Last night, went to a jam session. Met up with a friend, kinda felt at first like I wouldn’t get a chance to play, lol. Then I ended up playing guitar while my friend was on drums and someone else was on bass. That went well. After that a different group of guys asked me to sit in on guitar and I was like alright. They said afterwards I did a good job playing with them. 
Tonight I’m gonna go to another open mic night, haha. I’m gonna wear a skirt to it because why not. XD
Think I’m just about done refactoring the code so I can write the solver/clue-editor-assist part of this puzzle tool… been a little off-and-on with this but I’m still having fun
UPDATE: My house is still full of worms, but they are apparently millipedes!
I found another one in my bathroom last night, and it was way too dark to bring it outside, so I put the millipede in a jar and gave a bit of bread and water to last it overnight. It seemed to really appreciate it!
I noted a lot of physical characteristics, such as body segmentation, leg color, tail shape, and the two striking dark antennae on its head. I poked around online and apparently it is known as Oxidus gracilis!
MORE POSITIVE NEWS: These are not bag worms, which means my parents have no reason to dislike them now!
In fact, it seems that my habit of transporting them back outside is actually a good thing, because they unleash all kinds of problems if you kill them! Luckily, for everyone involved, I have been spotting them first!
From what I’ve been reading, they don’t seem to damage houses; they just have a habit of getting lost in them, lol. The ones I’ve been finding have seemed a bit confused, and then they get much more excited when they see grass. Based on what the jarred millipede did, they do have a motionless “comfy” behavior, so the constant movement seems to be a kind of searching behavior.
Anyway, I brought the jarred millipede to a patch of rotting leaves when I woke up this morning, which seems to be its preference. Super cute!
Got a stellar mid year review at work.
And now I’m curious, why would bagworms be a problem(beyond the usual invertebrates tend to freak people out when found in human spaces factor) and what happens if you kill millipedes?
Bag worms tend to cluster up and spin really thick webs throughout the branches of trees, and then strip the leaves from the branches. We’ve had a few trees nearly die because of bag worms, which can become a major threat to our house when the storms kick in and blow dead trees over.
For the particular millipedes we are finding, they will erupt with a powerful, awful-smelling acid, which apparently causes an irritating skin rash, and the substance is notoriously difficult to wash away, too, since it stains quite thoroughly. They will also expel some of this from glands on their body if you spook them, so I have luckily been very gentle with them, and never had to experience this firsthand. Here’s hoping I never will!
While that’s pretty concerning, the nice thing is they are not known to cause any damage to homes; they just wander in and get lost, so if you simply relocate them, then it’s no problem. If you haven’t spotted one in your home yet, you’re also at no risk of failing to spot a problem, either. They just wander and chill, lol.
I’ve finished my mini-series for the Neo-Twiny jam! 3 games, 1,500 words, 12 illustrations, an entirely new font, and a whole lot of hand drawn UI elements. It was really nice to work on something that comes together as a whole in the end, and it gives me hope for my next project.
Finished the yellow stripe of my rainbow bead mat the other day and the green stripe last night. Hope to get around to stitching the yellow and green stripes together and the red orange and yellow-green sections together today and have the blue beads in my spice jar dice dispensers… and running out of unique containers to put the leftover beads in to keep colors separate.. Got red in an old vitamin pill jar, orange in a travel mouthwash jar, yellow in a granulated bouillon jar, and had no choice but to use a spare of the spice jars I’m using as dispensers for the leftover green… and the tiny pill jar I’m using for beads I pick up off the floor is overdue to be sorted(and while I have six of those tiny pill jars, they only hold about 90 beads and I have about 120 beads leftover after making each stripe.
My love doesn’t like giving things as presents, so for my birthday I got an experience: an open air concert on a repurposed factory terrain which now has trees and grass and shrubs and flowers. One wall of the factory building has been stripped away, providing room for a roof-covered stage. Half the roof tiles have been replaced with coloured glass panes so the late summer day sunlight made pretty colours on the stage.
The artist was Trixie Whitley, a Belgian-American singer and multi-instrumentalist who alternates between electronic deep bass music and raw guitar distortion. She and the drummer gravitate towards the latter in this example:
Weighed in at 326 pounds today, and today was about 10 degrees F cooler than the last few days. Also got the Red, orange, yellow, and green stripes of my bead mat all stitched together yesterday, so officially more than halfway done on that project. Oh, and got a $10 discount on my cell phone plan for the next year.
That sounds fun, is this part of a project you’re doing or is it a coding challenge from a site like CodeWars? I’m currently working on a solver for 7x7 Skyscrapers puzzles in C++ for a CodeWars challenge, it’s really fun…
Worked on a sci-fi twine. It’s coming along nicely.
Did some more work on my new project creating different enemy types and using of molotov cocktails in the game.
Mostly just for fun. But I did tons of these logic-grid puzzles as a kid (you used to be able to pick up paper books of them just like crosswords), and was reminded of them two years ago (?) when someone pointed me to Murdle and also I’ve been thinking of them in the context of search-'em-ups like Roottrees and Type Help etc, whether you can think of them as a network of smaller puzzles and if a tool like this might be helpful in making a bigger deduction game like that or if you’re better off maybe going to a full SAT solver… so I’m experimenting.
Also I just like coding things around puzzles: it’s fun.
Have you seen Simon Tatham’s (of the eponymous Portable Puzzle Collection) article on How to write a new puzzle? It’s a pretty good overview of techniques for random puzzle generation (I’m sure I’ve mentioned this article several times before, but… look, it’s good, OK?)
Interesting read, thanks… I used to get PennyPress magazines in the 90s that had those types of logic puzzles in them and enjoyed them as well.
Not been posting in this thread much recently as it feels like all my positives are a bit ‘same old same old’ from day to day (which is no bad thing!), but today I hit a running milestone - 2,000 days on my daily run streak (running at least one mile every day for that whole time). It’s not for everyone but it’s something that’s a really important part of my life and my mental health.
If it means anything, there’s a rhythm to it. Glad you’re still doing well.
I can’t even imagine running a mile once, much less doing so every day for over 5 years… heck, I’m not sure I could complete the 50 yard dash at my current level of fitness.
On the upside, my joints haven’t acted up for like the last week. Having lost about 25 pounds in the last 6 months probably helps, but I suspect part of it has been that its been too hot recently to even try for extended walks… and sadly, the forecast is in the 90s for the next week.
Finished the blue stripe of my rainbow bead mat earlier today. Just purple and pink to go.
It’s been about a month and a half since I’ve been able to touch any of my WIPs. A combination of depression, sickness, stress, and the passing of yet another friend (so many in the past year…) have just made it impossible to put words on the page.
But finally, with some new meds, some broad plans for my life once I have my doctorate, and a hundred smaller things, it feels like things are actually getting better. And today was the first day in a couple weeks I haven’t had nausea or migraines, so I might finally be over this virus. I coded in a couple new rooms and objects this afternoon, and it felt amazing actually making progress again.
Fingers crossed it’ll still be ready for IFComp!
Sorry for the rough time lately. Sending you support and positive energy, Daniel! Prozac has been my friend since 1998.
