chess | Reading

I stayed in London last night, an extremely good idea after a ten-hour work day full of travel, the last thing I wanted was almost three more hours' travel to get home.

So I worked from the London office (gosh I sound like a wanker saying things like this) for most of today -- my manager suggested yesterday that I sleep in or leave early but I couldn't do much of either because of long-planned engagement with campaigners where I'd have really been letting my team down if I wasn't around.

So when I booked this train ticket I calculated that if I left right as that meeting finished this afternoon I'd be able to get the last train before afternoon peak time (which rendered my ticket unusable) would start.

And I would've been right but of course the meeting overran. Campaigners!

I got to Euston like six minutes before my train, so I didn't have time to go ask for passenger assistance. But since they have display screens I can actually read now, I could try to run and get the train myself.

Platform 3. So far so good. I rushed there, fishing out my work phone as I did because I have an e-ticket.

I have an e-ticket because I've had problems collecting paper tickets from the inaccessible machine or the office that's staffed for two hours early in the morning...except when it's not.

Neither paper tickets nor e-tickets are actually accessible.

Normally this is better (although I couldn't charge my phone today because Apple chargers suck and also my work laptop sucks but whatever).

But the app logged me out!

It never logs me out! It was fine yesterday! There was no warning or anything.

I was at the ticket barrier freaking out, shaking so I couldn't type my email address or password.

Even when I did finally manage it, it demanded a code sent to the email address. Which Outlook hid from me (all the other many many emails I get from this benighted institution go to the Focused inbox but for some reason these went to Other, which I don't get notifications of and which are more difficult to locate. Especially when you're freaking out because your train is visible and you can't get to it yet.)

I had to ask for another code and then I had to pay attention to which was the newer one so I didn't use the older one. This website has been known to lock me out for twenty minutes when I got my password wrong twice, so I was terrified of that happening too.

I copied the code and pasted it accordingly. Only at this point did I remember that my work phone doesn't let me paste anything. Because it lets me copy things as normal, oh yeah, no problem there. But when I try to paste them, my phone instead spits out a sentence something like "Your organisation does not allow data to be copied" or something like that. It tells you off. For expecting that you might ever want to copy something even when you have logged in with the same account to Teams and Outlook and Word and SharePoint... Surely no one ever needs to copy things right? Especially not a blind person who now has to memorize a string of random numbers...

My session timed out.

I had to start over again from the beginning. The shaky typing of my email address, the concentration it took to make sure my password was right when it's just showing up as a row of black dots... Getting a new email and knowing at least to check the Other inbox for it now. Trying to paste the six digits because my panicky brain had already forgotten that I couldn't. I had to do that three times before I got it to work.

I was almost in tears by that point.

I had also gone from hoping that the staff member standing just the other side of the ticket gates would help me, to worrying that he was seeing me about to cry or scream or more obviously have a panic attack, to wondering how Euston finds its staff because they really are an extraordinarily unhelpful bunch. I tried to imagine being as physically close as he was to any living being in such obvious distress as I was and just not reacting in any way.

When I finally got logged in and could access the lovely magical QR code, I tried to line up my phone and the scanner -- which is ridiculously hard to do, two smooth featureless panes of glass, and I find it ridiculously difficult not to accidentally touch any part of my phone screen in the process of trying to hold the phone there because if I do it'll select something, close the app, do something to ensure that the QR code isn't available for the scanner...

Turns out I was trying to use the outbound part of the ticket and not the return part.

This whole time the staff member stayed so exactly on the other side of the ticket barrier from me that when it finally opened for me I almost had to shove him out of the way.

Nothing but empty space in either direction and he still didn't move.

I can't help but think he didn't expect me to actually get through and get on my fucking train. I know that kind of stuff sounds paranoid but, it's not like it'd be the first time someone was waiting to laugh at a disabled person being prevented from doing something ordinary that everyone else is managing to do.

But: fuck that guy and fuck the app and fuck Microsoft and Apple because despite them all I did get my train and now I'm happily back home.

1. K-pop Demon Hunters explained by a Korean teacher 😈🧑‍🏫: (tags:Korea music language movie demon video )

Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!

This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)

This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.

Last two nights the sky has been so overcast it seems I get to see one star at a time. First it was Arcturus, Protector of the Defenceless being its old Arabic name and also Protector of the Bear, last thing you'd think she'd need - except the bear is Callisto, unfortunate side squeeze (another one!) of Zeus, shape-changed by jealous Hera. Zeus steps in before the boy Arcas hunts down the bear and inadvertantly commits matricide. The god of the sky places them both there as constellations, safe and glorious forever. I always feel like I'm seeing a good friend when I spot Arcturus. Though I understand Hera's wrath, there's also the story's warning to keep a grip and not do something heinous just cos one is angry.

