pebblerocker: A twenty-sided die carved from stone. (d20)
The way some people think about numbers bothers me SO MUCH. I am far from a mathematical genius (I got up to fourth form) but the way some people think about probability REALLY bugs me. Today's instance: "Oh, but you don't know for sure, you're making assumptions!" when I prepare myself for something I consider 90% likely to happen - this person thinks that since the 7% and 3% possibilities COULD happen, I should hold off until I hear which outcome has befallen, or else spend equal effort on preparing for each of the three. Almost as if there aren't any probabilities other than 100% or exactly even chances.

My partner also gets on my wick by rounding off excessively loosely before calculating, along the lines of "65cm is about 50cm so three of them will take up about 1.5m", and by paying more attention to how much the price is reduced than to how much something costs. And the way he uses "more than half" and "less than half" - exactly opposite to the way I use them - has caused a few misunderstandings.

Ah well, maybe it's my brain that's the problem.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
There were no onions in my house so I shouldn't have skipped the fruit and veg the other day. I bought onions and then fried a big skillet of onions and it was like a sausage sizzle came to my house, only the sausages were vegetarian. I am very satisfied with my tummy full of onion.

My partner's manager lives in Christchurch (jetting about between branches in different cities as only managers can) and has not had to evacuate from the huge wildfire yet, but it's getting closer. The smoke is visible from space.

Geoffrey's sensitive stomach has given him trouble again today. I have had to clean up after his hurling in six different places. Poor cat is feeling mopey and wants to stay near me all the time, which is fine if I'm not in a part of the house with carpet.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
My father's garden was looking nice when I went over. I commented on it and next minute he's picking courgettes and handing them over and giving me big long leaves of black kale to take home. I didn't need to stop in at the fruit and veg on the way home after all. My father says his mother would spin in her grave if he didn't grow some of his own food - Nana always grew an excellent garden in the tiny space beside her unit, and I think she's put a geas on him to always have his veges planted by Labour Weekend.

The courgettes were very nice in a stir fry, and the next day at work I was given two more and a bunch of green beans. I put some of them into a salad for lunch - beans cut small, courgette grated - but I'm going to have to work hard to keep up with everyone else's gardens. So far all that's in my garden is a huge sprawl of nasturtiums.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
Things I did on the first day of the new year:

Took apart a flat-pack computer desk, and assembled a different one, while sleep-deprived and dehydrated, in perfect harmony with my partner. I don't understand the meme about flat-pack furniture destroying marriages because we're so good at doing them. A nice ratcheting screwdriver with multiple fittings does help.

Jump-started a small tractor.

Ate all the cornbread.

Played one of my new card games late into the night with my parents and siblings, with much merriment and laughter.

I hope everyone else's year is off to a good start too.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
Nat King Cole can sing all the Christmas music for me this year. I don't need anyone else's voice when his is so perfect.



Although Bing Crosby is welcome to do one or two as well. I will just have to come to terms with having my father's taste in music this Christmas.



It's a pity neither of them ever recorded Santa Baby.
pebblerocker: Vila from Blake's 7: I have a very low pain threshold (vila pain)
How do other people do bookmarks? I may have bookmarked so many things that Firefox can't cope any more and now it's very erratic whether I can make a new bookmark or not. My partner is no help because he only bookmarks things like the internet banking website and Youtube and the weather website, whereas I think bookmarks are for things I don't already know how to type in myself.

Of course all fanfic on AO3 is bookmarked inside AO3, but not all fic is on Ao3 and not all my bookmarks are fic. I often bookmark an article I read that seems likely to give me thinky thoughts later on, so I can come back to it and do some more learning and thinking. Sometimes that system doesn't work because the most unexpected things can make me thinky weeks later when my history isn't much help.

