Ysengrin Blackpaw's Journal

It's amazing. Once deer season started, all the deer that have been grazing through our yard have become scarce.

I've updated the PotW and will be keeping it current. I'll go back and fill in the few missing ones from 2016, but I doubt I'll fill in 2015. I'll likely just put a brief note in there about why there's a gap. Meanwhile, here's last week's ...

21 Nov 2016 New Griffon Paws This pair has been delivered to the client, so I can now talk about the new griffon paw style. The big scales on the arm and back of the hand have extra reinforcement so they act like scales, not bending easily. The claws are also deeply embedded and extend over the wearer's finger. The palms are more human-like, with no pads. This particular pair also has magnets embedded around the arm opening so the upper arm of the body suit will stay in place over the seam. These will be available through the workshop. The next pair will also be photographed more properly, when I get a light booth set up. Location: Clarion, PA

I like how these came out. They're just a smidgen bigger than the wolf hands for sizing.

EDIT: LJ seems to be automagically resizing the images, ignoring the HTML markup. Sheesh, and sorry folks, I'm not going to take the time to dig through it and find out why.

Slowly getting the PotW back up to date. Most of them are photos already seen either here or on twitter - I'll post the exceptions here :)

08 Aug 2016 Catalpa sphinx moth caterpillar This is a late instar of the catalpa sphinx moth caterpillar (Ceratomia catalpae); they're just starting to appear this season. The younger caterpillars look quite different. They only feed on the catalpa tree, of which there is one large specimen in the front yard. For such a flashy youth, the adult moth is quite drab. The three-inch long caterpillar is supposed to be an excellent fishing lure. The catalpa tree itself was heavily stripped of leaves across the following two weeks - the second picture was taken mid-August and added later. While the tree has evolved to readily produce new leaves, repeated waves of caterpillars can kill the tree. Location: Clarion, PA

For a while these guys were everywhere around the catalpa tree; I was surprised that the birds weren't picking them off the grass more. The swarm of caterpillars seems to have passed now.

EDIT: Fixed my tongue-tiedness :) Also adding an additional reference on the catalpa sphinx moth.

For some reason, despite there being many cicada species in California, I never heard one the whole time I lived in that state. I missed that drone; I grew up with it in Texas.

Fast forward to Pennsylvania. The part of the state I'm in doesn't have a 17-year cicada brood coming up for another three years or so, but some annual cicadas are arriving. I've been finding empty nymph shells in the last couple of days, and I'm enjoying the occasional droning sound.

Grrr. Now I find that SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi is horribly broken in MediaWiki 1.26+ - because GeSHi was ripped out and replaced with Pygments, instead of forking it off under another name. It's working on Wikipedia, so it's a low priority for the rest of us (even though quite a few people have problems).

My problem is one of the dependencies to work between MediaWiki and Pygments - Composer - fails fatally to install on my system, vaguely complaining that it can't find a zip file or that there's no gzip (there is). That's locally; gods know what I could do to get it running on the hosted servers. Other people who have gotten past that are finding compatibility issues with older versions of PHP (I've got a more recent version). EDIT: I'm trying to install Composer as that's what the installation procedures for the extension call for. It's a bit vague, since the extension is bundled with MediaWiki now.

We all have the same result - no syntax markup at all.

I'm tempted to grab an old copy of SyntaxHighlight for the local server, but that's not a real solution for the hosted ones.

EDIT: 13 Aug 2016, still borked. Seems to be something to do with Pygments still, but there's no real motion on a fix since whatever the problem is it just affects little wiki installations, not the big ones. Likely something simple, but nobody has time to really troubleshoot it (myself included). Yes, it fails out of the box with a fresh Mediawiki install for me.

Twitted this but forgot to put it up here - this was a student film that I have some screen time in (kaiju or kaijin). It's intentionally in the style of the old B horror movies, and done with virtually no budget.



Oh, that *is* the old railroad tunnel near the house.

I'm certainly now living out in the woods (literally) with a more varied assortment of critters that visit after sundown - the night crew. No good pix as the cellphone doesn't like *that* low a light level.

Deer. They roam the area in general, and I've seen three different groups - a buck and two or three does in each - that occasionally check out what's growing in the yard. They also tend to nibble back new growth in the gardens, now that the mass planting of bulbs from the previous owner are coming up. They're not as cautious as the Texas deer, so I'm assuming there's not as much hunting pressure on them. Or, there's more of a deer population and they come around because of that pressure.

Groundhog. They don't roam as far, and there's one denning somewhere between me and the neighbor to the east and down the hill a bit. This one's a bit grumpy, and climbs onto very low branches (a foot or two off the ground) to eat new leaves and flowers.

Black bear. There's one that makes the rounds the night before garbage pickup, scavenging, and that stays away from habitations otherwise. Doesn't seem to visit this house - I haven't actually seen him - but neighbors up and down the street sometimes have garbage scattered or bird feeders raided. The bear's been spotted in an area from half-a-mile to the west to a mile-and-a-half east. It's not like bears are unusual in the area, either - tweet of a picture taken a few days ago.

Raccoons & Opossum. I'm told both are common. Haven't seen any sign of them on site (yet). EDIT: Skunks - I've scented one, but haven't seen any.

Foxes. There's a vixen and cubs in a culvert up the street.

Feral house cats. Yep, even out here. There's a colony up the street, also based around a culvert. They occasionally come down this far, and I think a mother cat relocated her kittens under our back deck for a while before moving them again.

Frogs. Haven't seen 'em, but their night chorus is *loud*. Guessing from the sounds there's two predominant species with a third less common one mixed in.

Not so much a part of the night crew - the birds. I'm working on identifying 'em. So far our most common visitors are orioles, mourning doves, and a plethora of small "peep peep" birds I haven't identified yet. I've also seen blue jays, woodpeckers, ravens, a bald eagle and several other large raptors (unidentified).