From now on, I am going to put all my photos of flowers in this thread. #bloomscrolling

Reading comics counts as reading. Reading graphic novels counts as reading. Reading fan fiction counts as reading. Listening to audio books counts as reading. Reading a 10k word Tumblr treatise on Star Trek/Dr Who parallels counts as reading.

From now on, I am going to put all my photos of flowers in this thread. #bloomscrolling

We shall try this at One Hundred Factorial today! Thanks @motivickyle.bsky.social and @jsellenberg.bsky.social !

They should invent faculty that don't hate the students they teach.

One guy tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up a plane with a bomb in his sneakers, and everybody had to take off their shoes at the airport for the next 20 years. Chatbots have a collective body count equal to Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, and they're trying to put them in schools.

"the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops."

As I suspected, at the newly merged university, everything is just a bit worse. I trust it will get better, but it will be a while until it is better than it was before.

“You told me to show you something worth seeing. I show you yourself.”

My favorite part of reading is when a book gets so good you have to set it down, (finger marking the page), and just let your mind be blown for a minute before picking it back up again.

It’s the first One Hundred Factorial session of the new year tomorrow! I know the forecast is 41°C but nothing is going to stop me having some mathematical joy. (Plus there’s ice blocks in the freezer.) davidkbutler.xyz/one-hundred-...

peek = 🫣 peak = 🗻 pique = 👀

The story is this: There’s a One Hundred Factorial session tomorrow, so I’m taking a hiatus from my holidays to do it, but I know if I was at work for one day everyone would want me to deal with stuff and so I’d be pulled away from maths play all day, so I had to have an extra work day.

It’s the first One Hundred Factorial session of the new year tomorrow! I know the forecast is 41°C but nothing is going to stop me having some mathematical joy. (Plus there’s ice blocks in the freezer.) davidkbutler.xyz/one-hundred-...

I am going to work today, and I don’t want to.

#read2026 Everless, by Sara Holland. The sci-fi/fantasy concept was very cool, but the writing is a bit uneven and the main character is a little too angsty for my taste. I don’t think I want to seek out the second book to find out what happens. (More about the plot in next post.)

For all that the media has spent years freaking out about what social media does to our brains, I don’t understand why there appears to be little effort to grapple with the fact that these chatbots are, for some not insignificant portion of the population, literally psychosis machines

A lone gum tree stands in a paddock of yellow grass, and a flock of sheep fills its shadow exactly and completely.

A plastic baby high chair stands on the edge of the road, its legs wrapped in sparkling pink and white tinsel.

The kitchen lights reflecting off the clean plastic containers on the bench make jellyfish-shaped patterns on the ceiling.

A silver car drives past with a tiny white skeleton sitting attached to its roof, with a black scarf flapping in the wind.

A grandfather and granddaughter walk in the sun, each drinking juice from their own green takeaway cup. The grandfather takes the straw out of his cup and lowers it to his granddaughter. She puts her straw into his cup to sample his flavour.

#read2026 The Quicksand Pony, by Alison Lester. A mother and baby escape into the bush, and nine years later, Biddy goes on her first cattle muster across the same country. A beautiful little book, with lyrical descriptions of the bush and the story pushed forward through multiple perspectives.

Wandering in the front yard of grey house with a grey picket fence and grey pebble paths is a huge black dog with a patch of white at the very tip of its pointy tail.

Tricked my brain into letting me read yesterday. Read for a while, then did a Lego set for a few pages of the instructions, then read for a while, then did Lego for a bit, then read, etc. Every time I got fidgety with one activity, I switched to the other. Didn’t look at my phone for several hours.

I finished 14 books in 2025. It was a tough year to find time when my brain would let me read. (To see them you can search for <from:@davidkbutler.bsky.social #read2025>.) They’ve all been special in their own way.

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

#read2025 Jane Doe and the Key of All Souls, by Jeremy Lachlan. Continues where the previous book left off with heaps of action, filling in all the background lore along the way, and bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. Lachlan manages all of this very well without it ever feeling forced.

Under a public bench, in a McDonald's soft drink cup, sits a single orange rose.

grateful | adjective | appreciative of benefits received : feeling or showing thanks Thank you all for a superlative year. Here are some of our favorite posts of 2025.

My latest comic breaking down the “generosity” of billionaires is live! aubreyhirsch.substack.com/p/the-genero...

#read2025 The Angel Tree, by Daphne Benedis-Grab. Four kids try to find the identity of the person who set up the Angel Tree where people post wishes and other people make them come true. Tween friendship and mystery as cute as expected. Community generosity that made me tear up several times.

A small girl in a pram holds her Barbie by the feet and leans down so that Barbie’s purple hair trails on the ground in front of the pram and can be run over by the pram’s wheels.

#read2025 The Angel Tree, by Daphne Benedis-Grab. Four kids try to find the identity of the person who set up the Angel Tree where people post wishes and other people make them come true. Tween friendship and mystery as cute as expected. Community generosity that made me tear up several times.

In the desolate front yard of a house in a new building development, a huge cubical stack of bricks is robed in Christmas lights.

I can’t be the only person who finds comics/graphic novels more difficult to read than traditional novels, right?

So when I get really REALLY annoyed about people arguing for GenAI use (here, I refer to writing, art, video making, creative work), it's almost always because they are not meaningfully engaged with the ethics of the technology, which I take to mean they either don't care or are too lazy.

With only a few days left in the year, many people turn reflective, so if it helps, you may like my year’s worth of observations I noted from October 2024 to October 2025.

With only a few days left in the year, many people turn reflective, so if it helps, you may like my year’s worth of observations I noted from October 2024 to October 2025.

#read2025 Jane Doe and the Cradle of All Worlds, by Jeremy Lachlan. A very good book. A chase through the Manor, a labyrinthine world between worlds, to rescue Jane’s father and find her missing mother. A direct style, giving Jane a clear voice and making great use of short sentences.

Merry Christmas!

Some daye soon we all will be togethir Yf the fates allowe Til that tyme we have to muddle thrugh somehowe

This aspect of LinkedIn is in such contrast to the usual vibe of toxic positivity Twitter .

Last Christmas Ich gave thee myne hearte The verye next daye ther came a wolf Wyth sinews of whispers - quiet as frost - And the wolf stole myne hearte, fled To a tower out of tyme biyonde all the stars. Seek now myne hearte, Return it within a yeare and a daye: Thys ys thy queste Fayle not

Oh my goodness, thank you LinkedIn for letting me know that all of my job woes are all my fault for saying the wrong things in my interview.

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

I found yet more flowers again.

To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

The current Adelaide University advertisement is a bit triggering for me because my main recurring nightmare is discovering I am able to fly but then not being able to come down again.

A story: Someone set up automatic redirects in the shared email inboxes, and an email came in, so it dutifully redirected it, except the email they redirected to doesn’t exist, so the system sent an email saying it couldn’t deliver, which also got redirected to the nonexistent email…