What's one positive/neutral thing that's happened today?

General Off-Topic Discussion
2332

back in april, when i was cleaning out my horrible mom’s house after she kicked it, i found my beloved old teddy bear in the same state he’d been in since i moved out of florida over a decade ago: gutted of his stuffing and stuffed in a ziploc bag, despite mom promising to get him repaired multiple times.

i then promptly lost him in the mess and shuffle of throwing out old things, and he is currently somewhere in a dumpster in florida. when i realized he was truly gone, it absolutely wrecked me, and i’ve had many dreams since about finding him, only to wake up empty armed, sobbing.

i had another dream like this last night, and unfortunately became lucid enough to realize that this was a dream and he is truly unrecoverable. still, when i realized, i tried very hard to focus on what he looked like, felt like in my hands. just so i could hold onto him a little longer, even if only in my sleep. i woke up crying once more.

30 minutes ago, on a lark and a thin ray of hope, i searched up ‘90s teddy bear’ and scrolled through the image results. on a few more hunts, i did it. i found him.

well, not him-him, obviously, and not the exact same bear as in my memories (aside from his age, mine had a little patch sewn on his chest, perhaps of a flower…and a few other minor differences). could easily be a cousin of his though.

i immediately purchased this little bear, this time through tears of joy. she can’t ever replace my old teddy truly, but i like to think that he wanted me to be happy, which is why he reoccurred in my dreams to remind me of how much i loved him.

i’ll call her teddy jr.

image
image1167×559 146 KB

17 Likes
2333

Played catch with the kid, and the words have been coming easily in this writing session. Can’t ask for very much more than that.

7 Likes
2334

Heard a random woman’s scream earlier and then silence. A peep out the window didn’t reveal anything, so I brought backup and went to investigate. A neighbour lady of ours, (who I have historical beef with because she HATES our non HOA compliant naturalized backyard, and her husband is a big fan of the birds that come to our feeder and to hang out with the bunnies and groundhogs and such) had fallen down in such a way she was obscured by cars and bumped her head on the ice. She didn’t seem too dazed, but we called the ambulance and her husband and things were fine after that. No one else noticed the yell, as people were either away, buried in the basement, or working in garages.

14 Likes
2335

Getting ready for an old friend to come spend the weekend. There will be so much eating and drinking and yapping endlessly by the fire. Since I look for any loophole in our “no bread in the house” policy, I reasoned that we can’t possibly expect my poor friend to suffer, too, so I’m making bread. The dough is rising on the clothes dryer right now.

And just girding our loins for The Weather that’s coming. It’s supposed to be a low of 10F on Monday. Here’s what will happen: Texas’s electrical grid will fail. Everyone will be without power. Some will die from cold. And then the powers that be will get all wide-eyed and say, “But who could have predicted this?” Wait a minute, that’s all bad news. The good news is that we have literal tons of firewood from all the trees that broke and died in the big freeze last year, and the wood stove heats the whole house very nicely.

9 Likes
2336

That’s interesting. I’m looking forward to your explanation of how a cloth mask would operate in such a situation.

Also. COVID. Please. You’ve all had three years to figure out what happened to you.

It’s 2024 now. All that pandemic stuff is a picnic compared to what’s coming.

I love you all, but seriously. Time to get your game on.

1 Like
2337

I remember that tree! I’ll keep you, Tom and company in my thoughts- I’ve another friend down in Texas and I’m a little worried for her, since the area’s pretty prone to outages. But hopefully it’s smooth sailing, and all of you stay cozy. Hurray for having firewood on hand!

7 Likes
2338

Ouch. I hope she’s got a plan B. At least it’s not forecast to be wet, so hopefully no ice storm with icy roads and power poles snapping from the weight of ice. Hopefully the electric overlords will do some rolling blackouts or some other reasonable plan so that we don’t end up like we have the past 2 years. But I swear that our state government just does not care. It’s easily fixed, but no one’s even talking about fixing it. Every time someone brings it up, they just shriek about the danger of trans kids in sports, and look how safe they’ve made us from that! The weight of being a Texan is sometimes very hard to bear.

7 Likes
2339

I don’t think Hanon has to explain anything. If he feels more comfortable with a mask in public, why does that bother anyone? I have several people in my life who have severely depressed immune systems, and their doctors recommend that they mask up during Covid/flu season. I’m confident Hanon has his reasons, and he doesn’t need to explain them to anyone.

I know that was just a typo, but it would be great if it was 2014 again.

14 Likes
2340

Something positive/neutral that happened to me in 2014: My Gods of Tension, One Two Three, Rêveur, and Such Strange Creatures albums released, I started work on my Kazhard Project, and… emotionally, I was a complete wreck a lot of the time, so these kept me focused.

7 Likes
2341

I miss the face I had in 2014, when my skin was better attached to my skull.

7 Likes
2342

I can’t remember the whole quote or the source, but someone once said that younger faces don’t look like they’re done yet. :woman_shrugging:

So you’re actually getting the fine tinting/shading details on the canvas now. :point_left::point_left:

6 Likes
2343

Hmm. Yeah, no. What even happened in 2014??? :rofl:

Good luck in the ice storm arriving!

5 Likes
2344

I would be surprised if you remembered 2014 tbh

4 Likes
2345

More like what wasn’t happening, or hadn’t happened yet, in 2014.

3 Likes
2346

An old person said that. I wouldn’t be 25 again for anything, but I loved my face when I was 35-40. A friend of mine in her 80s told me that 50 is the age when you stop having the face you’ve always had and start having the face you’ll always have, and man, was she right about that.

4 Likes
2347

So, this one’s going to take a bit of explanation. Which I might have already said here…apologies if so.

My current research focus is cuneiform, and specifically how damn hard it is to learn it. When you’re learning English and you run into an unknown word, it’s pretty easy to find it in the dictionary. You can open to a random page, and instantly know if your word will be before or after that page.

But if you find a sign you don’t know, well…you’re out of luck! And in cuneiform, you find signs you don’t know all the time. There are hundreds of them out there. And when tablets tend to be found in a minimum of ten pieces, it’s likely to be damaged, too…cuneiform experts recommend just flipping through the dictionary one page at a time until you find your sign.

(For the computer scientists: we can find English words in the dictionary with a binary search because there’s a total ordering on words. There’s no total ordering on cuneiform signs, though, so the best you can do is a linear search, O(n) instead of O(log n).)

Well, I’ve spent the past few years trying to fix that, by creating a new way to encode the relationships between strokes in a sign, and then letting the computer do the searching instead of the human. Much faster that way! And experiments show that students find it a lot faster and easier than a traditional dictionary.

But this still requires students to learn my encoding scheme, so that they can look at a sign and go “ah, yes, this is [{[hc]h}v{dh}]”. So I’ve been hoping to find a better way to input these things.

And I think I’ve finally succeeded!

Finally putting my decade-and-a-half-old JavaScript skills to use! Now I just need to get enough test subjects to say “and there’s statistically significant evidence that my invention is a good and useful thing”.

17 Likes
2348

This is SO cool! Is it alright if I share this video? And do you have a link to the software?

4 Likes
2349

By all means! You can try the mouse-drawing version here, or the typing-only version here.

(Note: this is specifically for Hittite cuneiform, so it won’t necessarily recognize signs from other eras.)

The full details are hopefully going to be published in the Journal of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative soon, with all the algorithms and such.

8 Likes
2350

this is freakin amazing

3 Likes
2351

Amazing work, Daniel! Not that I know the first thing about cuneiform, Hittite or other, but an easily searchable comparison database like yours sure sounds like a massive improvement over directionlessly flipping through a tomeful of symbols.

4 Likes