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Huzzah!

Happy Valentines, everyone! Long time readers will recall that February 14 is also our wedding anniversary (our 16th) and my blogaversary (my 18th). Sometimes we buy ourselves an antique to celebrate, but this house is currently so stuffed full of furniture (we inherited some) that we’re just going to go out and stuff our faces.

Image recycled from my tenth blogaversary post.

February 14, 2025 — 5:13 pm
Comments: 12

And the best bit is, we made it ourselves

See that happy, fluffy cloud in the upper right corner? That, my friends, is several years’ accumulation of piddle and wet toilet paper. Why yes, it did stink.

When our gardener hacked back the hedge yesterday, she found a drain cover. All the soil around was soaking wet. We got our friendly neighborhood drains man around and he found that, between the first drain cover and the next was this giant toilet roll boulder.

Between the two inspection ports is, like, thirty feet of straight pipe. No gravity feed + low flow toilet = what you see here.

That particular pipe only handles the upstairs toilet, sink and shower, so there wasn’t enough stuff to push it through. We’ve apparently been peeing on the ground outside our bedroom window for years.

We have instructions to pour a bucket of water down it from time to time.

This is probably a good time to promote one of my favorite YouTube channels again: Drain Cleaning AUSTRALIA.

February 13, 2025 — 4:38 pm
Comments: 8

GAH!

We’ve let the hedge at the back of the house grow up the whole time we’ve lived here. This is a very dark old house, and that just made it darker. When we noticed brambles were trying to grow up into the fabric of the building we knew we had to cut it back, and OH MY GOD IS IT EVER BRIGHT IN HERE.

Well, I mean, not now. It’s night now. But we wandered around the house all day going LOOK AT THOSE COBWEBS! and LOOK AT THE DUST! It’ll grow up pretty fast, but I feel curiously naked.

The illustration is…meh. When I couldn’t get Grok to give me a picture of a moleman flinching away from a beam of bright light, I decided to ask it for a mole and then ask it for a man on all fours and then cut them together in Photoshop.

I don’t think I’ll try the experiment again. I would have been better off ordering my parts off Google Images.

That first prompt? The complicated one? To my surprise, it gave me that same four racially diverse headshots. I think Grok’s instructions are “when you can’t understand the prompt, give ’em the Burger King Kids’ Club.”

February 12, 2025 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 7

Rats, rats and more rats

Smithfield Market. There’s been a meat market on this spot for over 800 years. The current Smithfield Market – I mean the buildings – are lovely old Victorian spaces. Still selling meat and fish.

We watched a TV program about it once. It’s one of those businesses that work all night to be ready for trade in the morning. It’s a whole overnight ecosystem.

I read somewhere it was closing down after all this time, but there’s no hint of it on the website.

The London Museum has shut for a year in order to move to Smithfield, it looks like in the old poultry building. I couldn’t be bothered to look it up for sure.

In the course of renovating their new (old) building, workmen broke through a wall and discovered an 800-square-yard warren of Victorian tunnels. “The hidden space was rediscovered in 2019 during the early days of the £437m development project, when a building contractor broke through a wall to find a vast, rat-infested network of subterranean vaults.”

They kinda knew there were underground rooms, but they had no idea of the scale. It’s astonishing the things they’ve found walled off in London.

We went to the London Museum once, years ago, in the old building. Outside on a bench, we found a purse and called the police to collect it. The police opened it up and found the woman’s information and a pair of false teeth.

How do you leave your teeth on a park bench?

February 11, 2025 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 4

Didn’t anybody say it out loud first?

I bought a packet of styluses so I can operate my new touch screen computer without getting weasel grease all over the glass. In case you can’t make it out, the brand name is iSOUL.

That’s like, I always refused to join the Graphic Artists’ Guild. If they couldn’t be bothered to visualize the acronym, they couldn’t be very good graphic artists, could they?

February 10, 2025 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 5

Not bad, AI

I asked Grok to “make me an image of elon musk eating a pickle in comic book style” and this is what it gave me. Not bad at all.

