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  • kengr

The Price of cool

Just got around top doing some calculations about the power my new air conditioner uses.

It's 1280 watt. That's 1.28 kW. So running it for an hour uses 1.28 kW/hr. And it looks like I'm paying more than $0.10 per kW/hr. Which means that it'd gonna cost me more than $3/day. Ouch.

Immediately turned it off and opened the window and turned on the fan in the bedroom window.

I'll save it for the really hoi days...

This entry was originally posted at http://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1044164.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Sailor on the Seas of Fhtagn

Well, it's less than a week til I head up to Seattle, and then get on a ship to Alaska and back. My biggest trip since I was a kid, with my folks. 11 days away from Château Innsmouth. Going to be...A mix of things. Honestly I'm kind of stressed about things. Travel makes me anxious, and this has all kinds of additional stressors added. But, I'll deal. I've spent today getting my tasks in order. Laundry, shopping, packing (yes I'm packing everything now, rather than flipping out later in the week). Already cut my wardrobe down so I could get everything packed. Of course, I'll probably pull everything out and repack it before the week is out.

So yeah, I'll gone for a long while. Not that I've been all that chatty on here, but I don't plan to be all that connected while on the cruise. I guess that's part of the anxiety, intentionally trying to disconnect for a while. Not completely, as I'm using my tablet for reading as usual. (I will bring a paper book or two just in case). I also will be bringing a bluetooth keyboard so I can keep journal entries on it, or at least notes of our adventures. Also have my camera, though I tend to be pretty lazy about taking pictures. Probably will spend most of my camera time taking sea photos.

Besides the trip, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. Busy with work, trying to get all my allergy shots in on time. Got my new, bifocal glasses today. Adapted to them pretty quick, of course I got the fancy no line/progressive lenses. Will be nice to be able to read small print book again without straining. Been fighting a kind of stalemate battle with my anxiety/depression. Keep trying to dig my heels in so it doesn't get a bigger foothold. Lots of reading, lots of movies. Some socializing, but it's been hard. I like being at Château Innsmouth, it's full of things I like. *wink* Oh well, I'll deal.

Also been plotting on my Providence trip for Necronomicon 2017. It's actually a less stressful trip, even though I'm going solo. Only going to be gone about half the time, and I'm pretty much staying in the same area of Providence most of the time. Of course, there's a lot of social activity, but that's with Lovecraftians, which previous experience tells me I'll find easier than most events. And I can always do my own rambles along Grandpa Theobald's streets. More plotting when I get back I think.

So that's about it. About to call it a night and go to bed. Books to read, and sleeps to have. If I don't post anything before I leave, see you all in August. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Today's Softball Action

The Des Plaines girls played today in the first day of a softball tournament over in Niles. It appears to be the first year that they're run this tournament and a great many things are being a mystery to us. :)

For some reason, there are five teams in the tourney and rather than scheduling things with a seeding round on day one, two of the teams got a bye so that they only had to play two games on the first day; the other three teams would need to play and win three games to advance to the finals. We were one of the other three teams, winning the first two games; then losing the third game to one of the teams with a bye which appears to be a tournament team rather than a team or all-star team from a house league.

But the girls played well overall. And by winning the first two games, we have postponed our first game tomorrow until 3:45. One win will put us into the finals, but then we will have to beat the team that beat us twice in order to win, this being a double elimination tournament, except when it isn't, because it's theoretically quite possible for a team with three losses to get to the finals if we've read the brackets correctly.

As I said, it's a mystery...

Good days, in a row

"Bad week?" my friend Riona asked me over the phone.

"Weird week," I replied.

I said that Thursday night. Without getting into details, the past week had been a little frustrating, odd, and "off." By Thursday night, as I was walking around in my neighborhood, I was feeling a little worn own by that. That's when Riona called me. I turned down going to a Friday night event with her; I wanted and needed some time by myself.

Luckily and happily, I've been getting that. Got out yesterday (Friday) and today, treating myself in cheap ways — Friday was cheap pizza from the SE Foster Rd. Little Caesar's, today was the fun Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 at a second-run theater and a Slurpee on my way home — getting good long walks done, and simply enjoying how Portland looks.

