Procyon

Another week in February, another con! As was the case last year, I would be "maxing out" my visit to Nordic Fuzzcon: flying in on Monday (two days early) and out the following Monday. My usual roommate Ethan is on staff and always arrives early and leaves late himself, and although 7 days is a lot for a single con it has actually turned out to be convenient for other reasons: Malmö is just across the bridge from Copenhagen where I used to live and work, and Tuesday (when the con is not fully up and running yet) offers a perfect opportunity to go visit my old institute and see some of the people I used to hang out with when I lived there.

My flight out from Manchester was late on Monday, and even though I had to catch a rail replacement bus to the airport this actually ended up being faster than the usual train route anyway and I made it to the airport in loads of time before my flight. I was pleased to discover that even Easyjet has now moved to the brand-new Terminal 2 and I no longer had to suffer through the overcrowded mess and long security lines of Manchester T1, so I had a weak beer and a pie at an upstairs pub while I sent a few final work e-mails, then went to board the flight. I touched down into CPH at around 10pm and was at the con shortly before midnight. I met up with Ethan in the room (extra-conveniently located this year on the lowest guest room floor of the main hotel) and went to bed shortly after.

Tuesday was my day in Copenhagen, so after an early breakfast I boarded the train back across the Oresund and made my way over to my former institute. There was no rush to get there because a student's PhD defense was on that morning and most of the staff and postdocs were - supposedly - going to be in attendance until it was completed around 11am. I arrived around then, but it turned out that attendance at the PhD defense and post PhD defense was remarkably thin (almost none of the senior staff were there) and as my postdoc hosts were feeling guilty about that I ended up mostly being roped into joining the post-defense announcement ceremony, celebratory lunch, and post-lunch tour of the instrument he worked on in his lab just to fill in the numbers (which resulted in walking back and forth between two campus buildings four or five times in the span of about two hours). At 2pm I gave a short talk (which was reasonably well-attended among the postdocs, although the senior staff were again basically entirely absent) and then had a long chat with my nominal former supervisor there, initially mostly about science although it somewhat derailed into a conversation of AI usage in astronomy (and me attempting to explain why I was largely against it on principle, which was not his opinion).

After that we went to dinner, which I had expected to just be a casual event with my postdoc friends - although unexpectedly my former supervisor came along as well, which somewhat quashed the irreverent conversations I normally have with that bunch but it was still a good time, and he even was able to pay for the meal off of his grant. He didn't join for the subsequent visit to a cocktail bar, but my other friends all came along and we were able to swap the latest gossip (there wasn't much) before the bar closed around midnight and it was time for us to disperse.

Wednesday is when the con started for real, although I didn't get up to very much in practice - unfortunately I had a bunch of e-mails to deal with (one of my students made an interesting/important discovery over the weekend and we had to secure a bunch of observations very quickly) and so I was mostly in the room (although I went over to the "Valhalla" venue later in the evening to attend the Barq panel, and had dinner there). I joined a group of friends in Karpour and Henrieke's room to watch the opening ceremonies stream on the hotel TV later in the evening - and then went to hold our place in line for the pub quiz, which started at 11pm and went well past midnight. Like last year, this was a lot of fun: the quizmaster's favourite topics were very much in line with our group's knowlege set (80s-90s music, science, geography) and we were familiar with his "patterns", so we did pretty well - although we also didn't know lots of stuff (including in particular two extremely obscure astronomy questions) and as the randomly-assigned rival team's sheet we were marking at the end was way ahead of us, we assumed we were not going to be in the top 3 this year. However, it turns out that we were marking the winning team's sheet and in fact we managed a result that arguably was better than winning: we'd previously named our team "And In Third Place" as a joke just to seed confusion in case we did end up at the top, and we actually did win third place, causing the quizmaster to crack up as he was reading out our name and position to the bewilderment of the rest of the audience. I went back to the room once the quiz ended, and was about to go to bed when Lupe and Wolfie messaged me inviting them over to their hotel for a beer (they had arrived but were too late to get a badge to enter the conspace) - which I did, joining them and one of their friends first in the bar and then up in the room for a long chat. At 3am I finally wandered back through the cold to my hotel to turn in for the night.

Thursday started off a bit slowly. After some initial fursuiting I met up with Baloki later in the afternoon though to walk around the Clarion conspace for a bit, and as we were thinking about going for a late lunch we ran into Wolfie and invited him come along as well, making our way over to the food hall. I went for a salad bowl while the others had sandwiches, and as the beer selection there was much better than at the hotel we lingered for a while before returning. Later that evening was the con's "Afterbark" event ("relaxed" dress code), which thankfully was over in the Valhalla venue which meant that I didn't have to deal with any of the crowds or queues that inevitably accompany these things (I was in the Clarion and had no interest in any Afterbark activities). I was a little worried that the big event over in the other venue would drain the energy from the Clarion space but it was still busy enough to have a good vibe about the bar and conspace - as well as at the dance later which I suited up as Cami for, and was able to stay out for quite a while as they had a powerful fan blasting the dance floor that I could station myself in front of to stay (relatively) cool even while dancing.

