I have a sudden craving for batter-dipped fish fillets. I don't even like fish.

Once you go through the standard process of turning off/denying all the annoying stuff Windows has been doing since XP, and knock down its eccentricities (such as moving the start button back to where it belongs, in the lower left), Windows 11 feels like........ Windows 10 with revamped icons.

... prosciutto.

I miss being able to post polls.

[email protected] thought you might appreciate this, if only for the array of classic synths on display: youtu.be/wLR029D2myI?...

pointillism taken to a new level, or, the origins of ASCII art?

There is a scandalous dearth of USB-A ports on this laptop.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, so here is an amazing cover of the late Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 hit song about same. youtu.be/8JLU9wXu-4M?...

we're going to the hardware store! (entire @alyankovic.bsky.social song plays in head)

Back in the shop after nearly a month. Trying to remember what we were doing. Feels pretty good, man.

Dried cherries are what raisins wish they were.

To the best of my knowledge, my family has never owned an electric blanket. I feel like maybe this winter I should fix that.

corollary: the people who MADE the damn thing have plenty of all three, and in evaluating the output of their creations, it would be really great to know in advance what the latter two were

It is SNOW. In MY BACK YARD. DISGUSTING. (By the time I took this picture, the precip had turned to rain, so it'll be gone in the morning, but still.)

Today I learned that I've now reached an age where my formative period was long enough ago to have a "-punk" aesthetic. Evidently a sci-fi/spec-future/post-apocalyptic setting with a 1980s vibe is now "cassettepunk".

today's forbidden craving: gyoza

Maine DHHS needs more variety in its hold music, if it can't do anything about reducing hold times. I can now hum that smooth jazz sax piece without thinking about it.

It's a blustery, sleety Thursday night in paradise, and I am eating a froyo bar and watching a time-lapse video of a man pressure washing a concrete driveway. Right now, life is... not terrible.

It looked like millennials were going to take over the whole ruining-things industry for a few years there, but then women came roaring back. You just can't keep 'em down.

On my way home from errands today, I saw something I don't think I've ever seen before: a school bus pulling into one of the (few remaining) local motels to make a drop-off. I don't know what circumstances compel someone with a school-age child to live in a motel room, but I hope things get better.

I see some people wondering aloud, "What happened to these guys to make them this way? Who hurt them?" My take parallels Tommy Lee Jones's Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard in the famous culvert scene from THE FUGITIVE (1993): DR. RICHARD KIMBLE I didn't kill my wife! GERARD I don't care.

Imagine if door-to-door ice (as in frozen water) sales were still a thing in cities. Two different clades of white vans roaming the city, driven by uniformed men... such glorious opportunities for confusion and comedic mayhem.

I'm listening to a biography of Henry VIII, and it mentions that during a hunting expedition, one of Anne Boleyn's greyhounds killed a cow, for which His Majesty was obliged to pay. Greyhounds in the 16th century must have been very different. Or cows. Or both!

dammit, I'm havin' some babybel cheese. (phrasing aside, this is not an act of rebellion. I'm allowed to have cheese. :)

Fun historical fact: Henry VIII of England was a candidate to succeed Maximilian I as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, and his minion Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was angling to be elected Pope at about the same time. Imagine how different history would be if one or both of those things had happened....

oh, hey, it's time for this year's urinary tract infection. yay!

I'm not allowed grain products until the 25th, and I cannot TELL you how much I want garlic bread with cheese right now.

@mikemaihack.com sorry about the flood, just catching up. :)

I saw this in a store yesterday and nearly plotzed in real time. It's a FOUR-HUNDRED-DOLLAR electric toothbrush. With... well, they never say "AI" in the description and it PROBABLY doesn't consult a cloud, but... just read that jibbajabba. www.bestbuy.com/product/phil...

Another thing I learned today is that my current solid food capacity is two chicken nuggets. I learned this by eating three chicken nuggets. Welp! It's a process.

Here's something funny: I completely misinterpreted what the next stage of my post-surgical diet was. I thought "soft foods" meant I would graduate from "broth" to "soup with stuff in it". Turns out that's totally NOT what it means; it means being able to alternate between soft solid foods...

appt report: alles in Ordnung! healing well. on to diet phase 4, soft solid foods. no grains or fibrous fruit yet, that's phase 5. eval for that in 4 wks (so 6 post-surgery).

always relevant

"King of Pain" is an unfortunate BGM for a doctor's waiting room. still a banger track though

Trawling around Google Street View just now. I know it's a glitch in the Matrix, but I want this car.

Why am I watching cooking videos when I'm not allowed to eat? Do I WANT to have a psychotic episode? (OTOH, it's giving me some good ideas for when the embargo lifts...)

Today I learned that the notorious sexploitation film Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS was filmed on the abandoned set of Hogan's Heroes, which had been canceled several years prior. I say that means it canonically takes place at Stalag 13, after Col. Klink and Schultz were sent to the Eastern Front.

They told me never to drink carbonated beverages ever again, but nobody said anything about shooting Reddi-Wip directly into my mouth. (That was a joke. I'm not doing that. Unless...?)

ah, the special disorientation when you fell asleep in your recliner while it was daylight out, woke up to find it dark, and have no idea how long you were out

Well, at least it's a jungle in a reasonable time zone this time.

Good morning from these Halloween goblins

Also, wait, there's a sequel to The Outer Worlds coming out next month?! I didn't even know they were working on one. YMMV, and a lot of people's did, but I really enjoyed the first one.

Why has there not been an epochal series of Skies of Arcadia games? Seriously. Or at least a remake of the first one for modern PC.

I'm reasonably sure that unless you consider the period between my birth and when I was old enough to have pizza, this is the longest I've ever gone in my life without eating pizza. And it'll still be weeks yet before I can have any.

On the one hand, it's absolutely viscerally shocking to see photos of the East Wing being casually demolished for a wannabe Mugabe's vanity project. On the other hand, at the end of the day, it's really just an annex to an office building. The whole phenomenon invites reflections about historicity.

"The detritus of deeply imbedded prejudice [is] only slowly trodden down." - Ian Kershaw, THE GLOBAL AGE: EUROPE, 1950–2017 #qotd

One of my strangest and least helpful superpowers: if I have to make a call in some official, bureaucratic capacity, no matter where in the world the office I'm calling is, I will call them at a bad time. Shift changes, usually.

Are you ready to learn something really stupid? Here goes! Microsoft offers a downloadable software tool for making Windows 11 install media. It only runs in Windows 11.

I want more people to care that SNAP benefits are being cut off on November 1. 40% of SNAP beneficiaries are children. This is callous and vile.

I'm sure replying "fuck off" to right-wing poli-shill text messages before reporting them as spam and blocking them is immature and useless, but it feels nice.