#mathmom

[nv-rivera]

Who carries sidewalk chalk in their pocket and assaults their son with bus stop fraction questions at 7:30am? This is no mystery. It me. 🙋🏻‍♀️ There’s a “Mastery Check” (“test” is a word that shall not be spoken?) today. Obviously, I needed to know what the fraction of people wearing backpacks was. I also needed to know the fraction of people wearing hats. A math mommy has needs… In fact, I also put a lot fraction info on his lunchtime note concerning the jackal puppies we’ve been watching on our new morning show SHAMWARI UNTAMED. I wrote that my drawing was only 1/3 of the jackals that were released into the wild. I also wrote that only 3/5 of the rescued jackals were released. I didn’t mention the 2/5 of the jackals that were not because every time I asked Alex what happened to them he told me they “passed out” and I kept trying to correct him to say they “passed away,” but that (unlike fractions) feels like too big of a conversation to have so early in the morning. We each have our parenting super powers, and I know my kryptonite. #GoodluckAlex 😘 #momlife #mathmom https://www.instagram.com/p/CnRqXHKu8wT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[anahub-studentfanacc]

You can tell I got this off of the internet, but idc. All you Shawn Mendes fans out there better watch out for my teacher whom is over 10 years older than him

[bomberqueen17]

what the fuck, roach

Last night’s Witcher 3-ing was-- well, to start off with, it was slightly delayed because Dr. F’s true gaming passion is a weird Kickstartered FPS game called WarFrame, and there was a time-sensitive mission he wanted to run, so he booted that up first and the loading screen featured various warframes standing there in their idle animations-- I guess they’re like, cyborg suits, maybe remote-controlled? anyway, he always plays as this weird dude with a fan for a head, but on the idle screen there was one that was decidedly feminine-looking and featured some fluttering detached bits that came and landed on its hips, and when I pointed it out he was like “oh those are robot butterflies” and so MM and I became so enamored of the “Ass Butterflies” that he loaded that warframe and played as it, and sure enough, the ass butterflies came off and brutally savaged an opponent at one point, and the warframe also had a flying malignant sprite aspect, and anyway we were drinking Manhattans so it became “Ass Fairies” and that was a whole thing.

He finished that in remarkably fast time and booted up Witcher 3 for us, though; I’d been worried he was going to stay with Warframe, but as he said, “It’s kind of boring to watch, I know. Just a lot of automatic gunfire and shing noises.” 

“And space glitter,” I said, as things tend to explode into glittery dust when shot a lot. 

But then it was Witcher time, and we came back to find Geralt standing around in the rain just before sunrise near the bridge over the Pontar. 

The first thing that happened was that as we were riding along following quest markers, we came upon a crossroads crowded with NPCs, near a roadside shrine, but all the NPCs were crammed into circles around the bases of trees. We investigated for a bit, but none of them could have a conversation, they all just had single lines about irrelevant stuff. One of them mentioned the rain, though, and we deduced that NPCs must stand under shelter when it rains? Why there were so many of them in the middle of nowhere was unanswerable. 

In the next town, as Geralt sat perfectly still atop Roach while looking at the map, two children NPC’s ran straight into Roach within a couple of seconds of one another, bounced off, and complained about the horse. Like, bro, we weren’t moving. Your collision detection needs work.

We hunted a “monster” and were introduced to the concept of the Scoia’tel, which DF immediately was like “oh it’s the elves, gotcha, let’s be nice to them and Not Get Involved”, and chose to lie to the garrison commander and tell them he couldn’t find the monster and not get a reward, because he was that convinced that this was the correct answer to What Would Geralt Do. (It’s fine, we already Axii’d a pass across the Pontar from a Shady Merchant so we didn’t need the reward.)

Had to chase peasants around the small village to ask about a witch only there were two quests leading from that village, so we kept getting info about the wrong supernatural being, which was a lvl 10 quest (called Jenny O’ The Woods, about which MM kept singing Jenny From The Block, you’re welcome) and not the lvl 5 we were attempting. (We’re still lvl 4, argh.) (A bit later, we ran bravely away from some high-level enemies. “He’s only wee,” DF said, referring to Geralt. I immediately responded with a nickname his in-laws had given his son. “Wee precious Geralt,” I said. MM chimed in with the rest of the title the boy (he is seven now and really neither of those things-- though a lovely sunshine creature, he is more of a high-intensity Personality Bludgeon with +1 Unintentional Maiming nowadays) had gotten, one summer day when he was like, three, and playing with dandelions. “Wee precious Geralt, the Flower Prince.” As DF had just stopped Geralt’s headlong flight in order to pick some flowers, this was especially apt, and we referred to Geralt as Wee Precious Geralt or the Flower Prince for much of the rest of the evening. During a try-on of some new (looted) trousers, this got lengthened to Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt of the Shapely Thighs, to get a sort of Homeric spin on the matter [uh but also truthful, dang you guys].)

