Year: 2025
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I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.
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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.
The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
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Somebody's doing a kickass job with these adverts on the Tube.
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Photo of a parody advertisement on a London Underground train, showing Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute. The fake ad is for 'Elon's Musk', 'parfum de 1939'.
Found via https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3ljobtnidrk2s; there are other examples in that thread.
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My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88x31 button representing "me" (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).
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88x31 animated GIF button in the Web 1.0 style, reading "DAN Q". The letter Q is spinning.
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The same image, but expanded so it's larger.
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How do birds hear the calls of species of bird other than their own? Is it like background noise that they can talk (sing) over, filtering out everything but the calls of their own kind, like how you can talk over the murmur of a cocktail party until the second somebody says your name? Or is it more like something they consciously observe and work around, like waiting for your turn to speak in a group conversation flitting between several different topics?
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Early springtime view of bare trees over green-brown fields under a sky dappled with clouds.
Either way: is such communication strategy an instinctive or a learned behaviour? It seems likely that at least part of birdsong communication is gained after hatching because birds from noisy cities are louder than their country cousins (although you wouldn't know it, to listen out of the bedroom window of my rural home, this morning!).
Just a moment's curiosity for the morning.
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A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
Right after I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built, I began reading its sequel A Prayer for the Crown-Shy and... it's also wonderful. It takes a different-but-similar approach to the philosophy of identity and purpose, and the story provides a deeper look into Dex's world, but it's still a familiar-feeling continuation of a beautiful story that's comforting and sweet.
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Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This'll work, right?
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Pizza built with bean chilli and mixed grated cheese, ready to go into an oven.
Update: yeah. This works.😋
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Finished pizza, looking delicious.
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What's the equivalent phrase to "hair of the dog", but for caffeine?
I've always been pretty sensitive to it, and while I'm less-so now, it was still definitely a mistake to eat several portions of tiramisu right before bedtime.
So now I'm going to need more caffeine, this morning, to compensate for the lack of sleep.
What do we call that?
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AI vs The Expert
Inspired by an 11-year old comedy sketch, I asked a GenAI to solve an unsolvable programming problem... and (for at least some models) it failed in exactly the way I anticipated: claiming to be able to solve it and delivering code that just... didn't. What does this teach us about AI trustworthiness for problems that might be solvable, but for which the human operator doesn't have sufficient comprehension to verify?
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
While I've been ill I read A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers, which had been on my reading list for a while. It's a comforting and compelling story about purpose and identity in an environmentally-conscious utopia, and it's flipping awesome.
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After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what's probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉
It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervising had finished her business.
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A white man stands outside a white house, looking cold. His hands are buried in the pockets of his checked pyjama bottoms, and his upper half is wrapped tightly in a Tumblr-branded grey jumper. Various childrens toys litter the garden around him.
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Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great... until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your "streak" as an "achievement"! 😅
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Two 'Jetpack' notifications on an Android phone, both at 08:07. The first reads: 'Dan Q posted on Marketplace Engineering: AFK for itsdang -26Feb25'. The second reads: 'New achievement: You're on a 3-day streak on Marketplace Engineering!'
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Third day of being ill with what's probably a winter vomiting bug, with one child home sick from school... and just having had to collect the other kid who started throwing up on his school trip... I finally got back to my bed and picked up the next book on my pile, Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Willd-Built.
The opening page reads: "For anybody who could use a break."
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Printed serifed text reading: 'For anybody who could use a break.'
Yes. Yes, please.
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Don't remember the last time I felt so run-down. I've been unwell since Sunday with an illness I can only assume I caught from the 11-year-old, who's been unable to keep food down for several days.
In my case, though, I've mostly been full of muscular aches and cramps, ocassionally fits of shivers, and strange dizziness.
I've spent the last day and a bit mostly drifting in and out of sleep, where I've had the weirdest dreams. I just woke from one where I was lost in a sprawling hotel, looking for my room which was number 317 or possibly 305, I couldn't remember. The signage didn't make sense to me and I couldn't read it, and found myself wandering around a sprawling resort, with hot air balloon services connecting different parts. At one point I found myself lost in a library whose winding shelves formed a Escherian maze, and a small child watched me with suspicion as I fumbled around for an exit.
In a disturbing dream from yesterday afternoon, I was lying in a desert of cold sand as the wind gradually piled up more and more sand against me. At first I felt fascinated, thinking I'd learned something about how dunes form, until I discovered that I wasn't able to move. I gradually sunk deeper and deeper underground, in pain except when I lay very still and let it take me, until eventually I started to become the very sand that I was disappearing into. I felt flakes of myself break away and become part of the desert, unable to resist the change nor reconstruct myself, resigned to my fate.
I'm in less pain so far this morning than yesterday, so I think I'm recovering, but man this has been an unpleasant ride. Whatever I'm infected with: do not recommend, would not contract again, one out of five.
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Generative AI use and human agency
Joanna Bryson's put together an absolutely fantastic list of considerations about the use of AI, and two of her points do a better job than I did at saying what I was trying to, last week.
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OpenStreetMap rocks (especially on foot)
OpenStreetMap blows Google Maps out of the water for walkers and also for if you're trying to find a particular-named house in a rural area. I'm not saying never to use Google Maps (there's plenty of things it's the king at): but maybe consider giving OpenStreetMap a go next time you need a digital map?