I had heard of people using Delicious for bookmarks; I thought it had been bought and shut down years ago, but apparently it still exists. Maybe that's worth a go. Or there's zillions of bookmark add-ons, but I don't know which are any good for my purposes. Someone tried to tell me how great Evernote was and I signed up, but it turns out you can only take 500 notes before it gets full, which makes it a very temporary usefulness.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
There might be something to be said for this spring pumpkin festival. I saw a girl in her fancy dress at 11am, playing with a dog outside her house; she had on an entirely normal T-shirt and shorts, and a pale blue wig tied in two tails, and she was carrying a plastic battleaxe. The overall impression was of some sort of icy fjordian war goddess accompanied by her battle-hound.

I haven't done any dress-up outfits for years. Sometimes ordinary clothes get boring and it would be fun to have an excuse to go around in a cape.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
What a trip back in time I've had! After a discussion with [personal profile] spiralsheep and [personal profile] capri0mni on handwriting a while ago, I dug out my old diaries to look for data on when I learnt cursive and how long it took me to get good at it. Whether it was developing co-ordination, or mechanical practice, or mental concentration powers, I finally started producing consistently legible cursive at age 14. It could even be that I just didn't feel like using cursive until that point for aesthetic reasons.

I was given one of those little lockable diaries when I was nine, and I've kept writing ever since. I haven't read over them for years, and I'm glad I did, not just for the handwriting, or for the memories; I've been trying to recover a fictional universe I made up back then, and there were some useful lists of character names written in the front of my diary from the year I was twelve.

Reading the record of my thoughts back then makes me want to write letters to my past self; I want to tell 12-year-old me that some of those wishes and hopes will come true, if not in the way I'd expect, and most importantly to write down my stories instead of keeping most of them in my head, and to archive them where they won't get lost if I move house half a dozen times. Of course I can't go back in time with advice for my past self... but I can extrapolate a message from my future self, and make sure to write down all the stories I have going around in my head now.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
I told a customer services representative to hurry up and get me a real person to talk to. Turned out he was a real person and was a bit taken aback that I thought he was a robot. It was the way he kept responding only to keywords in anything I said, starting with asking me what category my request was in, then circling back to the start when what I said didn't fit in his standard boxes. I should have guessed he was real when his voice recognition didn't have any trouble with my accent.

His telephone service training must have have given him a flowchart and specific scripts to use - his employers are, essentially, asking him to behave like a robot. He turned much more human in a hurry once we'd cleared up that he wasn't a robot, and became way more helpful. But I'm starting to feel really creeped out afterwards... what if a robot was programmed to be offended at being told it was a robot? What if he's programmed to joke about the situation to cover things up? Of course that's ridiculous - speech recognition and AI may already be that good, but they'd be that good when working with men with California accents, not with New Zealand women who stammer slightly.

Now I'm left feeling cross that I had to talk to a big company on the phone at all, and also guilty for being rude to someone, and also Uncanny Valleyed the heck out, and also wondering if it's actually even more creepy to think about a human sitting in a cubicle all day behaving exactly like a robot.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
We went to see the new Ghostbusters movie! It was excellent!

This is a story I've heard played out multiple times: woman wants to see Ghostbusters, her boyfriend isn't enthusiastic but goes with her, he comes out loving it as much as she did. Add one more data point to that theme from us! I don't know why my partner wasn't jazzed up about the movie coming out - he hangs out in different parts of the internet to what I do - but he's definitely glad I dragged him along. He walked out talking about how cool Holtz was with her engineering and her guns and her wacky hair, and he asked me which Ghostbuster I liked best, and it reminded me very much of the way my niece interacts with characters she enjoys - "Which one do you want to be?"

How often do I get to watch a movie where I get to decide which one I want to be?!? And I do. I want to march around New York in those overalls and save the day and be the hero.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
I accidentally made fat-free muffins. They were still edible.

Better than when I've accidentally made sugar-free things or left out the baking powder, anyway. I expect the banana in them helped with the texture. I haven't had the motivation to bake anything for many months so it's a bit sad to have made a mistake in these, but hey, having something home-made and different is still nice.

