Catching up on the June Question a Day Meme among other things...

[shadowkat]

Work was busier today - I get to play with a new excel spreadsheet as well as the editing that I'm currently doing. Lawyer has created a nifty one in Excel - that does things I didn't know you could do in excel. Sigh. She has an advantage? She grew up with the technology or as she put it, with excel and youtube, while I grew up with an electronic typewriter, dial up internet, rotary phones, copy machines, micro fiche, recording devices, cassettes, record players, and calculators. I didn't see a computer until the fifth grade, and it was huge, and had MS DOS, and a cursor. Basically coding, which I suck at. It was an Apple II. Microsoft didn't invent Windows until I had graduated from law school, moved to NYC, and was on my fifth job. I saw the earliest versions of excel. The advances in tech from when I was a kid to now blow my mind, when I think about it. She grew up with excel and was taught it in school, while I taught it to myself in my 30s, after having taught myself how to do formulas in Access.

I'm looking forward to retiring and putting it behind me. AI can do it. I've no problem handing excel over to AI. It'll probably screw it up - excel has rounding errors. You have to check the math in excel constantly.
But, I do enjoy playing with other people's excel spreadsheets and figuring out how they created them? I learn by pulling things apart and putting them back together, and playing with them - I'm an interactive learner. I need examples and things to play with. I enjoy learning new things or figuring things out. I like puzzles, although it does depend on the puzzle.

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Television Shows

I'm currently watching Legend of Vox Machina (new obsession - well not as obsessed as I was with Buffy, which dissatisfied me - only aiding in the obsession), Widow's Bay, From, Rivals, General Hospital, and Midnight Mass.
Also flirting with X-men '97, the Legend of Korra, the Mighty Nein, and The Citadel (which requires a rewatch), and the Witcher (which requires a rewatch). Oh, almost forgot, also flirting with the horror series "We Were Liars". (I'm in a horror, soap opera, and anime mood for some reason.)

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Books

Almost done with Wylding Hall (at the 90% mark) - which means I got to find something else? It's the first book that I've finished on the Kindle in about two months, since I finished "The Inheritance" - I went through three DNF's in between. So kudos to Wylding Hall! And it hasn't taken me that long to finish. I'm still reading "This Kingdom Will Not

I may go back to Willow Hill (another British folk horror novel). I need an e-book. Carting paperbacks or hardbacks on the subway is just unwieldy now. Although, considering I did it up until roughly 2008, I don't know why?

Wylding Hall is creepy and unnerving - it's also more in lines of Shirly Jackson and Donna Tartt than Stephen King? Or psychological horror with folk horror underpinnings? We get the suggestion of it, but don't quite see it happen. The author leaves it up to our imaginations. And, it's told through six points of view - in a kind of scattershot written documentary style narrative (think Daisy Jones & the Six). This makes it very interesting to me - because no one sees the same thing, or they each perceive it differently. Or see a different piece of it. I actually prefer this type of horror novel - but it's not for everyone.

**

Catching up on June Mememage

4. Is rain forecast for your area this week?

Yes. There's rain forecast for tomorrow - 80% chance and on Friday. I'm hoping Friday's forecast is either after 7pm or before 2pm. I have to walk twenty blocks to the doctor for a knee injection on Friday, and twenty blocks back to the subway. The knee doctor is unfortunately a bit of a hike from the subway station. The good news is it isn't hurting as much to walk now that it has gotten warmer. (Maybe I should rethink my plan of retiring to a cooler climate? Arthritis seems to thrive in cold and wet climates.)

5. Have you learned anything new in the past year (a new hobby/craft/language/fact)?

Well, right now I'm learning new things about Excel? I learn new things at work all the time. What else have I learned? I learned there's such a thing as a LORAM Dump Train this week. And I learned that if you go to work when you are supposed to be on strike or cross union lines, your union can garnish your pay for that period and suspend your union privileges.

I also learned that you can do cardio by marching in places and lifting your knees high - this is also considered Tai Chi walking.

6. Can you swim? If so, what age were you when you had lessons?

Probably 5 or 6, it might have been earlier than that. I joined the swim team at the age of 7. I swam during the summer months until I was roughly 16, then ran into the crazy-ass professional swimmers and stopped. I don't like competitive sports - most people, or so I've discovered, don't handle competition well. I took a life guard saving course in college with a friend - passed it. It was hard. We had to swim five miles, save someone pretending to drown, do CPR, run five miles a day at high altitude...But I was for about two years in my 20s, certified red cross life guard. I was in great shape in my early 20s.

