Because Ricky Gervais needs my money, I guess
He’s bought a poncey vodka company. Then he made a whole series of fake ads like this one and claimed they’d been rejected by Transport for London. In truth, he’d never submitted them, but some people swore they’d seen them on the tube (and were awfully offended).
The usual pearl clutchers have clutched pearls because he’s the vodka that cried wolf.
Whatever. They were funny. But that’s old news, the new news is – my shipment of Dutch Barn is late. Should have been here an hour ago.
I bought some for Christmas and liked it, so I’ve just ordered a couple more bottles. It’s grossly overpriced, but once you get on their aggressive mailing list, you get deals.
March 4, 2026 — 6:28 pm
Comments: 3
That’s chutzpah
Guy goes for his driving test. Gets pulled over in the middle of it for a busted tail light. Reeks of marijuana smoke. Arrested on the spot. Mom very surprised to see a cop get out of the car back at the testing center.
What was the driving instructor thinking? Or his mom, for that matter?
Me, I’m laying low. I tried to use Uncle B’s new printer while he was napping and I borked it. It asked me for an IP address and I gave it a plausible answer. Sadly, not the right answer.
I think he has it fixed now, but I’m not allowed to print anything by myself.
March 3, 2026 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 4
Seems like a contradiction in terms
Water cremation. Just legalized in Scotland.
That’s what they call it, anyhoo. What they actually do is boil your corpse in potassium hydroxide and water for ninety minutes, leaving behind a nice, clean skeleton. Which they smash to powder and give to your family.
I guess the you slurry goes down the drain.
All of this is because – you guessed it – it’s greener than regular cremation. Cremation seems all very hands-off and clinical. I’m okay with it. This sounds like something I’d hate to imagine happening to someone I love.
March 2, 2026 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 8
This is what my set looked like
Remember Rapidograph? I wasn’t a technical draftsman, but I worked in the cubicle next to them. Although I think there was a period of time when Rapidograph pens had a cultural cachet among people who weren’t artists. Like, people who kept poncey diaries.
Anyway, I had a hankering for one and went into my local art shop today. He said oh, I stopped carrying those when they went up to £30(!). They’re about £40(!!) now, he says.
Well, I found them cheaper online, but new ones not by much. And it’s a real risk buying used ones.
They draw such fine lines because the ‘nib’ is a tiny steel cylinder. Inside it is a fine wire attached to a weight. Periodically, you shook the pen so the fine wire bobbed up and down, which cleared the cylinder and kept the ink moving. A studio full of draftsman made the clack-clackity-clack sound at scale.
But the fine wire wore out eventually. And if you let india ink dry hard (and everyone did from time to time), rehabilitating the nibs became a chore. Sometimes impossible. The smaller the nib, the harder to resurrect.
I can’t for the life of me find my set of Rapidographs. Most people these days use fancy felt tips instead, but I’m kinda stubborn. The real thing has a feel to it.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
p.s. I thought my server was down for hours, but it looks like my VPN was to blame.
February 27, 2026 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 9
I remember that!
Uncle B just reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for years – Ling’s cars! Ling Valentine was a car dealer in Britain who was famous for her website. It was gloriously godawful.
The internet tells me she retired in 2020 to bike around the world with her husband and the remaining employees (Ling’s cars is still in business) have toned down the website considerably.
Fortunately, someone has preserved the old site in all its glory. Mostly.
February 26, 2026 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 6
Thanks, buddy
The website I’m building looks like ass on mobile phone, so I asked ChatGPT to help me fix it. Several tweaks later, the whole thing looks like ass on desktop.
Yes, that’s right, says ChatGPT, but it works better on phones.
Dear Weasel: Backup before every tweak.
I swear the version of this cartoon I remember in my head, both characters were cartoons, but Leo couldn’t find one. That’s right – I have a whole clique of robot friends.
February 25, 2026 — 6:08 pm
Comments: 11
Hold on – it’s coming
We’ve had a perfectly awful winter. Not cold, but wet and miserable and dark day after day after day. One sunny day every few weeks and then back to it. Everyone is depressed.
But the dickie birds know spring is coming. They’ve been singing their hearts out for days. And today – croci! (Flowers in black and white are stupid, here’s color).
March sometimes has a good thumping in it, but we’re almost through.
In the thread below, Jasonius asks if I’ve tried Claude. I have and I’m impressed. It’s the most conversational of the AIs so far. Try it. Ask it a neutral history question about your town, or a recipe, or how to get shoes that fit.
I’m paying for ChatGPT, though, and I feel obliged to use it. They’re all as good as each other for computer-y questions.
February 24, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 5
Robo-freud
I promised myself I’d never do anything personal with AI. I can’t for the life of me understand how people pour out their hearts to a command line. I’d feel silly.
But I was writing a business letter and I just couldn’t nail the tone, so I uploaded it to ChatGPT for advice.
It said don’t send this – it sounds querulous and weak. And then it wrote a second draft.
We spent the better part of a day going back and forth. Not just writing drafts, but it began asking me what I expected to get from this interaction. And then where I expected to be in five years. And how I was going to get there.
It asked probing questions and told me (somewhat) hard truths (ChatGPT errs on the obsequious side). I know it’s not genuinely insightful, but damn it’s been trained on some very good material.
At the end of the day, I felt a lot better about a lot of things, and I had a draft of the letter I was pleased with. It was kind of spooky, to be honest.
I’m not sure what to do with this information. It’s about to suck me down into a nightmare flaming demon hellscape, isn’t it?
February 23, 2026 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 7
I’m American, dammit!
I used the word ‘misdemeanor’ in a Twitter post and – as you can see – it was underlined in red as an error. So I checked the dictionary, carefully copied and past the word – still red underline. That did a number on my confidence.
So I came over here to post about it and it was underlined here.
That’s when the penny dropped – it was looking for the British spelling, misdemeanour. At some point – it hasn’t been all along – all of my apps have decided I’m British and they try to correct my American spellings.
Anyone know where that switch is?
p.s. Dead Pool tomorrow!
February 19, 2026 — 6:24 pm
Comments: 6
I was unfaithful
Today I cheated on ChatGPT. I signed up for Claude, because I kept hearing it was the best at words.
I’ve been doing a bit of personal research into a local artist I really like. For a start, I wanted to know if he was the son of a much more famous artist (no, nephew).
Claude as a research assistant was…interesting. It was highly conversational. It wrote very well (something it’s famous for), but it is obviously built to engage in human-like back and forth. Including paying me a few slightly uncomfortable compliments. It was a bit like having my shin humped by an enthusiastic little dog.
It put our conversation together into a Word document for download. If anything significantly changed, it wrote an updated document. Not bad. It made one obvious error a human wouldn’t make – it misunderstood a parent/child relationship. And it lied to me at least once – it told me it would forget our conversation and start over if I asked it to, then it didn’t. But its prose was nearly ready out of the box. It didn’t sound like me, of course, but it was serviceable.
And yes, it did start by asking what it should call me and I told it Weasel.
If I had to sum up – Claude is a conversation simulator, ChatGPT is (over) eager to help and Grok is a snarky teenager. They’re all pretty good as research assistants, though – if you verify.
February 18, 2026 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 8