I'm seeing [livejournal.com profile] naarmamo coming around again soon. Maybe there's something about the time of year - after joining in every year for so long - that I associate with the need to be creative. Yesterday I was outside in the clear winter sunshine taking macro photos in the garden, and today I found the drawing tablet I'd got for a birthday a few years back and tried plugging it in, but I hadn't consciously remembered NaArMaMo is coming until later on.

Maybe it's just that I've now had two days in a row where nobody at work has been sick and I haven't been called in when I'm rostered off, and suddenly my creativity starts to return.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
My mouse broke and I had to get a new one.

The new one pleases me greatly.

Read more... )
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
From the department of being late to fandoms:

I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Several weeks ago but I never remember to post about things at the time. Everyone on Twitter was lovely and didn't post any spoilers before I went. It was fun and the new young characters were lovely just as everyone said. I was happy because there were plenty of hugs. I'm always happy with a movie that has lots of non-sexual hugs. not much plot stuff )

Then the other day my partner was all excited to tell me he'd found out about a TV series he thinks we'll enjoy watching together and it's called BBC Sherlock. So we watched the first episode of that. I thought it was very well made but OH MY FLIPPIN' AUNT the entirety of fandom weren't kidding when they mentioned the queerbaiting. The show could have made them be actually gay and still easily have spent less time talking about whether they were gay. Read more... )
pebblerocker: Vila from Blake's 7: I have a very low pain threshold (vila pain)
I've been feeling a little too smug about my phone - my cheap, simple, solid phone with its two-colour non-touch screen. Pretty much everyone I know has a shiny, bulky, expensive smartphone and lives in permanent fear of damaging it... everyone except the two or three people who are using smartphones with screens already smashed into crazed mosaics.

My little phone lives a hard life. I drop it onto concrete on average once a week, and it flies into three pieces completely unharmed; all I have to do is snap it back together and reset the date and time. But today I utterly destroyed it. I put my bike on its stand on a slope and it tipped over, and somehow a hard corner of the frame must have come down right on the screen and busted it completely. And unlike a smartphone, that type of screen becomes completely unreadable once it's broken. I tried out my memory for button-push sequences to send my parter a text, letting him know I wouldn't be able to read any texts from him, but apparently all I managed was sending a blank text.

Oh well, a new mobile phone can be my Christmas present to myself. At least it'll be under $30 to replace.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
Happy Back to the Future day to people who are living in the past, relative to my position near the international date line! In the second film, October 21, 2015 is the date Marty and Doc arrived in the future - a future of flying cars, hoverboards, the nostalgic Cafe '80s... and keyless entry, mobile eftpos terminals, and Skype business calls.

I hadn't thought I was in the mood to watch the movie last night; I was stressed out after work and felt like anything intended to cheer me up would just make me crankier. But if I missed watching the movie on The Day, I'd regret it forever, wouldn't I - so I did, and before twenty minutes in I was in a greatly improved mood and actually having fun.

You know what though, they missed a big opportunity. The first film ends with Marty and Jennifer getting into the DeLorean with Doc Brown and flying away; then they decided to make a sequel and had to figure out what they could do with that scenario as the starting point. What did they do? They knocked Jennifer out within the first five minutes, and then she got a couple of minutes to overhear conversations from a cupboard before being knocked unconscious again; she spent most of the first half being carried around by Marty and Doc, limp as a sack of spuds, and then disappeared for the rest of the story. We only have the Doc's assurance that the timeline will re-form around her after she was abandoned on the porch in the hellish alternate 1985!

