We’ll freeze, thanks
We’re getting toward the end of the cold season, but it’s still pretty chilly at night. Amazingly, 500 year old houses are not warm. I had a check of our home heating oil and it’s getting pretty low.
Last time we bought some, we paid £.53 a liter. They’re now asking £1.20. We have opted to bundle up in the daytime until Uncle B. fires up the stove in the evening.
What’s it going for where you be at, if you have oil central heat? (Also, have a good weekend!).
April 24, 2026 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 6
It made me unhappy
I just received a Steam notice that Into the Radius 2 is out of early access and up for sale. I shall not be buying it.
It’s a VR game. I played ItR1 and it was excellent. It takes place after some sort of…cataclysmic event. The landscape is a bizarre welter of floating cars and electrical hotspots and giant, crushing footprints from some invisible beast. I died a lot.
You have a home base and are sent out daily to retrieve items and hunt…entities. It’s very well done, but I realized after a while it was making me jumpy, even when I wasn’t playing. I guess it was the combination of VR and monsters that can sneak up on you fast. Plus, you had to find food and maintain your equipment. Plus, the whole landscape reset itself every…I want to say 24 hours. I don’t remember.
The best bit was the shooting range. You could try any of the very realistic guns and attachments on offer in the game for free and it was neutral territory – nothing could get you. I spent a lot of time in there. I honestly think it might’ve improved my marksmanship – except, of course, no recoil. Also I live in a place where I can’t have guns.
If you’re made of sterner stuff than I, this is probably a really great game. Maybe I’ll watch a playthrough.
April 23, 2026 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 2
World’s oldest nun turns 113
That is an old nun. Followed a link from Citizen Free Press. Speaking of which, did you see the link a few days ago about the FBI’s file on Bigfoot? It wasn’t terribly interesting (not one of my passions, bigfoot), but it linked to something called the FBI Reading Room.
It’s real – it’s an fbi.gov URL – and it’s supposedly stuff that has been released under the FOIA program. Holy poop – if you don’t find something in there that interests you, you’re dead to the world!
Ooo…I got as far as Al Gore Sr. before I had to stop for a look. So far, it’s J. Edgar Hoover being palsy with him.
As corrupt as they come. His favorite method of bribe-taking was a cattle auction on his farm (near unto where I grew up). All these shady characters would line up to pay thousands for a cow worth hundreds. My dad, who was in government in a small way, always boasted, “I never bought the cow!”
April 22, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 6
I am consumed with techlust
I sat next to someone using one of these today – a reMarkable tablet. By the time you’ve added a case and stylus and other necessaries, it’s upwards of £500. These days, I don’t do anything that would come close to justify it. And what really put me off is finding out you need a monthly subscription to take full advantage of the features (I refuse to step onto the subscription model).
But it’s slick stuff. You can make notes in the usual way and it will type them up for you. You can connect it to your phone and move documents back and forth. I don’t know what it does for drawing cleanup – man’s a lawyer, I don’t think he doodles much – but it would be interesting to know.
I mean, there are cheaper alternatives, but the truth is – I would probably play with one for a few hours and then put it away in a drawer forever.
April 21, 2026 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 5
Yes, I ruined the surprise
Jaws bath bomb. Amazon link. Original tweet. You can count on the Japanese.
I stopped buying fancy bath bombs. So many of them have things like lavender or flower petals in them, and when they float to the surface, it feels like I’m soaking in a tub full of bugs.
April 20, 2026 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 6
I’m going to be that old lady
A 91-year-old lady in Cleveland failed to respond to an automated wellness check. After which, she failed to respond to a human dispatcher call. The police called her daughter and found that, yes, she should be home and answering the phone.
The police did a check and she didn’t come to the door. Concerned, they walked in, and…she was playing a video game and trying desperately to beat her own personal best.
I bet she was pissed.
It was a game called Super Bubble Pop (pictured). And she was super into it.
According to the article, 36% of Americans aged 80-90 play video games weekly, but she was 91 so I guess it doesn’t count.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
April 17, 2026 — 4:35 pm
Comments: 7
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: 11
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