Friday's main event was the "open house" when they allow (indeed, invite) the broader community to come by the con and walk around the main conspaces. This is always a fursuiting highlight, because there are lots of curious children and parents milling about fascinated by the big cute fluffy animals hanging out everywhere, and it's very easy to have simple and fun interactions with lots of people - and of course it was the same this year, both inside the con and outside (where it was nice and cold!) Later on was a "ferals" (i.e., non-anthro characters) meet in the early afternoon, which I decided to drop by for since this is a meet concept I'd been hoping to see at a con for a long time but had never actually ever seen scheduled. (Amusingly, in 2007 or so I remember seeing a flyer at a con advertising a "Feral party" but figured out later that this meant Feral the Ontario camping con, not feral characters.) I dropped by that and it was fine; chatted with some interesting people although didn't really follow up and maintain that connection. Ethan had attended the panel with me and he and I were lingering at the entrance outside after it ended, and while we were standing there people kept coming up to us asking if we were managing the Game Changer queue (Ethan was wearing his staff lanyard) - which we weren't, but as I had nothing else on I decided to go ahead and attend, and it was pretty fun (it leaned much more heavily on the improv show side this year compared to the game show side). Later on (after some brief fursuiting) I went to get dinner with Slycat, Zahzu and her partner Muse - none of whom I knew super well but we all were excited to get Indian food and everyone bonded really well over that. When returned the Grimnir concert was on, and with Baloki, Wolfie, and Lupe all planning on attending that I figured I'd give it a try as well. It was a lot of fun - heavy metal is not really my style but I appreciate its energy, and the old-Norse folk style of the band was a fun and unique aesthetic even if the combination of flute and electric guitar never quite "worked" for me. They also clearly knew who they were performing for, starting off the concert with the lead the lead guitarist wearing a "wolfskin" over his head but it was a cute furry-style wolf face. After that I followed Lupe, Wolfie, and some Berlin furs they knew to have a few drinks in the open space where the Artist Alley was taking place during the afternoon and remained there for a while, and then I returned the favor from Wednesday night by having them up to my room for a few more beers I'd brought from "home" to continue the conversation, until it became time for bed.

After breakfast on Saturday I went to my usual "special interest" meetup that was unusually scheduled in the morning ths year. Last year this was kind of awkward since I didn't really know anyone, but amusingly someone I'd met the previous day was there and since I actually had someone to talk to (and pull others into conversations with) I ended up sticking around until the end this time, or indeed even later than that. I wasn't in a rush, because unfortunately - but unsurprisingly - the fursuit parade through the city was cancelled on account of the rain that was falling, turning the snow outside into slush puddles. (Even though this was forecasted it was somewhat tragic, since up until that point the con had perfect weather for outdoor suiting - cold and dry). This freed up some time for other things though, so I did a bit more suiting, and made another run through the Artist's Alley (originally to pick up Baloki's sketchbook, but I also got another sketch from Zahzu after spotting that she had got a table for that day). That evening Lupestripe had invited me and some others to a mini pub crawl around Malmö. We started at Brew Dog at 5:30pm, moved on to a British pub, then tried to get into a nearby microbrew pub but they were full so we made our way to the Ukrainian Beer Bar, which served both Ukrainian beer and food so we stayed there for dinner as well (my first time having Ukrainan food). I returned to the con and the group dispersed, but I followed Wolfie to one of the side bars in the Clarion and hung out with a different group of his friends from VRChat for a little while (which included an Icelandic furry who was dating a different fur from New Mexico - which was a funny coincidence, even if the New Mexican fur wasn't actually there at the con). I got into suit and fursuited for the rest of the evening, hitting the dance until late.

The con felt like it has been going on forever by Sunday, but also seemed to be ending far too soon! I again met up with Karpour and his group to watch the closing ceremonies from their room on the TV, and then scampered off to my room to watch the Olympic hockey final (unfortunately the TV was not working and I didn't have an HDMI cable so I had to settle for watching a stream in Swedish on my laptop). The final was something of a best/worst case scenario for me, in that the two teams/countries I support (the US and Canada) were playing for the gold. This has been a dilemma for me since at least the 2004 Olympics (my dad, the one responsible for my interest in hockey to begin with, is Canadian, but I lived in the US for almost my whole life up to 2015) but I long ago decided to "follow my emotions" and support the US when it came to it (they are at least the underdog in hockey). This year that felt particularly conflicting, but sports isn't politics (or shouldn't be!) and in any case it was a fun game to watch, close the whole way through and the US pulling out an overtime victory despite being generally outplayed for most of the second and third periods. After that I caught up with Baloki and his friends downstairs and he and I then went to get dinner near his hotel. I then returned to the Clarion, where Karpour and Henrieke were hosting what was originally a small room gathering for Jackbox games but after an hour or so became something quite different when none other than Mausie (the original NFC con mascot) showed up and stayed around for a while, posing and playing around with the rest of us (and leading to lots of silly photos). Eventually he departed and things settled down a bit, and we had a good time for the rest of the evening.

And then today it was finally time to head home. I woke up a little before 9am, met up with Baloki and his friend at the train station, and we made our way to the airport. The flight was a little late and was just two hours, enough time to write most of this entry - the chipper nature of which is very different from my emotions as of when I finally got home at 5pm or for the rest of the evening, due to some things that happened on the train ride over and when I returned home. The explanation of that will have to be in a non-public entry.

