo posted by Михаил Зайков, скульптор?? (@michael_zajkov) on
The gobsmacking drawing skills of Kim Jung Gi, paraphrasing a good description “He draws like someone who could build a house starting with the paint.”
I even have the capacity to plug the drives themselves in elsewhere with handy cords. I can access the primary drive for an inconsistent twenty seconds or so before it resets and windows helpfully asks if I want to format the drive in order to use it. I have grabbed a few important things off the drive that way just to tide me over until I download the rest from Backblaze.
Still I’m pretty crushed and demoralised by it all. Struggling to see a way in which I can purchase a worthwhile laptop pre-Europe. Loans are unlikely due to the instability of my income, hire is for chumps. I am going to have to sell something big to achieve this and I’m going to have to do so without my primary creative tool.
In the mean time N and I will share her desktop which is her primary photography processing tool. For reasons still unclear her desktop restarts between 2 and 12 times a day at random intervals and with no clear trigger, so this is not an ideal solution. Event logging has yielded no explanation for the restarts so far and we have tried a huge variety of fixes to no discernible effect.
Adding to my frustration NSW Ed got back to me today and, in direct contradiction to the first enrollment officer I spoke to, asked for scans of certified copies of my ID and university documents. The first enrollments officer said that scanned originals were clearly superior and the second ‘jobsworth’ grudgingly acknowledged that a scan of a certified photocopy is an uncertified digital document and therefore worthless but that’s what the system needs. Fortunately I have a fairly large collection of certified copies and was able to scan and send them today. But it means it is likely to be at least another week before I get any progress on permission to teach in NSW. Another week without earnings beyond the meager supplemental income my tutoring is bringing in.
Thanks to the computer troubles and playing primary carer while trying to polish off the final rough edges of the unpack as well as clean up some of the grime our two darlings spread everywhere they go I’ve had limited creative success today. I have managed to recover the progress I made on a perspective reference model for the castle card in Sketchup, which is a relief. But I haven’t even begun installing Sketchup, tablet drivers and Manga Studio on this comp.
Some good news arrived in the form of my key ring showing up in West End so we will soon have a second car key again.
Painting all day. N took the boys to the farm for the day so I sweated it out at home painting digitally, listening and peripherally watching docos. Despite hours of attention the bloody village card is still not done. It’s getting there but my goodness it has been time consuming. Some minor and some significant changes still to go. Had took take a break as my wrist got sore.
Edit: Finished the bugger.
I watched or rather mostly listened to the following today:
Deep Web The Silk Road story which has a particular focus on the case against the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts user/admin Ross Ulbricht who has been jailed for life in a trial that involved some significant miscarriages of justice in the name of making a statement with his sentencing. Interesting for a variety of reasons, particularly so for the old law enforcement officers acknowledgements that the online trade has a profound effect in the reduction of violence in the drug trade. Which as the formost stated aim of The Silk Road counts as a success for the market. Also like so many other examples of distributed access as quickly as one is shut down others spring open. It seems that finally the writing’s on the wall for the ‘drug war’. Thanks largely to capitalism and the internet.
The Island President Follows the interesting figure Mohamed Nasheed during his brief time as president of the Maldives as he attempts to convince national leaders from around the world to act decisively on global warming prior to and during the Copenhagen summit. A somewhat depressing film particularly so for the endnotes which told how the Maldives have since slid back under military rule.
Unhung Hero follows Patrick Moote as he recovers from a humiliating breakup in which his penis size is implicated by travelling the world exploring the weird and wonderful field of penis enlargement treatments, almost all of which are decidedly dodgy scams. Occasionally quite touching, mostly annoyingly American, self indulgent and trite.
Playing link aggregate with a few other interesting things from the feed today:
Very much enjoying Rubicon still. This vid is quite timely really, though it shows Roma a few centuries after what I’m listening to. I do wish I had read it before my last trip to Rome.
I am seriously in love with Manga Studio best drawing software I’ve used in a long time. I’ve been making Photoshop work and it is incredibly powerful but it is not designed from the ground up for drawing. I’ve been playing all day working on pages for a children’s book, planning on trying to port some card progress over from Ps to MS tonight.
