Boo!

Pleasant walk in Birkenhead Upper Park. Coot busy feeding its young on the lake.

The last couple of weekends we went to Calderstones Park on the outskirts of Liverpool. It has wonderful tree-lined walks, beautiful gardens and, now the Mansion House has been transformed, a very nice cafe. I’m going to call the Mansion House the Hall

Not enough on TV+ to keep me hooked at present. I’ve enjoyed much of what I’ve seen and will miss the end of Sugar and Big Door Prize but overall no regrets and may well come back again as and when. 📺

Finished binge-watching the first three seasons of New Amsterdam. The coverage of the pandemic from the perspective of a hospital soap set in NY was both interesting and chilling. While I enjoyed most of the episodes, the synopses on wiki for the following two seasons didn’t engage me so I made do with the final episode to see how it all ended.

Liking Kagi’s ability to summarise and query YT videos

Watching Suspicion on AppleTV+. Nice and twisty, think I’ll stay with it. 📺

handy tool for converting a web page to markdown urltomarkdown.com

{{< summary >}}Conjecture on the evolution of the memorial to William Huskisson MP at Parkside after his fatal accident on the Opening Day of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway.{{< /summary >}}

{{< summary >}}Conjecture on a possible seating plan for the ducal carriage on the Opening Day of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway.{{< /summary >}}

Well, after my gentle criticism of Masters of the Air, this week’s episode moved in exactly the right direction. 📺

Have now created separate blogs for the Auvers and Liverpool & Manchester Railway content. Possible I might also create blogs for OpenSim musing and general Liverpool history content while keeping this one as a more general journal. That would make up the quota of five.

Getting to grips with moving blogs from sites that don’t support export. One good reason to be here. Have settled, at least for the time being, on the excellent Tufte theme. Also need to rejig this blog to move the Auvers content to its own blog. This will remain as a personal blog.

{{< summary >}}What happened to the trains when they arrived in Manchester and how they got back to Liverpool.{{< /summary >}}

{{< summary >}}What happened after George Stephenson departed Parkside and some background on one of the key players, Hulton of Hulton.{{< /summary >}}

{{< summary >}}What happened to MP William Huskisson and the role of medic Joseph Brandreth.{{< /summary >}}

OK, so with cross-posting to Mastodon set-up, the default is to cross-post even when the option is hidden, ie you have to reveal and untick the option. Also, need to consider (i) whether I need to have a general blog in addition to the history ones, (ii) whether the general one becomes my Fediverse account and I drop Mastodon per se. I have no particular interest in federating beyond there but at what level do I have a choice if I don’t run my own instance (I currently have Threads blocked and would likely do the same with BlueSky).

Masters of the Air on AppleTV+ is as visually impressive and vicariously experiential as any Spielberg/Hanks production of this genre. The twin leads, Buck & Bucky, are engaging and credible though occasionally it feels like the narrative is ticking boxes in a rather cursory fashion. The aerial combat sequences are in equal measures kinetic and horrific but cover so many bases that individual events sometimes lose their significance. The series has three more episodes after today’s and I’m pretty sure I’ll stick with it.

Enjoyed Criminal Record on AppleTV+. Leads Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo both excellent. Plot development a little slow at times but just enough by way of clever twists to keep one’s interest. 📺

Ah, so date finally announced for release of Napoleon on Apple TV+, namely 1st March. 📽📺

Today I learned that micro.blog uses emoji instead of hashtags and that Windows will popup a selector if you type Windows button+full-stop. You can select an emoji at the top of the Discover page.

I normally use Kayaker Magic’s product on the Kitely Market for terraforming in OpenSim but for some reason I couldn’t get it delivered on Wolf Territories Grid. I intend my presence there to be very light touch so decided I would improvise instead by making a large linkset of thin 1 m diameter cylinders. All that was then needed was a little piece of code placed in the root that iterated across the terraforming linkset (TL) and set terrain height at each cylinder’s location via the appropriate OSSL command.

This foxed me for a while as I was expecting some kind of unique user-post id. The format of links to micro.blog posts is vrsimility.micro.blog/YYYY/MM/DD/first-three-words.html where first three words refers to the title. This is used for internal as well as external links, i.e. there are no equivalents of wiki-style links. Presumably there is no equivalent for tweet-style posts lacking titles.

I’m increasingly using low poly assets from Luma Genie to populate my builds. They’re not a patch on custom-made mesh (as per Encantada plants, for example) but they’re available quickly unless you want a hi-res version and generally you can get something that approximates your need. The downside is that objects created separately like tables and chairs are unlikely to match. I did try looking for freebies on Wolf Territories Grid but the link that automatically appears in Firestorm takes you to a spot that doesn’t have much (if anything) of that ilk.

We were given a DVD for Christmas called Loving Vincent. This chronicles an investigation into the two months artist Vincent Van Gogh spent in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise prior to his untimely death. It follows one of several less conventional theories as to how the artist met his end but is most notable for its beautiful rotoscope-style integration of the story with the many paintings dating to that summer of 1890.