It was another furcon weekend for me (there are a lot of them this time of year) - the occasion this time being Scotiacon, the UK's "other" big hotel con. Since I started going in 2022 this has always been a bit of a side event from my perspective: I've never stayed in the main hotel or attended the con from start to finish. In fact, for the past two years in particular I had business trips abroad immediately after the con that meant I was basically just attending for one day only, leaving early Sunday morning to make my way to Munich (2024) or Baltimore (2025). This year I had no such direct conflicts, although with FC only a few weeks gone by and Nordic Fuzzcon starting just one week from now, I still decided on partial attendance: I would come up on Saturday morning and leave on Monday morning, staying on my own in an off-site hotel about a 5-minute walk from the convention. That would give me two full evenings at the con at the peak of the weekend, which sounded like a reasonable benefit.

I reached the con at around 3pm on Saturday, and after a bit of time getting set up in my hotel room I wandered over to the hotel and found Patter, Urban, and Taneli sitting in the lobby, who I joined. More friends from the group showed up soon after and - with seats in the lobby being a precious commodity - we ended up basically holding down the table for the entirety of the evening as various other friends came through to join us for a while, which was pleasant. Unfortunately the fire alarm went off a little before 1am, but as I was close to calling it a night by that point anyway I decided to just make my way back to my off-site hotel and crash a little early.

Thankfully I slept pretty well, and after breakfast the next morning (which was free on account of winning the hotel's silly scratch-card check-in promotion) I made my way back over to the convention again. Doveux and Patter were going to "Trudge", an audience-interactive improv RPG panel, which sounded fun although ended up mostly being audience members competing to provide the most outrageously lewd suggestions to further the "plot". After that was my one (and only) fursuit session, which was actually pretty good - I saw a lot of people I knew, and a lot of people around the con in general wanted to take pictures or hug/interact. So even though the conspace is quite small and there wasn't much area to roam about in, I had a good time and was able to dog about for close to two hours.

The main event that day was going to be a beer tasting room party (everyone brings four beers to share), but since my room didn't have a fridge I took my "supplies" and ran them over to Doveux's room over in the Premier Inn, just across the river from the con. He was there on his own taking a break so I sat down to just talk and chill for an hour or so as the beers (marginally) chilled themselves in the minifridge, and then we walked back to the main hotel for the party. That was also quite a lot of fun; it was a good group of about seven or eight people including the very cheerful host Ipequay, who had come over from the US. We ordered pizza towards the end (delivered to us by none other than Mohammed Ali the Deliveroo cyclist) before eventually heading back down to the lobby for a while. A few more lobby beers followed and some others joined the group even as others drifted off for the night. I remained there until about 3am before I finally made my way through the rain back to my hotel.

Somewhat to my surprise I woke up at around 10am without so much as a headache (I had been drinking all evening almost continuously, but maybe my strategy of sticking to sampler glasses during the tasting event actually worked and I drank less than I feared). I had enough time to make a brief stop in the conspace to see if the fursuit alcohol spray bottle that had gone missing in the (extremely overcrowded and cluttered) fursuit lounge had turned up, which it hadn't. And then it was off to the train station for the long-ish train journey back home.

It was a fun convention, and at least met (and probably exceeded) expectations - I was never bored, saw everyone I hoped to see, and met some cool new people as well. There was a bit of residual drama from last years events that echoed in the fragments of certain conversations - which has provided fodder to think about, although for the time being I won't write it about here. Nordic Fuzzcon - just a week away - will surely be much more signficant on that front, and we'll see how that goes...

Returning back "home" has been something of a rude awakening following the long and generally pleasant (if very busy) trip around the US the first half of this month.

Starting with the prosaic: I had absolutely terrible jet lag this time around. After most of my recent trips to North America I've been able to switch back to the UK clock without missing a beat, but for almost the entirety of the first week back here I found myself waking up around 3am or earlier, and thus ending up tossing in bed or awake in the dead of night with nothing to do. By (last) Saturday I was waking up closer to 6am and I figured I was making progress, but then I made the catastrophic mistake of going for a "nap" around 8am that turned into a six-hour sleep in the middle of the day, and for the next few days I was now having the opposite form of jet lag - unable to get to sleep until 5am and finding it devastatingly hard to be up at reasonable working hours. By the middle of the following week I had mostly recovered. But there's been lots of other negative developments in the meantime that have left me in a rather dismayed state going into this weekend.

The first bit of bad news hit right away on the first day back at work: the grant application that I'd written a year ago was rejected, meaning that I'm now 0 for 4 on these grants over my career (which, statistically, are the "easiest" to get since they're comparatively modest in size). This was not extremely surprising in that I (a) was proposing on a somewhat niche topic this time, and (b) had very little time to prepare and refine the grant application, as last February was extraordinarily busy for me due to my decision to chair a major telescope committee. Still, the open possibility that I might get this grant was one of the conditional factors in not writing any applications elsewhere this year. Furthermore, the adverse impact is compounded by the fact that no one in my department was awarded one of these grants in this cycle, and given that things like travel, visitor, equipment, teaching relief, and student funding are all tied in various ways to how much grant income the department as a whole is bringing in, it is not hard to imagine that the long-term outlook at work is going to be one of decline: fewer PhD students, more Master's teaching, less support for travel and equipment, worse office conditions. (And that's before considering the other piece of bad news involving the department's biggest grant-supported project of all, which I'll come back to later.)

