I'm delighted that this website exists: copyshrugemoji.com

My worst was also my best (it netted me a husband...): We were at a mutual friend's wedding. DJ asked for all couples to come to the dance floor. He asked if we should dance. I asked, "are we a couple?" He said, "we could be..." It's been 23+ years.

How on earth have I now been doing the same thing on NYE for 15 years? How is it that the *kids* at this gathering are 20,'18, and 14? When did we become so old?

I read 60 books this year. I thought it was going to be more. But I'm happy with 60, especially because I feel like I'm *still* recovering from the awful stretch between Sept 2023 and May 2024 where I managed to read *two* books: diaryofdoctorlogic.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/w...

"Preantepenultimate" is one of my favorite words.

The Association for Computing Machinery has put the metadata associated with the ACM Digital Library behind a paywall. Please sign this petition calling on the ACM to restore access to this data: Restore Fully Free and Open Access to the ACM Digital Library www.ipetitions.com/petition/res...

REVIEW: “The Museum of Lost Sound” by Vikki Stea sffreviews.com/2025/12/29/r...

"Gruit" isn't in the NYTimes wordle wordlist! I am appalled.

REVIEW: “Bumblecat” by Johanna Ivy Levene sffreviews.com/2025/12/27/r...

Today's in my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary. I am so very grateful that 50 years ago, they got married, because if they hadn't, it's highly unlikely my husband would have ever existed, and he has brought so much joy and happiness and comfort to my life. He has made it better in every way.

I had to look up the location on WhatThreeWords and it gave different tasting notes !

REVIEW: “”Secrets of the Goblin Market” by Valerie Hunter sffreviews.com/2025/12/23/r...

I feel like Ardbeg was just playing "what three words" with their Scotch descriptions.

About 10 seconds before I was going to get up and start packing for our Christmas travels, this happened. That was about an hour ago...

roses are red the world can be tragic;

Did you know Meng Haoran, a Tang dynasty poet, penned works that captured the essence of rural life? His poems, often reflecting solitude and nature, influenced generations of Chinese literature (Q18842339). #TangDynasty #ChinesePoetry

More happy news in the inbox! My abstract for the 5th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning has been accepted! When I submitted it, round-trip flights to Beijing for the dates of the workshop were around *650GBP*. I hope they are still that cheap, so I can go!

Happy news in the inbox! My paper with @Henry Curcio, "Experiential Learning as a Route to Joy: A Case-Study in Philosophical Fiction Writing," has been sent by the ed. of the special issue of AAPT Studies in Pedagogy we'd submitted it to to the main journal editor for final comments & copy edits!

Today's work goals: referee a few papers. read some student drafts. clear out enough emails that when I look at everything that has arrived in December, there is clear progress. (E.g., I have dealt with ALL the emails that were sent to me on Saturday. There are none! It's a gap!)

REVIEW: “Growing House” by Madison Ellingsworth sffreviews.com/2025/12/21/r...

REVIEW: “Shedding the Weight” by Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu sffreviews.com/2025/12/19/r...

There really needs to be a “blacklisted” database available for all researchers, journals, and institutions to check against.

In the Thai series I'm watching right now, two brothers went abroad to study. One went to UCL. The other? To the University of Staffordshire (!). How often does the University of Staffordshire *ever* turn up in film/TV?

I want to read this article. Two (meant constructively) things: 1) "demonstrating that LLMs are worthless for indexing" should, like most of these things, have qualifiers like "in our hands and with our LLM" 2) when people talk like this about accuracy, I suspect the workflow as much as the model.

Bought this book for my two mates’ babies for Christmas and I’m dying.

The gulf between these Frontier models researchers have access vs ChatGPT5, which can't even do basic AS-level economics questions, must be utterly extraordinary bsky.app/profile/adam...

Finally figured out that on ONE specific mobo/BIOS combo, under WInNT 3.51 ONLY, datetime would reset the time to zero at midnight BEFORE incrementing the date, so any sales happening at midnight (Kinko's: open 24 hours!) would time travel a full day into the past, ROYALLY fucking the database up.

It is now almost a week since term ended, and today is the first day where I feel like I've been able to respond to/resolve emails faster than they've been coming in.

We've decided to solve the problem by changing the website: Women in Logic (WiL) Workshop 2026: womeninlogic.org/workshops/20...

REVIEW: “Homonyms” by Laurence Klavan sffreviews.com/2025/12/17/r...

Not sure shame will work, if they had any sense of dignity they wouldn't be using bullshit machines to begin with

I absolutely love it when I'm watching a non-English series and in addition to the captions, there's a translator's note providing some context or other to what's just been said. It's the film/TV version of Informative Footnotes! My favorite!

While searching for something entirely unrelated, today I found (and downloaded!) an amazing book: A List of Words and Phrases in Every-Day Use by the Natives of Hetton-Le-Hole in the County of Durham, Being Words Not Ordinarily Accepted, or But Seldom Found in the Standard English of the Day.

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

If my first piece of fanfiction was the sequel to the Lord of the Rings that I wrote when I was ~10-11, I think my second piece of fanfiction was a short story I wrote at uni that featured a Mr. Frege who was not the historical Frege, but was very much inspired by FoA.

Steffen Lempp, with the ASL, is organizing an effort to translate the work of Georg Cantor from German to English, with translation and commentary. (I am shocked at how much has never been translated.) If you are interested in getting involved, please contact Lempp.

Anyway. I'm madder than I think i have ever been. Please play my game about attempting to strangle a horse. Its creation was entirely free of ai, and instead came from My Brain. You know. Like how creativity works. brainmage.itch.io/i-will-stran...

Speaking of pretty quilts, I just got this pride flag done!

Hurdy-gurdies are just the best "all-in-one" instrument: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lLV...

Today, for the first time in a very long time, I had to engage seriously with a Windows computer. I had not realized how Actively Hostile interacting with Windows has become.

REVIEW: “Small Prayers for the God of Sow Thistle Hill” by Kate Francia sffreviews.com/2025/12/15/r...

Friday was the last day of term, so of course this morning my alarm interrupted me in the midst of a dream where I: 1. was meeting in person with my dept manager where we were liked, "right, we're going to CALL timetabling and sit on the phone until they fix your teaching schedule for next term."

UK fiber arts people: where would you go for silk yarn that *doesn't* contain wool?

American pop culture depictions of unions that aren't police unions: there's The Irishman, The Simpsons S4E17, The Wire season 2 and Kramer's bagel strike; what else

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Get good grades, go to college get a degree, pick something you're passionate about, and you'll be able to have a good life. And it turned out that wasn't true. I went to a state college, but a lot of us were saddled with insurmountable debt as part of a societal agreement that society didn't honor.

REVIEW: “Reflexive Benevolence Imperative” by Matt Dovey sffreviews.com/2025/12/11/r...

I'm currently trying to organize a meeting for next week which will involve me, a colleague in another department, and then: Peter, Simon, Simon, and Peter. This amuses me on many dimensions.

Happy publication day to me! This volume contains my chapter "Failing in Front of Your Peers: A New Pedagogy of Logic". www.bloomsbury.com/uk/innovatio...