We set out from a village and encountered some bandits. Geralt really can’t fight from horseback for shit, though other bandits seem to be able to do it just fine, annoyingly. At any rate, having dismounted to fight some bandits, Roach was in the thick of the fight and she’ll annoyingly startle but never run away, and is just kind of a pain to work around if you didn’t get a chance to dismount her and then run away from her. But at some point during this fight, Roach decided the thing to do was to climb a tree. 

I’d gone to get a drink, but the yelling brought me back into the room and I beheld, sure enough, Roach halfway up a tree and apparently stuck, and the bandits dead. “How the fuck do I get her down,” DF asked, baffled, and we all watched Geralt run around for a moment. Then he hit on the idea of just... getting onto her. Fortunately she was near enough to the ground that this worked, and then he could just... steer her out of the tree. I did not get a photo but it was weird as fuck. 

(Apparently the way to handle any inconvenient Roach placement is just to stand some distance away and whistle, as that summons her.)

We also stole a dead bandit’s horse at one point and rode it for a while. It had apparently identical stats to Roach, and behaved just like her. When we discarded it, and then summoned Roach, Roach showed up immediately with no jealousy. Weird. 

At some point Not So Wee Or Precious Real Boy came downstairs complaining of a tummy ache an hour after bed, and DF set the controller aside to actually palpate his organs, which was unsettling but probably, well, actually useful, as he is an actual medical doctor and was able to say with some certainty that it wasn’t appendicitis or acute gas and probably would be resolved with a good night’s sleep. (As I write this, Neither Wee Nor Precious Actual Boy is playing Legos and singing me songs, so clearly he did survive the night. He and I are early risers, and the best thing I can do for this household is to sit in the room so he sings to me and not to the rest of the house of not-so-early risers.)

Not So Wee Or Precious’s sister kept coming down too, so there was a lot of quickly-go-to-the-inventory-screen Dad reflexes going on. IDK, any tips for how to get a 5-year-old to stay in her goddamned bed and get some actual sleep for once? Each of the three of us had to go up with her and put her back into bed. I get that attention-seeking is really support-seeking and neglect or repression is not the answer but there’s also a point where you’re just rewarding the thing you don’t want without resolving the underlying problem that’s causing it and it’s generally unhelpful all around and just makes everyone cranky.

We did discover the witch in the village, though, and it turned out to be the noted sorceress Kiera Metz, who in person turns out to look like a Botoxed Barbie doll who cusses a lot. And when you follow her through her weird portal, she is in there topless for some reason, so like, I appreciated the heads-up from @akilah12902 on that as there were a lot of little feet pattering around at the time and it was good to uh maybe put the bunnies back into their beds before we attempted that. I Had Not Realized there were actual tits in this game but oh boy there are. (Also: Sorceresses can step out of a bath and magically put clothes on immediately, and also this game can explicitly depict rabbits having sex, so-- I wonder how much other explicit animal sex it will include?) Don’t worry though, at no time does Kiera ever fully put her tits away, in case you were wondering whether men made this game. 

(I mean, there also was a scene with Geralt in a bare-knuckles shirtless Fight Club game, there are at least nods made to the kind of equal-opportunity ogling the Netflix series did so well. Oh, DF in continuation of his Geralt Is A Good Dude philosophy behind this playthrough had Geralt refuse to throw a fight, but then give the guy he’d beaten the prize purse afterward since the guy had told him he was only fighting because his family was starving and he needed the money. Geralt got XP for winning, but no reward for giving away the money-- still, he hadn’t bet much so it wasn’t a lot of money to give away.)

We followed Kiera accidentally into a much higher-level bit of quest than we’d strictly prepared for, and while wandering around some dank caves discovered a new kind of enemy. It killed us like uhh three or four times, and finally DF was like “OK, I have to actually think about this.” So we looked up foglets, which was what it was, and he made a point of saving, and figured out what blade oil to use. This occasioned some references to the GREASE ME UP, WOMAN bit from the Simpsons, which became another theme for the evening. (His other comment on repeatedly getting killed at the same spot and finally taking countermeasures was, “Fool me five times, shame on me.”) (Also: “I got complacent and forgot the first four rules of dodgeball!”)

There was various weird bits of loot in the cave. The one that really took the cake for me was... you’d find skeletons, clearly of long-dead other explorers of this cave, and they’d invariably have food items on them, which Geralt would take. One had, like, a jar of olives, what the fuck. Another had dried fruit, and as I was being incredulous about it, MM very drolly commented “Well of course it’s dried now.”

Blundering around this cave, we had cause to wonder if we could just... leave. But we kept occasionally hearing Kiera screaming somewhere, so clearly she was in a spot of trouble, and if we just left we’d be leaving her suck there. So we eventually found her and freed her from... where... she was afraid of some... rats? IDK. But then we found an exit and left the cave. And while we’d wondered if Kiera would just follow us around for the rest of the game, she helpfully said “I’ll wait for you here” as we left, which was awfully nice of her. Possibly she’d noticed we were still Wee and Precious and had little hope of defeating whatever boss creatures presumably lurked in this main plotline quest she’d kind of dragged us into. 

