Fun stuff -- word related or not, ramblings, junk, whatever.

[Naboka]

So I'm sitting here on break. A break from cleaning the garage. A break I bartered with the wife:

for every half hour of cleaning, I can play one game.

Harsh but fair.

My packrat ways have caught up with me, and the wife, having watched Swedish Death Cleaning has put her foot down, taken a stand, manned the bastions, yada yada.

But, that's distraction. The real point of this comment is that I'm eating cantaloupe.

"So what?" you might ask.

Well, I didn't buy it, didn't plant it. It decided to grow on it's own. One in the front, one in the back. The front one has 7 (was 8) large melon almost ready to pick. The back one has 4 (less sun?). Plus lots of little ones promising a future crop. Both are growing like crazy, sending vines over everythig in their path. They're growing over bushes, up the front porch, up the back deck, over everything.

But, it's sure good melon, so...

We have a habit of sitting on the front porch eating such things as cataloupe and watermelon, then seeing who can spit seeds the farthest. Cantaloupe seeds aren't large so they tend not to go far. (But, it's more the spitting and less about distance.)

Which is probably the origin of the volunteers.

Anyone else have any good garden stories?

(Guess I'd better head back. Played my allotted games. But there was no clause about posting. Anything to extend those breaks,--while remaining somewhat responsible and marginally ethical about a contract I was forced to sign. After all, she's at the beach in Florida for a week, so maybe I should just...

get back to work.

[BoggleOtaku]

I had a chance to see an exhibit featuring his paintings on tour once a long time ago, can't remember where... It had a lot of his self portraits. I think I first learned about complementary colors from The Starry Night.

[2cute]

I just read through this wide-ranging thread. It's good to take a break from ad watching, and, say, get some practice in for wife-carrying and cowchip-tossing contests (not good to get those confused!). For entertainment (aside for wordtwist) usually I cook, do woodworking and home projects or play piano or chess, but just recently I put together a spreadsheet to interpolate polynomials through given points and was really surprised to see this topic discussed. For further amusement, after reading this thread, I took a stab at transforming the polynomials in their standard (diagonalized) form to a different orthonormal coordinate system (cartesian to polar) and rediagonalizing but just ended up with a mess. I guess I'll leave it to the experts...
polyinterp.png

Yes, since the ads have become too much for me, I too spend less time doing the activities that require me to see them. Recently I've been learning about various painters. The National Gallery of Art website is amazing. There's so many paintings to view that aren't hung in the museum for various reasons. Plus I've learned more about painters I already knew like Vincent Van Gogh, he has lots of paintings that are not well known that I really like. I didn't know he had like 30+ self portraits. Before now, I knew of only a couple.

[2cute]

When I was a lad, many, many years ago, the FCC ruled what could be on US TV. Ads were tightly regulated: there could be no more than X seconds of ads per break and no more than Y seconds per half-hour or hour show. It seems to me that X was 90 and Y was 270 per half-hour or maybe 480 per hour. The thing was, with a restricted time the ad prices rose; the air time was worth more. If your ad cost a lot to run, it had better be a really good ad. I've watched TV shows with all the ads and it's ridiculous. 90 seconds? Ad breaks can be five minutes or more. If you want to watch an hour show, the ads will cost you about half of that. I watch streaming TV on free channels like FreeVee, Tubi, Pluto, Crackle, Plex, Xumo, and so on. Their shows do include ads, and usually the breaks are about 90 seconds, tops. On FreeVee, some of them might be as short as 15 seconds. But even with ads, an hour show (meaning a show that did take an hour to broadcast originally) takes about 44 minutes. If I'm going to be subject to ads, I want ad time restricted and (on the internet) the number of ads restricted. Instead of a gazillion ads with each advertiser paying a pittance to bombard you, make the ad cost substantial and the number of ads strictly limited. We'd all be happier and the ads we'd see would be better ads.

Agreed. I wouldn't mind 2 30 sec ads for an entire game or as breaks for a tv show. But that's not how it is. Each ad break is 5+ min & mostly its some overly priced medication you wouldn't ask you doctor about because you'd be paying for that ad time if you were to purchase it.

[BoggleOtaku]

I just read through this wide-ranging thread. It's good to take a break from ad watching, and, say, get some practice in for wife-carrying and cowchip-tossing contests (not good to get those confused!). For entertainment (aside for wordtwist) usually I cook, do woodworking and home projects or play piano or chess, but just recently I put together a spreadsheet to interpolate polynomials through given points and was really surprised to see this topic discussed. For further amusement, after reading this thread, I took a stab at transforming the polynomials in their standard (diagonalized) form to a different orthonormal coordinate system (cartesian to polar) and rediagonalizing but just ended up with a mess. I guess I'll leave it to the experts...
polyinterp.png

[bwt1213]

When I was a lad, many, many years ago, the FCC ruled what could be on US TV. Ads were tightly regulated: there could be no more than X seconds of ads per break and no more than Y seconds per half-hour or hour show. It seems to me that X was 90 and Y was 270 per half-hour or maybe 480 per hour. The thing was, with a restricted time the ad prices rose; the air time was worth more. If your ad cost a lot to run, it had better be a really good ad. I've watched TV shows with all the ads and it's ridiculous. 90 seconds? Ad breaks can be five minutes or more. If you want to watch an hour show, the ads will cost you about half of that. I watch streaming TV on free channels like FreeVee, Tubi, Pluto, Crackle, Plex, Xumo, and so on. Their shows do include ads, and usually the breaks are about 90 seconds, tops. On FreeVee, some of them might be as short as 15 seconds. But even with ads, an hour show (meaning a show that did take an hour to broadcast originally) takes about 44 minutes. If I'm going to be subject to ads, I want ad time restricted and (on the internet) the number of ads restricted. Instead of a gazillion ads with each advertiser paying a pittance to bombard you, make the ad cost substantial and the number of ads strictly limited. We'd all be happier and the ads we'd see would be better ads.

