lederhosen

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Tonight we finally trapped Mama Cat. Again. Tomorrow morning we find out whether my work on reinforcing the trap has made it a bit more escape-proof than the last time. If she hasn't escaped, we'll be taking her to the vet to get spayed, and then presumably release her again.

She took quite a bit of catching, and we only managed to get her after trapping both the local toms. (We caught Ginger Tom the other night but let him go again; hopefully he'll have less reason to hang around once Mama and Miss B have both had the operation.)

Mama Cat had figured out what the pressure plate was for, and had taken to lounging around in view of our kitchen window waiting for us to bait the trap so she could steal the food from it. In the end we tied a long string to the trigger and ran the other end back inside the house. When she started sniffing around the trap I hid behind the door and Rey watched out the window and let me know when to pull the string. (Which I did so hard I gave myself rope burn. Oh well.)

She seems a bit less wild than Dad Cat; I wonder if she might have been a pet at some point. I'm hoping that she might get a bit tamer with feeding, if she forgives us for the vet trip, but the main priority is just to make sure she doesn't have any more kittens.

Meanwhile, Miss B is growing fast. She's over 1.5 kg now, and looking more like a mini-cat and less like a kitten. She's been very sooky today, and I'm fine with that; the way the world is lately, having a snuggly feline is no bad thing.

I've been listening to German music for a while (Rammstein, Die Ärzte, Einstürzende Neubauten etc.) and especially in the last six months with ASP. So I've been using Duolingo to learn beginner German so I can understand what I'm listening to.

Partly so I don't accidentally end up singing along to some modern equivalent of the Horst-Wessel Lied* but mostly because the lyrics are interesting!

Anyway, so, Duolingo works by translating (or occasionally repeating) sentences spoken by cute little cartoon people. Most of the sentences are mundane: how do I get to the train station, she is my wife**, etc. etc.

( Then it started: )

All those and a few more available here. All these are genuine screenshots.

*Happy to say, this is not an issue. ASP's liner notes frequently include something along the lines of "Wir danken allen Rechten dafür, dass sie unsere Musik nicht mögen" which is roughly "we thank all right-wingers for not enjoying our music".
**Incidentally, German Duolingo seems to have a lot of queer couples. Not sure whether this is an intentional choice or just not bothering to micro-manage speaker gender for the relevant sentences, but either way, it's good!

So after yesterday's post I thought I'd extend it a little and test my code on a full-sized problem: casting Hamlet.

This helpful site lists the characters present in each scene, although you have to be a little careful - Claudius is also listed as "King", and Gertrude as "Queen". In some cases it just lists groups ("Assistants", "Clowns", etc.); for this work I've just assumed there are two of each, though you'd want to check that. This results in 39 parts.

I entered that data, along with some made-up numbers for how many lines each part has; the exact values don't matter too much, as long as there's enough info to distinguish between major and minor parts. I also tweaked it so that minor characters are assumed to have 5 lines each unless specified otherwise, which saves on data entry.

Unfortunately the demo license for AMPL doesn't allow me quite enough variables to solve this problem. (I could probably reformulate it to reduce it to one variable per part, plus a few extra, but that would be a bit messier.)

Not to fear, there's another option: NEOS. NEOS is a web service that allows anybody to submit optimisation jobs for free, without a size limitation... and it accepts AMPL format. Having tested and debugged my code on a smaller problem, I can then add the full Hamlet data and submit it to NEOS at this page.

I upload three files:

( castingmodel.mod )

( hamlet.dat )

Last, a commands file to tell NEOS what output I want:

casting_commands.txt:

solve;
display Casting;

I then enter my email address and click "submit". In a minute or two, NEOS shows me the results, which you can view for yourself, and also emails me a copy. (A result of "infeasible" would indicate that it's impossible to satisfy the problem as specified, either because of some inconsistency within the constraints or because there aren't enough actors.)

The output shows some information about the solution process, and at the bottom it gives the final casting:

Art: Guildenstern
Bea: Barnardo, Clown 2, English Ambassador, Player Queen, Reynaldo
Chris: Hamlet
Derek: Horatio, Player Lucianus
Eve: Doctor of Divinity, Fortinbras, Laertes Follower 2, Player King
Frank: Ophelia
Greg: Polonius
Hugh: Gertrude
Irene: Francisco, Gentleman, Lord2, Osric, Voltemand
Jo: Claudius
Kate: Clown 1, Rosencrantz
Luke: Laertes, Player Prologue
Meg: Captain, Cornelius, Laertes Follower 1, Lord 1, Sailor 2
Ned: Attendant 2, Ghost, Lucianus
Oli: Attendant 1, Guard, Marcellus, Messenger, Sailor 1

This looks pretty sensible overall: most actors either get one big part, or a bunch of small parts, and our choices for Hamlet and Laertes satisfy the fight training requirement.