Of course, the cave exit was a fair distance from the village where we’d started, and the entire area was full of much higher-level enemies than we had any hope of defeating. (This is when we learned: if a critter appears and instead of a level number it has a question mark and a 💀skull symbol you gotta run.) So we got Roach and just made a run for it and still died like three or four times. There was a fast travel signpost nearby but it was entirely surrounded by high-level ghouls. So we kept running, and the fight music kept coming on, and we kept running. It was intense.

But we got the fuck outta there, eventually. Phew. 

Then we discovered our first alghoul. And again, DF tried to just fight it, and got killed, and was like. Sigh. Gotta prepare for this. GREASE ME UP, WOMAN. (And I looked up what you do for alghouls.) Which eventually worked. Those fuckers can heal themselves, which is a pain in the ass. 

Also if you get to a town at 4am and barge into the blacksmith’s house, he will Not wake up and help you out. You have to pass the time for at least three hours. This is the only time Geralt gets to rest, like, ever...

We’re only a bit of thread away from being able to level up another gambeson instead of the hideous olive schlubfest we’ve been stuck in for like, a week of game time, but we’re not there yet. Geralt remains Unattractive, tragically. But, soon, soon we’ll get to wear a ridiculous stripy one. 

[grocerylist16]

Lets do some mortgage forbearance math.Mom and Dad have a mortgage.It’s...

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[tedward880]

Lets do some mortgage forbearance math.Mom and Dad have a mortgage.It’s...

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[thousandmaths]

So I was on Yahoo Answers yesterday (for reasons) and came across this question: How far is it from Helsinki to Seattle along the great circle route?

Mathmom gave a detailed answer to that question using spherical coordinates, but there was also a very interesting answer provided by Morningfox:

The actual distance between those coordinates, along the standard Earth ellipsoid, is 7665.149 km. Using spherical Earth approximation results in an error of over 25 km, or 0.33%.

Of course 0.33% is not a ton of error, relatively speaking, but 25 kilometers (around 15 miles) is nothing to sneeze at: certainly the kind of error you wouldn’t want an autopilot system to make, and probably the kind of thing the refuelers would want to know as well. 

As a source, Morningfox also kindly linked the above website. I expected it to be just some podink thing saying “hurr spheres are bad ellipsoids are good”. It is not that. It is, in fact, a page on the professional website of Chris Veness, a self-described “specialist in designing & managing large & complex information sets”.

The content of said page is an incredibly detailed writeup of how to code an algorithm suggested by Thaddeus Vincenty in his paper Direct and Inverse Solutions of Geodesics on the Ellipsoid with Application of Nested Equations. The writeup not only 

provides the code itself, but also 

the reference equations from the paper, 

an analysis of the theoretical accuracy of the program (0.1mm), a second analysis of the sources of error that decrease the practical accuracy of the program (but it’s still good to 1 meter!), 

an in-site implementation to test against known values, and

a breakdown of practical implementation issues, including, for instance, Excel and JavaScript’s incompatible conventions for the atan2 function.

[ Also, Veness describes as Vincenty’s work as “for the benefit of the terminally obsessive (as well as the genuinely needy, of course)”. I think this is a great line for describing those “technically-applied-but-is-it-really” kinds of math. ] 

[coldasice33]

We had such a wonderful afternoon at the @momath1 Thanks to the lovely ladies of @themomsnetwork we got to meet @danicamckellar and we received a copy of #GoodnightNumbers #MathMOMS and we won the @mathnasium Raffle. I look forward to making the Kid just as #mathobsessed as me #NerdyMommyHeaven (at Museum of Mathematics)

[jennlikesit]

They did it. They cracked the code! #mathnerd #mathmom #alistairschmalistair #wesleywoo #bedhead

[spookydad]

Math Mom

[anahub-studentfanacc]

All you men, get yourself a woman who can cook 🍅🍽

[anahub-studentfanacc]

Her photos please me 🍍🍉

[bomberqueen17]

awesome

Am visiting MathMom and DoctorFriend and DF got telling work stories. (He’s an anaesthesiologist.)

We’d started off by talking about the unsettling things anaesthesiologists sometimes say to patients, but he said sometimes patients will unsettle you. “There’s a common phenomenon of the Propophol Declaration,” he said. Propophol is often the first thing they push, which sedates the patient and allows other anaesthesia to be applied. Many people, it hits in such a way that immediately before they go under, they’ll say one last thing. Often these things are funny, sometimes they’re unnerving, frequently they’re nonsense.

His most unsettling story, he said, was a guy who was kind of a “frequent flier”-- he’d had to have a series of procedures, so he’d come in and been sedated and then put down under general a number of times, and as his condition had improved he’d gotten chattier. This time, he was talking with them as normal, and then suddenly he paused, looked DF straight in the face, said “Goodbye!” and passed the fuck out.

