Monica

With no prior expectations, this being my first year, I almost missed this in the pot:

And it turns out there's a second cucumber, almost full-grown, under those big wide leaves toward the left.

I dunno; I was expecting the fruits to appear where flowers had been, farther out from the base. I guess there was a flower under there. I haven't tasted my new produce yet, but soon!

This is, according to the tag from the seedling, a cucumber "bush". I expected a bush to be less vine-like, but fortunately I could move the pot near a trellis once I realized what I was dealing with. (I have another one that admitted to being viney and it has a tomato cage.)

Meanwhile, I have gotten exactly three small tomatoes off of that plant before the others started disappearing -- two that were almost ripe the previous day, gone when I went to harvest them, and today, many of the still-green ones are gone. This happened with a different variety in a different location last year, too. I might have to give up on tomatoes until I'm ready to build a greenhouse (ha, not going to happen on this property).

We went to Origins Game Fair for the first time since before the pandemic. We played games.

Wednesday

• Empire Builder "pot luck": this was a general sign-up, specific groups and games to be sorted out on arrival. We ended up in a four-player game of Eurorails, which I enjoyed. It took longer than usual; part of that was one player, but I think part of it was also some unfortunate card draws. (Fortunately, this was the only thing we signed up for Wednesday evening.) The game has gotten some usability upgrades since last I saw it: the goods chits are now colored with corresponding color-coding on the contract cards, and we played on a dry-erase map (single sheet). I asked about the map: that's something the folks running this did, not commercially available "but maybe later". (The organizers had a large art portfolio with all the maps.)

Thursday

• Hamburg: Nominally a city-building game (the veneer is kind of thin), the idea is that you have cards that can be used for different purposes: building (two stages), getting workers (needed for buildings), averting catastrophes, building walls, and (if I recall correctly) getting money. In each of eight rounds, the player with the most advanced position in each of five categories gets to check off an accomplishment (if not already met) for end-game points. There's not a lot of interaction among players. It was ok.

• Fortune and Famine: You're playing leaders in a fantasy setting and your goal is to maximize the grain you have stored by the end of the game. Each round you can bid on new workers: the two fundamental ones are the farmer (pay coins, get grain) and the merchant (pay grain, get coins), and there are several others. In later phases there are upgraded versions of workers, like more lucrative merchants. There are also wizards who perform one-time actions, some of which are attacks on other players, and there are thieves. Sometimes when you draw workers you get famine cards instead and all players lose half their unprotected grain. You can protect (store) grain, so it's safe but no longer available for spending. Each leader has a special ability; mine was being able to protect three grain and/or coins without storing, another was being able to ignore famine effects three times during the game, and I forget what the others were. It's a pretty light, fast game -- I'm going to guess 45 minutes once you know the rules. I enjoyed it enough to buy a copy.

• Familiars and Foes: A cooperative game in which you're playing low-powered familiars trying to rescue your witches and wizards from monsters. The session was led by the game designers, one of whom also played. It felt a little juvenile; I don't know how much of that was the game itself and how much was this particular session. (We were all adults, to be clear.) I felt it was trying too hard to be cute.

• Wingspan: I've been hearing good things about this game, and it did not disappoint! (We bought a copy on the way home.) Your goal is to attract birds to your habitat; each bird type contributes to your score and might have special powers that help either the game engine or your final score. Birds can lay eggs (usually needed to get more birds), and birds require the right food to be brought into play. On your turn you can draw bird cards into your hand, play birds, lay eggs, or collect food. Each round has an additional goal (like "birds in trees" or "eggs in box nests") that awards extra points. The game is well-designed (except for storage), well-made, pretty, and fun.

Having two "F-something and F-something" games on the same day was tripping us up all day.

Friday

• La Familia Hort: Players are competing to inherit granny's farm by building the most profitable plot. Each turn you can buy crops or farm animals, water and fertilize (limited options so you have to choose), and -- when a crop is ready -- either sell it or use it to feed livestock for income. There are also some tools that help you enhance the value of other tiles. You can only have six tiles at a time, though, so you're giving up substantial space to play a tool. The game was light, cute, and pretty forgettable, and did not consume more than half of its two-hour slot.

