Ice storm advice [meteo]
Jan. 23rd, 2026 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidereaFor those of you in the parts of the US for whom an ice storm is predicted and who have no idea of what that is except that it means it will be cold:
1) If you have an ice scraper to clean the ice off your car, have it inside with you, not in the car. Because at a sufficient level of ice coating, leaving your ice scraper in the car is like leaving your car keys in the car.
1a) Honestly, at a certain level of ice coating, it's more like having one's car coated in concrete, and you shouldn't waste your energy and body warmth whaling futilely at it. One of the failure modes is you succeed in getting the ice off but take the windshield with it.
2) You probably associate winter storms and coldness with grey-overcast skies and darkness. But once it is done coming down, often the arctic winds that drove the storm will blow the clouds away, the skies clear and the sun will come up. I cannot begin to describe how bright it gets when the sun is shining and the whole world is made of glass. If you packed your sunglasses away for the winter, go get them out. If you store them in your glove compartment of your car, again, maybe go get them and have them inside with you so you can see what you're doing when you are trying to get the ice off the car.
3) All that said, maybe just don't be worrying about leaving home. A fundamental clue is that an ice storm is not done when the storm is done raging. For as long as there's a thick glaze of ice on everything, the crisis is not over. Your life experience has given you an intuition of physics that says ice forms where water pools and is therefore mostly something flat. But in an ice storm, you get ice coating absolutely everything including sloped and vertical surfaces. YouTube is willing to show you endless videos of people attempting and failing to walk up quite gentle slopes covered with ice and cars slowly and majestically sliding down hills. Driving and walking can be unbelievably dangerous after an ice storm. Try to ride it out by sheltering in place and don't try to go out in it if you can at all avoid it. Remember, it's not about how good a driver you are, it's about how good a driver everybody else on the road isn't.
4) Snow and ice falling off buildings can kill you. Yes, I know snow looks fluffy, but it is made of water and can compact to be quite solid and if it attains free fall it can build up quite a bit of momentum. Icicles are basically spears. If you endeavor to try to knock snow or ice off from a roof or other high structure, be real careful how you position yourself relative to it.
5) Now and until this is over is absolutely not the time to do anything that entails any unnecessary risk. Any activity that is at all discretionary that has even a remote likelihood of occasioning an ER trip is to be avoided. Boredom, I know, makes people find their own fun. Resist the urge.
1) If you have an ice scraper to clean the ice off your car, have it inside with you, not in the car. Because at a sufficient level of ice coating, leaving your ice scraper in the car is like leaving your car keys in the car.
1a) Honestly, at a certain level of ice coating, it's more like having one's car coated in concrete, and you shouldn't waste your energy and body warmth whaling futilely at it. One of the failure modes is you succeed in getting the ice off but take the windshield with it.
2) You probably associate winter storms and coldness with grey-overcast skies and darkness. But once it is done coming down, often the arctic winds that drove the storm will blow the clouds away, the skies clear and the sun will come up. I cannot begin to describe how bright it gets when the sun is shining and the whole world is made of glass. If you packed your sunglasses away for the winter, go get them out. If you store them in your glove compartment of your car, again, maybe go get them and have them inside with you so you can see what you're doing when you are trying to get the ice off the car.
3) All that said, maybe just don't be worrying about leaving home. A fundamental clue is that an ice storm is not done when the storm is done raging. For as long as there's a thick glaze of ice on everything, the crisis is not over. Your life experience has given you an intuition of physics that says ice forms where water pools and is therefore mostly something flat. But in an ice storm, you get ice coating absolutely everything including sloped and vertical surfaces. YouTube is willing to show you endless videos of people attempting and failing to walk up quite gentle slopes covered with ice and cars slowly and majestically sliding down hills. Driving and walking can be unbelievably dangerous after an ice storm. Try to ride it out by sheltering in place and don't try to go out in it if you can at all avoid it. Remember, it's not about how good a driver you are, it's about how good a driver everybody else on the road isn't.
4) Snow and ice falling off buildings can kill you. Yes, I know snow looks fluffy, but it is made of water and can compact to be quite solid and if it attains free fall it can build up quite a bit of momentum. Icicles are basically spears. If you endeavor to try to knock snow or ice off from a roof or other high structure, be real careful how you position yourself relative to it.
