Nothing says love like a dogfood-flavoured kiss.

While it is not my practice to pollute my timestream with too much #politics, on this occasion I congratulate and encourage Donald Trump in his uncharacteristically resolute decision to give a prolonged standing speech in 39°C temperatures despite his physical and mental infirmity. #itcouldhappen

I'm on a few days' trip to Mallorca to help a relative with some work stuff there but I'm temporarily superfluous and this has devolved into reading a book while lying in a hammock slung between an orange and an olive tree.

Original Tomb Raider. Walk out and shoot a pack of wolves? Nopeski! I walked out, got eaten, and that was the end of the franchise for me.

Booking a flight. I usually go by train, but that's not an option now. The CO₂ budget already makes me wince, but now the airline is offering to let me buy an empty seat next to myself to allow more room for my arse cheeks. I wonder if "sustainable aviation fuel" is just more greenwashing bullshit…

Note that this graph is the temperature *anomaly*, not the absolute temperature, and this forecast is still ten days out and therefore tentative. Even so: brace yourselves. This is your lives now.

Huh. Linux desktop upgrade ran in half an hour with no sweat and everything just worked after. I've spent my life on Linux because it did things I found useful, but I sure ain't used to things being that easy. It's kind of disorienting to see non-geeks starting to use it these days. Progress!

am still not over this

The fundamental sin of using LLMs for anything — code, research, letters to your granny — is to conflate writing with thinking. Writing is only one building block of the edifice of thought, and if your CEO's writing is the bottleneck in their thinking then they're not doing very much thinking.

I can't remember when I last just sat down to read a book. I wonder what would happen if I just sat down to read a book.

saw this cap on tumblr and god it really is like that

Learning to fly in a foreign language isn't going very well. It's okay, *ish* until I trip over something, but flying and resolving a language difficulty are two intense cognitive loads that add up to way more than 100% of what my brain can deal with, and my confidence is starting to falter badly.

So perfectly balanced between the deranged and the sublime.

I have tried, in my way, to be free.

We switched our home solar+battery system on two days ago. The energy budget isn't infinite, but within that budget, energy is simply free. It's like having a UBI for lightswitches. A sudden liberation from a lifelong sense of constraint. This should be a thing for everybody. Socialism, bitch.

It's been several days since @bubblewolf.bsky.social sent me the final of this and I'm still (not quite) getting over the absurd privilege of getting to call it my own.

Every so often watching #Eurovision, I'm worried Victoria Swarovski is going to mate with me and eat my head.

Disappointing that even the Grauniad is covering today's protest / counterprotest in London with endless shots of the fash with their banners flying high. It makes the fash look good, which is generally one of the fash's strong points. But they're fash. The Graun is opposed to fash… right…?

When they tell you to practice painting hands more often, but all your brain wants to paint is dogs. #canine #creature

Over one million citizens signed the ECI petition to ban conversion practices. We hear you. ✋🏼These interventions must end. Being LGBTIQ+ doesn’t need to be cured. Your rights are an inseparable part of a true Union of Equality. We won’t let you down.🏳️‍🌈 ➡️https://link.europa.eu/PmbyM4

Compared to the size of a human in a bed, a dog's paws stepping across the bed are relatively small. Why do they have such an unerring targeting instinct for the human testicles? #stomp

I love Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy. Always have. Always will. Not blind to its faults, but some of the things others hate are exactly what I most love. Twenty-seven pages of someone's stream of consciousness including the word "phreatophytic"? A timeless indulgent pleasure.

Finding a paperback of Buster Wilde on someone's coffee table and rediscovering its wit and charm all over again. Even a few jokes I didn't get before! (oh god help me Buster is nearly 30 years old, i can feel my fur turning grey)

Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah! FUCK YEAH!

My precious, precioussss little pilot's logbook now records 32 flights comprising a munificent 5 hours in the air. Miniscule figures, but all mine. I hoard and gloat over them like a kobold sitting on four shillings and a bottlecap.

Damn, I'm on the train to England for tasks there, and the weather in Belgium looks *gorgeous* for gliding. Big boisterous cumulus clouds all over the place. Looks like I chose the wrong week to quit getting high.