• Final Strike: Players are gladiators competing for glory points by killing monsters and their sidekicks. You have a hand of weapons (everyone starts with the same hand), which deal varying amounts of damage and can be upgraded for better weapons that sometimes have special powers. You're trying to deal damage but not so much that someone else can "scoop" you for the kill; the killing shot brings a lot more glory. This game was run by the designer.

• Gempire: Zarmund's Demands The novelty of this game is simultaneous play with actions recorded on dry-erase boards for simultaneous reveal. The boards were laid out well so you could easily see what your options are. I am now out of positive things to say about this game.

• New York Pizza Delivery Lightweight resource-allocation game. You're building pizzerias in different NYC neighborhoods to meet delivery orders and collect victory points and maybe tips. Ingredient cards in your hand can be used to match delivery orders, or you can use them to add permanent ingredients to one of your pizzerias (can satisfy an order without more cards), or you can discard them to improve your range. There is a "marketplace" of ingredient cards that, in our game, grew quite large and unmanageable. There are also event cards and other special abilities. I came away thinking "meh", though possibly with a better playing space and fewer players it could be fun.

Saturday

Origins has activities other than board games too. Saturday morning we went to a lecture called something like "why you don't want too much realism in your game". This was put on by a wargaming group, so this realism was about battle plans and stuff. The presenter was an Army logistics officer who talked a lot about the stuff that needs to go onto the map that isn't "pieces shooting or blowing things up" -- stuff that's essential to an army actually functioning, but not very much fun for most people to play out. I wasn't the target audience but I still found it interesting. Apparently it was immediately followed by a presentation about making games more realistic (drawing from experience in Desert Storm, it sounded like), but we had somewhere else to be.

• Mistwind (not published; that's a Kickstarter link): Players are competing to deliver goods to places where they're in demand, using flying whales (if there's a reference here I missed it) to navigate from place to place and building outposts to reduce costs. On each round you will play four of your five numbered tokens, discarding one at the beginning of each round. Each token can, in turn, be played in one of four places: a row of options that give you resources in different combinations, a row of cards that let you build outposts in specific locations, a row of action options (like building whales and outposts or taking the first-player position), and a row of cards giving special abilities or end-game scoring. The trick here is that each of these four areas has five numbered positions, and you have to play your corresponding numbered token. So you can only play one "3" position, for instance, among those four choices. That all sounds complicated and there was definitely a learning curve, but I was getting it by the end of the game and the next one would be smoother. We were playing a prototype and the session was run by the designer, who was taking detailed notes and asked us for feedback. I like what I saw and expect to back the Kickstarter when it goes live.

• Railways of the World: Rail-building and goods delivery. We've played this successor to Steam twice at past Origins conventions and had one good and one terrible experience (which seemed to be players not the game itself). This time was a good experience; the map for the six-player game is huge and the convention gave them a big round table, which leads to visibility problems for me. The bad experience (last time) was other players basically saying "you'll have to cope"; this time, in contrast, the other players were willing to move the map toward an edge and let me choose my seat to maximize what I could see, at the cost of others having to work harder, and people were happy to help with reading things I couldn't see, and it was all very friendly and positive. With six players there's a lot of contention for routes; each player also has a secret goal that encourages building in different places, which helps mitigate that. You have to look at where the goods come out at the beginning of the game and think ahead to where you might be able to deliver them and what track you'll need to build to do that. It's more forgiving than Steam and we now own a copy (which we will not play on a big round table).

• Obelisk: Cooperative puzzle-style game. You have a 5x5 grid of tiles, each with an exit arrow on one side, one of which is the monster-spewing portal. During the players' phase you can rotate tiles to build a path (one rotation per tile ever), build towers at intersections to capture monsters from the adjacent four tiles, mine resources needed to upgrade towers, and do those upgrades. During the monsters' phase, a random assortment of monsters (three different types, varying in speed and strength) emerge on the portal and start to move along the path. If you have a strong-enough tower when a monster passes by, you can capture it (one capture per tower per phase). If a monster escapes the board or visits a tile for a second time, the players lose. It's a quick game, maybe 20 minutes; we lost our first game, declared the second layout untenable from the start, and won a third game with effort. We bought a copy. This game, too, was run by the designer.

