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
That’s a disconcerting image, Mr Robot
I went to the dentist today for the first time in…let’s just say, a very long time. For those who haven’t been Chez Weasel from the beginning, I had my entire mouthful of old bridgework replaced with shiny implants right before I left the States. The most important thing to me: they don’t come out of my head at night.
Anyhow, they haven’t given me any trouble, so I decided just to ignore them. Like, forever.
I’ve been getting headaches, though, so I thought it would be worth checking out. One exam and three x-rays later and…everything’s fine. Bone looks healthy, no erosion. I’m good. He said come back in two years.
Incidentally, there is such a thing as an NHS dentist, but you’ll apparently never get on the list. Everyone sticks their hands in their pockets for tooth work.
Next week – let’s see if a massage will shift these headaches!
April 2, 2026 — 5:03 pm
Comments: 4
AI isn’t the only one to hallucinate
Behold the two big fat simplified Chinese characters that Google OCR dropped in the middle of the page of the Victorian history book I’m working on. They were about that size, too.
Google Translate tells me it means “Lulu” – but of course it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pure glitch.
I asked ChatGPT to explain and it said modern OCR is trained on a multilingual character set and isn’t smart enough to stick with Roman characters. It saw a shadow or pattern I can’t see and dropped a character in. And once it’s farted one out, it said it’s not uncommon for OCR to repeat the character.
Google OCR has a little AI-sauce mixed in – which is one of the reasons its OCR is so clean – but not enough to know there wouldn’t be two big fat Chinese characters in the middle of an English history book.
This stuff isn’t taking anybody’s job yet. Managers who are firing on that basis are kidding themselves (or using it as an excuse).
April 1, 2026 — 6:01 pm
Comments: 4