But the funniest recent one was he’d done a kidney transplant on a 15-year-old kid, and he’d pushed a bunch of Fentanyl into the kid because that’s what fentanyl is really for, and the kid kind of went wide-eyed, said “This is fucking awesome,” and then went under.

“Fentanyl,” I said. “Isn’t that--”

“Fentanly is designed for use in anaesthetic,” DF said. He went on, aggrieved, “It is my job to give people fentanyl. All these other people dealing the stuff-- I’m the fentanyl guy.”

[bomberqueen17]

witcher 3: Stay hydrated, bitch

no, i’m not a gamer. But, Dr. Friend is.

One Saturday in the year 2001, probably, over the summer, I was sleeping in because I’d worked the closing shift at a gas station, and my slumber was disturbed by a weird repeating sound. As I came to wakefulness, I realized it was a cartoon villain voice saying something. I eventually got out of bed and deciphered that it was saying “your creatures need a bigger lair”. I went over and knocked on not-yet-Dr Friend’s door and solemnly told him to build his creatures a bigger fucking lair, and went back to bed. This has passed into history but I still occasionally bother him about building his creatures a lair. Especially at the moment, where in a fit of self-improvement, he rendered the children’s basement playroom unusable and has been procrastinating restoring it to usability by removing carpet from various rooms of the house instead, while the children have been locked inside for five weeks unable to access one of the major locations of the house where they can run wild. DUDE YOUR FUCKING CREATURES NEED A BIGGER FUCKING LAIR, my man, this is no longer just a weird inside joke but actually a deeply relevant situation. Paint the furnace room floor already and quit fucking around!

Anyway. Yesterday he brought down the X-Box console, which he’d had hooked up to the TV in his bedroom but had determined wasn’t really doing him any favors up there, because their daughter’s been refusing to sleep in her own room to the point of them finally setting up a cot for her in the corner of their bedroom, which means he can’t use the Xbox in the evenings, and so he’s been using it during breaks in the middle of the day, and he’s finally conceded that this is both antisocial and unproductive behavior. So now the Xbox is downstairs.

So he set it up and was scrolling around looking for a new game, and I was like “do Witcher! do Witcher! but only 3, that’s the only one where Geralt’s hot and the plot isn’t predicated largely on misogyny!” and he wasn’t particularly listening but I left the room because it was Pajama Time and when I came back down, his pajama-clad wife had just convinced him that he should, in fact, download Witcher 3, because she also wanted to see it. (Pajama Time is an important ritual, y’all.)

So he did, and we both watched in delight as the opening scene features Yennefer’s completely bare ass and also a bunch of gratuitous lingering shots of Geralt’s naked torso. For some reason he decided to do the game on Death March difficulty mode, which seemed ridiculous to me, especially when he then proceeded to spend the intro wandering around the bedroom running into walls and failing to climb bookshelves. MathMom went to bed early and missed out on the other bit of the tutorial, where Dr. F managed to get Geralt’s ass entirely kicked by Vesemir and throw a bomb directly into the middle of Lambert and Eskel’s sparring session. (They seemed remarkably unconcerned.) He kept having to put the controller down and get out his phone and look things up, and then go scroll through all the controller explanation screens to figure out the buttons, and such.

I was extremely dubious about how this Death March Difficulty was going to go, but dutifully passed along a bunch of excited tips from @akilah12902 who has been a fantastic source of Witcher 3 info for me on here this whole time when I’ve wanted to use video game canon to flesh out the worldbuilding in the MDS series, and then all of a sudden when the game really began and a bunch of ghouls swarmed onto the screen, Dr. Friend fairly handily despatched them and proved that he’d really just been fucking around this whole time.  (This is kind of a running thing with Dr. Friend, where he’ll willingly just sort of make an ass of himself for a prolonged period and look like he’s just this whole disaster of a person, and then some situation will arise where he actually needs to be competent and he’ll just casually do that and it’s extremely confusing and I fall for it every time. I have known him twenty years and still am so prone to absolutely falling for it when he pretends to be a fool! In my defense, he’ll maintain the foolish pretense long past what I’d consider to be an emergency, so I’ve been present for a fair amount of actual fuck-ups because he hadn’t turned on his Be A Person mode in time.)

Then he picked a bunch of flowers because i told him he should, and we were both disappointed to discover you can’t pick flowers from horseback. Once we reached the inn, only then did he explore all the inventory screens, and discover that if you want you can un-equip most of Geralt’s clothes.

He put Geralt in underpants, gauntlets, boots, and nothing else, and said, “Look! It’s Pennsic!” but then decided that since clothing gives you a defensive stats boost he’d probably leave it on. He also realized that all the equipment has durability stats too, so conceivably your pants can actually wear out, so that’s a thing to worry about. (I want to know what happens if you actually wear out a pair of pants.)