I know, four posts in one week!

I got together with some of my fellow gamers last weekend and we spent a couple of afternoons painting up our Pathfinder figures. It's been a while since I did any painting, so I'm a bit rusty; we had to throw out a lot of paints/glues/etc. Some pics of mine:

This is Nura, freshly undercoated. You can read more of her adventures here. In-game Nura has just hit level 3 and is pretty much broke, having blown most of her money buying spells from kobolds, but this version has a bigger wardrobe budget.

I picked this figure mostly because the clothes were a bit more interesting than what I normally see on female caster figures, which is either "generic robes" or "as little as possible". Perhaps not the most practical for tromping around dungeons, but Nura has magical cleaning spells and strong friends to do the heavy lifting.

Figure cleaned up and undercoated:



Base colours on:



(Looking back at the photo on the Reaper catalogue, apart from being consumed with envy for anybody who can paint that sort of detail on a 30mm figure, I note that I've interpreted her clothes a bit differently, as far as which bits are outer vs under layers etc. Oh well.)

Just after inking her skin:



seriously, the main thing I have learned in my time painting figures is INK ALL THE THINGS THEN INK THEM SOME MORE. I have no patience for painstaking highlighting; the right ink can really bring out details very quickly. At least, as long as the sculptor has done a good job in the first place; if the shape is bad, ink will emphasise that too.

Nura's dress, after highlighting/drybrushing:



...okay, so I'm not completely against highlighting, there's a time and a place for it, and the drape-y dress was a big part of why I bought this figure in the first place so it makes sense to put in some effort here.

The violet-magenta contrast is a bit stronger than I'd normally do for highlighting, but in this case I figure she's wearing something like shot silk. I realised halfway through painting that I didn't have any light blues to highlight the blue portion, so instead I mixed one of the darker ones with yellow for the green highlight you can see here; again, call it shot silk or mageweave or whatever.

Front-on, mostly finished:


And after doing the eyes. Usually I'd ink, then paint the sclera white, then dot the pupils with a felt-tip; this is really fiddly and often requires doing over and over. This time around, the ink gave enough contrast between her eyes and the shaded surrounds that I was able to skip the middle step and go straight to the dotting.



There are a few bits I want to touch up before I varnish, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming along so far.

Tweeted about this earlier, but this is a better medium for the length...

Lately I've been hearing the term "virtue signalling" used as a cheap put-down, mostly against leftie-type folk expressing leftie-type views. (James Bartholomew claims to have coined the phrase.)

Bartholomew's explanation:

I coined the phrase in an article here in The Spectator (18 April) in which I described the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous. Sometimes it is quite subtle. By saying that they hate the Daily Mail or Ukip, they are really telling you that they are admirably non-racist, left-wing or open-minded. One of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous. It does not involve delivering lunches to elderly neighbours or staying together with a spouse for the sake of the children. It takes no effort or sacrifice at all.

I'm surprised that Bartholomew doesn't mention visible displays of patriotism such as flying one's national flag or telling a soldier "thank you for your service"; as far as I can see this is one of the most widespread forms of "virtue signalling" per Bartholomew's definition, but I've never heard it described as such.

Part of why I dislike the term is that in practice, it almost always seems to involve equivocation. Bartholomew's explanation describes it as a form of deception, giving the impression of virtue without having to sacrifice for it - perhaps "feigning virtue" would be a more precise word for the concept as he explains it.

However, almost anywhere that I see somebody accused of "virtue signalling", it's coming from somebody who has no way of knowing (or hasn't bothered to find out) whether that accusation of deception is true; it's simply assumed that target's apparent virtue is feigned.

This is bad for obvious reasons (making unnecessary assumptions about a stranger's motivations is a bad thing) but it's also bad for subtler reasons. The equivocation and imprecise terminology gives the impression that signalling virtue (in the everyday meaning of those words) is a Bad Thing, and this is simply bullshit.

Certainly, people can signal virtue (real or feigned) for bad reasons. I'm sure everybody's met the holier-than-thou activist who's noisily embraced a cause because it gives them an excuse to be a dick, or to get laid.

But signalling virtue can also be a positive act. Couple of examples from my own experience:

#1: Back in November 2014, my work was running a White Ribbon Day event. I have very mixed feelings about WRD but at that stage my attitude was still "maybe it can be salvaged". This was not long after the murder of Mayang Prasetyo and close to Trans Day of Remembrance, so I asked the organisers if I could do a bit for TDOR as part of the WRD event and they said yes, so I did.

