Tales from the Tigerfort

Why is it that no-one will ever serve lager to Paul McCartney's band?

Because Wings can only get bitter.

Uh, wow, it's been a long time, hasn't it. Oops.

Anyway, quick comment that I currently don't have a mobile at all, and when I do have one next it'll almost certainly be a new number. It'll still be unlikely to get answered or checked for messages or anything, so this is unlikely to affect anyone very much :).

(Why? Well, Virgin Mobile very kindly sent someone else a replacement sim for my number. Having repeatedly failed to get them to do anything useful to correct this, I'm now giving up and getting a new sim from someone else. The probably-a-fiver-or-so of PAYG credit simply isn't worth the hassle; I'm probably going to decide the same about trying to get the old number transferred.)

Otherwise, things are ... (gestures at pandemic, rapidly approaching crash brexit, global climate crisis, Tory Kleptocrat government, etc)

It seems to have been a while. I haven't been good even at reading other people's posts recently, at least in part because most of my mental energy is spent either (a) fearing the apocalyptic wastes of brexit or (b) trying not to think about brexit.

The most important household event of the last three months was that ceb and damerell visited and moved many many boxen around for us. Multiple rooms are now actually pleasant to be in, and there's a table that's accessible to play games on. (I have in fact been doing a certain amount of soloing[1] to occupy some of the more sleepless nights.) Spare beds are more of a work-in-progress, but it's potentially possible for us to put up about three visitors. (There are also two fairly comfy sofas, but they're both in conservatories that don't have curtains; a situation with substantial drawbacks:)

[1] If people would be interested in coming and playing games with me, and possibly even seeing the sea (weather permitting), we're pretty accessible by rail for physically fit people. Assuming there are still trains, food, etc in the coming months, obviously. We might also be able to find some boxes or furniture you could move if you feel so inclined, but David and Clare have very much done the bulk of that :)

The second most notable happening was a brief psychological rollercoaster that came in this week's post. This was a government-issue brown envelope of the kind all British disabled people know and fear (we'd already had our letters saying that there's no cost-of-living increase in benefits this year because us silly paupers would only waste it on food or such). The mental atmosphere lurched (briefly) even further into "I don't need this" territory when I opened it and read that it was the outcome of our tribunal appeal, for which we'd not received any notification of a hearing date. The next page much improved my mood, however; it stated that the tribunal had decided (a) in our favour (b) without a hearing, because it was obvious from the paperwork that the DWP were completely in the wrong. And not only did they state that K is entitled to the higher rate of the PIP "daily living" component, but also that the award should be for at least five years (rather than the DWP's two years), to minimise the psychological harm.

Now, of course, we have to wait for the DWP to act on the decision, which they try to do as slowly as possible - but some extra breathing room should return to our budget. I deny having eaten my own bodyweight in chocolate pudding to celebrate :)

I've updated my list of answers to Fallen London's Mysteries with the correct answers where mine were wrong. I got 15/20 right, and at least a couple of the others required information that's only given out for following very specific paths through non-repeatable stories. Now to decide how to spend my sinister winnings...

Content warning: Brexit

I've been meaning for a while to write about the effects of the worst-possible brexit case; that is, a no-deal hard exit with no preparations. I've been having persistent nightmares about it, why shouldn't everyone else?

Note that this is a worst-case scenario. I'm still hoping some politician/organisation with a spine, a brain, and a social conscience will manage to get the whole idiotic self-destruct called off so that we can start to repair the damage. My most-likely-outcome expectations are more along the lines of a fudge that keeps us in the single market and customs union for a couple of years, putting the country into permanent steady decline - not necessarily a slow decline, but avoiding the nastiest crash effects.

( Final warning: what follows will not be a fun read, even if you like dystopian horror )

And to think, back when I was young and naive - before, and even shortly after, the referendum - I thought that the worst case was millions of job losses, total loss of the UK's political and economic standing in the world, and a body count in the tens of thousands. What imagination I lacked for just how stupid and blind our political class is; how far the right wing would push for their coup, and how much the opposition would fail to oppose...

I've been playing No Man's Sky recently. I got it heavily discounted around Christmas time, and for the £15ish I paid for it, I reckon I've had pretty good value. As a fairly relaxing mentally undemanding space-wanderer/gardener sim, it's quite fun in a lightweight way.

If I'd bought it at launch, even at the price I paid (~1/3 the launch price), I might well have joined the angry hordes complaining about it.

But for all that the several vast post-launch patches have added (base construction, freighter fleets, gardening, bounty missions, a (very basic) story that adds a bit to the (mostly awful and/or trite) lore, and a variety of other stuff) ( some problems remain... )

And yet, I still had something over 100 hours of gentle, (mostly) relaxing fun with the game, despite its best efforts. And depending on what the next big patch adds, I might go back. I think of what the game could be if the effort expended on annoying the player had gone into adding more fun instead, and I wish I could play that game...

The end of the year is upon us once again, dear friends, and this time the tigers have a grander plan than mere cards or trees. No earthbound venture, this: it's time for

Tigs in Spaaaaaaace

[sotto voce: I think I might be in trouble for that one]

The tigers have chosen to go to the moon this december, not because it is easy, or because it is hard, but because the moon is shiny, and shiny things are almost always treasure of some kind.

While a rocket was, very helpfully, supplied by external sources, it did arrive at the fort in a number of pieces, rather than ready for launch. Fortunately, complete instructions were provided, which the tigers were careful to study during construction.



Obviously, constructing a space vehicle requires precision and careful teamwork.