That’s as far as we got, except for accidentally bodychecking the friendly innkeeper into a wall. Oh, and he was like, ok the ghouls took a big chunk of my health and i need to replenish it and don’t have any obvious healing potions, what do, and after wandering around the tavern for like twenty minutes, he finally tried taking a drink of water and the health bar went “zoop” almost all the way back to the top. “Oh,” he said. ( @akilah12902 responded to my ??? about this with the extremely apt observation “STAY HYDRATED BITCH”.) 

So anyway. I’m actually really hoping that he uses his time painting the furnace room floor so his creatures can have a bigger lair, but maybe I’ll get to be amused by more of Geralt’s hair animations tonight, we’ll find out.

[bomberqueen17]

he actually equipped Quen on this one

Let me set the scene for you, in the household where I’ve been riding out this isolation period. DF, my Doctor Friend, with whom I attended university as an undergrad (I met him on his 18th birthday completely prostrate under a table having had two whole beers on his own) works in the local hospital. MM, MathMom, his wife, has been my friend since high school; we met in 1995, as near as we can remember. She is an engineer by training, a math teacher by experience, and is at home currently with their two children, Boy, who is 7, and Girl, who is 5. When schools closed, I grew worried that the children would go even more feral, and would eat MM while DF was stuck at work for endless shifts during the pandemic, so after I got furloughed, I came out here (about an hour’s drive away from my house) and have been here mostly ever since. 

So there’s the recap; I just felt like I hadn’t gone over that for a while and there’s some new folks and Tumblr doesn’t make searching the tags easy. Or, like, going through someone’s archives in an organized fashion.

Anyway-- the scene. In the family room is a big television, and the couches are arranged in a kind of L around the square of the room. DF has a rolling chair for gaming that he keeps quite close to the TV, and pulls it out and sits up there with his feet propped up basically on the entertainment center. And then MM and I sit on the couches and usually do embroidery or bullshit on our phones or whatever while he’s playing.

But, for the first however long it takes the kids to fall asleep, DF will play a fast-paced FPS shooter called Warframe, and a lot of time Girl keeps coming down the stairs for an hour, an hour and a half, oh i need a drink, mommy can you help me find this stuffed toy, mommy i was going through your closet but i can’t reach your good jewelry can i have it, mommy i am worried that a platypus might sting me, mommy -- in short, i don’t want to go to sleep and am resentful that i’m not allowed to just be involved in everything you adults are doing. SO, we have to sit there and watch the Glitter Robots Game (it’s horribly gory but all the “gore” is robots and looks like glitter so it’s not as obvious even though I think it’s scarier than the Witcher if you pay the slightest attention to the worldbuilding-- but the kids don’t, and he plays it with the volume really low so the gunfire’s not so jarring when they’re around, so it works fine.) until the little pitter-patter-feet down the stairs stop happening.

Sometimes though he gets kind of sucked in to a mission or something-- it’s multiplayer and he doesn’t want to leave a mission in the middle of it and so on, so it can be hard to get everything to line up. Some nights we despair, as it get super late and we’re still Glitter Robots-ing. But, on nights when he’s just launched into it, inevitably a child will come down and be like “WHAT IS THAT.” Boy now asks every night if we’re going to “play the scary game” after he’s in bed. .... so glitter robots it is. 

So tonight we didn’t get much Witchering time, but, we did a bit. 

All this is prompted by my having copy-pasted my notes on Friday night’s gaming session into this window and it opens with 

ah it's the witcher 3 loadscreen, all is not lost

We opened with a little scroll through the inventory to see what we needed to look for and what we could make now. We’re only bisongrass and bear fat short of Enhanced Beast Oil, which maybe we don’t need for gameplay but we absolutely need for inside jokes. This led to a rumination on whether it’d be better to go hunt down a bear, or buy bear fat somewhere. Sometimes you can dismantle things you already have into other components, but you have to go to a blacksmith’s shop and be in the shopping interface to do this. The things you can dismantle into other things don’t always make sense, either.

“Well,” MM said, explaining the blacksmith thing, “obviously, you need an anvil in order to make linen into silk.”

(Throughout this, DF was eating a bag of Cheetos and kept missing the buttons he was pressing because he was trying not to use the Cheeto-powder fingers. It was the most Gamer thing he has ever done and it was hilarious, but hard to recap. For further scene-setting, he is actually not a stereotypically gamer-looking dude, not that there’s really a particular way that gamers look, but y’know. It was just funny because he was doing this delicate sort of pinkies-out Cheeto eating with the xbox controller carefully held out of the way, and was completely failing at keeping things tidy. In the morning I found the empty Cheeto bag on the floor in the family room where food isn’t allowed (I’m sure he’d left it on the coffee table), and told Boy, who was watching keenly, that clearly the mice had dragged it in here, as no adult would ever violate the sanctity of not eating in the family room.)

