Note #27692

Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying “ethical non-monogamy”?

Nobody feels the need to say “ethical monogamy”; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.

I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word “ethical” and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)

Male Surname?

This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?

Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?

A form asking for Surname, Forename and Gender (with options Male, Female, and Both) changes its labels to e.g. Male Surname/Male Forename or Female Surname/Female Forename when the Gender option is changed.

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Happy Polyamory Day 2025

Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it, like most years.)

Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t always glamorous; but it is full of love.

Autumn Sunrise

Gorgeous autumn dawn this morning with a razor-sharp moon hanging above the shifting hues of the South-East.

A silver sliver of a crescent moon in the indigo part of a colourful autumn sunrise framed between spindly tree branches above and roofs below.

It’s going to be a cold one. (At last; it’s been an unseasonably-warm November so far!)

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Only Murders in the Building Season 5

I really liked Only Murders in the Building. It started with a fun premise. It grew into something hilariously self-aware. I’d recommend it.

But man, the fifth season had the most-disappointing reveal/conclusion imaginable.

Hoping the promised sixth season does better.

Vihreät Kuulat

Second “surprising Finnish confectionary” is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means “green balls”, which doesn’t tell me much.

Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visited) I had to try them, but I couldn’t place the flavour. They were tasty, though. We finished eating them before I looked it up.

A box of Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. The cross-section cutaway shows a green jelly within the biscuit, and alongside are pictures of spherical green jellies.

Turns out it’s pear flavour, which apparently I have a blind spot for (back in 2013 at an “eat mystery food in the dark” restaurant I failed to identify that I was eating poached pears for dessert).

Now I need to be on the lookout for actual green balls.

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Finnish Haribo

Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn’t have been surprised (given the country’s love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured.

And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was.

(Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.)

A bag of Haribo ClickMix, opened, held on a white hand.

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Note #27464

Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden.

Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you?
Guy 2: Dunno. But we can’t dig round it soo…

😬

1% Guild

vole.wtf’s 1% guild wasn’t the easiest club to gain membership of, but somehow keeping my phone alive for long enough to snap this screenshot was even harder.

Screenshot from an Android phone at vole.wtf/one-percent, showing a picture of Dan alongside other people.

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Note #27434

Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text.

It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three Rings, managed to connect that to my mobile number, and called me.

If Siri’s decided that I represent Three, this could work out even worse than that time Google shared my phone number.

Hot Boxes

I’d never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.

They’re both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the slow cooker aims to maintain as low a temperature as possible until the food finally cooks itself out of boredom.

A seared shoulder of pork rubbed with spices sits in a syrupy cider mix atop some sliced white onions in a slow cooker pot.

Anyway, this is going to be pulled pork in like 8-10 hours. 😋

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