Ironscarf wrote:
That looks absolutely cracking Tantz! The dramatic lighting really sets the tone, great job.

THANK YOU!

Popping in to say that I released another song. The inspiration this time was: if Drannik & Lizzep had a TV show, what would the theme song sound like? Soon this album will be done.

Buskers - Follow the Bouncing Ball

Just got off Facebook and saw some of old Army buddies sharing a photo remembering one of the other guys from the unit.

Looked at his feed, he'd passed away. We were the same age and came into the unit around the same time. Sad stuff. He was was around my age. We're all getting old.

bravo1102 wrote:
Just got off Facebook and saw some of old Army buddies sharing a photo remembering one of the other guys from the unit.

Looked at his feed, he'd passed away. We were the same age and came into the unit around the same time. Sad stuff. He was was around my age. We're all getting old.

Learning of a contemporary's death is not necessarily about getting old; it's tough at any age,

I'll recall our times together and cycle through that–sometimes it can get rather trippy. Yeah, I know, it's a numbers game: as we age the losses grow and the sadness is exponential as the good-byes accumulate.

In that way, being fortunate can become a sad affair. I recommend getting some fresh air; it helps me remember that the departed wouldn't want me to be sad as I think of them.

ayesinback wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
Just got off Facebook and saw some of old Army buddies sharing a photo remembering one of the other guys from the unit.

Looked at his feed, he'd passed away. We were the same age and came into the unit around the same time. Sad stuff. He was was around my age. We're all getting old.

Learning of a contemporary's death is not necessarily about getting old; it's tough at any age,

I'll recall our times together and cycle through that–sometimes it can get rather trippy. Yeah, I know, it's a numbers game: as we age the losses grow and the sadness is exponential as the good-byes accumulate.

In that way, being fortunate can become a sad affair. I recommend getting some fresh air; it helps me remember that the departed wouldn't want me to be sad as I think of them.

Amazing part it is, most of the real old timers are still alive and you just wonder. Though Don was a chainsmoker and had breathing problems the last fifteen years. At one point about twenty years ago I built a model of his tank. That was just before Ski passed away. The young kid in the crew is now a retired major and the gunner a just retired first sergeant.
Full lives and all well lived.

Anybody care if I take a second to rant about my job? I need to vent my spleen a bit.

So, I take care of a lot of billing issues with my insurance company. One of the key things I do is for homeowners policies. If the mortgage company is supposed to make a payment, I try to catch issues before they become problems and make sure the insurance company, my insurance agency, the customer, and the mortgage company are on the same page. Most mortgage companies have someone that does the same thing for them. So I get a lot of calls when the mortgage company knows that payment should be due, but they haven't recieved their bill yet. I don't mind these calls, but I hate it when the rep leaves a voicemail.

They usually sound like this:
“Hi, my name is John (unintelligible) I'm calling from the insurance department from (fast but intelligible) mortgage for the renewal of Jane Doe (not spelled out) for the property at 123 (unintelligible) Street in (city name mispronounced) zip code 12345. Policy number is (fast but usually intelligible). Please send the information to (fax or email number that is almost too fast to hear) and reference loan number (completely run together gibberish). Thanks!”

I can usually make things out enough to find who they are talking about, but the last few voicemails have been utter crap. I have decided that if I can't make out anything useable, I'm just going to delete the voicemail. And if I can understand the email, I'm about ready to send them the audio file for the voicemail. I think that are doing it to save time because none of the messages are longer than 30 seconds.

I'm just tired if wasting my time on them. When I leave voicemails, I usually speak at a normal pace and I will spell out any unusual names

End of rant.

I will be going ahead and setting my clock back tonight instead of next week. Why? Because I've always hated DST, and for 15 years, I have outright refused to conform to G.W. Bush's extended DST, because it was one of the dumbest things he ever did during his time in Office. Why was it even necessary to extend DST a week in the fall and a month in the spring? “To improve trade with other countries,” he said . . . literally the only other country that went along with this lamebrain and cockamamy proposal was Canada, and that was because they pretty much had no choice in the matter.

So, while the rest of you sheeples continue to adhere and conform to an antiquated concept that even contemporary scientists, neurologists, and other experts agree is something we should elimiate altogether, I shall enjoy an extra hour of sleep tonight.

I miss daylight savings time. We don't have it Japan. In the summer the sun comes up at 4AM and it gets dark around 7:30. It's kind of a waste of daylight. It wouldn't even be much of a problem to implement being that Japan is all in one timezone.