DF realized that potion stocks were low so he had Geralt meditate to replenish them. I hadn’t really considered it; of course in any kind of storytelling, Geralt would meditate in a carefully-chosen situation, but in-game it really doesn’t matter, so Geralt meditated in the middle of the street at an intersection in Novigrad, right on the cobblestones. He stood up and there was a guardsman kind of standing there watching him bemusedly (not really, he was an NPC and thus was totally vacant and running an idle animation but it really looked like he was watching in bemusement as this odd sword-bedecked man sat in the street staring at nothing), and he was like “What” and ran off. 

basically the first thing that happened is this halfling was like “pssst you wanna buy contraband magical stuff?” Geralt was like “what have you been looting the homes of burned mages?” and the halfling’s like “yeah you want some?” and Geralt was like “you’re a ghoul” and the halfling’s like “can’t have unsecured magical shit just lying around, right? anyway do you want some?” but then the guards show up and he’s like “ah shit tell no one you saw me!” and runs away. The guards come over to Geralt and are like “why did that halfling run away, tell us!” and I was like oh fuck the police but for some reason DF was like, no, I’m gonna snitch, that guy was a ghoul, and told the cops the guy was selling contraband. WTF man, I thought you were cool. And we had JUST been saying “ah we need to find someplace to buy magic shit” so like. I don’t understand this decision, but you can’t really play a video game by committee.

We had been killing time so we could go back and do fencing lessons with Rose var Attre, in the hopes of that being a useful plot-related quest, but the quest thing stubbornly didn’t update. “Go to Rose Var Attre’s residence tomorrow,” it still said, even though it was now 8 in the morning of the following day, and no arrow to guide us to her residence appeared. 

So we wandered a bit, picked up a weird little one-- a halfling and a man were arguing and a guard was super fed up of their shit and was like “oy just hire that witcher, he’ll figure it out”, “it” being, apparently, that there was a monster in the warehouse. Geralt was like “fine” and went in, and there’s a nekker in the warehouse. He despatched it handily, but like... those are monsters that live in nests and tunnel underground and are always in packs, wtf? A little searching uncovered a cage, which the creature had clearly been transported in. Also, the cage bars had been recently cut, freeing the creature.

So Geralt went back out and reported all that to the guard, who was like “ok i don’t care, we’re arresting both of you and torturing the truth out of you” and Geralt was like welp my work here is done, took his like $20 and left. 

(I genuinely have no idea how much the coins in this game are supposed to be worth. I also don’t think anyone really does. I’m just making up what the amounts are, I don’t really write it down.)

As Fencing Lessons still stubbornly refused to update, we hared off into the countryside. DF has a kind of little personally-assigned quest, where he checks all the noticeboards he can see on the map-- once you’ve checked them and taken anything Witcher-specific, they disappear from the map, and only light up again if something new spawns for them. So if he’s got a spare moment among Plot, he goes and clears out noticeboards.

We went to one in a little hamlet called Cunny of the Goose, which is weird nonsense-- isn’t a cunny a cunt?? I don’t object to the word, it’s a fine old English word of Germanic origin and venerable heritage, but as an experienced poultry slaughterhouse worker I am here to inform you that geese, like all birds, do not have cunts, so I do not understand the name of this village.

Anyhow. We picked up some weird little quests and went through the inventory tab again. The endless cycle of this game is, like-- ok. We need albedo as a component to this potion we need. We can craft albedo, but we need White Gull to do so. To craft White Gull, we need both cherry cordial and mandrake cordial. Shit, we had cherry cordial but we sold it. Well, can we buy more? Inns have cordials, sure. 

Ha, the inn at Cunny of the Goose does not have any kind of cordial but it does have fisstech, so now we know where to get that. (We have fisstech, we have a lot of fisstech, as we can neither consume nor dismantle it. DF has decided to save it, along with his purely-decorative swords; he has those all tucked away in the stash. And that’s it. Which is hilarious to imagine-- someone finally opens up Geralt’s stash to find out more about this creature of legend and it’s just low-level but cool-looking relic swords, and like ten kilos of fisstech. Which, if you’re new to this game, is literally just cocaine.) 

Geralt is now four points (out of 1000) away from level 15. We finally just Googled where Rose Var Attre’s house is and went there, since the quest wouldn’t update. Talking to the guards gave a small handful of XP and so he leveled up to 15 just from basically saying “hi is the lady of the house in” “no she’s taking a walk but she said if you came by you should go find her there” “ok” *big choral “aaaahhhh” noise, Level 15 appears on the screen* Amazing.

Anyhow, Fencing Lessons was kind of dumb-- Rosa is a spoiled-brat noblewoman who wants to play games, makes Geralt fight her with live steel even though he really doesn’t want to do that and isn’t prepared for it; DF got hung up on the controls and really wasn’t prepared for her to just attack him so she hit him three times and then it went into a cutscene where she was like HA I HAVE BEAT YOU, and Geralt was like listen lady this isn’t really how you learn fencing? also I could have killed you, maybe don’t? and she’s like turn around i gotta fix my undies, and he’s like what but turns around, and then she runs away for some reason? is he supposed to chase her? Fine. He tracks her across the bridge to a village where the villagers have accosted her and are like “oh we’re going to murder this Fancy Lady from a people who are trying to subjugate us” and Geralt has to Axii them into submission to save her. She’s like ah when Nilfgaard takes these lands I will personally have those men killed and Geralt’s like why you gotta be such a jerk about this and she’s like clearly you do not understand how our honor and morals work! and he’s like damn right, go fuck yourself but politely, and that’s... it. That’s the whole quest. 