Some wiring on the chook tractor, a swimming lesson for L and cooking experiments took up the rest of the day.
So we watched the first half hour of the 1953 Peter Pan which has frankly amazing amounts of overt sexism and racism. This got me thinking about the bizarre and alarming reactions so called Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) have had to films, games and books over the past year or so. I pictured the comical scenario in which guided by misplaced nostalgia Peter Pan was re-released to the big screen and the gigantic kerfuffle which would inevitably result between RedPill keyboard warriors and true believer Gender Feminists. This got me thinking about The Blank Slate(PDF Chapter link) again and I even began mentally composing a long form piece of the curious similarity between the two extremes in gender politics.
But… then N tagged out of a contested bedtime. Our beautiful progeny fought sleep until well past nine and all my aspirations beyond making art crumbled.
Speaking of my beautiful progeny. My firstborn A has been accepted into Law at Griffith!
Unfortunately not his first preference but a very good law school all the same. He may find he can transfer into his first preference with relative ease later if he still wants too.
L has finished 10 days of swimming lessons with huge gains in confidence and comfort in the water. He was uncomfortable getting his nose wet at the start. As he has taken a shine to the coach we are planning on getting him another 5 half hour 1 on 1 lessons over the coming month.
F has started expanding his vocabulary dramatically in the last week. This morning he said ‘Pterodactyl’ while playing with the toy.
We made minimal progress outside today as we spent most of the day at the farm for a family lunch. I have managed to knock out two cards though colouring on both and a revisit of yesterdays will happen tonight and tomorrow.
Fangs, which has taken more than its fair share of drafting, reference from bear teeth used in the end.
And now in colour! Not helped by my Wacom tablet drivers mysteriously malfunctioning. There are a couple of fixes to try but after trying one with no luck I persevered as is rather than get involved with restarts and reinstalls.
I can in no way claim to be fully impartial, I’ve been with Android since the beginning of the smartphone age and with Nokia, Sony and Motorola prior. I’ve never even used a blackberry. This iPhone 4 is the first apple product I’ve owned since an ipod video almost a decade ago. I am not an Apple fanboi and I although I have at times tended to the rabid opposite. I no longer identify as such. iPad’s have finally received the upgrade that would have prompted me to buy their first generation in a heartbeat, their laptops and computers are rock solid (if limited when it comes to gaming) and their phones are undeniably sexy pieces of technology. All that aside I still fall firmly in the ‘if you can’t open it, you don’t own it camp’ for computers and phones alike.
I have also in truth not been giving the iPhone exclusive use, partially because it is very slow, partially because despite not functioning as a phone my Gs4 is still fully functional as a mini tablet loaded with my audiobooks, comics books and a superior camera. My stories and their bookmarks pretty much ensure I need to keep the Samsung with me. I am also aware that the iPhone 4 is a full generation older than the Gs4 and so not fairly comparable for performance and specs.
The kind of perky, bouncy nature of everything in the OS is sweet, but not to my taste.
The top swipe notification tray does all that it should, though old hat on Android.
There are a number of iOS exclusive apps I’ve been enjoying. In particular ‘Camera +’ and the extra instagram apps ‘Boomerang’ and ‘Hyperlapse’ I have also tried out a whole bunch of other random crap that hasn’t made it over to android some good, some rubbish, some absurdly expensive.
Siri is cool and very comparable in accuracy to google equivalent, neither can do what hound can:
The Bad
So small, for dainty little hands maybe, this one gives me cramps.
Updating this phone, which had to be done, none of the google apps would even install without the update, has reduced its speed considerably. Is this an example of Apple deliberately slowing down an older product to encourage a new purchase or do they simply not care to tailor their software to the old architecture?
The home button on this phone is on its last legs, repeated presses are required for any action using it and I’m more likely to end up with siri than my home screen. I’ve resorted to using the onscreen home button to counter for this. It seems this was a really common problem with this generation which is a shame.
