A Part of Bee @morix@loci.onl

So how am I dealing with the pandemic at the mo?

Today I took a long exploring drive of parts of the local area, pausing to explore and reconnect with the land.

Also had a lovely charming roleplaying session about someone else's problems.

and I just cashed in 700+ cells in a single Dead Cells run.

yup doing the things to get by.

This morning's experiment (prepping for the return of LARP season) - cowboy coffee.

Following https://www.beansmitten.co.uk/post/how-to-make-cowboy-coffee which refers to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UAoT21eqXI.

Used 30g of coffee to about 500ml of water. I found that gave about two half cups that when topped up with hot water was just very smooth and strong.

I think in a taller pot I wouldn't have needed a filter but in a saucepan it really made it easier to keep the grounds out, still there wasn't much in the filter.

#coffee

So today did a second round of a thing we're experimenting with locally - online connected distant but local walks.

So a handful of #pagan #magician types all on a shared discord call wandering as their feet take them (with a couple resting in homes), poking about and communing with local #landscape and gently chatting and sharing pics.

It's fascinating that both times people have gone different directions than intended and also we've had overlaps between the experiences.

Finished the first version of my project - decorating cheap keycaps with nail art stickers (and then a couple of coats of spray varnish to hopefully make them actually last).

I think I've mostly got the distribution nice enough that it has a sort of organic look, and filled in keys with exposed sides with more stickers to give a sort of continuity.

Has spruced up the cheap #keyboard at the second desk a little and given me sort of aesthetically pretty feels :)

I am testing various transfers, stickers, and varnishes for decorating cheap keycaps and seeing what holds up. Preliminary tests are gloss coats with a matte topper could be a win but I'll know more with use.

Also it means I have a delightfully mismatched backspace at the moment as it's my numpad zero. It actually feels kinda nice.

#keyboard

Went out for a walk guided by some work with Elen of the Ways today, it's hard to convey how beautiful I find the bay, although I could have done without the snow and ice on my side of it.

Was interesting to be in touch with others doing similar working via voice while it was going on. We were remote but close, able to talk about how we felt through our own contact with exploring the paths of the world.

#photography #seasons #sunset #ElenOfTheWays

Today I redid a desktop fiddle. New darker beads at the middle/quarter points to make it easier to grab and slide chunks of it around that line up more pleasingly (beads slide if pushed, not under gravity). Swapped a few beads to make the chunks more evenly sized.

The bottom moveable bead is now a textured Hotei face I had laying around which is interesting under fingers, although (may switch again soon) and it now has a fixed bead at the end which is a nice grab point to spin/flip it around.

Today there is snow outside (although I think its melting away) and I had a really compelx and interesting oolong tea and I'm now debating between a long hot shower, making a fiddly thing, or playing video games briefly before going to a mostly online (except for the people in my household) party.

This is actually pretty fucking good.

Have a picture of dramatic snow from yesterday :) #weather #tea

Today I took a mug of tea and did a short drive early in the morning to a quiet bit of beach nearby where I could be assured of dodging people, it was cold but crisp and glorious to behold and me and a partner walked along and chatted in the fresh air.

Then I went home and cleaned the bath, it was warm and damp, but glorious when it was done. #landscape #photo #sea #winter

So suddenly it snowed lightly, which was a fucker because I was in the other part of the bubble I'm part of.

On the upside the short walk back to the other house was gloriously scenic if cold.

I packaged up my bodgy config for writing nanowrimo in emacs org and having such luxuries as

* A left/right split with outline in the left, editing in the right narrowed to a subtree
* Easy opening other narrowed frames for background notes
* Loads of hooks/customisation
* Filtering out tagged trees on output to hide notes/deleted scenes
* Every save shows your word count against the daily target for your goal
* Works fine in console

https://github.com/twitchy-ears/org-nanowrimo-setup-mode

#emacs #org #nanowrimo

So today I was carving pumpkins with a number of people over discord, when asking for suggestions it was suggested the "judges" for the contest were some kids someone knew who maybe liked dinosaurs.

But I also kinda wanted to carve a spooky pumpkin face, so I had the idea of carving a dinosaur menacing a tiny pumpkin :)

Tools used: One kitchen knife, one lid from a biro, one cocktail stick to help hold the pumpkin in place (I carved too deep)

I have cake for #TransCakeDay but also I have a bowl of cake scrapings from my girlfriends cooking of cakes.

it is a good day to trans.

As mentioned the other day I had a fun evening/lunchtime twiddling session and produced org-roam-gev-text-graph-mode which uses Perl's Graph::Easy module to parse the dot output from org-roam into ascii-art.

This means you can make it spit out your org-roam graph into an emacs buffer and by default it will try and rewrite the output to insert org [[file:/path/to/file][title]] style links and make everything clickable.

Untested on big/real data sets...

https://github.com/twitchy-ears/org-roam-gev-text-graph-mode

#emacs #orgRoam

Had an adventure to Chester Zoo today, kept a bunch of distance, wore masks, app checked in, so much alcohol gel. Hopefully helped make a sorta nephew happy, also saw many animals and enjoyed the quiet.

Last adventure until spring I suspect, or at least a while.

Got to do a mabon meal with the bubbled polycule in which my non-fediverse girlfriend made an epic stuffed pumpkin and savory cornbread for me and the @dragon

Was a quieter one than normal but also very tasty, the pumpkin was a new experiment and it came out well.

Had a couple of days of socially distant geocaching with people and saw some very green and damp scenary, now my boots are drying off so everyone here can have some pretty landscape I tromped through. #photo #landscape #geocaching

So today I had a day off, I spent some time in town, bumped into someone I hadn't seen in ages and had a nice socially distant chat, took some photographs and did some housework.

Most of the day was however spent dinking around in Emacs (I mostly use vim) and learning how to write a minor mode to give metoffice weather forecasts neatly on the modeline.

Some of the hacks I did were pretty hideous but it was fun coding something kinda pointless for personal discovery and amusement :)

Oh and in weird news I was putting the kettle on for some tea a couple of days ago and suddenly this small pink bead was bouncing on the tiles at my feet.

Logically I know it must have been on the counter and I knocked it off putting the kettle back.

Magically however no one in the house recognises it as coming from anything, I didn't see it there, and it appeared bouncing vertically up and down as it was straight dropped from the ceiling. So yeah my kitchen spawned a #magic bead.

In happier news I roasted a teeny bit of pork for me and the GF I live with (who doesn't fedi) and for the first time in several roasts I managed to get the crackling to actually properly crackle.

Fuck yes it was amazing just look at this.

We ate it while watching Warrior Nun and daaaaamn that has show has some spicy gay subtext, I hope the writers get to make it text. Also its cheesy as fuck I'm loving it.