So... fed up with Novigrad, we went back to take care of a Velen quest, Swamp Thing, which was level 12 and had to be take care of before we level up inappropriately. Of course, we picked it up so long ago we no longer remember anything about it, but whatever. It’s a... ah, it’s a foglet, so we checked and discovered that we did indeed have moon dust bombs. OK sure. 

DF actually equipped Quen for this one, which he rarely bothers with, but like, foglets are insubstantial and materialize and hit you hard too fast for a parry, so Quen is basically required for this. 

With Quen, though, it turned out DF is twitchy enough and Geralt powered-up enough that the foglet was actually not terribly difficult to defeat, so we never did use any of the moondust bombs. Just-- hit it a bunch of times, and put Quen back on periodically, and that was that. It wasn’t terribly difficult, though I clearly remember the first foglet a while ago with wee precious flower prince Geralt at like, level four, and how it killed us over and over and over again. 

So. Something to be said for leveling up, as it happens. 

We rode around Velen sort of aimlessly after that-- not really aimlessly, trying to clear up the map. We found a bunch of under-leveled stuff that would’ve been good to have found at like, level 6 or whatever, but interspersed with it were things like... oh here’s a Guarded Treasure, let’s see what we find. Ah, a chest full of goodies. Picked up the loot, and wandered for a moment, and then abruptly a Biglhag materialized. Level 20. Run away! Run away from the big ol’ hag! I mean. maybe we could take on a level 20 something. But like, why? We already have what she was guarding.

(We abandoned any thought of going back to Novigrad for Plot because the next Plot is Sigi Reuven’s bathhouse, and MM got sleepy and went to bed and we could not possibly take Geralt to a bathhouse and be treated to his lovingly-rendered bare chest without having MM along for the ride.) 

One thing about Velen, the fight music there is this guy just sort of hollering, and we had sort of forgotten about it, and kind of hadn’t missed it... 

We found the big central encampment of the invading Nilfgaardian forces and cleared out two semi-little quests for them. There was a cutscene where a soldier updates us on the injured woman from the intro level-- the griffin at White Orchard had injured a woman and as a kind of eases-you-in-to-potion-making, the quest kind of guides you through making Swallow (healing potion) for the first time to give her some to see if it helps, and now this guy updates you that it kept her alive but she’s catatonic. He says he doesn’t know whether to bless you for keeping her alive or curse you for denying her a death with dignity, and Geralt’s like you think I don’t think about that shit all the time?? and that’s that for that encounter. 

Anyway. we also wandered around in the swamp, and lied to a mother and said her dead son had died with honor instead of deserting and being executed for it. We also found that a Nilfgaardian patrol that had vanished had been killed by a wyvern, which was what the quartermaster was paying you to find out, and so we had to fight the wyvern, but then we also found out-- well, it was confusing, we followed a bunch of signs around and were like okay obviously we’re meant to be making a deduction here but what is the deduction, and I finally Googled it and was like oh, this is the deduction, so we went back to the camp and in the dialogue options Geralt’s like “so that patrol was out there executing prisoners of war”, and that’s what we were supposed to have been realizing.

Anyhow, needing to google it to figure out what the fuck was supposed to be going on also meant that I could advise DF that it only meant that either Geralt could get all high-dudgeony and refuse to take the guy’s coin for having done a job of work for him-- what, we don’t make war criminals pay their freelancers?-- and get a handful more XP but not much? or we can say “fuck you, pay me” and get money and almost as much XP from this guy we’re so mad at. 

So we did that, because taking money from war criminals to pay you for work you’ve already done for them seems more ethical to me than just saying “no, I’m so mad at you I did your work for free”. like, wtf man. no. get paid, honey. 

Anyway, it was time to put the controller down for the night. 

[bomberqueen17]

oh good lord

so we’re supposed to have a Zoom call at 3pm for birthday cake with a cousin who is turning 6

we made our own cake so we could participate, it’s frosted and sitting on the counter. 3pm sharp, we’re ready. Kids are pumped; they miss their cousin. Also they love cake. So excited for cake, we baked it yesterday, frosted it today. So much discussion. Big treat, can’t wait. So isolated and lonely, can’t wait for a chance to see people even if over video call. We’ve been, like, counting down to it a bit all day-- “better not have too many treats now, we need to save room for cake” etc. Kids are pumped. It’s a party! Kids love parties. We have so little excitement lately. This is kind of a big deal. 

and the cousin’s mom texted at 2:30. “Oh, I think we’re not gonna. Rather be low-key, just us. It’s all too much lately.”