General

We had more gaps in our schedule than in past years, some by design and some by games running short. We planned for some of that and got a hotel room across the street from the convention center. That location turned out to be noisy, but the convenience of being able to go back to the room for an hour instead of finding a place in the convention center to sit and read was a big win. And the hotel room didn't have annoying fluorescent lights.

In the past there have been some "general game-store" vendors, but this year we didn't see that -- general vendors for trading-card games and lots of individual publishers, along with the usual assortment of auxiliary vendors (dice, art, t-shirts, special-purpose gaming tables, costumes, etc), but no general stores for board games. Fortunately, we have a local game store we can support, and they even had Wingspan in stock so we didn't have to wait.

We were on the fence about True Dungeons this year, and then learned they wouldn't be there -- dilemma solved. :-)

Attendance was a lot lower than what I remember from 2019 (and some vendors commented on this too). I'm guessing half?

I don't have time for a full writeup of this right now, but here are the "highlights" of Stack Overflow Inc.'s latest community-affecting actions.

The CEO has recently gone all-in on generative AI and LLMs, the technology used by ChatGPT. He allocated 10% of the company to work on unspecified ways to use LLMs in their platform, and he's made some incoherent blog posts that scream "chasing the hype train". He also laid off 10% of the company including 30% of engineering and two community managers.

Stack Overflow the site does not allow answers written by ChatGPT. They worked together with community managers to develop that policy. Their moderators are seeing an increased workload because there's so much machine-generated crap showing up now, but the moderation tools and processes in place are handling it.

Or were. On Monday the company announced a policy that basically bars moderators from moderating this content. For further complication, the public announcement does not match what moderators say they were told privately -- they were actually told to start enforcing a strict hands-off policy without letting users know.

(The public post kind of back-handedly called moderators bigots, too. I guess at least this time they didn't smear anyone by name. But still... ick.)

People are, naturally, upset, both by a policy that invites non-vetted machine-generated "answers", and by the way it was done. Moderators' attempts to discuss these issues with the company have been rebuffed. One popular theory is that the CEO, having gone publicly all-in on LLMs, was embarrassed to find out that his flagship site deletes that stuff.

So there's going to be a strike. More than half of the Stack Overflow mods, many other mods across the network, non-moderator users who do the important curation tasks, and the user-run tools that detect spam and other problems across the network -- all shutting down. These people are all unpaid volunteers who are realizing that the company that relies on their free labor doesn't actually care about them.

Noticed in passing: there are a bunch of userscripts that power users use to make the site easier to maintain. These scripts are very popular. One of them now adds a banner to the top of the site that says:

We are calling for solidarity against actions taken by Stack Overflow Inc, which is posing a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content.

Clever.

For more detailed background and why this matters so much to the people involved, I recommend this post from a former community manager.

--

Update, 2023-06-05: From Meta.SE: Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers (includes demands), mirrored on Stack Overflow Meta.

Huh, this is interesting. There are many top-level domains these days; we're way past the days when the world consisted of .com, .edu, .org, and .gov. I hadn't realized that one of those TLDs is .zip.

Yeah, really. That seems like asking for trouble. People sometimes do legitimately download ZIP files from sites they trust, like GitHub. But maybe you're not really talking to GitHub...

This post does a good job of explaining how a stray @ in a URL might ruin your whole day:

Can you quickly tell which of the URLs below is legitimate and which one is a malicious phish that drops evil.exe?

https://github.com∕kubernetes∕kubernetes∕archive∕refs∕tags∕@v1271.zip

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/archive/refs/tags/v1.27.1.zip

[...] As you can see in the breakdown of a URL below, everything between the scheme https:// and the @ operator is treated as user info, and everything after the @ operator is immediately treated as a hostname. However modern browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Edge don’t want users authenticating to websites accidentally with a single click, so they will ignore all the data in the user info section, and simply direct the user to the hostname portion of the URL.

For example, the URL https://google.com@bing.com, will actually take the user to bing.com.

