Notes – Page 2

Steam Email alt-text improvements

I noticed that automated emails from Steam weren’t doing alt-text very well. Some image links had no or inadequate alt-text. (Note that Steam don’t support opting for plain text rather than HTML emails.)

I’m fortunate enough to depend upon alt-text never-to-rarely. But I prefer not to load remote images, so I still benefit from alt-text.

I filled out a support request to Steam layout out the specific examples I’d found of where they weren’t doing very well, and stressing why it’s (morally, legally, etc.) important to do better.

And you know what: they quietly fixed it. When I received an email today telling me that something on my wishlist is on sale, it had reasonably-good alt-text throughout. Neat.

Voice of America

In light of Trump’s attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims, “anti-Trump” (and because he’s so insecure that he can’t stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I’ve produced a suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th printing:

Yet another blow to US soft power in order to appease the ego of convicted felon Donald Trump. Sigh.

Castles and mazes

Possibly I’m a little late for the “casual daily puzzle game” party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)

I think there’s something in an idea I’ve been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!

Coaching in the Library

I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house’s new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room’s not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.

(Incidentally: I might be treating “lives in a house with a library” as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)

Engagement

I’ve been trying to comment more on other people’s blogs. It’s tough, because comment forms continue to wane in popularity, and it’s not always clear who’ll accept Webmentions, but there’s often the option of a good old-fashioned email or a fediverse ping.

It occurred to me that I follow a significant number of personal blogs, and my privacy systems mean I’m a bit of a ghost to most analytics systems they might use, so the only way they’d ever know I was there would be if I said so.

Plus, the Internet is better when it’s social. There are some great people out there, and I’m enjoying meeting them!

(You’re welcome to throw comments, Webmentions, or emails my way, of course, too!)

Horny and Silly

This year it’ll be 10 years since webcomic A Softer World ended its 12-year run. If you missed it, you can still go back and read them all, starting from asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1

But in the meantime, here’s one of my very favourites:

Rewilding Slay

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.

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?

Elon’s Musk

Somebody’s doing a kickass job with these adverts on the Tube.

Found via https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3ljobtnidrk2s; there are other examples in that thread.

Dan Q 88×31

My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88×31 button representing “me” (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).

Dawn Chorus

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?

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.

Bean chilli breakfast pizza

Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This’ll work, right?

Update: yeah. This works.😋

Coffee dogs

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?

Getting better!

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.

3-day streak

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”! 😅

For anybody who could use a break

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.”

Yes. Yes, please.