*screaming into the void*

MathMom FLIPPED OUT, because of much much much backstory stuff underlying all this (SO MUCH backstory stuff) but also this was arranged DAYS AGO and she TOLD THE KIDS about it because why the hell wouldn’t you tell them about this? why would you keep it a secret? why would it even occur to you that this would happen? Who UN-INVITES LITTLE KIDS FROM A PARTY AT THE LAST MINUTE.

...

The freakout went over correctly; MM rarely bites back when there’s family bullshit, but this was BULLSHIT. So the Zoom call is back on.

Except that they didn’t bake their cake on time and it’s not cool and wait oh we didn’t really mean 3pm, that’s weird why would we do cake before dinner

(we have ALREADY delayed dinner for tonight predicated on the idea that the kids’d be full of cake so we’d eat a little later and push bedtime back because it’s friday and it’s okay but we need some advance notice and... wait what????)

ARGH

...

Why do you think it is I, a friend from high school, who is the only person who’s been here to help out at all?? Nobody else prioritizes MM.

I keep saying we should just cancel her family, my family’s got room, and y’know. we do. so. my mom has two more grandkids. she knows, i think; she’s written them more postcards than their four biological grandkids combined in the last month. 

[Hilariously, as an aside, today Girl was looking at pictures on my phone and I showed her my niece and nephews in Maryland, and she looked at the oldest boy, a red-haired freckled skinny 12-year-old, and then squinted and looked at her brother, a red-haired freckled skinny 7-year-old, and said, “Why do they look the same?” and I laughed and laughed and told her that there isn’t really that much genetic diversity in the world, we are probably related after all. Their hair really is exactly the same shade, it’s quite funny.]

Anyway. The cousin’s dad is going to be there at 5, he says, and so he’s going to make sure they’re ready for cake at 5:30, which is copacetic with our schedule, and it will probably actually happen, because he is a decent fucking guy. (He is the only member of the family who was prepared to figure out a way to come out and help MathMom when Girl was born early and Dr. F couldn’t get time off work and MM literally could not physically carry Girl home from the hospital and I took time off work and came to help instead, because I could and because I care.

Ha, all of this is sort of making me think about-- well, in fic, I always feel like I have to do a little disclaimer that fiction is fiction, and just because I like things in fic doesn’t mean I do in real life, and boy is that true-- but it’s not always true, because I do like found family in real life. Quite obviously!!! 

[bomberqueen17]

it’s really not a garden of kinders

missbuster replied to your post “LOLLL thursday”

What I do with kids this age is help them sound out the word, like segment and repeat the different sounds in the word, so they can map the sounds into letters they know. That might work well for Girl 5. 6 seems confident enough to use his own knowledge.

That’s mostly what I do. 

The boy is extremely confident, and one thousand percent completely wrong. We had just puzzled through the word “school” together, and not two minutes later, he was to write “school” on his sheet of paper, and he very confidently sounded out, sss, c-c-c, oo, oo, L!  and wrote down “sokoh”. What! Then I told him how to spell “house” and he rejected that and wrote “haws”, which at least has the benefit of having the phonemes in the right order, so I let it stand, but his justification was that his method was shorter, and I was like, the entire point is that someone else can read it, dear, and he seemed taken aback by this. So it’s a work in progress. He is definitely getting to be a more comfortable reader though so I’ll take it-- I think he’s improved in the last two weeks already. 

The girl, however, really likes to melt down emotionally-- like, she’s actually fairly tough most of the time, but once in a while she’ll pick something and flip out about it? You can kind of watch her work herself up over something she’s decided she needs to be upset about, and it’s weird, and her mom is not great at diverting her which is I think why she does it? She’s got this weird need to control her mother, which is bizarre-- anyway, I can usually head her off from this by alternating being stern with being silly, but I’ve just sort of developed this feeling when we’re doing writing stuff-- often, what she’ll flip out about is that something she’s done a thousand times is suddenly “too hard” and she “can’t do it”, so if I try to make her do something too challenging when she’s not in the mood, it’s this huge pointless stupid fight. So I’ll make deals with her before there’s any sign of upset, and I’ve been working with her on helping her write by making her do all the words she knows already, and then I’ll make her sound out the ones I’m sure she can get, and then if I know there are non-phonetic bits or a word is more than seven letters long (and not a compound of shorter words she knows) I’ll just give it to her.  (The problem in this is that of course I’m a 40 year old woman fluent in English, and I don’t remember learning to read, and a lot of times I don’t realize a word doesn’t make any phonetical sense at all until I’m halfway through it. And I’m sure I’m giving away too much, but I’m mostly just trying to get her to come along on momentum so we can do more cool stuff, so.)

In the evenings after the kids go to bed we’ve been hearing a lot of talking over the upstairs hallway baby monitor and tonight MathMom finally found out what’s been going on:

They’re homeschooling their stuffed animals. Every night after bed, the boy sets his up and gives them ninja lessons and then sleeps during their recess. The girl sets hers up and is teaching them to read.  😭😍