Lockdown

SO obviously the whole world is stuck at home right now.

Honestly, watching american and English news is kind of like watching a few dogs look at a steak on a fire that's absolutely scorching hot, going to pick it up, burning themselves and then going back again.

After a few minutes, more dogs join, and by the hour mark there are dozens of dogs constantly burning themselves over and over again.

In this metaphor, you can assign any group you like to any part of the metaphor. The liberal media is the fire, corona virus is the steak, politicians are the dogs.

Conservative politicians are the meat, true-believers are the fire and the average person are the dogs.

Russian twitter bots are the fire, government handouts are the meat and the aliens living on pluto are the dogs.

My point being that this whole thing is stupid and everyone is dumb. One day we're going to look back at this and a lot of people are going to think, 'what the fuck was I doing back then?'

Actually, who am I kidding. No one is going to reflect on themselves.



In less stupid news, I've had a massive, MASSIVE infestation of aphids.

It is genuinely amazing how many of these bastards there are. I noticed the first one a couple of weeks ago, and they annihilated both my pots of pansies within the week. Apparently spraying them with milk is supposed to stop them. It dries out, coats them and the plant in a kind of oily, crustiness that they can't escape.

Needless to say, that didn't work.

I was then given some kind of foul vinegar looking stuff that they use here for this purpose. It's organic, which is to say it's a concoction of roots and leaves and some pretty gnarly stuff by the smell of things - but it's safe to consume. So I tried milk for a week, then this stuff for a week.

The aphids won.

Around that time I was given a bunch of welsh leeks, some melon seeds, a watermelon plant and a bunch of other small things to try out.

I didn't think aphids would go for anything with big thick stems and whatnot, on account of them being tiny bastards with, presumably, small mouth pieces.

I was wrong.

They went after the leeks, but the leeks won. They went after a few of the smaller plants I was given and were driven back.

But.

They found the melon.

Now, I've tried growing melons a couple of times, and they've always succumbed to aphids and then disease.

No more. I drew my line in the sand.

First of all, it's in my hydroponics system (a pipe with water in it) so the plant is weaker to bugs and whatnot than it would otherwise be (side-note, this is because I haven't figured out the right nutrient/acidity balance yet) so I needed to act fast.

First of all, I sprayed it down with the black goop. Then I realised it's a tiny plant so I should just crush them in my hands. So I did that.

Now my hands are covered in something and aphids. I re-sprayed the plant down with the black stuff. Then after that dried out, I sprayed it again with full-fat milk.

I must admit, it didn't smell great the next day.

And the aphids were still multiplying.

So I kept doing this over the course of a few days, to no avail. Their pace of production far outstripped the killing potential of my bare hands.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what else there was to do. I had to leave for a few days, and didn't expect there to be much left.

However.



I returned to this new enemy formation, and not a single aphid in sight.

I was confused and worried - what new tricks had they discovered while I was away?

I tried searching online but this is the one weakness of google. Searching for 'bastard bugs on me damned leaves' doesn't yield much.

I kept searching though, and found this:



I just went outside and confirmed that the troops look almost identical to this. There were a few, so I've moved one to a separate planter to begin his attack there.

Hopefully they have enough to eat to get big and strong, and continue the fight well into the future.

Vive la ladybird!

Bye Bye PC PC

So my old, old PC of nearly 10 years finally cycled away. It's been on the fritz for the past few years (as least) and was definitely a cranky old lady for the past 12 months.

All things considered, I think it didn't do too badly. It's visited a number of countries, has spent time at sea and in planes. I've only had to replace the motherboard, but aside from that every other component has held out well.

Unfortunately, there's nothing much for me to salvage. I've taken out the hard disks. I'll throw them into the new PC, copy everything over, then bin them. The graphics card is ancient, the ram is old DDR3 with not particularly fast timings so I doubt anyone would want that. I'll give it to the local recycling centre and maybe they'll give me a fiver for it. That aside I don't know if there's much else I can do with it.

I was hoping it would last another few months until the new cpu's and cards come out, but things never really work out as planned. I have to save up for some life stuff in the next few months, but after that I should be able to get a decent PC. It'll be fun to catch back up on the games I couldn't play for the past few years, not to mention rendering out scenes in my little personal project will be about a bajillion times faster which is nice.

That's all future talk, however, so for the time being I'll just have to keep working hard so I can save up enough to buy the mystical future PC.

Perfunctory Update

It's been a while, but as has been the case for entirety of the past year, I've been fkin busy.

I also left the last post without a follow-up because it was post number 666, and I thought that was kind of funny.

I'm not sure whether I've talked about this before, but I'm working on a personal project outside of work.It's almost entirely for the sake of experience, to give me something that I can pin to my name and say 'I made a thing off my own back.' I'd like to think it'll make a difference when the world collapses in on itself, but it probably won't.

It turns out that they have chicken nuggets in certain shops here. I've got a local place that sells them, so whenever we go shopping I pick them up.

It also turns out, that chicken nuggets are the Japanese apocalypse food of choice. The last 3 times I've been shopping, they've been sold out.  It's a weird choice in my opinion, but I'm not going to judge. They're super easy to make, and (in my case) a kilogramme of them make a fine meal in of themselves.

Perfect.

That aside, I titled this post perfunctory because it really is - this is it. I just needed to move past the 666 mark so I can post more regularly from now on.

(I can't wait until I'm able to post screenshots of my project on here, that'll be a lot of fun.)

Argh, Busy

So it's pretty much a given that I'm going to neglect my blog writing duties at this point, given that I'm a fully-fledged member of society and actually doing work now.

But I found this cool insect on my veranda today.  Considering it's the dead of Winter, I'm a little worried that it won't survive on account of there being no food around. On the bright side, my plan of leaving a trough out with bare soil, and letting the natural flora grow there seems to be working. I've already seen a few ladybirds, some spiders and now this guy out there.

Compare that to last Summer even, where the only insects that visited were moths, flies and spiders.

Unfortunately, I'm going to spray down my hydroponic system with some insect killer, and go after the stuff that's attacking my strawberries because no matter what I grow in there, it gets infested almost immediately.  I now understand why all the professional hydro growers maintain their spaces as clean rooms.

I wonder whether that's going to make a dent in the issue, or whether I'm just going to have to grow my hydro stuff in a cold frame looking thing.

I've already got a metric ton of different seeds I want to try in there, so hopefully I'll find a crop that is pest resistant.

I'm including this one for two reasons. First of all, this was shot at f22 which is as wide as it'll go, and the focal plane is still only millimetres. Very difficult to get good pictures handheld.

The second reason is look at his evil little feet. Kind of cool.

This one is the best of all the ones I took. I haven't done any editing, so it's a little bright, the colours aren't great etc. This lens is still pretty damned cool, and I'm reminded of that fact whenever I get time to use it.

P.S. The net is to stop the bloody pigeons.