First Published: 2022 April 26
Well, it’s been a little over a month since I last talked about my Pathfinder Character, so now seems like a great time. Salvia has thus far gotten roped into investigating the attempted theft of wine from a party. So far, this has involved overthrowing a minor crime lord and now venturing off into another city.
This session we leveled up, and Salvia learned two new feats. Since she’s still very passionate about the permanency of staves, she now has the Specialty Crafting: Woodworking Feat, and hopes to use that to improve her staff and make others for friends. Additionally, though non-lethal spellcraft was of interest, the idea of learning from all sorts of scrolls was far too tempting, so she took the Scroll Trickster Dedication. More or less, Salvia will be able to work with any sort of scroll going forward, which is very exciting.
Excitingly, today the party encountered a Cobbleswarm, and Salvia finally got to put her Burrow Elocutionist Feat to good use. After defeating the swarm, Salvia spoke with the remaining cobblemites and convinced one of them to join her on an adventure. Unfortunately, this meant letting Burrus1 go, and Salvia’s new familiar is Burrus2 the cobblemite.
Currently Burrus is riding the Dull Gray aeon stone that Salvia looted from the crime boss they fought. Someone cast perpetual flame on it, and it has been orbiting Salvia’s head for days now.
First Published: 2022 April 25
Since I first gave up my blog1, I have started homebrewing.2 One thing that I’ve really enjoyed making, and so have therefore made a few times, is lemon wine. I vaguely follow a recipe, though I often make it weaker, and I never start with a wine ferment. It tends to end up tasting like lemonade, which is really nice and generally appreciated in the spring and summer months that I’ve made it in the past.
I’ve started a new batch this past weekend, and I’m very excited for it. The fermentation seems to have taken off very well, and I look forward to maybe updating on the results from this as I keep fermenting it.
First Published: 2022 April 24
Acts 5:12 “Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles.”
Today is Divine Mercy Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter, and the Eighth and final day of the Octave of Easter. What do each of these mean?
Divine Mercy Sunday was instituted in 2000 by Pope Saint John Paul II. It stems from a devotion that Saint Faustina claimed as part of a private revelation with our Lord and Savior. According to her records, He desired the Sunday following Easter to be in honor of Divine Mercy, and JPII made that happen. As of 2002, there are indulgences, both plenary1 and partial2 associated with the day.
To earn the indulgence, you must3 attend Confession, take Eucharist, and pray for the intentions of the Holy Father.4 As with all plenary indulgences, you must be “in a spirit that is completely detached from the affection for a sin, even a venial sin”5. You then must pray in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament the Our Father and the Creed, along with a devout prayer to Jesus. Or, you can take part in a devotion for Divine Mercy. For the partial indulgence, you just need to pray to the merciful Lord “at least with a contrite heart”,
Anyways, moving from what Divine Mercy Sunday is, the Second Sunday in Easter is more or less what it claims to be. Like Lent’s 406 days, Easter Season is 50. It begins on a Sunday, so each Sunday increments by one until we reach Pentecost.
The final day of the Octave of Easter is similar. Octave means something to do with eight, depending on the context. Liturgically, it means an eight day period. Apparently the “General Norms of the Liturgical Calendar” assign that the first eight days of Easter and Christmas should continue festivities throughout. I had no idea, but now do.
On to the readings. The first reading shows the fact that the Church is alive, even though Christ is no longer in substance and accident present among us. The apostles continue the mission of caring for the poor and helpless.
In the Gospel, we get one of my favorite passages from growing up. St. Thomas did not believe that the Lord had visited the disciples, and famously claimed “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”7 The Lord did not punish him for this, but instead showed Thomas the wounds on his hand and side. Rather than condemn him for his disbelief, the Lord instead calls those of us who were not able to witness it blessed for our belief.
Growing up, I was an inquisitive child. Thomas’ willingness to question the claims of the other Apostles to me always read as something beautiful. Within the Tradition of the Church, we do not hold to beliefs simply because we used to hold to them. Rather, we use Revelation to inform what we believe. Questions are not punished, but rewarded with answers.
That may be a little unclear, let me try again. Thomas did not believe the other disciples. Rather than calling him foolish, or condemning him for his disbelief, the Lord answered Thomas’ question. The consequence of a question asked in good faith is an answer in the Catholic Tradition, and that’s vital.
Equally vital in this reading, though, is the institution of a Sacrament. The disciples are given the power to bind and loose the sins of the world, a power that has been passed down to the priests today. There’s always something beautiful in the Lord’s institution of Sacraments. If I am remembering correctly, the Holy Spirit is always invoked, and there is always a metaphor of breath. Here, “he breathed on them and said to them ‘Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.’”8 I don’t know what about the breath and invocation are striking to me right now, but I will think about it for the week.