I didn't know that part about user info. Combined with Unicode fakes of characters you expect in URLs, this can send you somewhere very different from where you thought you were going.

We all know not to trust links or attachments from unverified sources (right?). But stealth URLs add extra risk; you might eyeball the URL in that email and decide "yeah, I trust GitHub/Dreamwidth/Google/whatever". Be careful out there.

Edit: also .mov. This post does a good job of demonstrating how this can be exploited and catch even people who are careful (thanks gingicat).

I might just edit my hosts file to wholesale block these domains.

Someone on my previous post mentioned pictures, so I'll go ahead and record the starting state of the garden.

( photos )

Yesterday's torah portion, Emor, includes one of the "life for life" (death penalty for murder) passages. Locally, the trial for the murderer in the attack at Tree of Life in 2018 has just gotten started. We had a small discussion of the death penalty through that lens.

Many of the victims' families wanted the state to accept the murderer's offer to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Some family members pressed for the death penalty. I don't know how prosecutors decide these things, but they decided to have a capital trial instead of accepting the plea.

The systems around the death penalty in the US are badly broken in many ways ranging from injustice to impracticality. Through the lens of civil law and current judicial practice, I personally would prefer that they do the closest legal thing to dropping the guy into an oubliette, keeping him out of circulation while denying the opportunity for grandstanding and martyrdom. Through the lens of Jewish law, however, something struck me yesterday.

The rabbis of the mishna and talmud (in tractate Sanhedrin) were uncomfortable with the death penalty the torah calls for, so they nerfed it. It's very hard to qualify for the death penalty under rabbinic law. In addition to the requirements for eyewitnesses (who themselves face the death penalty for perjury), people must have warned the person beforehand that he was about to commit a capital offense, and he needs to acknowledge that warning. How likely is that? I used to wonder if anybody ever actually did that.

"Screw your optics, I'm going in". That's what the murderer posted on a site where he and others had been discussing the "problem" with Jews.

I don't know what else is in the transcript from that site; I haven't seen it. It sounds like people tried to stop him. Along with everything else -- his social-media activity, the obvious premeditation, the eyewitnesses to the murders, the lack of regret afterward -- it kind of sounds like the talmud's requirements might have been met. It's not a slam-dunk under rabbinic law, but if Jewish law rather than US law were governing this case, it strikes me that this could actually be the rare case that would qualify for the death penalty. And I'd be fine with that.

That's not vengeance talking, though this case is also personal to me (friends, not family). I can support the rabbinic rules for capital cases, theoretical as they seem, because of their many protections and focus on being careful. Example: did you know that a unanimous vote for capital conviction is overturned? Because if nobody had doubts, maybe the judges didn't look hard enough for factors in the accused's favor.

Making the rounds (I saw it here). Applies to Pittsburgh too:

Chicago actually has 12 seasons:
- Winter
- Fool's Spring
- Second Winter
- Spring of Deception
- Third Winter
- (you are here)
- The Pollening
- Actual Spring
- Summer
- Hell's Front Porch
- False Fall
- Second Summer
- Actual Fall

Somebody said today is World Frog Day (who knew? not I!), and with Pesach coming up soon that led to some discussion of the second plague, and somebody linked to a passage in the talmud about it and I have questions:

Rabbi Akiva says: It was one frog, and it spawned and filled the entire land of Egypt with frogs. Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya said to him: Akiva, what are you doing occupying yourself with the study of aggada (stories)? This is not your field of expertise. [...] Rather, the verse is to be understood as follows: It was one frog; it whistled to the other frogs, and they all came after it. (Sanhedrin 67b)

(Convention: the parts in bold are in the original text; the rest is editorial elucidation. The talmud's discussions are often quite compact.)

If I'm reading this correctly, Rabbi Elazar's objection to Rabbi Akiva's statement isn't the claim that there was one frog that then produced more. Rabbi Elazar is fine with the "one original frog" idea. No, he's disputing how the other frogs got there; Akiva says the first frog spawned them, while Elazar says it summoned them.