The second piece of dismaying news was the results of grading my the coursework and exam from my statistics class. Since the coursework was due in December and the exam took place in early January this was my first priority on returning, and it took up most of the first week. While I'm used to the results from this being pretty dismal, this year they were even more dismal than normal: the mean of the exam was 30%. I spend so much time and energy on this class (I do so much "above and beyond" stuff), yet it's clear that most students are not even retaining the very basics of the material. I don't feel that this is my fault (it is largely a reflection of the system-wide problem that UK universities see Master's programs as source of income and are perfectly happy to fill course rosters with highly underprepared students from abroad)... but it is demotivating anyway; while there are a handful of good students this year one really wonders if this small cohort is enough to justify me (and others!) devoting hundreds of hours of my time year on year. I still largely enjoy teaching and the material in general (although after 9 years this course is admittedly feeing a bit stagnant). But it's very far from the ideal of teaching.

On the maybe less serious side, there has been some drama afoot at the office. An awkward situation has developed involving the PhD student allocation process: the department head recently decided that each member of faculty is heretofore only allowed to supervise three PhD students at a time, a rule that in practice only affects a small cluster of people (including me) with three or more students already. I think it's a dumb rule and have said so (but left it at that). But another more junior faculty member that I talk to a lot in and out of work, and who has the same perspective as mine, has become highly bent out of shape over the question, and has been trying to recruit the existing students to his "cause" and in the process made quite a few supposedly inappropriate remarks on the issue (and, apparently, other issues). So I'm having to now navigate some weird fault lines that have sprung up over this. In the short term the main effect is that the post-work Friday pub outing has become fragmented with the students going to one place and a specific faculty circle to another venue. This has proven to not be entirely a bad thing since I can be a lot less guarded amongst a small group of people of my career stage versus at the huge 20+ person student/postdoc/staff mixed pub outings we did in the past. But it does seem like something has been lost, and there are going to be some complex social dynamics when the other faculty member returns from the trip to Japan he's currently on.

The next item is still a rumor, but it's a credible one as the writing has been on the wall for a while. Even since I arrived at this university (and from long before that), a group of my colleagues in the department has been trying to develop and eventually build a new 4-meter telescope optimized for time-domain astronomy (i.e. my research area, so it would be a very useful facility for me to use and has been one of the best reasons for me not to try to seek jobs elsewhere). They raised millions of pounds - some of it from our own university management who saw it as an investment, but also from the UK science funding council (STFC) and from a large institute in Spain - but it's not been quite enough to start construction, and STFC in particular is getting impatient that the committed money (which dates back more than five years) has been sitting unused for so long waiting for the project to come together. In September I went around asking the project development team what's really happening, and they said they were hoping to get China to buy-in but absent a clear decision on that by January the project would probably fold. I thought an announcement might be made at a big faculty meeting that happened the week I was away but the minutes that were sent around the following week contained nothing specific. However, one other faculty member told me today that she'd been told in fairly certain terms that the project had indeed been terminated. If that's true, it means even more dismal atmosphere at the department (there will be layoffs of the projects technical staff, etc.) and future threats to our semi-priveleged position within the university - you can bet the university management is going to ask questions why the (probable) million plus they spent on developing the project and committed to its future operations came to nothing.

On top of all of this is, of course, the steady drumbeat of bad news at the global scale, most of it originating from the odious regime in charge of my home country. A quasi-fascist police force mudering people in the streets. Threats to Denmark (of all places!) and the resulting corrosion of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Maybe this is a political nadir and will soon be the turning point for a backlash and restoration to some degree of normalcy (as 2020 proved to be). Or maybe this is just a portent of even worse things to come. I don't really know.


In the meantime, work has at least returned to a manageable state for a while. Teaching is done, grading is done, and other than one relatively straightforward proposal deadline next week there are no major deadlines to worry about. This winter lull has been a feature of many of my years here (although not last year, which was insanely busy on account of the JWST panel I volunteered to serve on) and it will last a few weeks yet. So far I've mostly been using it to play catch-up on a bunch of minor tasks, and to do a little bit of pre-planning for what is likely to be a complicated spring travel schedule. Perhaps I should be doing something more significant with my time. As has been the dilemma for years, I never know whether I should be working even harder to help me crack through this barrier that has continued to frustrate my career and life goals for almost a decade... or if I should just accept what life has dealt at this point and work to satisfy the basic requirements of the job and no more. It's hard to know, but it's becoming hard to envision what my future or even my goals are at this point in general. But for today, at least, I'm probably going to take the time to try and relax.

The end of the AAS meeting, unusually, saw me flying back to Albuquerque - there was a convenient, and short, late flight out in the evening after all the talks and presentations that still arrived in Albuquerque at a reasonable hour (around 10pm). With a week to kill between AAS and FC this year anyway, I decided that I'd defer my annual visit-friends-in-Albuquerque day until after the meeting.

It turned out that my grad school friend was out of town, though, and my brother (who I was staying with) elected to go skiing as a minor snowstorm had finally come through the state over the past few days, so I had the morning and afternoon to kill. (Had I checked the weather more carefully I might have used this time to go skiing myself, but my equipment was left in Socorro.) This was probably just as well because that week was the first normal work week after the holidays, and with my attention completely focused on the AAS meeting and paper submission a huge work e-mail backlog had built up that needed dealing with before my next trip that would already be starting the following day. I walked over to a nearby coffee shop and sat at a window, watching the (very light) snow fall outside as I tried to get as much dealt with as I could for much of the day.