5) Now and until this is over is absolutely not the time to do anything that entails any unnecessary risk. Any activity that is at all discretionary that has even a remote likelihood of occasioning an ER trip is to be avoided. Boredom, I know, makes people find their own fun. Resist the urge.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Unexpected Feelings
Jan. 23rd, 2026 12:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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January 23rd, 2026: Me and JASON LOO (!) are putting on a SPECIAL EVENT with the Hamilton Public Library where we'll be discussing COMICS and WRITING and will sign all your books too! It's on January 29th, 7pm, at the Westdale Branch - hope to see you there! – Ryan | ||
focus stack (crossbone x-2)
Jan. 22nd, 2026 09:28 pmesoteric_triangle_feedI'm trying a new thing! Composite photos stacked to allow the entire object to be in focus. I especially wanted to do it for the lance this guy has, but I did all of these this way just 'cuz it was fun
It turns out this is easy to do!! I took 6-8 photos using my galazy s21+'s Pro camera to let me manually focus. Braced against the table, I incremented the focus a bit each photo, then took them all to photoshop to combine.[1] I found instructions online here to make a focus stack and slapped each of these together. I color corrected/whitebalanced two of them, poorly. And here they are!
This robot is the "exclusive" version of the Real Grade Crossbone gundam. I had to get this p-bandai recolor version because it had a lance, and I think the ideal giant robot combat situation is a joust. I was waffling on trying some gradients and space effects on it, but then saw this amazing space paint job[2] and it pushed me to Try New Things and I think I did good.
As an RG this one has more details, movable parts, and color separation compared to the HG kits I usually build--while still being roughly the same size. I loved building and painting with all the teenytiny parts! It was a lotta fun.
The best part of this guy tho is how he's a pirate and a giant robot at the same time. That's just Correct.
painting II
Jan. 22nd, 2026 02:22 amesoteric_triangle_feedWe've entered a renaissance I think?? She spent most of yesterday painting, off and on. Em left the watercolors on the table and Goose came back every so often to have another go. Our table and fridge are covered in bunny eared guys. She's started adding rainbows overhead. Now we've got a bunny riffing off of the success of the cat.
And finally, we have a full departure into territories no man has gone before: not people, not creatures, but outer space. Not even just a starscape or a planet either; we are treated to the solar system, complete with lines of motion for the clestial bodies!! She pointed out the planets when showing off; which one was which was not consistent but she rattled off all the planets except uranus and pluto at least once in her explanation.
I keep thinking about these and glowing a little bit
Always Quicksave Before Important Dialog
Jan. 21st, 2026 10:01 pmquestionable_content_feed
Cute hanners :3
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January 21st, 2026: Me and JASON LOO (!) are putting on a SPECIAL EVENT with the Hamilton Public Library where we'll be discussing COMICS and WRITING and will sign all your books too! It's on January 29th, 7pm, at the Westdale Branch - hope to see you there! – Ryan | ||
Painting
Jan. 20th, 2026 02:20 pmesoteric_triangle_feedLast night me and Goose ended up having a little painting party. I was working on a watercolor, so she joined in on her own. Mine is going pretty good, but you don't get a WIP, sorry! This is all about Gooseberry's delightful work. There are two significant strides in this: new imaginitive features and a break away from tadpole people. Animals, it seems, get bodies!
I love these 'cuz a) they are all paintings of Goose and Snap together (except the yellow one at the top--that's Em) and 2) she gave everyone bunny ears. Em asked how she learned to do bunny ears and she said "at school! They're like an 'm'". I'm intuiting she means she learned 'm' at school, and connected that to bunny ears, but also there could be a fad at preschool around bunny ears altho her delivery seemed to indicate that was not the case. Regardless: I love each and every ear. The grey one at the top is a further experiment, linking more 'm' ears together to make a crown. Nice! I'm fairly certain the looong arms curving over Snap's head on several drawings are to make the sisters hold hands.
This is a landmark. She has drawn some hercules beetles with two segments, but those are different somehow[1]; this to me is the first time she's given a guy a body. I said, "oh!! look it has two arms and two legs and everything": she forcefully corrected me that those are all legs cuz cats don't have arms. My mistake. Once complete she looked at this and went, "oh! I could make it a cat bus??" but then decided to save that for another drawing, which makes me wonder what she had in mind to modify this one--more legs? A door on the tummy?
I'm extremely tickled
for one, they're bugs. For another, she doesn't seem to treat them as "head and body" but just "this is how you draw a hercules beetle"--based off of a wildkratz episode? ↩︎
PSA: US, pay attention to weather [US, meteo]
Jan. 20th, 2026 11:22 pmsidereaHey, Americans! Do you live around or south of the Mason-Dixon line? If so, your weather report for later this week is shaping up to be a bit exciting. Looks like Actual Winter will be visiting places that historically have been poorly prepared for this sort of thing, i.e. TX, the South, and the mid-Atlantic.