Rashi elaborates Elazar's complaint: Akiva should refrain from stories about frogs and focus on more serious stuff, like laws of plagues and afflictions, that Akiva actually knows something about. Which makes me wonder what any of them are saying about Elazar's knowledge, since it's apparently ok for Elazar to talk about this stuff. This is Elazar ben Azariah, who at the age of 18 was miraculously given white hair overnight so that the other sages would take him seriously as (briefly) the head of the Sanhedrin. It's not like he's some nobody who doesn't know more "serious" stuff and is only equipped for stories.

What a peculiar passage.

And also: world frog day? Really? (Search engines produce hits. And I found it on a list on Wikipedia, for what that's worth.)

Please share a link to this post with any SCA (etc) or tiny-homes people you think might be interested.

I have a house on a flatbed trailer. It lives at Cooper's Lake in western PA, where Pennsic is held. When I set out to build it, I first got Dave Cooper's approval of the plans so there would be no issues with using and storing it there. All was good. But times have changed, there are new people with new business interests running Cooper's Lake now, and many of the "old" trailers, including mine, have been evicted. In my case, my trailer has to be gone after Pennsic 50, this August.

The trailer is not road-legal; it's only been driven on Cooper roads for the last 20 years. Legality aside, I doubt the trailer would be safe at real road speeds. (The campground has bumpy dirt roads and traffic moves at 5-10MPH.) It's not practical for me to disassemble the house and rebuild a smaller version of it to take to and from Pennsic every year: I don't have the storage, the towing vehicle, or the fortitude. I don't think I'll go to enough more Pennsics to justify all those costs.

Perhaps you have those things, and interest? Or perhaps there are parts you can use?

Parts of the house are in good to very good condition and could perhaps be reused for a different building project. The roof was new in 2019, put on a month before I got the eviction notice (sob). It's made of ABS pipe, cut to look like tiles, and it does a good job of both protecting and cooling the house. I can talk more about its construction. The loft floor is made of 2x4 tongue-and-groove whitewood and, being interior, has not been exposed to the elements. The doors are in good shape (you probably want to refinish them). Some other lumber can probably be reused for the right project.

I would be sad to trash all this if there's someone who can make use of it and who can come collect it in August. I'm not looking for money; I want to reduce waste.

If you're interested, please get in touch -- Dreamwidth direct message if you're here, or email to this user name at pobox dot com, or the contact form on my personal web site, or Mastodon if you know me there. Or feel free to comment on this post if you don't mind it being public.

Edit: Exterior dimensions: 10 x 20 feet, 16 feet high at the ridge on level ground (the trailer is two feet of the height).

A few pictures:

Front:

Interior:

A better view of that roof:

I got my Pixel 5A in March of last year. So, fortunately, it is still in its warranty period.

This is the weirdest failure I have heard of. Yesterday, I took my phone out of my pocket, woke it up, and was greeted by a flashing screen. What it was flashing was a screen full of "snow", like what you get on a TV that's tuned to a station that's not broadcasting, but static -- the whole screen was flashing but the snow wasn't moving around. Hmm, very odd. As I tried to shut it down gracefully I could see that the "underlying" image was responding to me -- there were the usual buttons for "restart", "shut down", and whatever else -- but so fleeting that I couldn't catch them with my finger or read them. On to the hard reboot via the power button.

I Googled this but did not find answers.

I hoped it was a one-time glitch, but I wouldn't be writing this post if it were. Almost every time, but not every single time, since then, recovering from "sleep" mode gets me not the usual desktop but this flashing thing from which I can only hard-reboot. Rebooted about 20 times yesterday.

After the first reboot I had a new notification of a pending OS update, so I applied that. No change. I uninstalled the app I most recently installed, which should have been safe but it's basic troubleshooting. No change. I had, I think on Friday, gotten a batch of miscellaneous app updates, but I don't see a way to review exactly what now. But also, it wasn't right before this behavior. None of that was; that app (from my bank) was sometime last week.

