ggreig | Reading

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

ffutures

I was just looking out a couple of figures for a game and found one I'd forgotten - a 1986-ish Citadel model of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius in their short-lived Eternal Champions series. A bit old and battered, and I'm amazed at the amount of trouble I want to with the patterns on the trousers etc. Don't seem to own any of the others, but I was a much bigger fan of Cornelius than the fantasy characters in this range.

I'm newly reading Bluff by Francine Toon, which is set in St Rule, a thinly disguised version of St Andrews. I'm not sure why she bothered making it a fictional place. Not least when I read of the "Isle of Maeyar" ...

So far I'm finding the book frustratingly choppy, with incredibly short chapters, and constantly changing POVs and time periods. But hopefully it will settle down.

Rather amused, browsing the free PDF version (print copy also available to buy) of Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home Computers, originally published in 1984 by Charles Platt, and adapted with extra text for a British context by David Langford. More info available here.

Cover of book "Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home Computers" by Charles Platt with David Langford. The cover shows a black computer like screen, with pixelated characters and a home and computer shop, with stairs, pound signs, and frenetic activity.

Cover of book "Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home Computers" by Charles Platt with David Langford. The cover shows a black computer like screen, with pixelated characters and a home and computer shop, with stairs, pound signs, and frenetic activity.

ffutures

Two bundles of translated material for the Brancalonia tabletop roleplaying campaign setting from Acheron Games (Milan, Italy) for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and compatible systems. It's a "Spaghetti Italian" setting with an emphasis on rogues, humour, bawdy jokes, etc. and seems to be fairly popular. One is a repeat from 2024 containing the rules etc., the other is all-new supplementary material:

BRANCALONIA (from Nov 2024)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2026Brancalonia

BRANCALONIA BOUNTY (new)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/BountyBranc

I don't think that there are any changes in the original bundle, but if there are anyone who previously bought it should get them free of charge. The other is all new.

Last time I said "On a quick look this seems to be well presented and reasonably faithful to its genre, and more honest than most RPGs when it comes to character motivation; they're in it for the loot etc.. It doesn't, unfortunately, have anything resembling a flying spaghetti monster in the monsters section, but you can't have everything. If you're interested in D&D I think it's worth checking it out."

The new material adds a lot more creatures, my favourite being demonic geese, and includes recipes for cooking them, but there is still no flying spaghetti monster. So it goes...

denise posting in

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

Intermittently I would like to bring forward a single instance of a regular payment.

Normally transfer money from A to B on the 17th, but this month you want to do it 2 days early? Tough, you have to make the early payment, wait for the later payment to go through, and then get it transferred back.

Ah, the wonders of nature.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Children are having a very loud conversation with each other on the bus about where babies come from.

I'm hiding three rows back.

1. EU fines Temu €200m over sale of illegal products: (tags:europe china trade regulation safety )
2. US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes: (tags:usa healthcare epicfail )

Still in waiting limbo re the gynae cancer investigations, but generally happy, and my brain has thankfully stopped overthinking relentlessly at 4am/5am every day! Side effects from my Covid vaccine on Monday have largely eased, though I'm still popping painkillers every 6 hours, and am giving Paddington Bear level stares at my frustratingly itchy red and swollen arm. Anti histamines can only do so much! I hope tomorrow to tackle a big pile/clearing out area in the sitting room. Martin might be happier if I left it alone 😜 But we'll see what I can do.

... the final part of my favourite Doctor Who story first aired on TV. "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" immediately overtook "City of Death" as my top Doctor Who story, a position that had held since I first saw it as a youngster in 1979.

denise posting in

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)