2024-10-14 08:50
I bet a few letters of marque and reprisal issued to privateers could put a stop to that.
Russian Oil Flows Through Western ‘Price Cap’ as Shadow Fleet Grows – The New York Times
I bet a few letters of marque and reprisal issued to privateers could put a stop to that.
Russian Oil Flows Through Western ‘Price Cap’ as Shadow Fleet Grows – The New York Times
I keep seeing posts urging me to check my voter registration while there’s still time to register if my registration has been improperly deleted, and thinking, “Oh, right. I haven’t done that! I should check!” And then I remember that I voted last week, so I’m all set. Phew!
At 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of the month, the county tests its emergency sirens. #dogsofmastodon
The very first month we had Ashley, we happened to be walking right under one of the sirens at the moment it started up. Ashley started howling along with it, which made me laugh. And Ashley looked a little embarrassed, thinking she’d done something wrong. I didn’t want that, so I started howling as well.
Since then, Ashley and I (and Jackie when she’s with us) have howled along with the emergency sirens every month.
Our neighbors have not complained, although I suppose they think we’re rather weird.
I don’t get why people are treating Helene like some unpredictable catastrophe, rather than just the way things are now.
I’m like, “Hey, it’s going to be like this all the time from now on—either impending disaster, disaster occurring, trying to rescue people from the disaster, or recovering from disaster—from now on.”
It’s weird that people don’t understand that. I mean, it’s so obvious to me, but people are still treating each new disaster as an unpredictable one-off.
Although some people are getting a clue. Zillow, for example, will now show climate risks for property listings in the US.
Most years about this time I’ll see a couple praying mantises, like this one I saw yesterday.
To celebrate voting (and because the dog is at her Canine Academy) we’re having lunch out. I’ve got a Three Floyd’s Zombie Dust (yummy—I’ve had it before), and Jackie has a Big Grove Old Fashioned.
Jackie and I have exercised the franchise.
You can’t really see it in this photo, but there are a wide range of diverse, multi-ethnic “I voted” stickers this year.
There’s a small creek that runs behind Winfield Village. It feeds the ponds in the Lake Park subdivision, and then the water flows on to the Embarras River.
It usually has only three or four inches of water in it, but after heavy rain it swells quite a bit.
Frua je Esperanto kunveno, Do tempo por sipi mian bieron.
I wish I had as lean and muscly a physique as Ashley. But I don’t wish it enough to switch to eating nothing but dog food as a way to get it. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
For years now, I’ve been trying to figure out (and writing about figuring out) how to exercise in ways that support all the different things I want to do. My latest hobby, HEMA (sword fighting), has seemed like it required more support than most of my other activities, which prompted more (and more different) exercise than I’d been doing before. I’ve worried for a while that I was overdoing it, and I’m now pretty sure that’s been true.
The specific experiment that convinced me was skipping a few HEMA practice sessions. My HEMA club has two-hour practice sessions on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Two weeks ago I just wasn’t feeling it on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. Each of those two days I skipped practice, but otherwise did my regular workouts—and started feeling more energetic each day. Last week I repeated that. Not only did I continue to feel better, I also was able to step up my regular workouts a bit.
I’ve had two specific issues: a sore elbow and a sore neck.
I’m pretty sure the sore elbow is not HEMA-related, but rather dog-walking related. I think I’ve fixed the issue with how I was handling the dog, but my elbow has been slow to recover—probably because of either how I was handling my longsword, or else how I was exercising to support my longsword training. Having taking a break from longsword training (just going on Sundays, when we’ve been doing rapier training), and having my elbow get much better, even while I continued doing the rest of my exercise regimen, I’m pretty sure it was the actual longsword training that was keeping my elbow from getting better. As I write this, it’s feeling entirely better.
The sore neck, I suspect, is also HEMA-related, I think due to the asymmetrical stance of longsword. (Rapier stance is even more asymmetrical, but I haven’t been doing it as long or as vigorously.) Anyway, after a couple weeks of less training, my neck was, and is, feeling much better.
Of course I’m doing all the regular stuff to enhance recovery: stretching, good diet, trying to get plenty of sleep, etc.