Why the phrase “elon musk eating a pickle” popped into my head, I do not know. I’m kind of surprised Grok allowed it, in that it could easily be edited into something ruder.

I do know a whole lot of illustrators will be out of work.

Have a good weekend!

February 7, 2025 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 8

Embarrassing

Bought myself one of these. It’s the small version of the big and unwieldy one I have with my desktop machine. It’s small and unwieldy (Huion tablets use an unfeasible number of ports). I haven’t been able to set it up yet because I’m having a Windows 11 update that’s been downloading for over an hour.

Just had a message saying installing the update could take an unusually long time(!). Yeah, maybe later.

I bought this from the Huion Ebay shop – it’s a refurb. Yes, sorry, I can’t make myself not be a cheapskate. I ordered it yesterday afternoon and it showed up at 1:00 today. Wow.

Took a picture of the box to show you, propped up in a chair. When I saw the image on computer, there was a terrifying amount of cat hair on the chair. Crop! Crop!

February 6, 2025 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 6

Uncle B liked it, anyway

This photo won the Natural History Museum’s 2024 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was taken in an urban setting not that far from here. Do hit the link – there are some wonderful photos there.

There is a darker side to this image. I live in rural Dorset where I’m on a rewilding mission to enhance habitats for a huge array of wildlife. The badger cull – which is still ongoing – has decimated their numbers and I fear that unless the cull is stopped, we’ll only see badgers in urban settings in several parts of England. My hope is for this image to raise awareness of the damaging effect of the badger cull and help push for change.” – Ian Wood, winner of this year’s People’s Choice Award.

That’s the photographer, Ian Wood. While I agree the cull is disgraceful (they’re trying to murder their way out of bovine tuberculosis), I don’t know why anyone would want badgers in the city. They’re a menace to traffic and awfully destructive.

If you scroll down the BBC article on the topic, you might just spot a Belgian ermine.

p.s. don’t get me started on Banksy.

February 5, 2025 — 5:41 pm
Comments: 5

Lucky little newt

Look at the adorable smooth newt that Uncle B found SWIMMING IN THE DOWNSTAIRS TOILET. I may never poop again.

Yes, he rescued it.

Speaking of slimy things: Adobe. I posted a rave review of Photoshop Elements some time ago, which has damn near all the functionality of my full Photoshop but only costs, like, £70. I went to buy a copy for new machine, and noticed in the fine print it now says “3 year license.”

So I looked it up. Yup. After three years, the program stops working and you have to pony up again. They started this in 2025 and, because everything is delivered digitally now, you simply cannot buy an older version.

Anyway, I may have a workaround. I bought the 2024 version for work and it’s a one person, two seat license. If I can find the serial number.

Wot bastards.

February 4, 2025 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 8

Guess who got a new computer?

Me. It was me. It was a trick question.

The laptop that I sit around and shitpost with is over ten years old. It still works fine for my purposes, but the keyboard is going (notably the spacebar, which is hard to work around) and it was starting to lock and complain more and more.

Stupid. I can easily afford a new one. But a certain innate cheapness is hard to overcome. So I bought a nice computer, but bowed to my thrifty instincts and bought an ex-display model. They knocked a few hundred off it.

Nice, bangy screen. Lots of memory. Good sound. Big hard drive. I was loving this thing.

Day two, after assorted updates, the soundcard stopped working. I had sound with Bluetooth speakers but not the native sound. I spent an entire day in Gates hell, fart-assing around with the Device Manager, Control Panel, downloading drivers, rebooting.. I so didn’t want to send this computer back.

In the end, Uncle B found the answer: a Windows update from December broke Realtek and Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix it. The solution: do a firmware update on the computer. The search idea that called it up for him was the bizarre fact that sound worked with Bluetooth speakers.

I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent chasing Gates bullshit.

Anyway – new computer! w00t!

February 3, 2025 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 19