First Published: 2022 April 23
As I mentioned in my goal for the month, I really wanted to reach 60000 words on the book I’m writing this month. It’s been really interesting doing the writing for it, because each time I sit down to write, it reminds me of what I’m told it’s like to run. The first five to twenty minutes are painful, and I’m watching the seconds count down until I’ve finished the timer. When they run out, though, I find that I’ve suddenly hit a stride, and the words start flowing really easily. I honestly stop wanting to finish writing, which is a nice place to be.
Anyways, as of writing this post I’m at 48177 words, which is less than ideal. That means I’ve written around ten thousand words since the 7th of April, which as I read it seemed like far too slow of a pace. When I look at the time breakdown, though, that is an average of around 20000 words a month, so that’s nice.
I’m at an interesting point in the story. There are a bunch of plot points that I want to get to, but I really don’t want to end the plot points I’m currently writing. Being less vague, the protagonist is currently at home, and will soon be forced to go to magic school. Whenever he ends up at the magic school, the focus of those around him will certainly shift, which will be a fun way to change what I’m writing about. That being said, I really enjoy the part of the book I’m at now, for all that nothing really happens any more.
I recently read a piece of advice that said that if you don’t have the numbers actually perfect for time, make sure to use very vague words for the passage of time so you can’t be wrong. I haven’t been doing that recently, because I had the main character doing actions that were tracked daily. I hope that I managed to make a fairly convincing in-world argument for why he would stop doing them, but fundamentally it doesn’t really matter I guess. No one but one person reads the book right now,1 and he didn’t complain, which means it wasn’t horrible, at least. Anyways, it’s back to writing the novel for me now.
if readers would like a copy to read feel free to ask↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 21
As should be fairly unsurprising to most of my readers, in my research I1 need to graph a lot of things. Historically, I’ve graphed in either Excel2 or Python3, but I’m not really happy with either. It’s been suggested to me that I should learn Igor, which I feel notably unhappy about.
“Why”, you might ask, “do you have strong feelings about graphing? More to the point, what strong feelings do you have?” you might continue.
I have strong feelings because I think things should be done well. Python fails for graphing in my opinion because it takes far too long for me to load my data, and I don’t love the way that the graphs look automatically.4 Excel is worse on that front, and is awkward to manipulate graphs in. Excel is also bad for a major reason I mislike Igor: neither is FOSS5
If as I scientist I believe that information calls to be shared6, then I fail to see how I can justify using proprietary software any more than is utterly essential. Now, I admit some amount of hypocrisy here. I do not run on Linux or another FOS operating system, but I try hard to make sure all the software I use is runnable on those systems if possible. And, while I accept that there are circumstances where closed access programs may be essential for research,7 plotting data should not be one of them.
Of course, I also mislike Igor for other reasons, mostly dealing with the complete dearth of help available for it on the internet, its complete lack of user friendliness, and its absolutely baffling choices to be different than every other system I’ve worked with in handling x and y data. Is it powerful? I have to assume so, though I have no intention of learning how.
So, 118 words later, time to finally get to the title of this post. Yesterday I saw a groupmate working on GNUPlot, and realized that it could likely solve a lot of my issues. It’s super fun and easy, if I want to plot sin of x, for instance, I just say “plot sin(x)” and I get a pretty little graph. As I learned fairly quickly, you can make really fun arbitrary graphs, for instance using the commands:
set xrange [-1:1]8
plot for [i=1:30] x**i lw i/2
This plots 30 lines of increasing thickness. Why did I do this, you may ask.
There’s an argument for color where setting the color to -1 results in black. I was curious how many colors there were, so wanted to plot an arbitrary number of lines. Then I quickly got distracted after learning there were 8 and played around more.
Now, that isn’t to say that GNUPlot is without its issues.
One thing that Python and Excel do really well is allow you to edit and manipulate your data. GNUPlot doesn’t support doing that. However, when I need to manipulate my data, I’m probably going to be doing so inside of the spectral fitting software we use,9 rather than in either program, which makes that less of a concern. I still don’t know how to export the graph10 or plot an existing piece of data, but those both seem simple enough, and the documentation available online is really incredibly useful and prevalent.
So, moving forward I hope to switch over to GNUPlot for my plotting needs.
will↩︎
natively↩︎
using matplotlib.pyplot↩︎
though it can export to a format that makes the figure text readable in my LaTeX documents.↩︎
Free and Open Source Software.↩︎
and if I don’t, why am I doing research?↩︎
though I can’t think of many outside of government-enforced secrecy, which is its own bag of worms↩︎
this limits the plotting range so you can actually see the pretty things↩︎
which you can download the source for↩︎
an immediate google search seems to suggest the use of it with LaTeX is common and well-accepted, which is nice.↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 20
Crocheting is something I’ve blogged about once before. I didn’t talk much about it, which is fair.
