corvi

My parents took me to see Halley's comet when I was a kid; it's one of my earliest memories. The newspaper printed an astrolabe sort of thing you glued onto cardboard and cut out (I  think we used a Raisin Bran box), then knotted on a string with a washer to be the vertical reading. They showed me the comet with binoculars - one parent would find the comet using the Raisin Bran astrolabe and binoculars, then tried to hold the binoculars perfectly still while the other parent picked me up and tried to put my face up to the binoculars.

It looked like every other star to me; I have no idea if I was looking at the right one. Did I even see it? It was not a great viewing setup, the comet was far away from earth, on the other side of the sun for the whole apparition. I was cold and tired and much more interested in swinging the astrolabe washer in front of the flashlight as a shadow puppet. 

Last night juli  and I went out to look for comet Neowise. We live surrounded by mountains and some forest, and the sea is the wrong direction, so we poked around various locations looking for a clear view and watched the owls, bats, satellites, shooting stars, and humans smoking weed. I thought about Halley's Comet a lot. Would we know the comet when we saw it? Or would it just be another star, of no particular distinction without a telescope or a long exposure photo?

We knew it immediately when it came into view. It was like something out of a fairy tale. It looked like a luminous milkweed seed, drifting stationary against the dark sky. It looked like a comet.



juli  took this photo of it. There were no surprises revealed by camera cleverness: the photo was brighter, but undeniably the experience of looking at the photo was the experience of looking at the sky.

Look at it in the next couple days if you get a chance!

Someone has made an AI that "depixellates" human faces (invents plausible details it learned form its training data of thousands of photographs of human faces). Some of the results are incredibly funny:



There are times of absolute moral clarity in one's life. This was one of them. I knew what I must do, and that is: depixellate Soup Nose the Goat's Creepily Human Smile:



So I pixellated it:


And the result:



Tada! A Soup Nose-coloured human, complete with toothy smile!

It pretty much had to make up the eyes from nothing; I think Soup Nose's actual eyes are so far away from what it expected it didn't register them; they ended up part of the stripy black and white hair. The edge of the window got turned into a shirt collar. It assumed her horns and ears were part of the background. Still, a pretty good attempt!

Topic suggested by shadaras
( secret rainbows )

This week was apparently time for our approximately-once-a-year pile of snow. We live on the side of a mountain up a steep partially unpaved driveway, so we were stuck in our cozy home watching the white winds and eating bowls of fluffy snow with maple syrup for four days (woohoo!), with brief interludes to fruitlessly attempt to shovel the driveway and try out our best swears.
( Snow photos )
The snow's completely gone now after a couple of days of warm rain. The world is a little sharper and a little louder without it.

I keep a visual journal: each day, I answer a handful of questions with a colour. I love looking back at them at the end of the year, watching for patterns in the way time flowed over the year. maribou commented on them this year, and inspired me to actually run my collation program and post the results.
( many images )

And that was 2019! I haven't though of any new questions for 2020 yet, but I have, uh, a day, I guess.

This is zhelana 's December year in review meme
December 08 → talk about games this year

( Playing Video Games )

( Watching Video Games )

( Traditional RPGs )

( A Nontraditional RPG )

Today was the last Chinese brush painting class of the year, and the brush painting instructor taught a traditional snow painting technique. It's magic!

First you paint all the rocks:


Then you take a supersaturated alum/water solution, which is completely transparent, and you transparently paint all the snowy bits: mountains, trees, snow piled atop rocks. It's maddening because you can't see what you're doing. Did I just make a bunch of tree branches hanging in space unconnected to the trunk? (spoiler: yes)

Then you turn the rice paper over, and paint the entire back of it with indigo. Where the alum has soaked into the paper, it partially prevents the indigo from soaking through from the back. But even where the alum wasn't painted, the indigo has a luminous quality and some depth, very different feeling soaking it through from the back than just placing it on top of the paper in front.

And then you turn the paper back over and the magic trick has occurred, right on schedule.



There's a lot that needs to be cleaned up, shaded, or connected still, but ... snow!! :D It's a very good magic trick.

Went to the dentist Thursday to get a crown replaced. The dentist waved a 3d scanning wand thing around the tooth gap for a while, then used a Tooth CAD system to design a new crown - he traced the outside circumference of the tooth where it would meet the crown, and then the software suggested a generic bicuspid shape, which he adjusted a bit with push/pull sculpt tools that behaved identically to any other 3D modeling software. Then he sent the file to a machine in the next room, which 3D printed a new tooth for me out of porcelain composite.

The dentist has a TOOTH PRINTER. That printed a TOOTH. That's in my mouth RIGHT NOW. For BITING THINGS.

Finally, we get one of the nice parts of the cyberpunk future: replacement body parts made while you wait. They even let you watch, and I am delighted to announce that like many other things from the cyberpunk future, the tooth printer glows blue for no reason whatsoever.



Now, if only we could get fewer deeply unpleasant dispatches from the cyberpunk future.


(I could get into so much trouble with a tooth printer. So many things need realistic and functional human teeth. Coffee mugs. Teddy bears. Bananas. Precious Moments figurines. Alas, I don't think he'd let me borrow it.)

I've kept a list of all the new words I encountered during the past few weeks (or old words I encountered again but wasn't entirely sure about).

Most of them are very specific, single-purpose words (English has a word for injuring a horse with a horseshoe nail, apparently!) that I probably won't encounter again until the next time I'm reading about whatever it was, so it was kind of fun to jot them down as I went and review them now, instead of them just fading into the ether until next time.
( 64 words )