We've found out that Marty and Jennifer are still together, married with two children, thirty years in the future. That drives the whole start of the plot. Wouldn't it be so much better if we could see what it is that makes them work so well together? I think it would be more convincing if we're shown that these teenage sweethearts have what it takes to form a lasting relationship - not just told that, well, that's what they did. Imagine if Marty and Jennifer could have had an adventure in 2015 together, possibly involving both their son, who looks just like his father, AND their daughter, who could in this envisioning look like her mother instead of like Michael J. Fox in a wig. And they're in trouble which only their parents can solve, by impersonating them in a scene perhaps involving hoverboards!

And if anything needed explaining, but Marty shouldn't need to ask because he's an old hand at time travel, Jennifer could ask the Doc what the heck is going on. And when they go to 1955 again, Marty needs to avoid crossing over with himself from the first movie, and Jennifer also needs not to run into past-Marty because he doesn't know she's a time-traveller too, so seeing her would freak him right out unless she was heavily disguised, WHAT ARE GOOD DISGUISES FOR A TEEN GIRL IN 1955? And Jennifer could have a run-in with teenage Biff Tannen and maybe as a liberated 1980s girl she's done karate and she has ways of dealing with his harassment which weren't available to poor Lorraine. And it all gets ever more confusing and they need another walkie-talkie.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
I didn't think I was in the mood to watch Back to the Future II last night, but that was because I'd forgotten what an enjoyable movie it is.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
Things I have managed to forget in the past week:

-my keys
-my sunglasses
-my drink bottle (both of these before bike rides on sunny days, but not the same day)
-a prescription
-to change from my fluffy slipper-socks into normal socks before putting my shoes on and going to work
-that my grandmother was hosting a family lunch
-that my niece was coming to visit
-to bring a snack for a long day out
-that I'd told that exact same bit of news to my boyfriend not two minutes ago
-to bring a fork as well as the plate of food when I sat down to dinner just now
-the other thing I was going to write in this list

I would blame Daylight Savings but that only started halfway through the list.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
I bit the dentist whoops. I didn't know he was putting his finger in my mouth just then. It wasn't hard enough to draw blood or even leave dents, but I did bite him harder than it's polite to bite someone you don't know very well. Still, I expect dentists are used to it.

My feet are in new socks which are nice and thick and comfy. I like the sort of socks with thick terry stuff in the foot, but sports socks made of that stuff usually don't come up your ankles at all, leaving a cold gap, and socks that do are all thin. These are polypropylene hiking socks. It's been freezing lately so it's a good time to have warm new socks.

The nursery had a sale so I went and bought many trees and I don't know where to put them. I bought a fig tree and a plum tree and several native trees for the bit where I'm trying to get a nice shady bit of bush growing, and I'm going to have to water them and keep them alive until I've worked out where to dig their holes. Apparently fig trees grow quite big.

I haven't been doing any art. I was doing well at art until I had a couple of big days of work, and now I'm not creative at all. Being tired drains it all out of me. I recovered from being tired after work days ago and I still haven't done any art whatsoever. Maybe I'll have a go tomorrow.
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
I've been entirely disproportionately exhausted by working for two days this week and my ability to contribute to NaArMaMo has fallen through the floor. So instead of art, I'm doing a cat post. Here's a proper introduction to Monty, with pictures!

Read more... )
pebblerocker: A worried orange dragon, holding an umbrella, gazes at the sky. (Default)
Followed a link today to an article on the ubiquitous tastelessness of the Red Delicious apple. My Nana used to buy three Red Delicious apples every week to put in her fruit bowl, then throw away and replace them. She didn't eat them and I had to be pretty desperate for an apple to chew through the bitter skin of an apple at her house.

But fandom-relevantly, from the article: the Red Delicious was brought to prominence by the Stark Brothers' Nursery, and they called it the Stark Delicious. But before it got famous, it was called the Hawkeye.

Oh, also, the Stark Delicious was striped red and gold. The solid deep red was selected for later on.

There is a surprising amount of Avengers fanfic involving bananas (and not even in a dirty way). Iron Man and Hawkeye having their own apple varieties calls for fic too, don't you think?

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