Insomniac reminding self about Kylie Minogue because what else is there to do. Fuck me, did we actually LIKE this drivel? Fucking Bananarama was better than Kylie and they didn't even care.

Nolan's new film "The Odyssey" is going to have an Argos scene and I'm not sure I can take that.

I should probably write in my living will that you should confirm my death with the usual checks of heartbeat, blink reflex, etcetera, but if I don't giggle at a Uranus joke then you *really* know I'm dead.

Nice work by @confuzzled.org.uk on shielding their safe spaces for queer, kink and minority people. I'm not an expert on how to do it right, but I've seen a lot of doing it wrong and Confuzzled is not doing it wrong.

If one in a thousand of your customers are confirmed and documented shoplifters, then "99.98% accurate" facial recognition means that about one in five of the people you accost, accuse, and throw out of your shop will be innocent. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This is the designed weak link in a glider winch launch cable. It lets go if the launch forces are becoming unsafe. This one has a breaking strain of about one tonne. That was an interesting couple of minutes.

I love you, THE DOG. I even love you enough to put up with your habit of walking in from your visiting Human's room in the morning, lying down by my bed, and farting. But goddamn.

To look at THE DOG, vast as he is, you'd think he's indestructible and imperturbable. But now, with a storm blowing through, he's come to my room (the most sheltered in the house) to sit and be squeezed between my knees until the storm is done. I feel very privileged and trusted.

The German civil aviation authority Luftsicherheit were here inspecting our flight operations this morning and I ate the figurative Swiss cheese right in front of them. Their response was, frankly, exemplary. What a sound bunch of people.

THE DOG should not look so happy in such thoroughly unsatisfactory sailplane flying weather, but he is happy anyway because he is THE DOG and knows he is loved.

This time last year: Oh my god, just look at this fabulous summer weather! It's so bright and warm and calm! There's literally not a cloud in the sky! Nowadays: Temperature inversion. Bugger.

waking up early in a completely unreasonable state of stress from critique I received on the airfield that I felt was unfairly aimed and delivered but which I didn't have the nerve and quickness of mind to rebut in my second language so I just swallowed it

My longest flight yet, 57 minutes! In radiantly beautiful summer weather. Some help from the flight instructor to get some initial height in wobbly thermals, but I'm handling ever more of it on my own. Every so often I still get 'wow' moments where I realise, no, this is real, I'm learning to fly.

I watched an Infowars video yesterday (for reasons) and I've just sat upright realising what it reminded me of: the screeching incoherent indoctrination scene in "Zoolander".

I miss Customer Service Wolf. Customer Service Wolf was one of those wonderful comics that felt like it ended too soon, though actually I see it went for nearly five years. customerservicewolf.com

Spoke with our neighbour. He's adopted a squared-off haircut and short beard which makes him look not entirely unlike Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Yay, my security check went through. Nontrivial when it involves background checks in three countries. The Germans took three weeks; the Brits took eight; the Swiss turned everything around in five days. Anyway, this means I can fly with the club that flies out of a nearby military airfield.

"Was"? I have an idle habit of checking the German supermarket glossies for Meghan. She's ALWAYS there and they're ALWAYS making some horrible innuendo about her. A constant drip of hate into the ears of millions.

Oh great, now Gmail has switched on AI suggestions for me. I hate them — every single one is wrong, they shoehorn idiosyncratic prose into the deathly trammels of a soulless uniformity. THANK YOU NO I HAVE BEEN USING THIS LANGUAGE FOR A WHILE NOW

Oh come on, Google. First you disable a gamertag you yourself generated, because it's "hateful". And now you've censored that review I wrote for a birdwatching venue, presumably because it mentions tits?

Aviation brings SO much to learn and SO many mistakes to make, and the mistakes are SO public and SO commonplace, that this is palpably helping with my neurotic aversion to inconveniencing people or looking silly in front of them.

Artemis II and a dictator out in Hungary within three days of each other, I'm not sure I can deal with this onslaught of non-ghastly news

I may have encountered longer words in #German #aviation, but "Flugzeugeigensinkgeschwindigkeit" is today's champion. It means "Flight thing self descent speediness". Glad we cleared that up.