[2cute]

You have two true points. The problem is that Stephen can't vet every ad that comes in to make sure they don't break the rules. I've had ads come up while running other applications, too, where the ad basically shut everything down and made all commands unreachable -- except things like alt-backarrow and ctrl-alt-del. Many such "ads" are actually malware masquerading as an ad. The rest are created by someone who shouldn't be inflicting their attempts at coding on the public. The example given here was apparently poor coding by a local business rather than actual malice. I use an ad-blocker, which doesn't actually stop all ads but does keep most off. I actually have three computers -- one runs Windows with an ad blocker, one runs Linux/Firefox with no ad blocker, and one runs Linux/Vivaldi with a built-in ad blocker. The Linux/Firefox combination gets really busy, with tons of ads all the time. The Windows machine sees a tolerable number of ads. I have yet to see any ads on the Linux/Vivaldi machine.

Without ad-blocker, games on any site would be too annoying. I'd probably stop playing games altogether as on some sites they force you to watch a 30 sec ad between levels of a game. I think the commercialism of our world has gotten out of hand. Why is it necessary for me buy things constantly? Whoever has the most money wins? Wins what? Its just too much. Too much unnecessary negative stimulation.

[bwt1213]

You have two true points. The problem is that Stephen can't vet every ad that comes in to make sure they don't break the rules. I've had ads come up while running other applications, too, where the ad basically shut everything down and made all commands unreachable -- except things like alt-backarrow and ctrl-alt-del. Many such "ads" are actually malware masquerading as an ad. The rest are created by someone who shouldn't be inflicting their attempts at coding on the public. The example given here was apparently poor coding by a local business rather than actual malice. I use an ad-blocker, which doesn't actually stop all ads but does keep most off. I actually have three computers -- one runs Windows with an ad blocker, one runs Linux/Firefox with no ad blocker, and one runs Linux/Vivaldi with a built-in ad blocker. The Linux/Firefox combination gets really busy, with tons of ads all the time. The Windows machine sees a tolerable number of ads. I have yet to see any ads on the Linux/Vivaldi machine.

[crazykate]

Alt-Backarrow will dump the game. Running Vivaldi as your browser will kill the ads.

While these are valid points, Stephen has said that they tried to ensure that ads wouldn't impede gameplay, so you shouldn't be forced to abandon a game or change your browser.

[bwt1213]

Alt-Backarrow will dump the game. Running Vivaldi as your browser will kill the ads.

[jeepiegirl]

This happened at about 45 seconds left, and I tried and tried to move/ reduce the ad but no go.

[jeepiegirl]

So I just had an ad completely ruin my game: I was not able to move it to go on with the game!!

image.png

[bwt1213]

I now know where the phrase "I never heard the like of it" came from. The "wife carrying contest" I had heard of, but the potato shenanigans are beyond the pale. I have a good imagination, so I could imagine the goings-on, and better dropping the packets of potato chips than the turkey-dropping contest in WKRP (Oh! The humanity! I swear I thought turkeys could fly!). But all the rest of it is just bonkers. And WKRP in Cincinnati was a comedy TV show, not an actual festival. Sounds like you Aussies know how to have fun.

[floppers]

there are rules for the sport of Finnish Wife Carrying...you can google them...apparently there is a minimum weight requirement of 49 kg, a minimum age of 18, and it can be "your wife, the wife of a neighbour, or a wife acquired by alternative means". I heartily recommend attending this competition if you can, it is carried out over an obstacle course, and much Finnish hilarity ensues. I wonder what other interesting and possibly obscure cultural competitions await our consumption(?).

I recently attended the Thorpedale Potato Festival...a true cultural gem. There was a "Hessians on the Field" competition...with a first prize of $500 AUD (at least), both professional and amateur spud picking contests, a competition heaving bags of spuds to the top of ever increasing stacks of pallets, a 500mt spud sack carrying race (huge bag of spuds, and another $500 prize), photography competition (elementary, secondary, and open age divisions...lots of freshy planted potato field pictures), the local primary school sold potato sausages, and other stalls purveyed potatoes in all of their nuances, and in the midst of it all the local crop duster flew over the area, dropping hundreds of packets of potato crisps/chips, umm whatever they are called in your local tongue, to hundreds of children who stampeded to collect them...I'm not sure if this was Australian hilarity, or this is International...but hilarious, it was.

[bwt1213]

So...has anyone else ever been to a Finnish Wife Carrying competition?

Ah -- Where I used to live (where I was born and raised) the most common ethnic background was Finnish. Pretty much everyone was Nordic. Some of those Finnish wives would not have made an easy carry. But if you married young, you may have been in luck; most Finnish women I knew were quite slim when young. Later, they were like everyone else, or perhaps a little more so. Must have been the good food. And it is good food.