I'm feeling better. I hope, as always, to feel more consistently good.
  • kengr

Fun comics

I read a lot of webcomics. And I've slowly been working my way thru a backlog of comics folks have recommended to me.

I recently caught up on one, and was quickly able to catch up on several others. In order

Spinnerette A different take on "getting spider powers. Very silly at times

Grrl Power Words fail. But I pointed Fay at it last night and she was reading and giggling for the rest of the time she was here.

Magical Girl Neil an interesting subversion of the Magical Girl trope

And I'm currently working my way thru Magical Transvestite Cherry So far a rather *different* subversion of the Magical Girl trope

Check my feeds for most of the comics I'm following. I also follow a bunch that don't have RSS feeds, but I'll get to those some other day

This entry was originally posted at http://kengr.dreamwidth.org/1043753.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mazes and Monsters: The LiveTweeting

A couple of weeks ago, I asked people to share an announcement about Invisible 3, saying that if we got at least 100 retweets, I’d do a livetweeting of the 1982 made-for-TV film Mazes and Monsters.

Mazes and Monsters movie posterThe film is based on the novel of the same name, by Rona Jaffe, and warns of the dangers of fantasy role-playing games. It’s based at least in part on rumors and legends of students sneaking into the Michigan State University steam tunnels to play Dungeons and Dragons and disappearing.

Most of this background is, as you might imagine, complete bugbear twaddle.

On the other hand, this was a chance to see Tom Hanks in his first starring role for film.

You’ve got Robbie (Hanks), a troubled kid whose brother vanished years ago. He comes to a new school after failing out of the last one for playing too much Mazes & Monsters. He tries to avoid M&M’s siren song, but because he’s “Level Nine,” Kate, Daniel, and JJ really need him to join their game.

When Robbie and Kate hook up, JJ gets depressed and talks about suicide, but instead decides to run a live-action version of M&M in the local caverns. Robbie promptly has some sort of mental break and “becomes” his character, on a quest that takes him to New York City to find the Two Towers.

All four kids seem to come from rich families (I’m not 100% sure about Kate), because the film is so much more powerful if it shows that even rich white kids can be broken and destroyed by the evils of role-playing game.

Invisible 3 CoverThere’s also a bird, a lot of hats, a mother who likes to redecorate her son’s room, and a skeleton having inappropriate relations with a flashlight.

I’m embedding the Storify of my tweets below. If any of this makes you laugh, or if you just want to show your support or sympathy, please consider checking out Invisible 3 and/or leaving a review. Thanks!

And now I’m off to try to recover some of my SAN points…

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

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Anybody have an old Win98 USB mass storage device driver?

Anybody have an old Win98 USB mass storage device driver? I've set up an real Win98 box on the machine that used to be door.murkworks.net - it's a P166 from 1996 and accordingly hilarious. I have USB running on it, but not drivers for USB disk drives, and I want that working, in no small part because the non-lulz non-vintage-games part of this project is having a (the?) last working 5.25" floppy drive for PC-DOS/MS-DOS diskettes.

(I like having the ability to read all antique media. Need anything off a Commodore PET floppy? In theory, I can do that for you, as long as it's double-density or less, and yes, they had a 1mb PET floppy at one point.)

The machine is named Blue, drive D is named Purple, and it's registered to Amélie Lacroix and the password is oneshotonekill because of course it had to be. Also, the desktop starts out with weapons and such but turns into widowtracer art because we all know what's really going on here.

It's also much quieter now, particularly for a machine from 1996, as I've replaced all the fans and improved the venting. Two of the fans were outright dead - the CPU and GPU fans, so that's terrifying. (I think the CPU fan may have worked occasionally, but don't hold me to it. Also I had already improved the venting some, even with the old fans - I just improved it more now.)

A couple of power supply capacitors should be replaced too, they're bulging a bit, and I had to order them - VetCo had none of the right caps in stock. Ah well, I tried.

Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん; comment count unavailable comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.

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