RatCreature's Journal

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth the risk (and extra hassle, tbh, what with reservation and name check-in) to watch Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in the cinema.

The mainstream reviews I've seen all sound really positive, otoh I haven't seen anyone squee about it in my DW network, and I'm unfamiliar with the comic character this is based on and have no prior fannish interest in him.

I'm also a bit unsure how risky sitting in a cinema for two hours is. Considering that I'm now fully vaxxed and cinemas are still requiring masks and distancing, and only let you in if you are vaccinated, recovered or recently tested (though depending on the cinema the tested option is being phased out here), it would probably not be that risky, except that people can take masks off for eating and drinking in cinemas, so that makes it more like indoor dining, which is high risk. And if I skip the popcorn myself and keep my mask on throughout (and I now commonly use the FFP2 kind, so that gives some protection for yourself) I probably would have to deal with my glasses fogging up at some point. Even with my best efforts for a tight fit with the wire and taping up the small gaps near my nose, that tape starts to fail at 30-40 minutes, since the moisture of the breath it blocks eventually starts to loosen it. And then the glasses fog up.

Then there is the whole extra hassle of having to reserve and buy your tickets online now and check in with your name for contact tracing, when I just used to buy my cinema tickets in person with money without anyone collecting my data. I mean presumably they aren't allowed to do anything with this personal data, but then nobody is supposed to make unsolicited phone calls to sell me stuff either, yet that happens.

So I'm waffling whether it's really worth it.

Unfortunately I didn't get to see any sun today, even though theoretically there still might have been almost seven and a half hours of sunlight. If it hadn't been overcast, gloomy and raining all day, that is.

But from now on things slowly are looking up again in this hemisphere. :D And I did treat myself to some tasty apple-caramel-spice cake from my favorite bakery.

I should not have read while walking. I stumbled over some uneven pavement and fell down. I didn't hurt myself too badly, mostly my hands, one wrist and both my knees are scaped up, but my ebook reader was destroyed. :((( Also my trousers, but I mostly feel the loss of my ereader.

I mean, I feel lucky that I didn't break my right wrist -- I awkwardly landed on that since that hand was holding the ereader and scraped its outside, but I guess the device absorbed quite a bit of force (it actually bent and partly shattered). Or damaged my new glasses which were far more expensive than my ereader.

But still. I really liked that ereader, and it wasn't that old either.

( ETA: a picture of the casualty. )

I really hope summer will get a bit drier as it goes on. However, I'd be happy if it stayed on the cool side, because anything above 25°C makes me miserable. Though actually according to a weather press notice I just read, it turns out the average June temperature has been almost two degrees above the long term average here, but I guess it didn't feel like it because it's been much wetter than usual (135l per sqm instead of 70l per sqm).

Anyway, I feel like indulging the time honored tradition of weather griping, so have a poll:

Why do rotting potatoes smell so much worse than any other rotting fruit or vegetable?! And how can it get so bad so quickly? I swear a few days ago there was no sign of a potato liquifying in my storage box. Ew, ew, ew.

I've been doing HabitRPG for a bit now, and this approach has been working for motivation in some respects, for example I managed to do my dishes every evening instead of letting them pile up for days since I started, and my kitchen has been much more functional. I mean, I have no idea why the reward of getting stuff to hatch virtual zombie dragons works better as motivation than just not having to shift around piles of accumulated dirty dishes whenever I want to prepare food, but it does.

On the other hand, for more irregular cleaning tasks and my to-do list the success has been middling. In the past three weeks I did some cleaning, but I'm not sure whether it has been more than usual.

For accomplishing a regular bedtime before 1 a.m. as a habit it has not worked so far. So results are mixed, but my kitchen sink has been bio-hazard free for three weeks now, so that is something.

For quite some time there has been a big spider living in my bathroom (not tropical spider big, but really big for these parts). Since there are no dangerous ones here, I have nothing against spiders (as long as they don't drop onto me) so I left it in peace. And just now I looked at its web (it's visible from my toilet, so I can't help but notice the developments), and I think it must have reproduced, because there are now something like two dozen tiny things in the web, which has a different shape than usual too, like with a ball structure in the middle rather than just a few strands (it never made a really nice regular web, just some threads). And while I can't get quite close enough without a ladder to be a hundred percent certain, I'm fairly sure the tiny things look like lots of little spiders. So now there is a developing nest of them or something. I don't think I've ever actually seen (or rather noticed) baby spiders outside of nature documentaries before.