We don't have Daylight savings in my state in Western Australia, but they have it over in the Eastern States (as we call them here)… collectively that's New South Wales, Victoria, The Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania, and South Australia.

Our states have stupid names, apart from Tasmania, but even that one is weird.
Queensland is one of the Eastern States and in a direct line with all the rest of them pretty much but it doesn't have daylight savings haha!

Meanwhile Western Australia and the capital city of Perth where everyone lives in this gigantic empty state, is thousands of miles away from the rest of the people living in this country, so we're the only ones that really deserve a separate time zone :)

-Actually the Northern Territory does too, there in the middle of the country up North, but much less people love there.

Haha, I think we are only one time zone apart, Ozone.

lothar wrote:
Haha, I think we are only one time zone apart, Ozone.

You're right!!
You're on 9+ GMT and I'm on 8+, wow!
That's freaky! Hahaha!

Meanwhile the Eastern Sates of Australia are 11+ at the moment, LOL! So Japan is ahead of the western part of Australia and well behind the Eastern part, that's weird.

DST sucks here in the eastern US, especially in the dead of summer in July; the sun's already out by 5am, but it doesn't even get completely dark until 10pm! Not cool when you're an insomniac night owl like me. Hell, even as a kid, I always hated DST: my parents always had rather early bedtimes for me growing up, anywhere from 8:30 to 9:30pm, and when school would start back in August, it would still be broad daylight outside at those times . . . how's a kid supposed to get any sleep, when it still looks like daytime outside? Of course you don't want to go to sleep, you want to go back outside and play (see, kids today wouldn't know this, but back in those days, we liked to go outside and play, lol).

They really want Daylight Savings Time here… and by “they” I mean a teeny but wealthy and powerful minority. They want to catch up with the Eastern States, because they're so far ahead. They force “trials” of it on us every few years and it always gets voted out because almost everyone hates it XD

——-

I've bought some fancy old clothes- A mariarchi Charro suit, which I took delivery of on Monday, and a lovely old silk dressing gown.

The charro suit fits almost perfectly, but the thighs are just a little wide. I believe it was made as a high quality costume for a wealthy American woman back in the 1950s or 1960s, rather than being made for a mariarchi, at least that's what the seller thinks. It was from a deceased estate.
I like knowing a bit about the history of my clothes :)

The dressing gown hasn't come yet. It will probably be far too large but it's very beautiful- made of silk with big quilted cuffs and lapels. The body of it is in a lovely print and the cuffs and lapels are shiny bronze/copper coloured.
I don't know anything about its history yet.

Ozoneocean wrote:

The charro suit fits almost perfectly, but the thighs are just a little wide. I believe it was made as a high quality costume for a wealthy American woman back in the 1950s or 1960s, rather than being made for a mariarchi, at least that's what the seller thinks. It was from a deceased estate.
I like knowing a bit about the history of my clothes :)

That charro suit looks amazing on you. I like to think the wealthy woman who owned it was a mariacha fanatic who formed her own all female group back in the sixties, a precursor to the group I posted about the other day in the good things that happened thread. They were no doubt the toast of all the society and show biz events back in the day, inspiring Herb Alpert to create the Tijuana Brass.

Altenatively she was rich enough to have it made for a fancy dress ball and it was never worn again, but that wouldn't be much of a story.

Ironscarf wrote:
That charro suit looks amazing on you. I like to think the wealthy woman who owned it was a mariacha fanatic who formed her own all female group back in the sixties, a precursor to the group I posted about the other day in the good things that happened thread. They were no doubt the toast of all the society and show biz events back in the day, inspiring Herb Alpert to create the Tijuana Brass.

Haha, Thankyou!
OK, that will be the official history of it :D
Yes, I had a look at the ladies from your link. That's pretty cool.

I did a few searches on Mariachi to make sure that wearing the outfit wasn't cultural appropriation and I came across a vibrant global mariachi culture, with mariachi groups in many countries around the world, all nationalities, from Japan to Sweden (a bit like Scottish pipers in that way). And it seems that Mexican people are happy to see the culture spread.

I loved listening to the groups when I was in Mexico a few years ago. At day there were one or two performing on the street for tourists, but at night a bunch of different groups would go from bar to bar, performing everywhere for the locals.
-There were no tourists apart from me and the lady I was with because the cruise ships that typically delivered them to the town didn't stay over night.

