pebblerocker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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... )

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.

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.

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... )