Tales from the Tigerfort

State of [strike]decay[/strike] de fort

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:08:23 GMT

( Mostly moaning )

It helps if I don't absentmindedly put the /cut tag immediately after the cut, doesn't it.

comments

A terribly pour joke.

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 13:50:08 GMT

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

Because Wings can only get bitter.

comments

Situation Abnormal, Though Still All F***ed Up

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 21:28:20 GMT

My condition has improved a fair bit in the ~three weeks since my last post (people around and medication readjusted). Seem to be in the mental-health version of that late-flu thing where you feel fine provided you don't get out of bed or try to concentrate on anything. I *think* I'd be ok at home provided someone else was in the house with me, but... (experiments last week suggest testing my boundaries is both unwise and no fun.)

Thanks to all who replied to my last; I'll try to respond to you all individually but do type much slower much slower without a keyboard.

comments

Brief update

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:44:00 GMT

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)

comments

Then switch on again using your left thumb...

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 07:56:49 GMT

I've never really seen the appeal of internet-connected "smart" lightbulbs (or most other internet-of-stuff-that-shouldn't-be-on-the-internet ideas), but this is a really amazing demonstration of some of the things wrong with the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo

Having a problem with your bulb? Just follow this two-minute process to reset it to factory defaults. Unless it came in this style of packaging (you do still have the packaging for the bulbs you bought five years ago, right?), in which case you should follow the other two-minute reset process.

What's that, your bulb's broken and you want to throw it away? Remember that it's got your address, phone number, and wifi password stored on it, so you need to factory reset it before you do. You'll be able to tell when it's deleted your personal data because the bulb will flash repeatedly. If it can't flash because it's broken, there's no way of telling whether it's reset or not, and thus no way of knowing whether you can recycle it without letting someone to harvest your data. Why are you getting a hammer?

comments

Slightly here

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 10:00:04 GMT

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 :)

comments

Lost and Found

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 15:17:06 GMT

Having been unable to locate my camera for some time, there are no new Tigmas photographs this year. I have, however, dug out some old ones that I could have sworn had been uploaded at some point in the past but can't now find the DW entries containing.

The last is perhaps less strictly Christmassy, but 'tis the season for lots of cooking! :)

Merry Tigmas, to you all, and may your stripey coats be ever lusterous!

comments

Revelations and Regnal Katabases

Sat, 18 Aug 2018 10:38:53 GMT

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...

comments

The Mysteries of the Neath

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 16:20:12 GMT

The second round of Fallen London Mysteries are closing tomorrow, and I've been meaning to get my answers down. I'm making a record of them here so that I can check how many I got right after everything's sorted.

Update: I got fifteen out of twenty. I feel a bit hard done by about one of the other five.

( Probably of little interest to those who don't play Fallen London )

comments

How bad could it be, really?

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 07:03:18 GMT

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...

comments

No Man's Idea of Good Design

Mon, 21 May 2018 09:03:01 GMT

I kinda-sorta promised in my last rant that I'd come back to NMS, so here we go. Again, this is a game I've had a lot of fun playing. But in addition to the total failure to live up to what the devs said/thought they could deliver, there are a number of design issues.

( Shorter than last time, which is not the same as short! )

comments

No Man's Universe Starter Kit

Sun, 13 May 2018 23:07:47 GMT

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...

comments

Genders are like Genres

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:06:28 GMT

Genders and Genres have a lot more in common than the shared origins of the words we use for them.

Some people (or books/films/games) fit neatly into one of the existing categories, and that's fine.

Other people(/books/etc) are a combination of two (or more) existing categories, like an urban fantasy romance, and that's fine too.

Then there are people(/etc) who take a bit from each of several existing categories, but in such a way that the combination needs a new name (or no name at all). And you know what? That's OK too.

And sometimes, a person(/etc) is simply something new and different and unique to themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that, either.

A lot of people start out with a fairly solid idea where they fit ("I'm a Horror novel"), and just refine that slightly over time. Others might start out a bit fuzzy, and work out what they are as they learn more about themselves and the world. And some people will start with a clear idea that they belong in one place, and then realise that they were actually something else all along. All of this is fine.

Because the universe is complicated, sometimes people might start off with external signs that don't match what they know about themselves, like a romance novel with exploding spaceships on the cover. And like a book with the wrong cover, it's what's inside that counts. A romance doesn't become horror just because it was put on the wrong shelf, and the solution is to reshelve it under romance, not to demand that the author writes a horror book for you.

(The analogy is imperfect here; no-one else has the right to "change the cover" of someone's gender presentation, or to force that person to do so. If an assigned-male-at-birth trans woman doesn't want gender reassignment surgery, that's her damn business, and doesn't make her any less a woman.)

And, again, all of this is fine.

The only way to be wrong about gender is to insist that someone else is wrong about theirs because they don't fit your pre-conceived notions. (I will allow that, on very rare occasions, people are wrong about themselves, but it's almost always because of societal pressure to conform to expectations. And the correct answer is to encourage self-examination, not to bully them.)

comments

Tigmas 2017: Infinity and Beyond!

