wychwood: the side of Ronon's face (SGA - Ronon eye)
[personal profile] wychwood
I'm feeling outrageously exhausted, but also I can only slack off so much because I'm in the office tomorrow, out all weekend with the Augustinian no-longer-youths, and then going to Mum's for the week on Sunday afternoon, which means I need to be more-or-less ready for the next ten days by bedtime. This is not in fact going to happen, but at least I've packed my work bag.

Of all the indignities of middle age that I was warned of, the most annoying so far is one that no one mentioned: my nose hair has suddenly started growing so long and luxuriant that it starts tickling the inside of my nostrils. What is this bullshit. Constant random tickling! I did not sign up for this!!

My flu jab went ahead fine (and no side effects except for the bruise) but they didn't have any private COVID vaccine on hand. They were supposed to get back to me about it, but they haven't yet, which I assume means they're having trouble finding it... and I'm not going to be available to pop in until November now anyway so there's not much point chasing right now.

We are solidly into Dehumidifier Season now. I've been trying to get at least some open-window time just for ventilation (it's smelling fairly stale in here) but it's so dank outside it makes the humidity worse if I'm not careful! Although I did manage to get the kitchen hygrometer up to 89% earlier this week, and it's not that wet outside even if it's still raining heavily. Ah, the joys of a damp climate.

Quality Experiences

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:11 pm
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[personal profile] tcpip
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.
wychwood: Sheppard tossing a coin (SGA - Shep choices)
[personal profile] wychwood
I have been enjoying the slightly calmer pace of life; being back in a work routine has really helped, so that even being out every evening last week was not actually that stressful! However it looks like I'm going to be spending next week, or possibly the week after, at my mother's while dad goes to shut up the house in France for the winter, so I shall be all out of sync again... The plus side is that the main thing I miss when I'm there is my computer gaming, and right now I am doing basically zero of that (well, a couple of hours of The Sims 4 at the weekend, but that barely counts).

The second attempt at my annual diabetic retinopathy check was rather more successful, and I came out with a clean bill of health (yay!). Tomorrow I have my flu and COVID jabs, although the NHS has reduced the criteria so extremely this year (even dad doesn't get one, and mum only does because she's literally just finished chemo!) that I'm going to have to pay for it. There's definitely more fun things I could do with that £75, but I'll take it.

Work has also calmed down slightly, to the point where I can actually find some time to spend on the urgent things my boss wants me to work on, instead of purely on emergent... stuff. I am solidly three months behind on reporting, but the big testing project I was supposed to be doing this month has shrunk because most of the work is not in fact ready for testing yet. The next round, early next year, will therefore be much worse, but that's next year's problem (and hopefully I should have more support from the rest of the team then, because it's not the start of the academic year! or so I can dream).

And now I need to run around and get things ready for the cleaner tomorrow, instead of accidentally doing nothing for another hour.

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Climate: A Grim Prognosis

Oct. 17th, 2025 11:37 am
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[personal profile] tcpip
For the past several weeks, I have delved deeply into the content produced by scientific climate change deniers. By "denier" I mean those who argue that global warming is below the range expected by mainstream studies and by "scientific" I mean that handful of actual active researchers in climatology, rather than unqualified opinions. Without exclusion, I've found that these scientific deniers engage in extraordinary selection biases, unfounded speculations, and flawed logic. But, to the untrained eye, I can certainly see how they could be convincing; they appeal to ideological confirmation biases and, of course, they appeal to certain vested interests. Their influence is profound; there are very few climatology journal articles that are in the denier category, but the content makes up the overwhelming majority of related advertorials. The result is a profound disparity between an misinformed public opinion compared to scientific research, which, in a capitalist democracy, is reflected in the politics of demagoguery.

Two days ago, the World Meteorological Organization reported the largest recorded level of atmospheric CO2 and the largest increase in a single year (a reminder that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a very long time). It follows Trump's decision to withdraw from the 2016 Paris Agreement, which sought to preferably limit global warming this century to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, with a long-term objective of below 2.0 degrees. As COP30 approaches it increasingly becomes clear that voluntary agreements to a global problem is biased toward unenforceable lobbying even when adaptive and mitigative technologies exist and even when our first major tipping point (coral reef losses) looms, a situation that has been warned about for years even as fossil fuel subsidies increase - your taxes at work.

I am now in my third year as a climatology postgraduate, after many years of debating the issue and engaging in autodidactic research. When I started formal studies, it quickly became apparent to me that, despite international agreements and technological change, the most accurate trajectory was the RCP8.5 scenario; high-emissions, high-growth, high-population, the highest plausible temperature increase, i.e., the worst case scenario. Maybe it's the risk engineer disposition in me, but I think we should prepare against worst-case scenarios, especially when the costs are high. The problem is that they are so incremental; people understand the accretion of warming as explained by the popular metaphor of the "boiling frog" story that describes how people do not effectively react to creeping changes. Whilst it is a strong and appropriate metaphor, it is also a myth. A frog will react when the water is too hot for comfort. But I wonder whether humans are as clever as a frog.

Rocknerd Explorations and The Thing

Oct. 13th, 2025 11:46 pm
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It's been several months since I've written anything for Rocknerd, and over the past weekend, I put together three reviews that have been sitting on the back burner for too long. The first is a bleak review of Bleak Squad's debut performance at the Queenscliff Town Hall. The second, a review of John Schumann and The Vagabond Crew performing songs of Redgum at the Darwin Ski Club, a thoroughly enjoyable concert, and the third, the charm of Guy Blackman's album launch at the Northcote Social Club. One can also add this to the few hundred words I penned on "Command-Line CD Extraction and Formatting", which uses some delightfully old utilities and is helping me put together a selection from my own vast collection in the most efficient manner.