Remember, it's important to take breaks to avoid making mistakes.


But soon enough, the first stage of the majestic rocket was complete, and ready for the team to take turns playing "king of the castle":


Days of further effort permitted the completion of the second and third stages; unfortunately the supplier has made a mistake in the writing on the second stage, and the word "Stripes" in "United Stripey Assembly" is misspelt, but it is hoped that this will prove rectifiable without damage to the launch vehicle.




Finally, the tiger-team are almost ready, and the launch-day is nearly upon us. What treasures might the universe provide to such bold investigators? We shall have to wait and find out!

Wishing you all a merry tigmas, and a stripey, happy, and prosperous year to follow!

I recently posted a somewhat sideways thought to twitter. Expanding the thought properly requires more than 140 characters, so I'll do it here rather than there.

Purple number one: Violet
Imagine looking at a rainbow. (If a real rainbow is available, stop wasting time reading this and go and look at it. Admiring pretty things is a vital and shockingly undervalued lifeskill.) Purple is the bit between blue and ultraviolet - since most people can't see ultraviolet, it is therefore the innermost chunk of the rainbow, fading into blue on one side, and invisibility on the other. This type of purple consists of photons with wavelengths in the rough range 380 to 450 nanometres.

Purple number two: Magenta
Now imagine looking at an LCD screen showing a picture of a rainbow. (Feel free to find one on whatever device you're using to read this if you've not practiced admiring pretty things recently.) It looks very similar, right? But your screen isn't emitting a single photon in the 380-450nm range; it isn't physically capable of doing so.

So far, this is actually entirely normal, as far as human vision goes. (Human vision, like almost everything else to do with the human nervous system, is a weird heap of barely functional kludges piled on top of other, older, kludges in a way that really shouldn't work but collapses surprisingly infrequently for something so absurdly incoherent. But that's another story.) Most colours can exist in either of these forms. So a yellow flower might be reflecting just a single wavelength in the 570-590nm range, or it might be a mixture of different wavelengths, some longer and some shorter, the average of which lies in that range[1].

And that's where purple gets unusually weird. If you want to show cyan, you mix green (longer wavelength) and blue (shorter wavelength), and your eye/brain interprets this as being something between the two. But if you want to display purple, you mix blue (longer wavelength than purple) and red (much longer wavelength). And then your brain says "halfway between red and blue is green, but there isn't any green here, so it must be something else", and shows you purple. Some of the magenta-purples you see when it does this are indistinguishable from the violet-purples that you see looking at a real rainbow. But it's possible to combine reds and blues to produce magenta-purples that (to a typical person's perception) don't match any wavelength of light at all.

There are other types of colour that can never be produced with a single wavelength of light - brown is the obvious example - but "Purple" is unusual, in English at least, in being both a chunk of the visible spectrum and a batch of non-spectrum colours.


[1] in practice, a flower is never going to be reflecting just a single wavelength. In fact, even sodium streetlights emit two, albiet two pretty close together. But imagine a flower that does, OK?

On the whole, the last few weeks have been pretty good (by our standards) in terms of stuff actually getting done. There are more shelves in the living room than there were a week ago (although most of them are as-yet unfilled), and the piles of boxes are starting to show further shrinkage. We've also switched over to our new electricity supplier (British Gas, basically because we had to go to one of the big - is it six? - and our gas supply was already with them), who rang up to apologise for the fact they wouldn't be able to switch our prey-pay[1] meter to a proper one until mid-January. They contacted us, the day after they became our supplier, to confirm that the meter change would happen, and apologise for not getting it done sooner. Makes a nice change after a year of nPower's delay and denial tactics. (Sure, I'd rather not have the six-week wait, and in the longer run we'll probably want to switch to one of the co-ops or other more eco-friendly groups, but by comparison this is pretty d*mn amazing.)

[1] this was a typo, but is sufficiently accurate I'm going to let it stay!

Well, a year and a month and a half, or thereabouts. Since we moved here, that is. Much of the stuff we had plannedhoped to get done in our first year remains entirely not done. Sorting out the garden? Nope. Redecorating some of the tattier rooms? Not even one. Visitors for weekends of gaming fun? We do have a (single) spare bed, and have had one visitor, but we need to invite more, and it still isn't really possible to have more than one at a time. There still isn't a useable table and the other (double) extra bed remains hidden away in K's parents' house, awaiting a point where we communally have the energy to move it. The piles of boxes are somewhat reduced, but still present in most rooms.

We do have quite a lot of books out on shelves, though, and hope to get more (shelves put up, and books put on them) by Christmas. And most of the boardgame collection is sitting on shelves eagerly awaiting the chance to be played, even if there's nowhere to play them yet.

Some of that's progress in the (oops) nearly two months since I last posted. In particular, we paid a visit to Ikea('s website) and got a bunch of Billys to go along one wall of the living room, which allowed quite a few boxes to be unpacked, making more room to do other stuff in. We also finally got a water meter fitted, and we're even in the process of escaping from [insert expletives] nPower. Hopefully, once we've switched, our new supplier will be more amenable to pressure to replace the *&!@# key-meter with a standard one. (Not least because they'll know that, unlike nPower, they can't lie and tell us it isn't possible to switch supplier while you're on one.)

So progress in the 1st year and a bit, while it feels pretty slim a lot of the time, was definitely made (and our expectations of ourselves were, as always, unrealistic, even without accounting for the inevitable post-move crash and the delays and problems caused by needing to get the place rewired).