Maybe the whole country could do with remembering this.

I have detested Nigel Farage forever. He's a mendacious venal con-artist, always has been. So it makes me angry when he goes across to the States and says something which...is true. Bad men make themselves more credible when they mix a few truths in the unending stream of their rubbish. I find myself irritated with - who? Us? - for having allowed things to reach this point.

AFAIK Farage cited two examples. Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for a tweet now impossible to discover, but from I can find, she said this:

“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care... If that makes me racist, so be it.”

As I understand it, she has the right to say appalling things, but she doesn't get to incite violence; prohibitions against this kind of activity have been a part of UK law for a long time. So, first part = unpleasant but not illegal viewpoint, second = seems like distinct incitement to arson/violence. She sticks 'for all I care' at the end of it, almost like a disclaimer, but the first thing she does is push the suggestion out there. She pleaded guilty so it's not as though she didn't know. Lucy's unpleasantness is not the issue and nor are her ideas. The problem is her encouragement of thousands of people to attempt murder.

Graham Lineham's tweet went thus: "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls."

What then happened was that he was greeted by five armed policemen and arrested for the tweet.

The SC has clarified beyond doubt that transwomen are breaking the law if they enter into a female only space. Graham gets to decide the terms he uses to describe that act. But to suggest that a woman should use violence on seeing a transwoman in an inappropriate place is imbecilic; the reason so many women don't want any kind of adult human male near them in a place of vulnerability is safety. They don't want to be near testicles at all, never mind touching them or getting into a physical fight with a much stronger person. Graham was being stupid and offensive. But was this incitement, or, as he suggests, a bad joke? He's suing and he does have a point; this is the Metropolitan Police Force, if they're working for Stonewall, Stonewall can pay them. But is there a difference between this matter and that of Lucy Connolly?

As an aside, five armed policeman? We can't get five armed policemen to attend a robbery!

Farage cites these as examples of a system that fails... but does it always or usually fail? These are extreme examples, though there is underlying weakness that needs to be addressed, as well as nuance to be parsed. He's milking it. But he'd find that harder if there was absolutely nothing there.

Last night's star out of the gloom was Altair also called Niulang the cowherd whose love affair with Vega/Zhinu the weaver girl is at the heart of so many stories. Separated by the Milky Way, on the seventh day of every seventh lunar month, magpies form a bridge so that the lovers can be together for a day.

Sometimes, got to get away from all this dead light flattening everything. Time to pause, look up, steer by the stars.

Current Music: https://tellingthebees.bandcamp.com/album/steer-by-the-stars

Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).

a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.

cf.

telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic,

telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)

Apparently I am a good level of tech-savviness for vibe-coding a Linux version of this thing.

"Write, from scratch, a program that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white": beyond my skill level.

"Here is a Python script that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white! It has one (1) critical bug causing it to silently fail. Figure out that the bug exists, then track it down, then fix it": *not* beyond my skill level, actually.

---

(I *was* originally running the linked program in a Windows 7 virtual machine (connected to the Internet, but not logged into anything), but at least one of the following possible explanations had started to happen:

(1) Windows was pissed that I didn't give them a software key and, after a grace period, started throttling me.

(2) The updates Windows 7 had downloaded (apparently Microsoft is still running update servers for 7, just not uploading new patches to them?) had increased its minimum viable specs beyond the specs I'd given the VM.

(3) It was getting clogged with viruses.

(4) Other.

A Linux Lite VM should be better at these. (Except maybe "other".))

---

the code (click to expand)

import time
from PIL import Image
import os

# Define region to monitor: left, top, width, height
REGION = (100, 100, 200, 150) # x, y, w, h

# Path for temp screenshot
SCREENSHOT = "/tmp/screen_region.png"
SOUND = "/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga" # replace if needed

def capture_region():
os.system(f"scrot -o -a {REGION[0]},{REGION[1]},{REGION[2]},{REGION[3]} {SCREENSHOT}")

def contains_white_pixel(image_path):
img = Image.open(image_path)
pixels = img.getdata()
return any(pixel[:3] == (255, 255, 255) for pixel in pixels)

while True:
capture_region()
if contains_white_pixel(SCREENSHOT):
os.system(f"ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet {SOUND}")
time.sleep(1) # avoid repeated alerts
time.sleep(0.5) # check interval

Everything *except* the bolded "-o" was written by ChatGPT (current default free tier). If you don't include the "-o" (for "overwrite"), each screen capture is written to a new file with a new filename, but the program only tests the *original* file for white pixels. So it only actually functions during the very first screen-check after you start the program, and each new check after that just re-does the first check over and over (while also piling up more and more screenshot files it isn't looking at).

