I was making breakfast this morning and I had put my two eggs on the stove top so I could put the carton away. When I went to grab one of them I somehow accidentally knocked the other one toward me, off the edge of the oven. But, miraculously, it did not crack. It had just the right amount of momentum to land on the handle of the oven door and sit there

You ever notice how doubters of THE LINE seem to shut up whenever you point out what the shortest distance between two points is?

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Community Notes

Most objection to Saudi Arabia's 'linear city' is centered around the fact that the city will actually be an arc because the earth is an oblate spheroid.

The other day I watched middling, fate-based, romantic comedy, Sliding Doors (1998). In it, the romantic lead (played by John Hannah) regularly quotes Monty Python in a way that makes the movie feel even more dated. I think the first time he does it works quite well. A dejected Gwyneth Paltrow (of Goop fame!) has had an almost absurdly bad day when Hannah suggests she remember what the Monty Python boys always say. Paltrow reasonably guesses he means "Always look on the bright side of life", but he instead responds "Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition". The joke works because it is genuinely unexpected as a response and as a bit of helpful advice. As the movie goes on, we discover this quote is sort of a mantra of his and quoting The Monty Python boys is a regular habit of his. Charitably, Hannah's character has had a rough time of things himself, and it is a way of establishing a character finding humour in the disasters one can not plan form. I don't think the film does enough to sell that and it really just comes off as an affectation.

There's a sort memory 90s online (and sometimes offline) nerd culture consisting of just quoting Monty Python and it is maybe uncharitable but it isn't exactly wrong. As much as we might bristle at it in the particular, all culture can probably be summed up as nodding at or directly quoting a shared context. The sin is just in doing it so blatantly, broadly, and consistently to render any meaning or humour in the original lost.

All of this is to say that if I compare people endlessly quoting Monty Python to people endlessly referencing internet memes, I'm kind of left thinking at least some of the Python lines might have been well-written or funny when they were first said.

Seven, it's a number that many of us can count to, but is it a number that any of us can count on?

thank god

new PB

If you consider how long it took me to add thumbnails to my website, it honestly was pretty quick how fast I fixed the issue where landscape thumbnails were sideways.

I also made it so the tag pages were somewhat useful and got rid of the comment section because I forgot how to use it.

One day (maybe even one day this year?) my process for posting photos won't require me to copy/paste all the image IDs into a command line script

Winter is an underrated time for photography. Obviously, I love to take photos of flowers and insects and other things that are only around in summer, but when it's all white out it's a chance to really lean into texture and shadow as the focus of a photo

once in the game, and once in real life

What if there was a number, A such that X + A = X for any value X

I don't know if anyone ever thought of this before

Is the Twitter Logo (not a bird the brand guide is very clear that it was the twitter logo and not a bird) now called the X Logo?

The thing about "whatever wrapped" that is separate from whatever company is doing it is that the data you can track about a thing is not especially relevant to my experience of it. Yeah, my favourite album probably isn't one I didn't listen to^*, but iTunes doesn't know whether one of the times it played an album it was the perfect time and I still think fondly about it. Did I already complain about this recently? I'm not keeping track

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* Ok, but now that I think about it, I definitely said Hellraiser was one of my movies of the year the year after I first watched it. I was still thinking about it and it's probably better as a concept than a film.

the purpose of a system are the friends made along the way

a movie is basically the same thing as it's plot summary, but to really know a film you also have to read about it's continuity errors on IMDB

Obviously it is bad that companies compile and sell all this information about you but I feel like people don't worry enough about how keeping track of that information about yourself can lead to unhealthy habits. It's good to forget things sometimes or just not know something and be happy in that

It's my favourite holiday and I've been busy. I just published my Year in Review/Year-end Best Ofs/Plans for 2025 as well as my 2025 Qualtagh

I also posted my first photos of the year to my to my photo blog (yesterday I posted my last photos of the year if you missed that)