That evening my plans involved meeting up with Sabot and Carol at a local taproom and pizza restaurant, so once "beer hour" approached I grabbed an Uber across town to the west side and meet up with them. I was a bit early and grabbed a beer and table, taking longer than I should have to realize that they were actually already there and sat at the table right next to me. I quickly moved over and we yapped for a while as I followed up the first beer with a couple more and a mandatory green chile pepperoni pizza. As we were finishing, a live band started setting up threateningly close to the table so we decided to move back to Sabot and Carol's place for bourbon before I again caught a ride back to my brother's place for the evening.


The next morning it was time to travel onward to my next destination, which was somewhat outside my own usual circle of winter-vacation destinations: Tampa, Florida. Nexrad had invited me to visit him there numerous times in the past but as I rarely end up in that region it's never been something I could easily tack onto an existing trip nor close enough to where I live to make a destination on its own. But this year I had just enough time to slot that into my other plans, and so off I went!

Nex picked me up at the airport and we drove back to his place, stopping to pick up takeaway Chinese at a local joint. The next day the weather was beautiful (not actually guaranteed in Florida!) and we opted for a couple of outdoors spots - in the morning we visited a botanical gardens on the bay shore near downtown Sarasota, and then in the afternoon we drove inland to visit Myakka State Park. The latter was particularly interesting since although I'd been to Floria before, I'd never actually been anywhere except the cities and interstates and it was interesting to see a new and unfamiliar biome - palmetto forests, oak woods, and the occasional "prairie" clearing. Also, there were alligators - lots of them in places, lounging in the waterside. (Lots of other wildlife, too, including many different unfamiliar birds). After that we picked up Nex's husband Loopy and went to a Peruvian restaurant for dinner before finally concluding the evening.

But this was another quick visit, so on Monday it was already time to depart: my flight out was at noon to head back west again, almost all the way to the West Coast. The ultimate destination would of course be Further Confusion, but with a few weekdays to get through in the meantime I decided to slot in a low-key "work" visit. One of my grad school friends is now faculty at UC Davis, and while he works in a different field than me, the department there does have at least one faculty member in my area and I figured it might be a good place to drop by - particularly when, after we had plenty of time to chat and catch up at a mutual friend's wedding back in September - he offered to let me stay at his place and set me up with a talk.


I landed on Monday evening, took a taxi to his place, and after some short conversation and early bedtime we were off to his workplace the next morning. It was a pretty casual visit in which I was mostly free to myself (and as I was still struggling with an e-mail backlog, that was fine). But the senior emeritus professor who conceived the LSST (now Rubin Observatory) project had actually signed up to meet me, so I had a half hour chat (and mini-lab tour) with him in between various coffee runs to the campus Peet's (much as we did during the year we overlapped as postdocs at Caltech).

My friend is married and has two children now. I sometimes have mixed feelings about visiting friends with kids, since it can be a somewhat uncomfortable reminder about how different my life is now from society's conventional expectations and I don't always entirely know how to handle very young children in particular. This was a more amusing visit than usual though, since both children are old enough to actually hold a conversation and the overall family dynamic (two boys, academic parents) is similar to the one I grew up in myself. (Anyway, they also had a cute and chill dog.)

I gave my talk the next morning, which went well, and I used the afternoon to catch up on a few more tasks. But this was yet another super quick trip, as that evening I'd be moving on to my next (and last) destination on this trip - this time by train, via Amtrak to San Jose.

I started the year off by doing something I've been considering for a long time - finally exporting my entire, 22-year-old LiveJournal history onto another site, specifically this one. I have been pondering this on and off for a few years now: the number of friends who are active on LJ has continually dwindled over the years (the number currently stands at two), and my engagement with the place has felt more and more questionable over the years. The site was sold to a Russian company well over a decade ago, which initially wasn't a problem, but as the Russian government has become more and more oppressive over the years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable that the definitive written account of my entire adult life is hosted exclusively in a hostile foreign country. On top of that, most of my readers these days are probably not on LJ - and while the LJ experience is largely fine for those with registered accounts, anyone without one is subject to irritating advertisements (mostly unintelligible Russian ones) and that's not really the experience I would like to subject my friends to when they come to check in on my life.

This has all been the case for a while, but what eventually tipped things over the edge was an announcement that LJ is going to require its users to register with a Russian government digital ID to continue to use the site. As I understand the situation (from a Bluesky thread that made the rounds yesterday), foreign-language posters will be exempted... but as a consequence the site is going to have to wall off Russian from non-Russian users almost entirely, and it's unclear what incentive the developers have to maintain the non-Russian part given that Western sanctions prohibit most forms of advertising payment from the outside. I have a couple of low-quality backups on my laptop, but they're lacking formatting, material behind cuts, and various other things, and restoring them to something readable would be incredibly unwieldy were LJ to just... disappear with no warning; nor would there be any way of announcing where I'd be moving.

This probably won't happen. Still, I had some time to kill this week and New Year Day's seemed an appropriate time to get started on a new site. So here I am.

The import was pretty painless - or at least it should have been. I had to plead with the developers to ask them remove "raccoon" from the list of banned account words (lol), but thankfully they did so almost immediately. (The account names "procyon" and "procyonid" were, alas, taken). I then had the brilliant idea that I would repost my old entries manually instead of trusting the automatic import system... but gave up after the first 200 entries or so when I realized that that would literally require days of tedious effort and was prone to mistakes with setting the dates correctly. (Additionally, skimming through so many old entries was starting to get genuinely chronologically disorienting.) Fortunately, the automatic import feature ran flawlessly (although I then had to go back and delete all the duplicates from the old entries I did manually crosspost), and the last two decades of my life are now safely duplicated here.

