Do chickens have feelings?
That’s the question posed by Backyard Chickens Magazine and the answer is duh.
They’re emotional wrecks, are chickens. They’re scatty and fearful; they mourn the missing, they cheer when you come around the corner. They’re the most emotional animals I’ve ever interacted with. And they have real, discoverable language for all of it, too.
It’s heartbreaking to watch Sam pecking around the garden and calling to his friends when he finds something tasty.
There’s no one to come.
April 16, 2026 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 8
Interesting numbeers
I got an email from the Wayback Machine today. They’ve partnered with Automattic (the company behind WordPress) to publish a free plugin to fight link rot – dead links. According to them, 43% of the whole www is published with WordPress.
They say they’ve catalogued a trillion (!) web pages. Apparently, Pew looked into it and found that from a group of 10-year-old websites they studied, 38% of the links were dead.
I run into this a lot. Second only to websites who don’t publish the date, so you think you’re looking at the dates for this year’s Weaselfest but it’s actually 2017. But I digress.
The way it works, you install this plugin and it catalogues all the links you’ve posted and schedules them for backup. Then if the site breaks, they seamlessly switched to the archived version. Not a bad idea, if it works.
A trillion webpages. That’s got to be incredibly expensive to store. I’ve always wondered how they’re funded, so I asked Grok.
He says they have an annual budget of $20–37 million and a significant chunk of that comes from small donors. Then there are regular grants from philanthropic foundations and money from the government for archiving. They offer services like book digitizing.
I know what you’re going to ask. I’m not sure if I’m eligible for this plugin. Some years ago, there was a frenzy of copyright trolling. It was costing little websites thousands in legal claims. I’m usually careful about copyright, but I’ve published about 6,000 images and I couldn’t be sure, so I asked Wayback to forget sweasel.com. I never checked to see if they did.
April 15, 2026 — 4:43 pm
Comments: 3
I…what?
I wear fingerless gloves from September to May, because I’m an old woman and my hands are always cold. I never bothered to read the little teeny tiny tag on the back of the woolly ones I wear around the house. It says:
WINTER IS HERE
MIS YEAR WILL SURELY BECOME
A SPECIAL WINTER.
A heartwarming Chinglish message for cold times.
Speaking of which, did you see earlier this week when they turned on automatic translation in Twitter and then threw all the Japanese into the American tweet streams? Or perhaps it was the other way around. At any rate, everyone had a wonderful time asking questions and chattering away. It was quite sweet.
April 14, 2026 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 3
Hooey
Beaver, naturally. If you must see this travesty in color. This popped up on Pinterest – because if you ever sign up, you’ll get a minimum daily email from them.
The idea is, of course, utter horseshit. There is no Indian zodiac. There is no native American race. And there is no individual tribe that had a formal zodiac.
Grok tells me the US government currently recognizes 575 tribes and villages, between Alaska and the lower 48. God knows how many, if you reach back in history. We probably made a bunch of them extinct. And they all have different cultures and beliefs.
This is 20th Century New Agers showing the world their asses.
Speaking of asses – yes, we are still being hammered by spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.
April 13, 2026 — 3:02 pm
Comments: 7
Smells like robots
Yesterday or the day before, my Twitter feed was full of references to this band – Angine de Poitrine. A guitar and drum combo that seems mostly about these dumb costumes. You can give a listen, if you want, but I wasn’t impressed. It was too little music and too much performance art for my taste.
And no more links since. Y’know, I don’t think that was organic…
Have a good weekend!
April 10, 2026 — 5:08 pm
Comments: 4
…on a chicken hunt…
One of the nasty little rat dogs from next door got loose and chased Sam, my little white cockerel, into the hedge. He’s usually easy to spot because of his color, so I reckon he’s crawled deep under some bush and gone to ground. If we don’t find him before roosting time, Mr Fox is likely to overnight.
They hunker down and go silent. I’ve been on a scared chicken hunt or two.
And I have to go to an event in town later. I’ll give you an update, but it’s likely to be late.
UPDATE: GOT HIM! Not sure where he was, but I found him walking up the drive headed to his own bed for the night. I wanted to pick him up, but he’s a little too freaked.
April 9, 2026 — 4:37 pm
Comments: 9
Still seeking
A still from my lost masterpiece Damien’s Jaunty Balls above, celebrating the 2006 neutering of my cat. It makes visual sense as a stripey cat walking when it’s animated, which was fun to do.
I’ve tried a number of the swf > mp4 converters without success. Some render the audio but no images. Some do the job but result in huge files. One – Ruffle Player – will play the link for me when I upload it, but won’t download in any kind of shareable form. Hence the still image.
The text above reads: go go gonads, you’re the besticles, there never was a pair like Damien’s testicles.
No badger in last night’s footage, but there was a fox. Very misty again.
April 8, 2026 — 5:27 pm
Comments: 5
Some things won’t die
One of the roguelike games I used to play – a version of Nethack, I believe – if you played as a thief, your deity was Ratgod. That always tickled me. Whenever something strange but harmless happened, we said it was the work of Ratgod.
So I registered the domain ratgod.com. I built a number of websites in the early Noughties just for fun, and this was one. I used it for silly quotes (a different one every time you refreshed the page) and one animation called Damien’s Jaunty Balls, celebrating the day I had my cat neutered (if I can convert it to a modern playable file format, I’ll post it). Then I let the registration lapse. Something like 2006?
Damn if I don’t still get mail to it – always addressed to Ratgod Dot. I think I must have arrived in some entrepreneurial list. Here’s today’s:
Hi [my actual first name],
Not sure if this is on your radar but if Ratgod Dot is making at least $20k/month, there is a solid chance you can qualify for same day credit line.
Up to $750,000, no PG or credit checks and you get it in under 24h
Can I send the options available?
– Gabriella
Who on earth has a website pulling in $20K a month?
April 7, 2026 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 4
Gorilla in the mist
We have a badger! This is actually a very bad thing. He’s digging great holes in the lawn looking for worms (their favorite protein source). And there’s jack shit we can do about it. They’re a protected species, and even if they weren’t, what would you do?
We caught him on wildlife camera (he’s been digging up the lawn for days), but the picture quality was so poor owing to ground mist, you can barely make him out. The above was an artist’s reconstruction. By which I mean Grok, of course.
Note the stripes.
April 6, 2026 — 6:04 pm
Comments: 11
Well, *I* thought it was cool
Modern Word files are XML files, zipped. (XML is a sort of cousin to HTML, the markup language webpages are written in). That’s why the extension is docx. If you rename a .docx file to .zip, you can actually open it and see how it’s structured.
That’s what you see in the picture above.
The _rels folder contains relationship files (with the .rels extension). These XML files act like a “map” or “glue” telling Microsoft Word (or any compatible program) how all the different parts of the document are connected to each other.
CustomXML is self explanatory, and the docProps folder (short for “document properties”) contains the metadata about the file itself — not the actual content of the document, but information about the document: it’s the place where Word (and other Office apps) stores things you usually see when you go to File > Info such as the author name, title, creation date, etc.
The actual documents lives in the Word folder and the [Content_Types].xml file’s job is to tell any program what kind of content each file inside the ZIP package is. Sort of a “file type registry”.
And yes, they’re human-readable and you can edit them manually, with a fair probability of screwup if you get it wrong. Why you would want to I do not know; I just like to take things apart to see how they’re made. Yes, some of these words were cut and pasted from the robot.
I hope you had an awesome Good Friday. I’ll see you on the other side of the weekend!
April 3, 2026 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 4