The biggest project I’ve ever worked on for crocheting is a blanket that I began in December 2019. I’m currently about 1/3 finished with it, though it’s been at least a calendar year since I’ve worked on it, so I should get back to it.
Currently, I’m in the habit of making hats.1 I’ve been averaging one a week for the two and a half weeks I’ve been crocheting them. This week’s hat reminded me that I really prefer to crochet using yarn rated for a larger hook than the one I use, because otherwise the material ends up feeling too flimsy to me. But, I neglected to realize this until I had finished an entire hat, so to make it thicker I’m now going through the entire design backwards and adding another layer of thickness. In many respects, the way I make hats makes this much easier than it otherwise could be.
The way that I crochet hats is by making a circle of 10 double crochet in the round.2 I then, rather than adding a discrete row, just keep crocheting onto the first stitch again, making a spiral. In the second “row”, I put 20 stitches in. There are 30 in the third and so on until I get to the 70 stitches that’s been working for me lately. I should mention that I crochet into the back loop only, which adds a pretty spiral pattern into the hat. This also worked well for me working backwards, because it gives me an easy place to crochet into. Anyways, once I’ve reached the 70 stitches, I just keep going in the spiral without adding stitches until the hat gets long enough.
For this hat, I ended the string, because I thought I wanted to crochet from the top down again. However, upon consideration, it appears that bottom up works better for the second layer, so I could have saved two ends by just going backwards from the bottom.
As I should say more often, c’est la vie.
First Published: 2022 April 18
Sorry for the sudden disappearance, but it’s relevant to the post I promise.1 One thing that’s been a positive from these crazy few years is that I haven’t really gotten sick as much. I feel like I got the flu or something every winter and spring, and I think I’ve maybe gotten sick twice since it began.
On the other hand, I feel like I used to bounce back from illness immediately, and now it takes me a little longer. Maybe it’s the whole “I don’t sleep for 12 hours normally anymore” or “I don’t eat as well anymore”2, but I got sick over the weekend, and I felt a lot sicker than I feel like I remember I used to normally feel when I was ill. I’m very much on the mend now, but it meant that I didn’t really have the mental or emotional capacity to really do much of anything, especially writing a blog post.
First Published: 2022 April 15
Despite my claims about needing a while to adequately learn the telestich, I’m happy enough with the speed I wrote yesterday’s that I’m going to move on to the double acrostic. I feel like this is going to be really hard because the way that I had to modify my word choices was very different in the two single acrostic forms. But, you know what they say: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Attempt
Attend to the pleasant aroma
That wafts from an effort since past
Take heed of the slow-moving draft
Each time that it comes to your side
Meet the day with outward calm
Pass times until all used up
Together with every attempt
So not the best poem I’ve ever written, but I think it’s not horrible for a stream of conscious writing. According to the book of forms, the poem’s content should center around the word being built. I don’t know if I’ve done a particularly good job with that today, but there’s always tomorrow.
First Published: 2022 April 14
As I mentioned last time, I’m writing through a book of poetic forms. I wrote my first telestich, and it’s a much different experience than writing a typical acrostic. I can think of lots of words that start with almost any letter of the alphabet, but very few words ending in certain letters. The first poem I worked on was based on “church”, which meant I needed two c-ended words and a u-ended word. It took a lot of searching for both, so I think that to make a good telestich the word choice is far more important than in an acrostic. Future poems will hopefully go better as I figure out good words. Below is today’s poem, rough as it is.
Begin and End
In watching water flow and ebB
Or daylight turn to evE
Unlike that last and bitter dreG
Which ends the alibI
I start and hope to wiN
First Published: 2022 April 12
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m writing through a book of poetic forms. The first of these forms listed is the acrostic. There are apparently four kinds of acrostic:
normal acrostic: the first letters of each line spell out a word, with stanzas forming the spaces
telestich: the last letter of each line spell out a word, otherwise the same
double acrostic: acrostic+telestich, but using the same words, I assume, because
coumpound acrostic: spells a different word in the first and last letters
According to the book, acrostics tend to have meter and rhyme, but it specifies nothing further, which kind of makes sense. Any other restrictions added probably just make it an acrostic and a rhyme or what not.
Yesterday I wrote a standard acrostic, which went easily enough. Since my goal is proficiency1 in the different forms, I think the single one was enough. Today is going to be a telestich, and hopefully that goes well as well.
if that’s a fair or valid term↩︎