The Twitter stuff is so silly. People's reactions are a little over the top, aren't they?

Jeez, I was into all that social media stuff back in the day and I stuck around with Facebook forever- from the beginning all the way up until the end of April this year, but it just got so impersonal.

The rise of Meme culture was pretty shitty, but worse than that was everyone just mindlessly, meaninglessly sharing and refreshing stuff. Generally some pithy, entirely out of context thing, or maybe something some celebrity said, or a news story that was total rubbish but designed to get reactions and go viral, which is exactly what it did…

People re-sharring stuff to show their allegiance and support for various sides of pop-culture issues was jarring and sickening in its open tribalism, no matter the ethics of the underlying cause.
(Tumblr was the worst at this)

Even in nerdy, topic specific groups you weren't free of that behaviour, but those had the added issue of people sharing the same topics and images over and over and over again because there were so many members so people wouldn't all see the posts when they first came up, and it would all be brand new to new members so they're repeat all the same things everyone else already did.

And that's just Facebook! XD

Twitter is a whole other circle of hell…

I'm still on Instagram but for whatever reason it's been relatively free of that crap for me so far. I share pics of art, costume and photography I've done and people like them and sometimes comment. I like and sometimes comment of the art of photography of other people. Just creators sharing what they create and appreciating it. Healthy and simple.

Can't argue with that. Instagram is not as painful as the others but it doesn't have as much community building potential as it once had, probably because Facebook acquired it. The algorithm will Bury your posts as effectively as Musk will Bury you on twitter if you don't stump up his $8 per month.

The sudden rush to Mastodon right now was just waiting for a trigger. These sites have been doing us dirty for too long.

Ozoneocean wrote:
The Twitter stuff is so silly. People's reactions are a little over the top, aren't they?

No, they're really not. Already, Elon Musk is living up to exactly what he promised, in allowing hate speech to thrive and spread throughout the platform again, not to mention he has been attacking and even banning people who say anything that happens to piss off his delicate and fragile ego from AOC to Mark Ruffalo to Kathy Griffin. He apparently is even starting to charge people for accounts now. All of this is exactly why the American people did not want him to buy Twitter - they knew he would do shit like this to ruin the platform.

Pretty much what J. Scarbrough said. This was all forecast in detail when the news broke about Elon buying Twitter.

Being a veteran all the folks I served with fit into that “haters and fascists” category and it's a lot easier for me to deal with on Facebook than Twitter.

But of course I made the mistake of following astronomy feeds and all the flerf Dunning-Kruger proof stupids are spouting their ignorance. Gonna need some Fight the Flat Earth YouTube to restore my faith in humanity.

Woke up an hour early with indigestion and really couldn't go back to sleep.

But it worked out to be the exact time to see the lunar eclipse. Now that is neat.

Love a lunar eclipse. It was already light in the UK unfortunately, especially as we finally had a break from the rain.

Today's civic duty day :)

1. Vote (check)

2. Get car inspected (check)

3. Fill out son's 8-page social security form because he gets benefits, and SSA has to determine if he's now still eligible for benefits after he got a new 12-hour per week job. Not only do they want copies of the pay stubs (count 6) from his new job (understandable), but they want PAPER copies of his pay stubs from the 2 part-time jobs he held in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 (count 204 bc he didn't work the last month) that they have already received And scanned. (purgatory)



I'd like to believe that our new senator, whomever it turns out to be, would not only care but DO something to improve this assinine process, but pipe dreams are too much energy these days.

@J_Scarbrough - I mean that Twitter is shit already. Musk wading in there will make it much worse, but it's already terrible anyway.

———–

@ayesinback - Ah, they never do. Generally it's up to affected people like you to do all the backbreaking, thankless, time consuming work of campaigning and changing the thing that needs changing all by yourself. :(

———–

Re- Lunar stuff.
A strange thing happened last night.
I came home very late from a friends place, it was almost 12PM
As I went to walk down my street I saw a fat, stocky bird on the street sign. I walked up close to see and it was an owl. I looked up at it for a while and it looked down at me. Then it decided to fly off into the shadows. So I continued on my way down my street.