(Also eventually the NE, but a forecast of a few feet of snow is threatening us with a good time.)
H/t to the RyanHallYall YT channel. He's a well-reputed amateur, but his report is congruent with what I'm seeing in conventional weather reports:
https://youtube.com/shorts/nh4JEVGWfFU
Good luck and remember running a charcoal grill in your living room is a dumb way to die.
(Also eventually the NE, but a forecast of a few feet of snow is threatening us with a good time.)
H/t to the RyanHallYall YT channel. He's a well-reputed amateur, but his report is congruent with what I'm seeing in conventional weather reports:
https://youtube.com/shorts/nh4JEVGWfFU
Good luck and remember running a charcoal grill in your living room is a dumb way to die.
An explanation of US military perspective and behavior re illegal orders [mil/US, Ω]
Jan. 20th, 2026 07:10 pmsidereaI found this intriguing. YouTuber KnittingCultLady, who is an Air Force veteran and author about two books on military culture from the standpoint of cults(!), put out this rather frustrated video clarifying how members of the military respond to illegal orders. The tl;dr is they will follow orders of ambiguous legality, and refuse to follow orders of obvious illegality, and what is obviously illegal may not be what civilians think.
2026 Jan 18: KnittingCultLady on YT: Some Examples of Recent Malicious Compliance from the Military, ALSO Listen Carefully To My Words:
She doesn't put it this way, but it sounds from what she says that what makes something obviously illegal is that it resulted in a courtmartial or other nigh-universal condemnation when tried previously. Orders that are for doing things that are war crimes by the letter of the law but which did not result in prosecution or other negative consequences for the perpetrators when done in the past do not trigger the sense that they are illegal, e.g. if it was okay for Bush to seize Noriega, then clearly it must be legal for Trump to seize Maduro.
2026 Jan 18: KnittingCultLady on YT: Some Examples of Recent Malicious Compliance from the Military, ALSO Listen Carefully To My Words:
She doesn't put it this way, but it sounds from what she says that what makes something obviously illegal is that it resulted in a courtmartial or other nigh-universal condemnation when tried previously. Orders that are for doing things that are war crimes by the letter of the law but which did not result in prosecution or other negative consequences for the perpetrators when done in the past do not trigger the sense that they are illegal, e.g. if it was okay for Bush to seize Noriega, then clearly it must be legal for Trump to seize Maduro.
Movie music challenge
Jan. 20th, 2026 01:15 amblimixA new music challenge:
Off the top of your head, without looking them up, name songs that come from movies, whose titles do not include the movie's name or the word "theme".
(Songs that existed beforehand, and happened to be included in a movie soundtrack, do not count. Nor do songs from Broadway musicals with later film adaptations.)
(Once you've finalized your list, you may double check that you've gotten the titles right.)
Off the top of your head, without looking them up, name songs that come from movies, whose titles do not include the movie's name or the word "theme".
(Songs that existed beforehand, and happened to be included in a movie soundtrack, do not count. Nor do songs from Broadway musicals with later film adaptations.)
(Once you've finalized your list, you may double check that you've gotten the titles right.)
missing no
Jan. 19th, 2026 07:04 pmesoteric_triangle_feedSomething I regularly worry about with this blog is accidentally replacing a file by naming another file the same thing. Since I'm uploading these to my phone via github, there's a very real chance I'll forget I named an image something, upload a new version of the image, and some old post will be confusing forever[1].
It turns out I have already made this mistake, and in an incredibly poetic way. When I was testing out how 11ty would work and getting a feel for how it compiles pages into lists I made three sample posts. And then left them there when I went live because I thought it was funny. The files are named one.md, two.md, and three.md. When I realized my site turned one, I excitedly wrote a post about and named it... one.md. I can see in my git history the change.
I found this out scrolling back thru my posts and seeing how the final page of posts starts with 2. Wondering where one went, I took a look in github and: lo and behold. I could fix it and split them but... this is also funny? Maybe I'll make a RIV post complete with a tombstone to commemorate it.
Most posts should theoretically not hit this problem since they all reside in Obsidian, which yells at me when I name something the same but. There are outliers, as this shows. (plus the problem of images, which are scattered)
or at least until someone points it out. ↩︎
yotsuba
Jan. 19th, 2026 05:13 pmesoteric_triangle_feedSpeaking of yotsuba&!, there are two Perfect Comics about childhood: Calvin & Hobbes, which is about the inside looking out and Yotsuba, which is about looking from the outside in. Both are Perfect.