I am using energy saving light bulbs for lamps I leave on for a long time, and just now the bulb in my bedroom started flickering. Which was fine, it had lasted some years, much longer than a regular incandescent bulb, just as advertised. Unfortunately it also started to emit an absolutely disgusting chemical smell (like solvents or melting plastic or something like that), that became noticeable as I got close to change it. I know of course that they are toxic if they break, but this one was still whole and no plastic parts had visibly melted either, and certainly they don't normally to smell like that. (I also use one of these in a desktop lamp for getting bright, more blue-spectrum daylight so that I can avoid color distortion, and my nose tends to be quite near that, closer than it came to this one while changing.)

Either way, I changed it, and ventilated the room, but this really makes me wonder what level of chemicals this thing released during its normal function, because clearly something was released at a higher level in its malfunction phase, like maybe the plastic part with the electronics got hotter than usual and thus more of something evaporated or something. Seriously, it was extremely unpleasant.

I had heard critics of these bulbs claim all sorts of negative things, including harmful chemical emissions, but had always assumed them to be somewhat overblown (I mean, I'm not unconcerned about environmental toxins, but for the most part try not to be too alarmist). But yeah, that smell was not environmentally friendly, that's for sure.

I've been watching some episodes of that Hoarders reality tv show after I came across clips from it somewhere that piqued my curiosity, and I'm really baffled. Not so much by the mindsets that lead to keeping all kinds of stuff including junk, and letting your living space deteriorate, as that I don't understand how many of them could have had the money and time to acquire all these things in the first place.

Because of this I keep finding the cases with people who really just have junk (like things they collected from dumpsters or even empty boxes or plastic bottles or such) far more comprehensible than the people with piles and piles of clothes, stuffed animals, or other things they paid for. Even if you buy second hand on some flea market, with those massive volumes that has to add up significantly, doesn't it?

I'm fairly sure that the main reason my own place doesn't look worse is that I have neither money nor inclination for the process to acquire things to begin with. I like having things well enough, but shopping is awful, and comparing prices or looking for bargains or searching for things is worse. (You see, I'm not fond of flea markets or such.) I don't even like looking for comics all that much. Actually one of the reasons why I hang onto semi-broken things myself is to avoid buying new ones, and not just because of the money. Like for example I have this immersion blender, and parts of the plastic have broken off, so it is rather less usable, because the part that properly keeps the distance between the blades and the bottom is not working as intended anymore. However you can still blend things with it of you take care. I use this tool fairly often, so I'm annoyed quite a often too, and immersion blenders aren't *that* expensive, and yet. It's been broken for many months now. Or how I've been living with some bare light bulbs for over 15 years to avoid having to buy ceiling lamps or lampshades or the like, when just having the bulb is adequate for having light.

I also have some truly broken things for which I had to get replacements yet still haven't thrown away the old ones, but that is mostly old electronics, like my broken digital camera, because I am too lazy to bring them to the recycling collection place for specialized waste, but feel bad about putting them in the trash against the rules.

IMO the only shopping that is remotely tolerable is restocking things that I know where to buy at an acceptable price, so that no choices or comparisons or other tedious (or even anxiety inducing) efforts need to be made. So I'm baffled that all these people get a kick out of acquiring things, when it takes so much effort, time and financial resources, whereas I understand the inertia, vague or aborted ideas and sentimental attachments that lead to keeping stuff that is already there quite well. I suppose my own hoarding tendencies are kept in check sufficiently on the acquisition side so problems on the disposal side just can't escalate too badly.

Not a single goal? Here I had counted on you to put a damper the football craziness (and its related inconveniences for the non-football fans) here, and instead you let yourselves be beaten this badly, and now it's worse than ever. Just -- WTF, Argentina? You seemed so certain you'd win, too.

I guess, I ought to be less Scrooge-like and be happy that other people are having fun, but do they have to honk this much?