But I noticed a very curious thing! Everything was strangely bright, like it was just before dawn or really early evening. REALLY bright. It felt like day but with the dimness turned up and the colours gone.
I looked around for what was causing the brightness…

It wasn't the streetlights, they're dim and few and far between. It wasn't house lights because almost all were out. It wasn't starlight because the sky was blanketed solid with cloud. It wasn't the moon either because that was also completely behind the clouds. I could just see the rim of it through cloud and it was no brighter than usual. And there were no moon shadows anywhere.

It seemed that the clouded sky was just emitting its own pale universal light from all directions and there was no light I could find that was the source of that reflection. Nothing on the horizon etc.

I had to just reason in the end that my eyes were just super adapting to the darkness.
I tested that when I got home- I went inside, turned lights on to get ready for bed and then went outside again and looked into the darkness and it seemed just as dark it normally should be- not weirdly bright at all in any way. No special light coming from the sky.

If I was a magical thinker I'd say the owl gifted me with its night vision for the walk home :)
But I'm not and I know it'd just be my eyes.

I remember that from when I did lots of stumbling around in the dark when I was in the Army. Suddenly everything was more ambient.
Now driving to work in the dark every morning I know when that happens it's time to put on the blue blocker glasses because of my increased light sensitivity after my eye operations.

I've experienced the same thing a few times, so I looked it up and it's a documented scientific phenomenon. Cloud cover really can amplify ambient light from natural sources like the moon, as well as artificial lighting.

Magical owls definitely play a big part in this, but their role is not so easily explained. We're just not that wise yet.

Yeah, it's probably a mixture of the clouds reflecting all the ambient light and my eyes adjusting to it just right- cos' as I say after going inside and coming out again it as inky blackness for me, even when I waited a bit.

Thanks for the link Scarf! Much appreciated!

I can mark 2022 as the year i finally started taking my learning of programming seriously. After like, 3 years of putting it off due to insecurities… i mean, what if it turns out i'm just too stupid to code? Well, turns out i kinda am but i'm also very stubborn, so i've been sticking with it for a month and making marginal, baby step progress.

var progress = false
if progress = true
print(“Little victories”)

@thejagged- congrats on that!
Once you get into it it's a lot easier than you think because it's all based in logic. The hardest part for me was learning all the commands that are available and then learning all the shortcut, shorthand commands. I found that SO confusing! :(

_______

Rant about The Watch.
So this is based in the comedy fantasy Discworld books by Terry Pratchett but it's been totally reinvented to fit with modern fashions.

It's SO bloody f***ing obvious about it. It's like it was done as a College Humour sketch designed specifically to parody this style.
- ok, so let's modernise this fantasy bullshit and get rid of any charming mediaeval stuff.
Let's shave everyone's hair on the sides and make everyone wear eyeliner!
Ok, let's genderswap the lord of the city because controlling condescending women are in fashion.
Let's randomly swap white characters with African actors.
Colourful hair.
Transperson.
Ok that character that was the main one that started off the whole entire arc, Carrot, let's make him a total rookie that comes in as a minor side character and have all his rookie recruits be the senior guys who boss him about…

And so on. I'm ranting about it here because it's not appropriate to attack the story like this in the review thread. The final product is well made and really very good.
I'm just totally baffled by why they felt the need to totally rewrite the story (and it's a GREAT story originally), instead of just creating their own original thing. It's like tieing an anchor around the neck of a champion sprinter-i.e. The Watch would be much better if it didn't have the baggage of being a stupid adaptation.

Do an original story and don't do fanfiction! No matter how good it is it's STILL fanfiction.

You know what I've come to realize? More often than not when a show does a Valentine's Day episode, they don't bother to change the season in that episode to reflect that it's winter, those episodes still look like standard spring or summer time, but Valentine's Day is a winter holiday: even if it takes place in a region where it doesn't usually snow (like down here in the southern US), the trees should still be bare, and characters should still at least be wearing long sleeves, or maybe even a light jacket).

J_Scarbrough wrote:
You know what I've come to realize? More but Valentine's Day is a winter holiday: even if it takes place in a region where it doesn't usually snow (like down here in the southern US), the trees should still be bare, and characters should still at least be wearing long sleeves, or maybe even a light jacket).

Because the whole world is Southern California. 🤣

I've seen a few anime where they treat it as pre-spring with jackets and winter school uniforms.

You'd think Hallmark channel would get on it and do Valentine's Day in Minnesota with twelve feet of snow. I'll have to ask my sister, she's inherited watching the channel since mom passed away. So many memories that it's just a warm glow watching the channel.