It all adds to what was already a bit of a rocknerd weekend, starting on Thursday night, where I caught up with Adam F., at The Retreat Hotel to see a very competent instrumental funk band, "Buttered Loaf", ply their sounds. I've never had a bad time at The Retreat, and I do enjoy a good funk band, so this was quite a delightful evening. The following night I had arranged a small posse (Kate, Liza, Tony, Declan, Carla, myself) to go to The Grace Darling and see "Cold Regards", a 1980s coldwave guitar-synth duo (Marc and Jaimee) whom I've heard a lot about for more than a year. It was really my type of music, as were the other acts, "No Statues", and "Human Intrusion". The latter group was using the night for an EP launch which they distributed, in retro-cyberpunk style, on floppy disks (with oversized floppy-disc props on stage). Said performers may all find themselves subject to me putting finger to keyboard in their name in the future.

One of the nice touches of "Human Intrusion" was their backdrop with various 1980s science fiction clips, which included part of John Carpenter's "The Thing". Unpopular at the time, it has since gone on to become the cult hit that it always was going to be. Somewhat unfamiliar with movies of this suspense-horror-gore genre, I decided that Kate R., needed to view this classic in preparation for our Antarctica trip, where it's an annual screening at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The gory special effects are more clever than terrifying these days, and the theme of in-group paranoia stands up well, especially with the ambiguous ending.

booklog: first half of September

Oct. 12th, 2025 10:15 pm
wychwood: a cartoon panda doing a somersault (gen - tumbling panda)
[personal profile] wychwood
This month was ridiculous, so I'm splitting the booklog in two, in the hopes of getting at least some of it out of the way!

86. The Chalet School Wins the Trick and 87. A Future Chalet School Girl - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) I'm always very happy to read any of this series.


88. The Life of Birds - David Attenborough ) I personally am not invested in birds in particular, but all of this stuff is fascinating.


89. Steering the Craft - Ursula Le Guin ) I think this would probably be useful for someone who wanted to improve their fiction writing - and it's interesting even for someone like me.


90. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet - Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse ) A good snapshot of a moment I remember, and a reminder of how much things have changed!


91. The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett ) I unexpectedly enjoyed this; not particularly memorable, but solid entertainment.


92. Tales From the Folly - Ben Aaronovitch ) I would say this was really only for fans of the series, but if you are a fan there's some really nice moments here.


93. We'll Prescribe You a Cat - Syou Ishida tr. E Madison Shimoda ) Not much depth, but it was quite pleasant to read.


95. Conclave - Robert Harris ) I really enjoyed this book, and I thought it did a great job of the Catholic vibes.


97. The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley ) Ultimately I don't think I have any idea what this book is doing, but I do think it's at least trying to do something different; I would try Bradley again.


94. Sheepfarmer's Daughter, 96. Divided Allegiance, and 98. Oath of Gold - Elizabeth Moon ) A really classic fantasy trilogy; I still love these with the wholehearted commitment I did when I first came across them in a second-hand shop as a young teenager.

Harvest Celebrations

Oct. 10th, 2025 04:55 pm
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This week was the Moon Festival, mid-autumn in the northern hemisphere, a harvest festival celebrated in Chinese culture and among its aficionados for about 3000 years. Due to the use of the lunisolar calendar, the event can be anywhere from mid-September to early October when a full moon is present. Last year it was around the former, this year the latter. The weather permitting, it is often held outside with friends and family, which is meant to coincide with the harvest gathering. Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival; last year I made some, a fairly complex process, this year I received some from the Consulate, which I took to Anthony and Robin's where, joined with Matthew, we had a little festival of our own and imbibed several glasses of Maotai; at 53% that stuff is like rocket fuel, but doesn't have bad effects the following day. The following evening, I had a second Moon Festival with Kate, where we engaged in the dice game of Bo Bing, one of the many games of celebration held at such festivities.

There are several additional parts of the tradition that I find particularly charming. One is the reflection on distant friends who, although not present, will be gazing at the same moon at the same time as you are. Another is the opportunity for especially close friends to express their fondest desires and greatest dreams to each other, although one imagines that sometimes that can result in a bitter harvest, so to speak. But perhaps my favourite is reciting one of the variations of the story of the goddess Chang'e, whom the festival is named after. The version I tell recites how she drank an elixir of immortality and flew to the moon, becoming the moon goddess. Her heroic but still mortal partner, the archer Hou Yi, made mooncakes to show how much he missed her; talk about shooting for the moon. Chang'e would later be joined by a rabbit who had been exiled by the Jade Emperor for surrendering the elixir of immortality to the Queen of the West.

I did take the opportunity this year to reflect on distant and absent friends and on the new harvest from the last celebration. Despite some significant disappointments, I am more than satisfied with how this year has progressed so far. I also have my eye on an even more involved and interesting twelve months in the future, which involves a fairly significant life change. It is not something that I am prepared to discuss publicly, but those whom I have told know of its importance. I have already observed some sadness among you with the realisation of what this change will entail, but remember that no matter where we are this time next year, we will be gazing at the same moon and in celebration.
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