General Discussion Thread

[thorny]

Stay put if you can, midwestmutt! Not much worse than freezing rain for hazardous travel conditions.

-- they said we might get freezing rain yesterday, but it didn't materialize. Which was fine by me.

[Solokov]

*puts on my shilling hat*

Once again, it's time to shill Spamadventure. We need more players.

I'll do a TL:DR of the story later*.


While you're at it, join the game over at Spamkingdom , run by Jacob Thomson. Both the Spamkingdom and Spamadventure storylines are entangled at the moment and it would be greatly awesome if we could finish the crossover event before 2020.


*Later may roll on until 2020 or later. No promises.

[Ana Nymus]

Farewell, Opportunity. You accomplished so much more than we ever dreamed when we sent you off so many years ago. You shared with us a whole new planet, walked miles no other Earthling has tread. Maybe no one else ever will, but we all know what it's like thanks to you. I'm sad to see you off, but all things must come to an end.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep."

Sleep well.

[Róisín]

That, Ana. A worthy sentiment.

[midwestmutt]

Been spending the day rebuilding my computer pages after needing to get it reset yesterday. When I shut down Friday night it got trapped in a windows automatic repair system loop. My brother who is computer savvy had to spend all day fixing the error, finally doing a reset which put me back to my backup from my previous computer two years ago. I lost two years of downloads and bookmarks. Fortunately I save my pictures on 2 different ubs sticks so it wasn't a total disaster. I have been spending all today reinstalling deleted apps and reviving passwords on saved sites. Computers are fun until they don't work.

[Róisín]

Sympathy, Dan! As a not-very-computer-savvy person myself, I feel your pain! Husband, who does understand the things, says to suggest to you that more frequent backups, and remote backups, may help you to save more of your stuff. Hugs!

[Nellie McEnt]

Please ignore me if this is totally uninteresting, but I feel like here and now are as good a place and time as any to share the titles of the subfolders in the SSSS folder on my desktop. I hope they are somehow vaguely amusing.
These were pretty much all written back when I was a new(er) Minnion and hadn't even caught up with the comic yet.

Spoiler: show

-Emil of the Magical Hair
-This Folder Absolutely Does Not Contain Anything At All That Would Make It Seem Like I Am In Love With Lalli*
-Sweet Naive Reynir (Who I'm Not In Love With Either)
-The Most Best Captain Eide
-Tuuri is Adorable
-Mikkel is a God of Calm and Evasive Answers
-Onni is a Heroic Worried Owl
-The Triumvirate of Mages
-Our Dear Hotakainens
-General Information About Our Heroes
-Shipwrecks** (Mostly Lalli and Emil)
-Our Goddess Minna
-The Most Best Commentariat

*No, but really, I'm not in love with Lalli. Well, I am, but not romantically in love. It's a joke because I have a tendency to get very attached to various characters platonically, causing all of my friends think I'm in love with them. Lalli was/is one of the victims of this kind of obsession.
**Things I don't ship but everyone else seems to. Honestly, at this point it's more like I don't actively ship them, because I have a policy against shipping noncanon things, but I would be fine/happy if it became canon, and anyway I might just be in denial.

[Róisín]

Urgh! Weather! This morning the market closed more than an hour early, because the temperature passed 40C locally. Still no rain. I will be relieved when the weather cools down a bit.

[Ragnarok]

Urgh! Weather! This morning the market closed more than an hour early, because the temperature passed 40C locally. Still no rain. I will be relieved when the weather cools down a bit.

I think I found your rain. It's been here for two weeks non-stop.

[Róisín]

Thank you, Ragnarok! Where you live must be downright soggy after two weeks of rain. Could you please mention to the clouds that if they are tired of being sworn at, they could always drop by South Australia for a visit? They would be welcomed! Everyone's tanks and dams are empty around here, my eyes and lungs are raw from the dust, half-ripe fruit is dropping from the trees cooked, and the wildlife is dying. This is the worst year I have ever had for fruit and flowers anywhere, not just here.

And my smallholding/garden is a permaculture of plants carefully chosen in the expectation of climate change, intended to give some kind of crop no matter what the weather does. Gods know how more conventional monocrop farmers are doing - I fear not at all well. Certainly all my fellow vendors at the Farmer's Market are in trouble.

[Purple Wyrm]

Denver Airport has installed an animatronic gargoyle and it is possibly the best thing ever!

[thorny]

Róisín, major sympathies to you and to everyone else there trying to deal with this.

Still too early here to have any idea what this year's going to throw at us, except that at least our water tables are up. Hope that turns out not to be a disadvantage after all. So far March here has been going in for snow; which is not abnormal, though some years fields are workable this early.

I don't suppose you want the snow, in your summer season (though compared to 40ºC I might find even snow in summer to be welcome); but do wish I could send you some of it as rain.

[midwestmutt]

So far this winter I have learned 5 new songs on the pennywhistle and 3 on the hammered dulcimer to play this summer at events. It's still 8 weeks until my first one so I hope to add a couple more on whistles and 1 more on the dulcimer, which being a fairly recent addition to my act takes me longer to learn on.

[Róisín]

Which songs have you learned?

[midwestmutt]

On the dulcimer: child grove, the black nag, the black joke (a favorite melody for bawds), and I'm still working on a nice harmonic version of amazing grace. On pennywhistles: Hargalaten (melody of uncertain date for an 18th cent. Swedish folk tale of the devil masquerading as a fiddler and dancing young folks to death, it's a children's song, Nordics, go figure), two unnamed dance tunes from the lesson book of a 18th century fiddle teacher in Franconia-Thuringia which I found on a really good German tutorial site for folk instruments,  a tune whose name I lost when my computer recently crashed, and Loreena, the most popular American civil war song on both sides, kind of like Lily Marlene was in WWII, which I'm learning for my friends who do that time period..