I’m still working toward a plan for exercise. My current thinking is to give up one of Tuesday or Thursday HEMA practice. Then I’ll do four days a week of general exercise focused on support for my HEMA activities: Specifically, I’ve started two different programs of steel club swinging, one 1-handed and the other 2-handed, with a plan to do each of those two days a week. That would add up to 4 days a week. Add to that 2 days a week for HEMA training, and I’d be exercising 6 days a week, with one day of complete rest.
No one day of that should be completely exhausting, so maybe I’ll be able to recover better than I have been.
My new Sigi Forge rapier arrived!
The default length (normal), is probably several inches longer than ideal for Meyer rapier fencing, but there are advantages to having a longer blade.
I’m very pleased.
Right from the start I referred to Ashley as my “pupperdog.” After a while though, I realized that she was actually my “pup ur-dog”—that is, some proto-dire-wolf aspect of a pit bull / boxer cross.
You can see it in her eyes. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
Newsletter question: @help Is there any way to create/edit the front text that goes ahead of a newsletter, besides catching the email 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out?
Somebody in the local HEMA Discord shared:
“The fact I gotta train 3–5 days a week to keep my body at “moderately broken,” while my cat sleeps all day, and can do parkour with ease, is a crime.”
Another guy said:
“Maybe the reason the cat’s ok and needs to sleep all day is because it spends all it’s waking time doing parkour. If you did parkour all day and then slept for 12 hours you’d probably be able to keep up with the cat.”
To which I said:
“I have spent the last 15 years of my life trying to arrange it exactly like this. I have not yet achieved complete success, but I haven’t given up.”
Now that I’m over 65 I qualify to get the pneumonia immunization. The doctor mentioned that it has much less in the way of side-effects than common viral immunizations—flu, covid, shingles, etc.
Maybe that’s true, as far as the fever and body ache side-effects. But as far as the soreness-in-my-arm side-effect, it is really, really not true.
I’ve been whacked in the arm with a steel bar and not had it hurt as much as my arm hurts right now. (Admittedly, I’ve mostly been whacked with steel bars very gently.)
Ow.
Here’s a dog wearing a cooling vest.
As someone who’s been paying attention to AI since the 1970s, I’ve noticed the same pattern over and over: People will say, “It takes real intelligence to do X (win at chess, say), so doing that successfully will mean we’ve got AI.” Then someone will do that, and people will look at how it’s done and say, “Well, but it’s just using Y (deep lookup tables and lots of fast board evaluations, say). That’s not really AI.”
For the first time (somewhat later than I expected), I just heard someone doing the same thing with large language models. “It’s just predicting the next word based on frequencies in its training data. That’s not really AI.”
Happens every time.
This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).
Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.
… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.
Source: NYT
Copper River sockeye salmon cooked in coconut oil with a soy-ginger-mustard-maple glaze. Cahokia brown rice. Sautéed red onions and red peppers. Delicious!
Jackie almost always gets up before me and makes the coffee. But every few weeks I’ll wake up first and then I’ll be the one to make the coffee. And when I do, I bring Jackie a cup of bed coffee.
Ashley routinely stays in bed until the second person gets up. #dogsofmastodon 🐕
I have written very little in a long time. But today I started working on something new, and I have a plan to get another (related) thing that I wrote a while ago ready to submit.
The older thing is a bit of steampunk-esque whimsy that I started as an experiment in voice, and found I rather liked. As it grew, I realized that it was longer than a short story, and a market I was interested in was about to open to novella submissions, so I thought I’d just let it grow.
One thing I do when I’m writing is to just drop bits in that seem cool, as possible set-ups for later bits. This often works out very well. Sometimes, though, those bits of set-up imply stuff that doesn’t get written. That happened this time, and I made a list of bits that either needed the follow-up stuff written, or else be deleted.
Since I was aiming at novella length (and I wasn’t there yet), I figured that I could just write those bits out. But several didn’t end up working out. So now my plan is to make another pass through the planned novella, delete the bits that didn’t go anywhere, turn it into a novelette, and get it submitted somewhere.
But that is all work for another day. Today I’ve started on something new: a sequel to that story. I remain delighted by the characters, by the steampunky world, and by the voice I used to write the story. And yesterday I came up with part of a new idea.
Just now I jotted down a few sentences, which I very much hope to get back to later today.
Ashley is on her Very Best Behavior since picked up after being boarded for our trip. I don’t know if they did a bit of training (insisting that she not jump, having her sit to put her leash on), or if she’s nervous that we might take her back if she’s not a good dog.