Lack of a physical back button drives me bananas. It would be all very well if there was some uniform system wide on screen action that would perform this function but even that isn’t present. Most but far from all apps include this function as an on screen button. I honestly do not understand how people put up with the lack of this feature. To those of you who are iOS lifers, Android phones, in addition to the power/lock, volume and home buttons typically have a back and a menu button on either side of the home. The menu button is falling out of fashion being replaced by system wide standard ‘swipe in from the left for menu’ function. But ‘Back’ is for now at least, here to stay. I have encountered and witnessed people being confused by the buttons behaviour. All it does is if possible go back to the previous screen or action. It can go back through a number of screens or actions this way usually depositing you back at the home screen after a couple of presses.
The phone doesn’t display the number you are calling, only the contact name.
iTunes is almost as bad as I remember on PC. It slides its tentacles in deep, cannot be removed from background operation completely and is generally a cumbersome and irritating program to use. By comparison the Gs4 behaves like an external hdd when plugged in and is fully accessible. Prior to rooting I could not write to the SD card this way without removing it and plugging it in separately to my computer thanks to a google mandated security update.
The Verdict
Really the bulk of my issues with iOs come down to customisability. My Gs4 always had Nova installed so even though a few months ago I finally got around to Rooting it and installing Cyanogen Mod installed it is functionally and visually identical to what it was before, with the exception that I have superuser write access allowing me to bypass a few of the annoying restrictions in Android.
These are my Gs4’s two home screens, current background image is the camera obscura image the lounge room curtain gap makes on the wall in the middle of the day. Everything I need is on my home page, all other apps live in the app draw which shares the button with Nova themes settings, red button bottom centre. My icons are a custom set, labels would normally be switched off, but I haven’t bothered since the factory reset done while trying to diagnose the sim problem. I use signal the crypto messenger as my default sms client with the added bonus that if both I and the recipient are using signal and on WiFi the messages are sent that way instead.
My iPhone looks exactly like everyone else’s. The icons aren’t customisable, the spacing grid alignment isn’t customisable, icons don’t expand to fit low volume folders, every installed app populates neverending visually indistinguishable homescreens. There are no widgets, seen below a clock and weather widget with custom skin and on the other homepage a custom skin for a calendar widget. Bloatware apple apps are irremovable.
Android wins for me for now at least.
Discovered this wonderful site via someone being effusive about Elon Musk. Very pleased to with this discovery.
Packed lots and lots and lots of stuff. Boxes are towering in most rooms now. Still huge amounts to do, Including the gardens again tomorrow morning as the realtor is bringing people through. I was hoping to leave that job until later in the week so that I would only need to do it once.
I finished an important card and finally replied to an important email.
Injured my right hand, not badly, removing removable picture hangers. The older 3M variety still take some paint with them, the newer ones seem to come of cleanly. But be warned they can be sling shoted very hard into your hand, as happened to me, drew blood and all.
Tarantula infected by Cordyceps
I recently finished “The Girl With All The Gifts” by Mike Carey. It was an entertaining read or in my case listen.
Gripping, intense action, morally challenging characters and occasionally heart rending decisions. It is a zombie novel with a difference not least for its well thought out use of the ‘Cordyceps‘ fungi. All in all it is a well realised portrait of humanity looking into the abyss of extinction.
The ending has repeated on me, even though I saw at least part of it coming, the characters are left in such a way that further contemplation of where they are headed and what world they will create is inevitable.
Cordyceps features as a zombie infection in the game ‘The Last of Us‘ which I haven’t played, it being exclusive to a system I don’t own.
Until tonight I did not know people willingly ate it, but of course they do.
The most interesting link I know about this fungi is from a rather old TED talk by Paul Stamets. In which after ten minutes of proselytising the wonders of mycelium he finally gets to the point and shows six pretty cool ways fungi can be used. One of which is the use of Cordyceps as an incredibly effective carpenter ant treatment. He demonstrates that in the non sporulating form the fungi is actually attractive to the ants as a food stuff and hypothesisesthat there is at least one species of Cordyceps for each species of insect on earth.
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