For now my presence here is primarily as a backup, and to provide an alternative for readers who would like to learn what I'm up to without being clogged by advertisements: I'll be cross-posting to both places... at least for now, and probably for as long as I still have friends over on the other place.

It's the holidays again, which means finally I have a break. I finished the paper draft that had been dogging me on the 23rd, clearing up the next few days to spend with family and friends enjoying the season as best I can.

As has been the case for a few years in a row now, the weather has not been feeling particularly seasonable - almost every day since I returned to New Mexico has seen record-setting or near-record-setting warmth, with conditions that are more like April (or October) than December. I can't complain too much about this; the sunshine is a nice contrast to the weather in the UK this time of year and the warmth (and lack of wind) made the luminaria set-up on Christmas Eve comfortable and easy. My brother came down from Albuquerque for much longer than usual (after breaking up with his long-term girlfriend this spring, he had no particular reason to rush back up) - meaning the whole family was here for a few days, although the four days were probably enough as my brother has a tendency to get rude and moody at times.

Even though my hometown is tiny, there have been lots of good social things to do as well. The neighbors had their usual Christmas Eve party, which was fun (even if it's mostly my parents' friends, of course). We had company over for Christmas dinner as well (same disclaimer applies, but it was still good company). One of my close high school friends was back in town again this year; he (and his brother, who still lives in town) came over a couple times to hang out and the three of us also went over to a local bar yesterday afternoon for a couple hours to reminisce on old times.

At the same time, some of the same ennui of Christmases past has returned a little bit this year. Things are fine... but are they getting better? Do I have a means to make them better? Ah, well. I'll leave the deeper thoughts for my next entry in a day or two, and will try to enjoy the things that remain good in my life while I have the chance.

My flight into Chicago touched down shortly before midnight on Thursday, and after a few minutes of searching I was able to track down the hotel shuttle and make my way over to my quarters for the night. I was on a different shuttle from usual because I was staying at a different hotel from usual: for the first time ever, this year I did not find a way into the main hotel and so would be staying at one of the overflows (the Aloft, about a 10 minute walk away from the convention center).

A lot of things about this year were different, in fact, although some of these differences were really reversions to past form. A lot of old friends weren't there: MFF increasingly seems to be off the radar for the west coast furry contingent, and there were few familiar faces from at least that phase of my life. On the other hand, some older friends re-emerged to attend this year for the first time in a while: Fylwind (who I roomed with in 2022 but didn't come last year), Izixs (who hasn't been to MFF since probably 2019), Astro (who probably hasn't been since 2015!), and Aeron (same as Astro). I also was without my fursuit, and went into the con in a fairly anxious state that never fully subsided... but I'll get to that later.

I was rooming with Fylwind and Izixs this year, although Fylwind was not arriving until Friday and Izixs was already asleep in bed by the time I reached the room. Because unfortunately we only were able to get a king bed in the room draw, Izixs had brought an air mattress and set it up on the floor - I'd agreed to sleep there for the duration of the con since I'd failed to obtain anything better off-block. I quietly changed upon entry and settled into the sheets that had been left there. However, a wicked draft was coming in off the window and A/C unit (it was a very cold night outside) and pretty soon I found myself curled up against the cold. Draping a jacket and trying to plug the draft with pillows didn't work, so around 3:30am I hunted down the thermostat to find that the heating was off entirely! Izixs, being an arctic dragon, had apparently not noticed. I turned on the heat and was able to sleep soundly soon after that.

The following morning Izixs and I made our way over to the next-door mall to hunt for breakfast, but only found a Cinnabon and had to make do with that (which wasn't a terrible decision, to be honest). We then went over to the convention center, and Izixs peeled off to go to a panel while I met up Aeron who had made it over to the con from the shuttle hotel (Astro was delayed due to a work call he had to stay for). Aeron and I wandered around the conspace for a while and dropped by a panel on invasive species, but Astro arrived in the middle of that and I quickly scampered off to meet him and make our way to our "old" MFF hangout (Red Bar) for a quick drink before dinner.

Friday dinner was my annual MFF physics meet up, and I was pleased that we had a really good crowd this year: there were of course me, Izixs, Fylwind, and Astro, plus Tundra (new to the event), Vanen, and a couple +1's. We had a good conversation (and a couple good beers) before moving on for the evening. Astro, Aeron and I went over to the pinball machines and played there for a while (I was as bad as always) before eventually calling it a night a little on the early side as I was unexpectedly tired.

I woke up around 10am the next day and went to get breakfast downstairs. By 11am my roommates were still asleep and Astro and Aeron were already at the con, so I walked over to greet them, We spent a couple hours in the enormous Dealer's Den (and also had lunch there), and I picked up about $100 worth of framed prints from Animal Shapes (a furry artist who draws a lot of hiking/outdoors/nature scenes), a raccoon tote bag from Weasel Gear to carry the above, and some stickers here and there. After that we went to the Art Show, Artist Alley, and other standard con stuff before making our way over to a local cinema for a screening of none other than Zootopia 2, which I hadn't seen yet (and neither had most of the others).