You also have to figure out yourself (and manually edit) what the pixel coordinates should be for your particular usecase, but that's fair.

(Note: I haven't included the part where ChatGPT explains which prerequisites I should make sure I have installed in order to run this, but it did explain that and it does seem to have been correct.)

---

This may all have sounded like faint praise, but as someone who has barely used LLMs other than Whisper, I am genuinely very impressed by how close it got. Nullius in verba, sure, but that's true of Stack Exchange too.

Rather than digging around trying (and failing, other than the Windows program) to find someone who has posted *almost* what you were looking for so that you can tinker with it until it does *exactly* what you were looking for, you can directly ask an Internet egregore to manifest the software that post *would* contain if it existed!

The future is *wild*.

Tomorrow is the day the report I wrote will be published.

Writing the report has also involved basically being the project manager for all the moving parts: communications and social media and PR and linking people up and answering random questions and already doing a couple of media interviews and having to film myself for social media which sucks and I'm bad at it...

I think I had my first it's too early for a drink isn't it thought at like 10:30 this morning.

Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!

Posted by morbane

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/293360.html

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding A 2025 Experiment: Increasing fandom slots for nominations & requests. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

https://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/293360.html

As we all start planning our nominations and requests, mods have been reviewing our rules around the number of fandoms that can be nominated and requested.

Traditionally, Yuletide has allowed participants to nominate a maximum of 3 fandoms to the tagset, with up to 4 characters each. We increased that to 4 fandoms in 2023 and got positive feedback about that change.

During signups, participants have been required to request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 6 fandoms if they choose. They must offer a minimum of 4 fandoms.

We've needed to limit the tagset size due to a combination of AO3 technical limitations as well as the logistical effort to confirm each fandom is eligible while avoiding duplicate fandoms. The good news is that we’ve found AO3’s tagset interface loads the moderation tools a bit faster lately. We've also developed more scalable processes and a group of wonderful, experienced volunteers to help with that checking. We think we can handle more nominations this year, but we won’t know until we try!

Change to nominations:

For 2025 only, we are going to increase the number of tagset nominations from 4 fandoms to 5 fandoms per person. The maximum number of characters will remain at 4 per fandom.

We’ll see how this goes, and whether the additional workload seems manageable to us, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

Change to requests:

For 2025 only, we are also going to increase the maximum number of fandom requests from 6 to 8. The minimum of 3 will not change. This means you must request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 8 fandoms if you choose.

Everything else remains the same: for each fandom, you will still be able to request up to a maximum of 4 characters. You will still be required to offer at least 4 fandoms with a minimum of 2 characters each.

Again, we will evaluate how it goes, and how this affects our workload, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

We hope this opens up some exciting possibilities for you in the 2025 round! Please stay tuned for our usual eligibility and evidence posts.

Bit of a diary catch up here. Before last weekend, on Thursday 21st August, I spotted an advert for Women's Rugby World Cup 2025 matches in Manchester. I looked this up at home and learned that there were two matches that Saturday 23rd at the Salford Community Stadium near the Trafford Centre - Australia vs Samoa, and Wales vs Scotland. I knew that cosmolinguist, angelofthenorth and P would all be interested, so after work on Friday I tried to make the logistics work. I finally got everyone to agree a plan... and found out that the tickets were no longer on sale! I swore a lot and went to bed, grumpy.

On Saturday morning, the tickets were back on sale. It was too late to make the first match so we watched it on iPlayer instead. It was a drubbing for Samoa and probably wouldn't have been much fun anyway. Once it was over, I drove our gang over to the stadium. There were a couple of logistical snags but nothing that stopped us getting to our seats. I've not watched a sporting match in a stadium before, and it was good fun to be part of the crowd and watch the game up close. For £25 each we got decent seats near the centre line, which was very reasonable for international sport. We were yelling support for Wales, and behind us were a group of Scottish fans, but we never felt threatened or intimidated. Sadly Scotland rather handily beat Wales at the actual rugby, but it was an exciting match all the way and it was good to lean into the energy.

Not something I'd do all the time, but definitely a good experience.

I had some leftover of a single I'd spun and decided to be cheap and DIY a loom to explore weaving it in a smol format. Still in progress but this will be going to

eller. :3

Cardboard, polyurethane clear coat (to stiffen it up a bit. I used an X-acto knife and Japanese push drill because I had them around.

Today hasn't been a great day in a lot of ways, but I was able to send an online pal €20, about a quarter of what the short Chinese language class costs that they want to take (and the textbook). That made the difference between them not being able to register for the class and being excited now to start it next week.

I don't like to brag about stuff like this, but on some days it's really good to have it to hold on to.