A few months later, somebody from my office came to ask me for advice about a scary mental health issue. I didn't know her well at all; the only direct interaction we had was occasionally saying hi at afternoon trivia or in the break room. But of everybody in that building, she'd decided that I seemed like a safe and possibly helpful person to ask about this stuff.

I'm still not sure how she decided that. Possibly my TDOR talk gave her the idea that I might be a good person to ask, possibly something else entirely that I don't remember. But either way, she needed to talk to somebody with a particular virtue and she'd picked up some kind of signal that suggested that might be me.

(I like to think that she made a good choice there. I wasn't able to fix everything for her, but I was able to help her find confidence to talk to other folk who could help.)

#2: Last week, somebody on a mailing list for stats professionals made a throwaway joke that involved deadnaming a famous trans person. I responded to the effect of "hey, as a point of etiquette, deadnaming trans people is impolite, I would like trans people to feel safe and welcome in our profession, so please let's not do this".

Usually when I have an issue with somebody's behaviour, the chances of resolving that are better if it's handled in private. Telling people off in public usually encourages them to get defensive rather than reconsider their behaviour. In this case, though, I felt that my reply needed to be public, and a lot of that boiled down to "virtue signalling": I wanted any trans people on that list to know that somebody had their back.

And it worked. I already knew of one person on the list who would appreciate that gesture, but almost immediately I got a thank-you from a stranger whose colleagues don't yet know that she's transitioning, but who trusted me enough to sign her email with a different name to the one that appears in the headers.

So if "virtue signalling" is what it takes to show a vulnerable person that someone's on their side (and perhaps to influence bystanders in the same direction), I refuse to be shamed for signalling.

If I fail to live up to those assurances, then by all means, shame away.

May contain spoilers for Pandemic: Legacy

Skye's journal

January 3rd 2016

Started work at CDC today. Met some co-workers. Bianca [jesusandrew] runs the sequencing lab, Rosalba [17catherines] is one of the field doctors, and Jamala [reynardo] knows how to use PubMed and the surveillance reports.

Rosalba asked me if I was interested in field work. Wasn't sure how to answer - I mean, what sort of sucker wants to go meet Ebola up close, seriously? Well, apparently, Rosalba. But Emily from admin tells me it's pretty safe, most of the time it's just sipping cocktails on the beach in Phuket and taking a few temperatures here and there. So I said sure, yeah, why not? Rosalba's going to help me with the paperwork.

( Read more... )

Think I might've just broken off a long-standing and much-valued friendship. Dammit. And not even for anything they said or did to me - this is somebody who's always been good to me, who's given me a great deal of fun and kindness over the years.

But there are things I can't overlook, not even in my friends, ESPECIALLY not in my friends. And knowingly signal-boosting refugee-hating white supremacists and anti-PP propaganda is definitely in that list, because that shit gets people killed.

NB: I'm not saying we have to be in perfect agreement on those issues. I'm talking about basic honesty (if you share material that turns out to be a fabrication, maybe correct the record?) and, um, not relying on sources that would be right at home on the Daily Stormer. I don't think that's an extreme position.

Gah. This is not a friendship that I would cast aside lightly. But I have to draw a line somewhere. If they change their behaviour I'd gladly welcome them back, but I doubt either of us is going to shift on this one :-(

NB: The person in question has access to this post - not sure if they still read LJ/DW, but they're welcome to read this if they see it. I have no desire to see people trashing them in comments; I'm feeling sad enough about this situation as it is.

Sent today:

Hi, my wife and I have been coming to Dracula's [cabaret restaurant] for 15 years, often bringing friends and family with us. Last night (Retro Vampt in Melbourne) was our fifth time.

As always the food was great and parts of the show were great. But the repeated anti-trans jokes left a bad taste in my mouth. (I counted at least three, including one about Caitlyn Jenner that must have been added in the last couple of weeks - if you're going to be topical, I'd much rather have had something about Christopher Lee.)

My wife and I have several transgender friends, we know the sort of crap they have to deal with in life, and it's just not enjoyable for us to deal with that on what's supposed to be a relaxing night out. The previous time we came, we took one of our trans friends and they had a great time - I'm very glad they weren't at last night's act.

I know gender-bending Rocky Horror humour is Dracula's thing, and I enjoy that, but there are ways to do it that don't come across as "ew nothing worse than a transgender woman, amirite?" If I wanted that, I'd watch the Footy Show. (Not too keen on the homophobic parts of the act, either.)

It's your show, you get to decide what sort of comedy you want to perform. All I can do is let you know that if anti-trans jokes are going to be part of the act then I'll have to look elsewhere for a fun night out, and I'd be sad to do that. I've had a lot of fun at Drac's over the years.

(Tattoo progress: itchy.)