7. Have you ever made pastry from scratch?

Yes. But I don't remember how? I did it back in the days before I was diagnosed as ceiliac - somewhere in the 20th Century (or the dark ages before the internet, youtube and cell phones). Now, I wouldn't try - while it is possible to make gluten free pastry, and I have some frozen in the fridge, I wouldn't attempt to make it.

8. If you could share your life with any kind of animal (assume for a moment that the animal is tame and wouldn’t kill you, and you had the space and resources to care for it *g*), what kind of animal would be your dream companion (real or imaginary)?

A flying white tiger or a flying lion.

More practical? Siberian Forest Cat or a Siamese Cat.

I'm a cat person.

9. Do you like wearing hats?

No. They tend to give me a headache or come off. I don't mind knitted hats during winter.

10. Have you ever been to a horse race?

Yes. A couple when I was a child living in PA. We lived in Horse Country.
I didn't own one. But I had a friend with one. And my parents took me to a horse race once when I was a kid, I only have vague memories of it - mainly of a lot of people standing around dressed up and in the mud. It had rained.

Comments

[jazzfish]

Specifically Korra? First time through, or ?

[mtbc]

In my memory, it's a good show, been a long time: until it was mentioned here I'd clean forgotten it!

[jazzfish]

My feelings about Korra as a show are complicated, but the characters are absolutely spectacular.

[shadowkat]

Is it more adult than Avatar? I can't remember. I think it is.

[jazzfish]

It is. It's about teenagers / young adults rather than kids, which helps it. (Also a lot of season 4 involves Korra dealing with PTSD.)

[shadowkat]

I tried Legend of Korra briefly back during the pandemic - when I finished Avatar. But couldn't quite get into it - also it was hard to find back then. Now, I think it's on Netflix? And it's kind of in the same vein as Vox. I want adult anime though - so may try Cowboy Beebop again (assuming I can get the dubbed version. Watching anime with subtitles is headache inducing and I lose the art.

[jazzfish]

Makes sense! I don't think it stands up to Avatar, in part because it's four twelve-episode stories instead of one sixty-episode story. But it's absolutely worth watching.

[shadowkat]

The 12 episode story arc is where they are going at the moment with anime. My guess is that it is cheaper to make and easier to stream than the sixty episode longer format. Vox is currently four twelve episode stories, with a fifth one coming. Great characters though and character arcs. So, I'm happy with it.

X-men was 22 episodes - thirty minutes each - not connected, except occasionally, with lots of stand-a-lones. But it didn't do it justice. Very uneven, and most of it is just crap. You need a lot of patience to make it through. X-men '97 - I think has shorter seasons, and is a whole lot better - art and writing wise. But it is shorter. I honestly think the shorter seasons are just cheaper and easier to produce.

[jazzfish]

I don't really object to shorter seasons, or to the elimination of (most) fluff/filler episodes in an episodic series. But a lot of A:tLA's greatness came from knowing they had sixty episodes of canvas to work with. My understanding is that Korra started as a single season, got renewed halfway through, and then got the green light for two more seasons once the second was (airing? in production?).

My usual statement about Korra is that at its best it's better than A:tLA, but both the bad episodes and the median episode are worse than A:tLA. (Also it refuses to engage with its premises. The anti-bender villain in S1 has a real point! But he gets trounced and then that's never spoken of again. Etc.)

[mtbc]

Yeah, my first touching a spreadsheet was on an eighties microcomputer, 40×25 character display. One could watch it updating the formula values.

Excel's famously bad for various things yet good enough everybody uses it. My background in scientific research labs had me hear all manner of entertaining stories about crazy things Excel did to people's data, often by wrongly guessing how to interpret input values. As my day job now involves calculating things about people's investment portfolios, I'm again especially sensitive to numerical errors. (Excel has some finance functions like XIRR, kind of like the classic HP-12C calculator which had a few calculation bugs too.)

I find Excel useful for simple little scratch things, e.g., I plan to get around to using it to helping our eldest to understand what happens when you take a loan but don't spend it all but it grows faster than the interest rate on your savings account.

[shadowkat]

Yeah, my boss (Breaking Bad) and I were discussing how much we missed Access - which manipulated data better than Excel actually does. Excel does the math well enough? But Access could track more data and more efficiently.

I didn't know that about loans. I'm now feeling validated for rarely taking one, and paying them off quickly. Doesn't seem fair somehow - that folks who loan money (ie. banks) make more than we do off savings accounts with banks.

[slaymesoftly]

"...standing around dressed up and in the mud". Sounds about right for horse events!

[shadowkat]

Particularly in wet rainy climates - which tend to be where horses thrive.

[kazzy_cee]

I used to really like Excel, but I always cursed Microsoft when they changed the operating system and decided to hide away things in different menus, which I then had to hunt for. I've probably forgotten how to do everything in it apart from the simple stuff!