dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

Back to 5k running

Not too much to talk about today. It was cold, but I forced myself to go do a 5k run. I felt some strain in the lower biceps femoralis again after a while, but pushed through it to complete a 5k, my first complete one in over a week. The time was better than I thought too (I thought I was going quite slowly), so it didn’t seem to hod me back very much.

I made another Darths & Droids comic, and worked a bit on the next science lesson for the student I’m tutoring, on the remaining body systems. But this evening after my four classes in a row I’m planning to just relax the rest of the night.

Monkeying around and dove spotting

Friday was board games night. After all my online class teaching, I drove over to the host’s place for this week. I stopped on the way at the Thai place nearby to get some dinner. I usually get a stir-fried noodles of some sort, since that comes in a single take-away container and is a reasonable amount for one meal. I’d love to get one of the curries, but they only come in a big serving with rice extra and separate, and it’s really enough for two people. But this time I noticed the menu had tom yum fired rice, with your choice of protein, so I got one of those. It was pretty good – I might get that again another time.

Five of us played a round of Scout. When the sixth arrived we played No Thanks. Then we moved on to the main games for the night.

First we split into two groups of three. The other group played Quest for El Dorado, while I taught two people to play Lego Monkey Palace. Our game was very close – two of us ended on 36 points, while the other player ended on 34, but held the tie-breaker piece. Although if he’d taken a bit longer with his final turn, he might have found a way to squeeze out two extra points and also ended on 36. He rushed a bit though, as the others had finished their game and were waiting for us to finish.

We combined for a six-player game of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. We’ve played this several times, but we were introducing a new player. I managed to win, after pulling ahead in the first round and managing to hold on to the lead despite some challenges over the next two rounds.

A few people went home, and the remainder played a quick game of Guillotine to round the evening out.

Today I worked on some comics stuff. At lunch time we all (me, wife, Scully) went on a long walk over to Cammeray. I got a slice of Italian sausage pizza from Maggios’ cafe, and one of their “famous” apple pies. It really is amazingly good. While there, I saw a spotted dove.

These are introduced Asian birds, and not that uncommon, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen one this close to the centre of the city. I’ve previously only seen them in outer suburbs or the countryside. So I was excited and recorded it on both eBird and iNaturalist.

This evening I made lentil dhal and rice for dinner. To fancy it up I added some toasted chopped cashews on top, and fried shallots, and a side of cucumber raita.

A very weird movie

Last night I finished watching the second half of a Netflix movie: I Saw the TV Glow. It was interesting and I kind of enjoyed it, but it was pretty low-key and had some weird moments. It had a hanging ending where you’re not quite sure what happened. Not one of the best horror movies, but not the worst I’ve seen.

Today was also pretty low-key. Just the usual classes and working on stuff. I’m adding a few things to a lesson for tomorrow’s science class, about body systems. I found this awesome beating heart animation on Wikimedia Commons, which I’m going to use to show the pumping action of the ventricles.

I went up to the local shops to buy some more rye flour for our sourdough, and baked a loaf. Made some curry for dinner.

Oh, an exchange I had today:

The door intercom buzzed.
Mail woman: I have a package for (my wife’s name). It needs a signature.
Me: She’s coming down to get it.
…
Door intercom buzzed.
Mail woman: I have a package for David.
Me: My wife just came down, isn’t she there?
Mail woman: She just left, sorry.

Amazing pumpkin soup

My wife made amazing pumpkin soup for dinner tonight.

With red lentils and spiciness of coriander and a hint of chilli. So good.

I tried to do a 5k run, but had to stop after 2.5k as one of my leg muscles felt strained again. Looking at some leg anatomy diagrams, I’d say it’s the lower part of the biceps femoris, just above the knee joint. This happened at about the 4.3km mark on my last run, on Friday (I notice I neglected to mention it on Saturday when I wrote up Friday’s events). It’s been fine since Saturday and I assumed it had recovered enough, but obviously not. Maybe I need a bit more rest before running again.

