in retrospect my favourite part of 2025 was when i had COVID

it doesn’t look like an SOS… it looks like a warning

ret歸rn

Mörk Borg research

it’s such a treat that Virginia Woolf wrote more than one book even one would have filled the world

white truffle negroni (somewhere in Wellington) I love truffle, I love negronis. But this was the only drink I’ve ever been physically repulsed by.

I thought I messed up my coffee pour, but really: accidental bhikku

"...the only reflections in the lake were a slash of causeway, a dot of pavilion, a mustard seed of a boat and the two or three specks of ourselves aboard it."

unbelievable. they really *are* using AI to create the new NZ curriculum "analysing and synthesising information from international curricula and related educational frameworks," is just another way of saying "we're turning them all into untraceable hallucinations" #NZpol #kikorangi

as is tradition, I’m starting day 1 of #AdventOfCode off with #awk

This is a sobering read that starts from a straightforward premise: look at how the poverty threshold is calculated in the US and see how well it holds up as an actual measure. I expected it to be bad. It’s much worse, in ways it’s hard not to see.

"Cat, Northland" Eric Lee-Johnson, July 1956. Ref F.005230, Te Papa.

rolled the dice at the recycling centre on a set of mahjong tiles in a Glad ziplock for $5 very surprised that it turned out to be a full set with no missing tiles, and even includes “100-uses” jokers and two alternate types of white dragon

it’s important to remember that all of 2025 can be blamed on the people of Epsom

Affinity became a freemium product? ah, fuck

the Dutch really did invent what is objectively the worst quotation style of all time

Who is the poet 管鳥 Kanchō that Robin D Gill cites in “The Peony and the Poet”? simplyhaiku.thehaikufoundation.org/SHv3n2/inCon... The name shows up on one other website, with a slight diff poem: 唐音も少しいひたき牡丹哉 唐音をすこし言ひたき牡丹哉 Google Books shows more results, in books about Buson. Is it a nickname?

the implications of James Mickens’ Mossad/not-Mossad threat model are not meant to include “throw up your hands and do it anyway” www.usenix.org/system/files...

I can't find our staple gun but I know that if I go and buy another I will immediately find it upon my return

if you want to have this house, you can!† †offer may be conditional on exchange of monetary value www.trademe.co.nz/a/property/r...

modern building techniques were preëmpted by the Heart Sutra: form is no different from emptiness; and emptiness, form

considering a new ontology for backlog management: is this work flotsam or is it jetsam?

very weird seeing your house empty but staged. “hi yes, this is what our house would have looked like if we were better people who didn’t accumulate objects”

yeah I know about linked lists

made up some Picts for next Pendragon session, got overly excited at the results and ended up making enemies for all the battle encounters as well

hell yeah, the Chaintech Desperado AGP with composite video out: all you need to experience trains, rockets, and jetskis

went to Mitre 10 with no shoes on only to be served by an American at the checkout

fixed a funny bug in Excel that’s been there for more than 20 years

“etymologically, of course, the plural would be ‘mahs jong’”

me buying RPG books: haha yes, this rules me moving house: what the fuck

i don't know what the source of this video is but I love it

can’t believe that private equity killed Hammacher Schlemmer

this feels like looking at the photo of kids playing with blue asbestos www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

sometimes you have to admit the Catholics are right

If you mash the audio example buttons on the wikipedia page for the IPA vowel sounds you can create a choir of mildly disgusted men

new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)

started reading the Hobbit with 5yo and just got up to where they’re discussing the map “... and those are the directions? wait! if we know that M is North then it’s N, P is South so it’s S, cross is W for west and east... [E is for east] ... S is for E! so we can translate the runes!”

visited Fo Guang Shan for lunch yesterday. reflecting later, 5yo’s favourite part of the meal was the (lone) gingko nut, which was apparently “rice flavoured”

cannot believe that Airborne got rid of their wonderful bee just so they can fully embrace the generic Manuka scam æsthetic

the current game is a vet clinic where the animals’ problems are encoded in bananagram tiles which need to be rearranged to figure out what is wrong

games that lack house rules are already dead

incidentally, I think that Wordsworth Classics using an AI-generated image for this cover is very much not following the Tao and very much lacking Te

the statue stood there,

the building stood there,

a cute new #Hanafuda #花札 by Otwarte Karty (first one I've ever seen with spot UV) www.otwartekarty.pl

at his best, Gurdjieff is a Taoist (of course, at his worst, a monster)