Off to chat support I went. The agent I spoke with told me both that it's a software problem and that I would need to take it to their designated repair place for a hardware repair (for which you must first do a system reset); I asked her to reconcile those two things but she didn't. I pushed back on the repair place, noting that earlier in the warranty period I'd had a problem for which they said that was the solution, but the place couldn't help me and was kind of rude about it and it never got fixed. I asked if the software problem was something I could fix but her script didn't have any info about that. I said in that case, since it's under warranty, I want to exchange it, and I know they have a scheme where they send you the new phone (with a hold on your credit card), you migrate to it and send back the old one, and they release the hold. After I sent her a video of the behavior (an adventure of its own, as she was assuming I could do that from my phone and share it and I was like "uh, this is a video taken with my partner's iPhone and no it's not in my photo gallery and I need to upload or email it to you"), she collected some information from me and came back a few minutes later to say something like "good news, it's under warranty" (I knew that), and then gave me instructions for mailing back the phone and then they'd send me a new one, "or if you like, we could do" (exactly what I'd just asked for). Yeah that, I said.

Meanwhile, I installed Authy on my tablet lest the phone become completely unusable, because I wouldn't want to be locked out of anything that requires two-factor authentication. Today I noticed a seeming pattern where the phone would be fine so long as it was active, and if I set it on the desk next to me I could then wake it up but if I put it in my pocket we'd be back to the snow. This is, uh, the same pocket position I always use. But then the snow thing happened while I was using the phone, so apparently it's not that either. I am mystified.

It's going to be an aggravating several days, methinks.

I have just learned that eftychia (Daphne) has passed unexpectedly, way too soon.

I met Daphne at an SF con, probably Darkover, about 35 years ago. She was already a capable musician then and was an outstanding one later in Homespun Ceilidh Band. We enjoyed playing together for some balls at cons, and she was often on the Pennsic bandstand when I was more active there. She encouraged others, drew shy musicians in, and had a welcoming smile. In all of these places, it was obvious that making music was her happy place. I know she struggled with chronic pain, but when she was making music, that all seemed to fade away.

I haven't seen her since before the pandemic, alas. I had been looking forward to catching up with her at Pennsic this year. I am reminded that sometimes when we say "next time" there isn't going to be one. The world is a little darker and more dissonant tonight. :-(

Why no, I never expected to review a desk lamp, but here we are.

My father, from whom I inherited my vision problems, got a lamp for himself that he really likes, and so he bought me one. The "Yeslights Business Desk Lamp" is a small desk lamp that fits nicely amongst the three computers, two sets of monitor/keyboard/mouse, assorted external hard drives, tablets, and charging cables, and other tech necessities on my desk. The base is about the size of my Kindle, and the light is on a folding, rotating arm that sits flush against a vertical support when not in use. The base has a USB port because of course it does, and a wireless phone charger that I can't evaluate because my phone charges the old-fashioned way, with a cable. The wireless charger has a red indicator light (I assume red because it doesn't detect a phone) that I've found no way to turn off; it's not bright, but it's an unnecessary light in my field of vision and I'd prefer to not see it.

The LED light (a bar, not a bulb) has adjustable brightness and adjustable color temperature; the first I'm used to, but the second I haven't seen in a conventional lamp before. Color temperature matters a lot to me, so this is a delightful surprise. The controls are easy to use (no finicky touchscreens or the like), and very sensitive. Mine's in a space where I don't expect to accidentally brush it much, but depending on where you put it, you could surprise yourself with unexpected lighting changes. If you have cats that jump up on your desk, this could be an issue.

That vertical support has an embedded clock; I discovered this when I plugged the lamp in for the first time and it started playing Auld Lang Syne at me. I was not expecting that. I set the time and date (doing so emits loudish beeps) and I hope it won't play music again. (There's a button battery, so I assume it will retain these settings during power outages.) It also reports temperature, though I'm not sure how accurate that'll be when sitting on a desk with computers and monitors. It currently thinks it's a couple degrees warmer than the thermostat in the hall thinks it is. The clock has an alarm and a snooze setting, so even though it's billed as a desk lamp, they seem to have also had the "bedside table" use case in mind.

The lamp does very well with its primary function, to produce light at the desired brightness and color temperature. It's got a good range from "bright enough to easily read by" to "a little supplemental illumination". The head rotates in two of the three dimensions: up/down and left/right, but you can't change the angle of the head. So far that hasn't prevented me from getting light where I need it.