Built a lot of farms in Apiary yesterday.

Live and Let DEI: call for submissions for a poetry anthology using words the Trump administration is flagging on government websites and research papers https://winningwriters.submittable.com/submit/323173/live-and-let-dei-anthology-no-fee

@dahie @caolan This is outstanding -- raw and honest and passionate. Thank you for sharing it.

@caolan https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/confirmed-bachelor

I've mirrored my #UniversesBeyond article on my housedraft.games site, in case @mtgzone ever goes down.

https://housedraft.games/ub/

#MtG #MagicTheGathering

I've posted probably my longest article to date on @mtgzone, and it's about how I'm leaving #MagicTheGathering because of #UniversesBeyond.

https://mtgzone.com/post/1525554

It's over 7,000 words, but if you don't have that kind of time, the main body is less than 2,500, and you can easily skim or skip the "Rebuttals" section.

#MtG

Happy government shutdown season to those who celebrate.

Any time I see somebody online post a reminder to take a drink of water, I do. Or really, almost anytime anybody even mentions #water. If you post stuff like that and wonder whether it has an impact, it does for me.

When someone says "there's no maximum <blank>", what they mean is "there's no DOCUMENTED maximum <blank>" or possibly "we don't know what the maximum value for <blank> is". But I guarantee that you can make <blank> big enough that somebody will tell you to stop.

Like, every text field has a character limit. If you're not enforcing a character limit, then the character limit is the size of the disk you're storing the data on, and someday you'll discover that in an inconvenient way.

Wrote a new wiki page at work yesterday and I'm still in the phase where I'm proud of it and think it looks nice. In a few months it will have fallen out of date, and I'll regret having written it, and rebel at the thought of having to update it.

Holly & Macy and Everyone Else returned this week from an 11-month hiatus. It's a #romance #webcomic about figuring out which people you want in your life, and dealing with regret for how you've treated some of them. Oh, and witchcraft. Currently at 189 pages.

https://hollymacycomic.com/

Finished upgrading all 4 of my home PCs from #Ubuntu 22 to 24.

- Old laptop is fine.

- New desktop mostly fine but keeps losing track of pen tablet.

- Old desktop started freezing immediately upon opening Nautilus, even after a complete reinstall. Alternative file managers not affected. Installed #Xubuntu instead, seems OK.

- Middle-aged laptop no longer comes back from auto-suspend (but can if you suspended manually). Edited logind.conf to ignore when the lid is closed, seems OK.

@pointB I share your opinions on Universes Beyond (been working on my own post about that) and on the "Speed" mechanic. Always relieved to hear someone else say that this stuff seems as deranged to them as it does to me.

I've decided to not spend any money on Magic: The Gathering post-Foundations due to Wizards' decision to make half of all Magic product into advertising and make them legal in all formats.

My timing works out pretty well, because Aetherdrift has to be one of the least interesting sets I've ever seen. Yay, more one-off mechanics that require tracking if no card on the field cares about them! And what are these orange borders?

I've posted about #DragonAge: The #Veilguard a few times. I finished it a few days ago and I'm sorry to say I ultimately don't recommend it. It didn't deliver what I hoped for in terms of gameplay, story, or worldbuilding. It's the first in the series that I don't plan to replay; if not for the words "Dragon Age" in the title I would have stopped much sooner.

Biggest −: you're the party's tank whether you like it or not.

Biggest +: inclusivity in character design remains a strong point.

Gerald Ford used the phrase "our long national nightmare" in 1974 to describe the Watergate scandal, which had begun in 1972. Unfortunately it is now common for national nightmares to last much longer than that.

Spent some time at #Neocities recently and it always does my heart good to see so many sites like the ones we all made back in the '90s/'00s. They're eyesores, and there's almost nothing on them I'm interested in, and they're the most beautiful things on the internet. The authors are palpably excited to be online and communicating with the world. We made a wrong turn when we started using the #Web for business. Should have stuck to personal home pages and fan sites.

https://neocities.org/browse

It's hard to believe 2025 is over. Good riddance. What a terrible year.

// TODO boost in ~50 weeks

Thinking about how the consensus best approach for dealing with snow -- "push it out of the way of anything important and then ignore it until the problem resolves itself" -- doesn't work with anything else I try it on, like laundry or dishes.

Oh hello there. My new indie rock album “Naturally” is streaming everywhere today (and also available on vinyl btw fyi), maybe you’d like to check it out? https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/bradsucks/naturally