I absolutely adored the first Zootopia, going to see it in theaters five or six times - because of the furry angle, of course, but I loved the super-creative animal world that kept all the funny species quirks and size differences, and the wonderful characters (the optimistic main character who was always so buouyant and determined despite any setback, the cynical street fox who learns some things are bigger tham himself). Zootopia 2 offered more of all of that, and the first half was particularly fun, setting up all kind of silly scenes and character interactions that riffed on its richly detailed and playful animal world. The second half I found a little more... questionable. Zootopia (or at least part of it) is revealed to be some sort of ethnically-cleansed apartheid state formed by driving out all the reptiles 100 years ago, which struck me as a little bit heavy even for a soft-edged funny-animal world. (Of course, they make it all better in the end, but I found it an odd choice to add to the canon.) Also, I found some of the second-act parts a little bit too melodramatic. Still, they landed the ending and (perhaps best of all) very strongly implied that there would be a Zootopia 3 in the end-credit scene, and considering that was made before the film reeled half a billion in ticket sales in we can probably treat another sequel as a given. Bring it on! In the meantime, I probably won't see the current film another five times... but I still enjoyed it a lot, and hope to check it out at least once more while it's still in theaters.

Anyway, back to the con - as soon as the movie ended I walked over to the Hyatt to catch up with my longtime friends Ye and Toki (and a couple of their friends) for the annual outing to Club Lucky, an extremely good Italian place in the city. We had a reservation at 8pm but arrived closer to 7:30; fortunately they were able to seat us early and we had a good time in the crowded, Christmas-decorated setting, having cocktails and amazing food and generally good times.

Arriving back at the con, we went up to Toki's room for a couple beers; I invited Astro and Aeron to come up and we had a nice time chatting before we all moved across the hall to what was supposed to be a "gear party" of some sort but was generally quite subdued, and the only mandatory accessories was a set of fake stick-on moustaches. We chilled there for an hour or so before calling it a night a little after midnight.

On Sunday I slept in a bit, then went over the con to catch Astro and Aeron once again for the final proper day of the con. We went to a game show panel, and then went to see the dance competition before once again winding over to Red Bar at their opening hour. This time we were in no rush, and we spent a few hours there before Astro and Aeron had to depart to drive back.

I stayed behind, as I'd invited someone I knew and really wanted to meet during the con to join and he'd told me he would be there shortly. Another two hours later he still hadn't shown, but updated me to say he was going to dinner and asked if I would still be around when he got back. I said I probably would be, but he never updated me after that, and I started to fall into a bit of a sad funk - I was just sitting in the bar on my own drinking $12 beers. But I got through it, and eventually a different friend (Sandy) and her partner showed up after being stuck for hours closing out the art show, and we had a nice chat before the bar closed and we had to leave. I dropped by the dance (which was rocking but extremely loud) and then went back to the hotel to crash out for the final time.

Finally on Monday, I woke up much earlier than I would have liked, waited for Izixs to do the same (Fylwind was not there, as he had decided to book a hotel room on his own in the Hyatt when a room appeared there halfway through the con and left our Aloft roomshare on Saturday evening). Izixs dropped me off at the airport before making the drive home, and I had a brief "airport con" encounter with Sandy in the United lounge before she flew out and I did the same shortly after.

That was the weekend. It was an unsual con in that I spent almost the whole time with a small group of two or three friends (and without a fursuit), which is the way I did cons in the... 2000s but rarely if ever since. That (plus the lack of huge parties, late night escapades, or similar schenanigans) meant it was a very quiet and chill event overall, despite the packed and chaotic 17,000-attendee environment all around. I suppose that's OK.

Indeed, probably the most notable thing is what did not happen. The person who was as of a year ago the closest friend I ever had, and probably more than that, was at the con... but never reached out to me, nor did I reach out to him. So maybe this is truly the sad end of that saga. Time will tell. In the meantime, I have another solemn flight across the pond, and then it's back to a work frenzy for another couple weeks before the holidays return.

The wave of intense business at work has finally crested now, after finishing a trio of major tasks. The largest by far is a (now long overdue) draft of the paper on a particular strange transient that we found a year ago; second largest is the conclusion of lectures for the course I teach; third largest is finishing my comments and feedback on (almost) all of the grant proposals I regrettably agreed to review.

Up until a few days ago my only real break was Friday evening, although it was a particularly pleasant one as Lupestripe came over to pay me a visit. I made an early departure from the usual Friday after-work pub to meet Lupe at the train station, and we made our way over to Bold Street for a burger dinner (or at least it was supposed to be, before my patty escaped from the bun and I ended up just eating bread, condiments, amd fries instead...) followed by an abbreviated bar crawl (if two bars counts as a crawl) that ended at the quirky basement bar near where I live. Lupe was extremely good company as always and even if we couldn't get too crazy (I would be working all weekend and Lupe would be catching an early train out of town to go visit their uncle) it was still a good time, particular as I don't have visitors in town that often anymore.

Another weekend of solid work followed, a hectic Monday and Tuesday - and then it was off on my next trip. I decided earlier in the year that I would come to visit my family again for Thanksgiving: last year was extremely pleasant, and I was feeling a little guilty for my abbreviated summer visit in which I was only in Socorro for about three days. So off I was again on Wednesday morning, taking the long flight to Denver and then the short one to Albuqerque. After being picked up we went almost immediately to a fancy restaurant to celebrate my father's 79th birthday, which was very pleasant (and indulgent), before driving down to Socorro.

