It's a new year. Buckle up.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Funny how Red Bull (an early attempt at nootropic marketing) has become very working-class-and-below coded.

Once you start seeing the world as a sort of simulation/computation you can't stop, it all fits so well

In #EldenRing, the Tarnished is essentially a terrifying entity that walks around deleting other programs, copying their best lines of code, and pasting them into its own source file until it becomes complex enough to rewrite the Operating System (the Elden Ring) of the simulation it resides in.

Minor parenthood hack — you can get audio tracks of your kid's favourite shows with meta-narrative for the visually impaired on audiovault.net and have play it in the car on long rides as a break from music. It lets you vet the content, they get a different cognitive workout, and they love it!

Happy summer solstice for those who observe

There's actually a lot of work going into agrivoltaics right now. This is from University of Melbourne

Galahs at our place, feasting on the seedbed of my weed infested lawn.

The opposite is way worse: just as the vines are curling back & the nights are getting longer and colder, we're meant to bring out the colourful bunny rabbit / egg imagery. The majestic, somber dignity of Autumn is tarted up with cheap chocolate and a pair of slutty bunny ear headbands. Disgraceful!

The Solstices are bad enough in their inverted form here, but I find it's the Equinox celebrations that gall me the most. Since moving to temperate regions, I have discovered that the story books were right; Spring really is a wonderous time of colour and life! But our Spring aligns with Halloween 💀

The darkness will retreat!

After playing around with a few personal projects with it, I think I have officially hit my tolerance of #Suno. Not fun anymore, and I've developed an ear for the audio version of the em-dash.

Back to listening to game sound tracks as I work (bless Amos Roddy)

Writing articles for horticulture industry and can't help but notice how nice a day it is away from my desk

Having originated from near the Equator, none of it made much sense to me, but now I live in Tasmania I understand the urge to will the Sun back to us in the darkest part of Winter. Here, we have "dark mofo", a festival of food & fire & edgy pagan pretension, which for me is just too on the nose.

Yule was an existential technology designed to keep communities & their morale alive and functioning through brutal winters. The Sun will come back, darkness will flee, greenery will return! Feast to honour the gods & use up those perishables! Come together to take stock of who hasn't perished yet!

I love Midsummer! Feast and give the Sun a proper send-off! Bonfires for sympathetic magic; "here, fire and light to keep you going until you come back!", stay up the whole shortest night; this is meaning!

So I, the bitter, jaded, spiritually barren nihilist I am, must once more find my own meaning for it.
Fortunately, I'm a sucker for a good feasting of the seasons! I see nothing wrong with celebrating, like really celebrating, the solstices and equinoxes! Our ancestors did this, and we should too!

My wife very expressly wants her kids to NOT have my anti-Christmas nastiness, and so the implication is that I must at least perform a love of it, lest I poison their pure waters with my bile. And I can't fault her, because being anti-Christmas is like being anti-puppy-dogs, in the eyes of society.

But like a great many things, all that became very complicated when I had kids.

I would like to rear my kids like an objective weirdo and nip this Christmas rubbish in the bud. No kid of mine is going to demand to sit on the lap of some alcoholic and very possibly paedophilic mall Santa!

Alas.

I'm not Christian, and my upbringing/family wasn't super great, and I'm obnoxiously against blind commercialism telling me to buy in and consume like some sort of lobotomized chattel. So my default impulse is to leave it to the folks who enjoy it, and I'll just take my paid days off.

But if you're not a Christian, then the meaning behind it all gets a bit vaguer, bit more handwavey. Also fine! Many a word has been written that boils down to "I know it's stupid and commercial but I don't care: I just love Christmas!" and truly, what blessed lives such folks must live!

Even the Christians they know the early Church just absorbed Yule for sociopolitical reasons. Christ's birthday was likely Spring or early Autumn. The symbolism of Yule and it's popularity with the folk meant it couldn't be ignored, so the Church re-wrote it. And yeah, whatever, no issues really...

A part of my general grinchiness about Christmas is that in Australia, the hollowness is taken so much further because the symbolism of the original celebration (Yule) is retained, but it's rendered nonsensical by the inversion of the seasons (it's Summer here).

Just read about the Presidential wall of fame plaques that Trump wrote.
Honestly I cannot wait for the pendulum to turn again.

I struggle a lot with meaning. Always have. When my baby son died, well, that struggle obviously got harder.
There's no lesson in this post. Just saying shit out loud.

All roads lead to Roam, Rex

Metroidvanias. What defines them?

'Return here when you're stronger' is the mechanic.

The combat is usually acrobatic and demands skill.

But what really burns these titles into our memories is *atmosphere*. That's exactly where Carrion excels.

Gasification is NOT burning. When it's done properly, it converts mixed, dirty ag plastics into syngas, heat, and inert char; reducing volume massively and avoiding landfill.

This is already solved tech. We’re just not deploying it.

Tasmania has a huge problem with agricultural plastic waste. Primary producers have to ship it to the mainland for "recycling" at a huge cost, usually many thousands of dollars per hectare. Most of it will go to landfill.

We need a gasification plant.

Crazy to think that eucalyptus species actually evolved to be as highly flammable as possible.