When I got a policy certificate to move to Canada and had to request extra space to list all the place I'd lived in the past ten years

For my first six months in Seattle I lived in a tiny studio without a proper kitchen (I had hobs and a microwave but no oven) and that was a salutory lesson in how actually decent ready meals have got. The Trader Joes curries are pretty good and they're like $3-4 each.

It's funny because I do basically believe that money changes people but I can also believe that if Elon Musk had never been rich he would have been repeatedly warned about creeping on the girls at the local board game meetup

Can't sleep and seem to have picked up my third cold in two months.

Nobody On The Internet Can Read is a running joke on BlueSky but this site's users are like Dickens compared to trying to sell anything online.

Some people don't want to win, they want to be immortalised in bad folk music about how gloriously they lost

I find Republican rhetoric funny because they reached "demonic communist" with Bill and Hillary Clinton and so they've struggled for rhetorically where to go next. I know people call Trump a Nazi but a) more justifiable and b) they usually didn't call Mitt Romney a Nazi.

Had to do three administrative tasks this morning and am 3/3 on them being a massive headache and not working as advertised Welcome back to Canada

Can highly recommend learning a foreign language to the exact extent that you can speak and understand it if required, but people's background chatter remains incomprehensible. I'm back in Canada and suddenly my brain is trying to process EVERYTHING.

BC must take decisive action to protect minorities in the breakway republics of Banff and Jasper.

I recently overheard some Americans in a bar bemoaning how there are no supersonic commercial flights anymore. "Concorde was amazing, but it stopped flying before we were born" 😔

Plane neighbour is reading Candace Owens' book : (

In hindsight the fact I responded to this headline with "oh my God is that still on?" is an insight into what's happened to broadcast TV in the last 15 years.

That's it for Japan, for now. What a strange, fascinating, wonderful four weeks it's been! 必ずまた来よう！

Seems bad

John Prescott's ghost appears Mufasa-like in the sky over Minneapolis

Girl in the Hobonichi store, as I buy some Earthbound socks and a box of Mr Saturn cookies: "so, do you like Mother?"

I will still be in Canada until the end of February but if there is anything I and @wildebeest.design can do to help stop Matt Goodwin MP we will do it for free.

I cannot conceive of anything more delightful than this twat having to deal with the amount of piddling crap that would fill his in tray. Council replaced a wall with the wrong sort of bricks, is it? Yes I will sit and listen to you warble on about it for an hour.

It suits today the weak and base, Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place To cringe before the rich man's frown, And haul the sacred emblem down.

Flying back to Canada (for four weeks) tomorrow and have ended my time in Japan in appropriate fashion by eating Far Too Much Ramen.

I've been charmed by how the man on the pedestrian crossings in Japan wears a hat. So on this very long train journey I decided to see where else in the world the person on the pedestrian crossing wears a hat.

"I've said what I needed to say and here I am back in my job. A full focus on my job as mayor of Greater Manchester." "I'm at work. Enjoying the job."

Things I will miss about Japan: being able to walk two minutes to the konbini and get a Karaage-kun and a Strong Zero at 4am should I so choose.

I am in a relationship with a reasonable age gap and the one interesting dynamic it does have is that we exist on different sides of the Always Online divide. iOS and Android came out when my fiancée was 20 and I was 12, and I think the behavioural differences are noticeable.

Great opportunity to bring up that I made an *award winning* game about this for last year's Historically Accurate Game Jam! robinwilde.itch.io/monky-business

Spending my last day before starting the journey home in Kagoshima! Currently on Shiroyama, the mountain where the last major rebellion against the Meiji government was crushed. With an *active volcano* as the backdrop. Extremely cool. 🌋

Japanx cat

Got a ¥50 (24p) refund for returning my rental car early lads

One of the second-order effects from this which I think *is* important is that people who moved right claiming it as a justification has made it harder for progressives to get out of its orbit, because not doing the "don't hurt me!" tone makes people think you're One Of Them

I really understand very little about the current version of reality.

Right on cue. Colossally entitled, yet still somehow playing the wounded naif. A classic Burnham, 10/10

Andy Burnham's attempts to become Prime Minister, 2010 to present:

Ah good, now we get to enjoy Aggrieved Burnham, his least attractive form.

Made it from the top to the bottom of (mainland) Japan! As helpfully illustrated here, including the 25 degree gap in temperatures between the two...

Starting the last leg of my journey south... By heading north, then changing on my way to Kagoshima 🌋 Nagasaki has a silly half-Shinkansen - it takes you halfway to Fukuoka, then you change for a normal train. Bit like if they built HS2 to Birmingham then gave up on the Manch- hang on

this is all downstream of the idea that some americans are more real than others. it’s a manifestation of the basic and fundamental logic of authoritarian populism. we will not heal ourselves until we understand that this kind of thinking - and this kind of rhetoric - is anathema to any free society

Hands up if you miss Quinn

"And why have you been flinging every available dollar at repaying your loans while you've been living abroad, Robin?"

And I'm back in one month baybee

😭

Nagasaki absolutely pulling it out of the bag with tonight's views. Make sure you get the bus up Mt Inasa if you visit!

In Nagasaki today. Obviously it's not a contest but it feels sadder than Hiroshima - possibly because Hiroshima is so visibly transformed and prosperous and a beacon of recovery since the bomb, whereas Nagasaki feels like any number of slightly struggling coastal cities.

Asking Reddit for advice remains a great way to make yourself irritable and unable to sleep

I'm in The Only Craft Brewery in Nagasaki and that sounds annoyingly like a bestseller from about 2009.

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Sunken City - David Wirsig. It's about a prison break after the end of the world. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ6c...