With the pressure briefly off, since then it's been a relatively chill weekend. Like last year, my parents invited over a bunch of coworkers for Thanksgiving dinner, which was nice - they were good company, even if I had to wind down my participation in the evening a bit early on account for still being fairly jet lagged. On Friday my dad and I went for a hike in the Magdelena Mountains not far out of town (on a trail I haven't been on in at least 20 years), and I went to see the second Wicked movie with my mom. In the meantime I've been writing Christmas cards - sending out cards last year (with custom artwork) was such a positive experience I've resolved to do this every year from now on, and since my cards arrived just in time for this trip I've been using the brief downtime and a base in the US to write and package up the first batch of 35 to send to various US addresses.

I had told myself I would mostly work on Saturday, but I ended up getting very little done after having shifted out of work mode. I suppose that's OK - after the last couple months I could use a more significant break.

It's been a while since I've written here, and the reason is the usual one - this time of year is busy at work, and without travel to provide an occasion to post I've mostly been content to just churn through work (and whatever social opportunities on weekends that I can scrounge). But there is at least plenty to report on that front, so here's a brief summary of where things are at in that regime.

The proximiate cause of the busy period is, of course, teaching: classes started in late September and so each week has featured the usual grind of spending 9am-5pm in the classroom each Tuesday, and a half a day on either side preparing. Admittedly, things are a little more relaxed on that count this year compared to the previous few - after having to overhaul several aspects of my statistics course because students can now get AI to do their homework for them, the course delivery has mostly settled back to a steady state in which huge changes from last year aren't necessary. Additionally, I handed over my other fall course (on observational astrophysics) to another instructor this summer and no longer have to worry about that all, and as further relief I've also shed responsibility for organizing our weekly research seminar. Partially compensating is that I've now taken over a management role for overseeing the whole data science master's programme... but so far that's been pretty straightforward.

In the meantime I've been trying - on and off - to finish the big paper resulting from the very exciting astronomical object we found around this time last year. The pressure has been on with this work for a while, although we gathered so much data that getting it organized and making sense of it all has been slow going, and it's been hard to find time to just buckle down and get it done... although progress is happening gradually, and maybe within a couple weeks I'll finally be there.

The latest distraction from that effort - admittedly, a very fun one - was the discovery of a different new and shiny astronomical transient a few weeks ago. One of our collaborators tipped us off that an otherwise unremarkable-looking faint supernova in our ongoing survey was at the location of a possible gravitational lens system, and later in the month we used our university telescope to show that the object had been split into multiple images as predicted, an exciting discovery on its own that we announced to the broader community. However, the nature of the supernova didn't seem consistent with anything we'd seen before and we remained unsure what to do with it until Friday, when a different collaborator sent us some data that indicated the object was far more distant than we thought. When we found out that a competing group had picked up on our early discovery and was writing a paper in secret, I was able to convince the others to go for an all-hands-on-deck sprint to finish our own paper on the discovery on the same timescale, and this weekend I was working basically nonstop (except sleep) to get that done. We somehow managed to get the paper in just two days and submitted just a few hours ago, just slightly behind the other group. Even though it was basically a weekend working it was honestly some of the most fun I've had in a while in a professional context, and it was good to know that I can still get really inspired about astrophysics research after the past year whipsawed my priorities.

Other than that: there have been proposal deadlines, I took on board yet another PhD student (... kind of), and the office has been more "lively" in general now that the academic year is fully underway. Meanwhile, another sort of dilemma that always hits this time of year has risen to the fore - but that will have to be a subject for another time.

After one of the warmest summers in memory the turn to autumn has been swift and severe - the past week has seen much cooler temperatures and lashing rain almost every day. It's been a similar story at work; the relatively relaxed August period is now long-gone and the ramp up to the semester is in full swing.

Classes don't begin until next week, but my teaching duties started today. The reason for this is that I agree to take over as "programme leader" of our Master's degree program in data science. I've been teaching on this degree since I joined the university (I teach the statistics module), but earlier in the year it was proposed that I take over the degree entirely. This can be seen as something of a promotion, but like most academic promotions it doesn't come with extra compensation or anything like that. I agreed to do it anyway, for a few different reasons. First - there was no other natural person to take over (if I declined, it would go to someone completely unfamiliar with the degree). Second - they offered to remove a bunch of my other responsibilities (more on that some other time). Third - I have been dissatisfied with a few different aspects of the degree for a while, and this is a position where I'll be able to actually bring about changes on matters I otherwise have little control over.

So I'm now in charge, and this means that this week I had to prepare and give today's in-class "induction" presentation to the students welcoming them to the university and laying out their expectations. Most important among them: clear statements about allowed and disallowed usage of AI, which is becoming an increasing problem for us (and which were entirely absent from last year's guidance). Over the past week I've also been busy marking recent Master's theses and conducting viva exams for students finishing their degree this year, and more than a few of them show obvious signatures of being mostly or entirely AI-composed. We will fail these students, of course, but it's infuriating to me that students even think they can get away with using a plagiarism engine as a substitute for a written thesis that is supposed to require 600 hours of work. Dealing with this is probably just the reality of our times, but maybe if we set their expectations now it will at least slightly diminish the risk of this in the future. (I also plan to lean on the instructors of the other classes to be more explicit in their AI usage guidelines and alert to students who are skirting the rules.)