A favourable draw?

 Well, I avoid the top seeds in this year's Microsoft Excel World Championship. My bit of the round of 128 looks like this...

Mmm, it's not impossible for me to win the first round, if I have a good day (Jesi Lipp seems to do better than me slightly more often than not in these things, but it's kind of close), and even vaguely plausible I could get through the second round too (although Brittany Deaton is kind of awesome). Let's see what happens next Saturday afternoon, anyway! Let's get Excelling!

DNA doesn't lie

 But it does wander around Europe a little, if you follow Ancestry's ethnicity estimates. And I'm glad to see the latest update has nudged me just a little bit closer to being English once again!

If you haven't been following my occasional blog updates, I did a DNA test in 2022, and got this estimate of where my genetic origins might lie (based on comparing my DNA with that of other people with "deep roots" in specific regions). It had a surprising chunk of Scandinavia, both on my mother's side (not impossible; her father was more cosmopolitan than the Yorkshire origins of the other three-quarters of my heritage) and a mysterious 1% of Norway on my father's...

When they updated it the next year, I'd got 7% more English than I was before...

And now, in the October 2024 update, I've inched another 1% towards being a Full English Breakfast!

Sweden and Denmark have been split in this latest one, and 2% of it has ebbed away from my mother's side, while that bit of Norway has disappeared from my paternal genes altogether!

And now I'm significantly less Scottish than I've ever been, and not at all Welsh! Instead, I've acquired a little bit of "Germanic Europe" and a little bit of the Netherlands!

It's nonsense, of course - my dad's side of the family tree are nothing but working class midlands/Yorkshire ever since the dawn of time. I suspect the confusion comes from the branch that sprung up from the primeval sludge of Rutland - that's the kind of element that could confuse any kind of modern scientific testing! But the point is, I'm still gradually increasing my Englishness, which can only be a good thing, right?

Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence

 Woohoo! I admit I was worried about my chances of qualifying for the Microsoft Excel World Championship this year, with not having done all that great in the monthly competitions. That left me needing to get through the big qualification round to select the remaining 68 competitors to join the 60 who'd already qualified. And since it's divided into regions, I had to be in the top 22 Europeans (out of 194 entrants), excluding the lucky people who'd already secured their place and could just take part in this final challenge for the fun of it.

And maybe 'fun' isn't the word. After the hour's time limit was finished, I was a LOT more worried about my chances of qualifying! But I needn't have been - it turns out the tasks really were unspeakably difficult, and nobody (not even the REALLY great guy on the livestream who always shows us all how it's done) got close to the maximum 10,000 points. My measly 4,400 was enough to put me in European 6th place, provisionally.

It might still be corrected before the final results are announced, but that should be enough to guarantee me a third consecutive prestigious place in the grand final round of 128!

Now, can I get beyond that first round for the first time? I just have to hope for a lucky draw, avoiding the top seeds...

I also wish I could win a Nobel Prize

I'm sort of almost acquainted with Demis Hassabis, after all. I know who he is, and he might if prompted recollect meeting me and even having at least one conversation. So I'm kind of envious that he's going around winning Nobel Prizes and I haven't won anything for absolutely ages. Except an online chess match earlier this evening, but that's not quite the same.

Although to be fair, he only won a quarter of a Nobel Prize: "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”."

And what does predicting protein structure actually help with? My lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals of this area of knowledge is another thing that annoys me. Someone give me some kind of award, quickly, or I'm just going to feel terribly inferior!

I wish I was musical

 You know how Paul McCartney says he dreamed the tune to Yesterday? I mean, obviously he's just making that up so we'll think he's cool, and it's a pretty dull tune anyway, but the point is that I can dream cool music too, and sometimes wake up with a tune in my head that isn't totally stolen from whatever most recent song I've heard on the radio.

But not knowing anything about music, I can't exactly write it down or preserve it for posterity when I do dream something beautifully melodic. I suppose I could record myself, if I figured out a good way to do that on my phone, but I don't think it'd sound so good. I'd like to transcribe these things and give them to someone musically talented to reconstruct and tell me where I plagiarized it from.

This morning, for example, I tried to preserve the song in my head by writing down that it was basically the All Saints song Never Ever, but in a higher key, and had the really catchy line "You've been the beating of my heart for so long" or something similar. But after humming it all morning, I can't recapture what it sounded like now, so the world has been deprived of another masterpiece.

Further updates

 I haven't written enough in this blog recently, and can quantify how much I haven't written by following up the last-but-two post to say I've now watched the first 24 episodes of The Owl House (one a day), and it's even better than I thought after having watched the first nine! I really admire the clever writing that makes it feel like each episode is a one-off story disconnected from any other, but still never just resettles into the status quo, instead subtly changing and developing as the saga continues. I wish I could write like that. Or at all.

