spinflip @spinflip@qoto.org

Attempting to solve a computer problem this afternoon has taken me to an irc server for the first time in years, and holy fuck irc is good. It's a tragedy that it's basically dead for most people now

been doing some thinking about daemons in the his dark materials books, informed by real-life internet knowledge

…there are definitely people with sexy plane daemons that they fuck, aren't there?

I'm in my twenties, I have good friends (not relatives or frienda of relatives) in their fifties or sixties, and that seems like it should be cool and normal! Sadly, it's not

At an evening gathering of chemists in a pub, and it's kind of cutely fun but sooooooo full of awkward old retirees. I'm glad they're here! But it makes me sad, how difficult it is to have a social event across generations

Would it really have mattered if I used the larger file she sent me, and left the artifacts in place? Probably not, but it would have irked me. I'm also irrationally prejudiced against unnecessarily large file sizes, even in this age of cheap broadband and storage: if I can fit 50 pages of sheet music into a 950 kB pdf, sticking a 3 MB image on the front page just feels *wrong*.

I've been putting together a songbook for some Christmas singing in pubs, and thought it'd be nice to have a pretty cover for printed copies. A friend made some art and sent it my way, but the enormous file was full of unmerged layers and weird clipping artifacts… apparently she put it all together in PowerPoint, the mangling happened somewhere along the way, and that's that.

An afternoon of dissection+tinkering+reassembly in PS later, and it's in much better shape! Time for a final music and words check, and then printing.

It's alsp really interested to see the differences in how they answer questions. I love it when people get asked really hard and broad questions: it's a great opportunity to demonstrate what they know, demonstrate their ability to think rationally beyond what they know, and admit when they can't reason their way any further. All great skills! But some students seem to really freak out at the prospect of open questions with no simple right/wrong answer

Watching our undergraduate research students give their final presentations, and *wow* there's a wide range of how much they've accomplished in their ~7 months of work: some make me feel keenly aware of the shortcomings of my PhD, and others seem like they've only really worked for the last month. Research is hard.

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