view from a hotel window

We're at Levitation, the 2024 Eastercon, being held this year at the Telford International Centre (TIC). It's a new venue for Eastercon, and is nice and spacious (great for social distancing) and well laid out.  There are also nice gaps between items, so no need to teleport around the TIC.  So far, we've been to:

• a panel on SF and the Industrial Revolution -- a theme of the convention, given that Ironbridge is just down the road
• a talk by Kari on the history of the Welsh border -- also close by, and surprisingly ill-defined
• a talk about bones and forensics -- not all found bones are human: "the last time this bone was above ground, it was surrounded by cow"
• a panel on narrative point of view and tense -- which has moved from traditional 3rd person past tense to more 1st person present tense, especially in Young Adult fiction
• an enraging talk by Clute on the British Library's destruction of 100 years of dust jackets
• a panel on libraries, in the real world and in SF -- "getting my adult card which allowed 4 books a fortnight meant you were supposed to read 4 a fortnight!"
• a panel on Dr Who and the Industrial Revolution, including the 1985 story of The Mark of the Rani
• a panel on Educational Safeguarding in SF/F -- fictional schools seem very dangerous!
• a talk by Emma King on her unsuccessful applications to be an ESA astronaut, and the other successes that led from that 
• a panel on (fictional) Invertebrates in Space -- including interesting discussions of real invertebrates (on Earth), too

We're looking forward to more great stuff tomorrow and Monday.

We're staying at the hotel next door to the TIC, with the customary view over the car park:

at least we can keep an eye on our car...

We drove up to Telford yesterday, in our new electric car.  I still have a little range anxiety, so when we stopped for lunch, I did give it some juice, despite the prediction we'd have enough left when we arrived.  Note to self: when travelling on a Bank Holiday, charging points tend to be well-occupied.  The hotel has four of its own fast (22kW) charging points for guest use, that are not quite as eye-wateringly expensive (70p/kWh) as service station chargers (~79p/kWh), so I will fill up tonight, ready for the trip home.  A bit different from the 9p/kWh I can get at home on the overnight rate, though.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXXXVII

 The latest batch:

no need to fear the AIs

A mouse died somewhere in the walls recently, so we've been combatting the resulting very unpleasant smell with lots of fresh air (not very warm at this time of year) and an air filter.  That has helped, but we also tried an air freshener.  It sprays a scent that for some reason is called "fresh linen".  I sprayed a bit, and then commented, "it now smells like a dead mouse in a linen shroud".

Not one to miss an opportunity to blog, I wanted a picture. I googled "dead mouse in linen shroud" and got several pictures of dead mice, but unshrouded.  Unsurprising, as it's presumably not something that common.

So I tried, for the first time, an AI picture generator.  The prompt "dead mouse in linen shroud" got me:

Not only no linen shroud, but not even dead!

(The smell has very nearly gone now, fortunately.)