In other news, I seem to have become the head of a puppet theatre troupe, my qualifications being that I "seem to know what I'm doing". This is a bit worrying, really, because I genuinely don't. It's all going to be a horrible disaster, but never mind.

Secret Origins

 That comic disaster in the bath prompts me in multiple ways to talk about reason number five hundred and thirty-seven why I think "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks" is the world's finest cartoon. So here we go...

See, Astro City issue #16, as I mentioned, tells us the origin story of the superhero El Hombre. Similarly, Electroboy issue #15 tells readers the true origin story of the great superhero Electroboy. The only difference being that the former comic really exists (and is impressively resistant to being submerged in a hot tub of water), while the latter only exists in the world of the Chipmunks.

This is the absolutely brilliant fourth-season episode "Dr. Zap vs Electroboy", in which Theodore is struck by lightning and believes this means he shares an origin story with his favourite hero! But only because he hasn't read the fateful fifteenth issue of his comic, which reveals that Electroboy was actually grown in a lab by his father, and the one who got superpowers from being struck by lightning was his evil arch-foe, Dr. Zap!

Theodore's reaction on finding this out is one of the greatest moments of the series. And incidentally, isn't that a great cover for a comic? I'd buy it!

So Theodore, believing himself fated to become an evil villain, dejectedly gets to work formulating his evil plans to conquer the world. In preparation for his criminal career, he follows the school bully, Derek around, making notes and signing up as Derek's sidekick. Luckily for the world, Miss Smith is eventually able to convince Theo that he has his own origin story and can still go out and spread joy and happiness and sweetness - it's a wonderful episode, it really is!

But it's that comic in the picture that I'm interested in talking about. Obviously the CGI prop was created specifically for that one episode, and we don't see it again until the fifth-season story "Bathroom Bully". In that one, Theodore is repeatedly seen reading Electroboy issue #15!

Which is very interesting. The plot doesn't require Theodore to be reading a comic at any point, and it's not mentioned in the dialogue. It seems to me that someone has put the comic there to specifically signal that this episode happens shortly after "Dr. Zap vs Electroboy", and this is absolute genius!

Maybe I'm wrong. The cartoon DOES sometimes reuse the CGI props to save money, and there's nothing wrong with that. It might just be accidental. But I'm fairly sure this is a deliberate piece of continuity to make the episode all that much better. This theory is supported by the fact that I don't think we ever see that comic again, except in these two episodes! I'm going to stick with my theory that someone involved in the creation of "Bathroom Bully" is a genius.

You see, that episode ends with Theodore confronting Derek (who's been bullying Simon) in a crowded hallway with the information that nobody really thinks Derek is cool; rather that people just think there's something the matter with him. Derek reacts with shock even before everyone else in the area agrees with Theo's assessment. I mean, it still works, even with the episode on its own merits - Theodore's charming, ingenuous simplicity does have that effect on people - but it's so much better if this comes straight after "Dr. Zap", and Derek knows that Theodore (for the usual unfathomable reasons of his own) has been researching bullies in great detail! It gives his little speech a lot more weight - obviously, he's genuinely well-informed about how everyone sees Derek!

You might say I'm overthinking it, but I think everyone needs to see this shining example of how they use the CGI animation to its maximum possible effect in this wonderful cartoon! Go and watch it, right now! (And don't worry, Theodore always comes out on top in the end)

Oh no!

 

If you heard a lot of loud swearing coming from my bathroom window this morning, that was me dropping Kurt Busiek's Astro City No. 16 in the bath. The one with El Hombre's origin story, part of the Steeljack epic. I'm sure I can dry it out without the pages sticking together, so it'll still be readable (it's not the first time I've done this in all my decades of reading comics in the bath), but it's still really annoying!

I bought this comic when it first came out, in early 1999. Probably from Page 45 in Nottingham, though I see now that I'd been keeping it in a bag with the cryptic price label "NX1408, NM, £1.65" rather than one of Page 45's usual ones. Maybe I bought this one without a bag, somewhere else on my travels, and subsequently put it in a bag I'd got with some other "near mint" but cheap comic. I definitely bought this one new, anyway - the comic was coming out once in a blue moon in those days because Kurt Busiek was ill and there were all kinds of delays, so a new Astro City was a rare and special treasure.

The point is, I'm very upset and aggravated about this disaster! This is something I've owned for a quarter of a century, in as near to mint condition as you would expect from something I've re-read whenever I was in the mood, and now it's always going to have wrinkled, water-damaged pages! Just think of all the things I've done in these 25 years, with this comic safely in my cupboard.

It's not even an appropriate comic to get wet. Steeljack spends a fair amount of time underwater in this storyline - not a naturally tenable position for a big heavy guy made of steel - but not in this particular issue. I'm REALLY annoyed by this. I've just drowned a piece of my history.