Today I finished writing up my class plan for Public Transport, and had the first three classes tonight. It’s not a particularly thrilling topic, but I think the questions are thought-provoking enough and cover an interesting range of ideas. Such as why in some places do people of all socio-economic levels use public transport, whereas in other places buses and trains are considered “only for poor people”?

Planning more weeks of critical thinking

This morning I had that science class on cells that I mentioned yesterday. After that was done I needed to plan some future weeks of Critical and Ethical Thinking topics. I decided to do topics on (1) Virtual Reality, (2) School Rules, and (3) Valuable – as in what makes things “valuable”. I came up with enough preliminary questions to advertise the upcoming weeks on my class description on Outschool. I’ll develop them into full classes when they come up.

For this week, I am working on a lesson plan for the new topic of Public Transport. I started that, but still have some to do tomorrow. I also needed to spend some time making Darths & Droids comics, to keep up with the update schedule deadlines.

I took Scully for a short walk at lunch time, in the rain. It’s been intermittent showers here all day, sometimes moderately heavy. They last for up to an hour or so, broken apart by fleeting glimpses of blue sky between the grey clouds. This weather is going to last all week, apparently. And then when my wife got home we took Scully out again for a longer walk, and this time it was just a light sprinkle of rain.

Not much else to talk about, except that I really enjoyed Belgium defeating the USA in today’s World Cup football match.

From atomic theory to cell theory

After my morning class teaching today I moved on to preparing a new lesson for the kid who is doing science with me. We’ve done four lessons on atomic theory, and it’s time to move on. The parent told me that the kid likes biology stuff, so I’m moving over to that, now we have a base for understanding a lot of the interactions that go into making biological systems work. I’m starting with the basic building blocks of living things – cells.

I had a prior presentation that I made for another student a few years back, which I mostly copied, and then added a bit more historical context to it. I like to frame science in terms of the discoveries that pioneers made, to show how the knowledge came together, rather than just present a single monolithic theory as if it arrived out of nothing.

And yes, we do talk about the golgi apparatus.

After lunch I went for a walk with Scully and my wife, up to the old Moon Phase bakery (changed its name to ENA, but I prefer the old name still). My wife got an almond croissant, and I chose a black sesame cookie, which I’ll have a little later this evening as a dessert.

For dinner I made pizza. I made hummus a couple of days ago to accompany some panko-crumbed cauliflower steaks that I cooked, and one can of chick peas makes a lot of hummus, so we have plenty left over. I’ve been using it on falafel wraps the past two days for lunch. And tonight I decided to try it as the sauce on pizza instead of tomato. Since the toppings were pumpkin and nuts, it actually went fairly well together. Very much a Middle Eastern flavour instead of Italian, but that’s fine!

The first cold day of winter?

It was notably cold today. Notable because up until now it hasn’t really been cold all winter so far. The maximum barely tipped 15°C, and it was closer to 13°C when we took Scully for a walk just after lunch.

My main activity today was making a new Darths & Droids comic. I also fiddled a little with the new mezzacotta code that my friend has been working on. He’s got the comics running with a new codebase that he built on his machine, and is now serving the first brand new mezzacotta comics in years. I won’t link to them, but here’s a sample!

New mezzacotta comic

Yes folks, I think it’s really happening! Although there’s some more work to be done, and it may take a while, since this is a low priority task for both of us.

Greek food sketching and a potential mezzacotta relaunch

Friday daytime was busy as I had six online classes to teach, and was prepping material for them in between. But my wife decided to book us a restaurant for dinner and we walked up after my classes ended.

We ate at Xenos, a Greek restaurant. We had some arancini balls as an appetiser, then I had moussaka for my meal while my wife had spanakopita. We both did some sketching while we waited and during the meal. Here are four quick scene grabs that I did.

It was a very nice and relaxing dinner after the busy day.

Today I dedicated the morning to writing my report for the ISO Photography standards meeting that I attended (remotely) in June. I need to get this done and submitted to Standards Australia as part of my role as the Australian head of delegation to the ISO meetings. I completed the report just before lunch.