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 20:44:12 GMT

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!

comments

Fleeing from the dark

Sun, 07 May 2017 23:52:14 GMT

I meant to do this as soon as the news about the new LJ terms and conditions emerged[1], but my general slow-motion existence struck once more. Because of the appalling nature of said T&Cs, I'm not willing to log into Livejournal. This means I will no longer be able to read private posts or reply to comments there; I'd prefer not to visit the site at all, and encourage anyone who has not yet done so to join the rest of us on Dreamwidth. I'm currently intending to stop cross-posting, and probably shred my existing LJ entries using crazyscot's tool for the purpose. If you are - for whatever reason - unable or unwilling to join the exodus but would like me to continue crossposting, please comment on this post (on LJ) to let me know[2]; if you have made the move but not reconnected, I'm tigerfort there as well.

[1] If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see this post by crazyscot.

[2] Or email, if you prefer. Please don't send me an LJ message, however - having logged out forever, I can no longer read them.

comments

Purple is a many-splendored thing

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:16:47 GMT

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?

comments

Unresolved

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 12:24:08 GMT

I had intended, once more, to try and get back into the habit of posting at least once a week, as the closest to a meaningful new year's resolution I was likely to manage. Squeaking my first entry of the year in just before the end of March doesn't really meet that (not-so-)lofty target, does it?

Partly, I think I've been letting "write something worth reading" be the enemy of "write something, anything". Partly, stripey_cat and I do both seem to have been even more low energy than usual, the last couple of months. (Some of the latter can probably be blamed on politics - which subject I'm probably going to try and avoid round here, since I already get more than enough on Twitter.)

Speaking of Twitter, I'm now working on a proper post related to this poll. Hopefully I'll get it up later on today.

comments

Power corrupts, but we need electricity

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 01:46:22 GMT

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!

comments

That time of year again

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 01:24:13 GMT

Once more winter has come; once more the solstice is past; once more I have almost completely failed to be even remotely organised. But stripey_cat got some (gluten-free) cooking done earlier, so we are able to greet the season with appropriately excessive quantities of baked goods!

There are giant-sized portions for all, even those who are not giant themselves!

Pico seems not to have learned that while tigers may safely break the rule about not eating anything larger than your head, it's unwise to try and eat something larger than your entire body in a single sitting. Still, he's had a lot of (chocolate and peanut) cookie, and there's more for later, so he's definitely happy!

(As usual, larger versions of the photos on click-through)

Anyway, happy holidays, everybody, and have fun but try not to make yourselves ill doing so!

comments

A year on

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:01:49 GMT

Well, a year and a month and a half, or thereabouts. Since we moved here, that is. Much of the stuff we had ~~planned~~hoped 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).

comments

Over at the Frankenstein Place

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 02:38:38 GMT

I seem to have fallen off the at-least-one-post-per-week wagon again, don't I. Oh well. This isn't much of a post, but hopefully there'll be more to come in the near future; I've finally managed to get round to processing a batch of photos to start putting up. Flowers, Sunsets, and parts of the fort to come in the future, but for now have the sun hiding behind some clouds.

(Click for embiggenized - or at least less shrinkified - version)

comments

Eye Upgrade

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 01:18:59 GMT

Update, sorry, I meant update. It is almost back to normal functioning now, but I don't (sadly) have any cyberpunky extras like a built in telephoto lens or infra-red vision. My pupil is round again and dilating normally, and the related pain seems to be gone as well. The steroid drops make my vision a bit dodgy - focussing just isn't quite right for the first couple of hours after each one - but I'm dropping to four doses per day from tomorrow, which should make it a bit easier to do things that require proper binocular vision.

Once more, we say hurrah for modern medicine and the NHS!

comments

A passing thought

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 19:45:18 GMT

Why don't hazardous waste bins have "Caveat Emptier" on them?

comments

The play's the thing

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 02:14:03 GMT

I've been asked if I can let anyone who is both in/near London and might be interested in it know about "a staging of Midsummer Nights Dream exploring equality, the patriarchy and LGBTQIA+". I can't really say anything more about it, since I've not seen it, but if anyone here is interested, performances seem to be every evening this week. (With a two-tickets-for-GBP10 on Fri/Sat/Sun, see here.)

comments

The difference a day makes

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 17:14:10 GMT

The difference a day and a huge quantity of prescription medicines make, to be more specific. (Where "huge quantity" amounts to probably less than 1/10 gram of actual drugs, but that's in quite a lot of doses of several different things.)

Relatedly, I seem to still be sucking at the more-frequent-posting thing, don't I?

( medical stuff, in case you'd not guessed )
Other than that, I have mostly spent the last week or so listening to audiobooks, for some reason. If anyone would like to recommend cheerful soothing podcasts that I can download as MP3s without having to f*ck around with iThings, I'd be very grateful.

comments