Then I took Scully for a short walk. My wife got home from a sketching group meeting that she went to in the morning, and we took Scully for a longer walk, all the way down to the ferry wharf and back, which is a fair hike.

Back home, we played a game of Dorfromantik, our fourth game. We did extremely well, scoring maximum points for every task type. We unlocked a bunch of new stuff for the next game, which will be a big evolution in how the game works.

In other news, my friend who did most of the coding on the original mezzacotta randomly generated comic suddenly asked me today for access to the code, so he could try to get it running again, by converting and modernising it. In just a few hours he says he has the comic generator running properly again! However, he realised the original SQL output wasn’t specifically ordered, and relied on whatever default ordering came out of the SQL server, so there is actually no guarantee that the code is deterministic. He also feels like we should improve some aspects, which make it more or less incompatible with being able to reproduce the old version exactly.

The upshot is, if we do get this back to a state where we decide to relaunch the mezzacotta comic, it most likely won’t generate the same comics that it used to. But we think that’s okay, as we can preserve all of the cached/Hall of Fame comics (the most significant ones) as a hardcoded legacy version site. I will of course let you know if we do relaunch it!

The temptation of games on sale

In between my classes today I looked online for card sleeves to protect the cards in my new board game, Inis. I found during the first play last week that we were handling the cards a lot, and they are beautiful tarot-sized cards which I want to keep in good condition. Also there are some that are left out of the deck when playing with different numbers of players, so they won’t wear evenly over many games.

While browsing my local game shop’s website for the right sized card sleeves, I noticed they’re having a mid-year sale, with substantial discounts on some games. One in particular I noticed is Oath, by the same designer as two of my favourite games Root and Arcs, and almost 40% discounted. I’ve been looking at this game for some time, thinking it’s definitely the sort of game I would enjoy. But there are two negatives: I don’t know if any of my friends would want to play it. And secondly, there’s a solo mode which I think could be interesting, but which online consensus seems to be that the solo mode is overly complex and unsatisfying. (Thirdly, it’s a very expensive game, but at 40% off it’s more tempting.)

There’s a new expansion due out in a few months which adds a new solo mode with (hopefully) improved gameplay. So now I am stewing over this while the sale lasts for the next couple of weeks.

The sad part about being a teacher

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere, which means summer break from the school year. And after that the kids will be starting a new year. Some kids will be changing up to high school.

At this time of year, I have a big turnover in the enrolments in my online classes on Outschool. Some students have holiday activities or go on vacations, which mean they don’t have time for our weekly lessons during the summer. I hear from parents who say they’ll sign up again in August or whenever. And I get new students whose parents are looking for extra activities for them to do during the summer.

And then I get the ones whose parents write to me to say thank you for teaching their daughter or son for the past few years. The child enjoyed the class and the parent can see how much it has helped them improve their critical thinking and logic and interpersonal communication skills, in some cases English skills as their second (or third!) language. How much they appreciate the time and effort I’ve put in. And their child is starting high school after summer, and so with a busier schedule might not be returning for more classes.

I got one a few days ago. A student who has been doing classes with me since 2022. This isn’t the longest lasting student I have – I have at least two who began in 2021 and who are still doing classes. (I know this because I don’t want to repeat any class topics from back then as long as they’re still doing the class!) But still, this one student has been doing my class almost every week for four years, and you really get to know someone over that time, even over Zoom. From age 10 to 14 is a significant chunk of a kid’s life at that point.

I’ll miss this student, and I’m sad that I may never see them again.

Today I did the final lesson of my second concurrent AI Literacy course. Then worked on my new topic for tonight’s start of the topic in Critical Thinking: Magic Tricks & Illusions. At first I thought I might not have enough different questions, but it turned out I have plenty. The first three classes this evening went very well. Students had interestingly diverse opinions about the secrecy of magic tricks, and whether they’d volunteer to be “sawn in half” on stage or not!

I also did a 5k run, taking it a bit easy today. And worked up a new Darths & Droids strip.