Grover (the Sesame Street muppet) in the Tall Hall. In increasing order of height, the room contains Grover himself, "it certainly is a tall hall", Big Bird, "hi!", a giraffe, a flag-pole (flying a US flag), a tree, a telephone pole and a bean-stalk. The room is narrow, square and extremely tall. We are looking at Grover from above and he's waving up at us. It's an illustration from a picture book "Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum".

Sometimes you need somewhere to keep your giraffes and telephone poles.

Excited to discover this contains, like, an Amazon Basics ethernet cable. A measuring tape. A short length of garden hose. A dog leash.

Okay I need some photographs here because right now I am just thinking that you cannot possibly mean a 7m rigid pole. Maybe a 7 foot pole. Or maybe it's collapsible or something. I don't believe anyone would agree to drive an 18 tonne box truck to your flat to deliver a single absurdly long tube.

Modern Java seems to heavily use: a) the builder pattern, b) method chaining, c) the streams API, d) lambda functions. And the google code formatter does a terrible job with this. Newlines galore, each line indented 8 spaces from the last, rapidly slams into then smears down the right margin.

Why are there no decent code formatters for Java? In which I compare and rate code formatting tools for Java.

What is with the state of Java code formatters. I stumbled on this blog post and I think it's pretty accurate? No way am I touching the Palantir Java formatter, I don't care *how* good it is, but the other Java formatters all seem terrible???
jqno.nl/post/2024/08...

Did it just teleport there? How did you manipulate this up your stairs and through your doors?

Is it rigid? How does one transport a 7 meter tube? Where does one store a 7 meter tube? Is it just leaning against the outside of your building now?

Aerith concept art from the original Final Fantasy 7. She wears a long pink dress buttoned all down the front, large brown boots, a small red jacket with metal cuffs, which barely covers her shoulders and chest, and heavy bronze bracelets. She wears a large pink bow in her long brown plaited hair. She's wielding a metal quarterstaff. She has manga-style blue eyes, pale skin, a slender frame and very long limbs with a small body. She looks cheerful but serious.

Really, you're not keen? I feel like it has a bit of an Aerith Gainsborough vibe to it.

Annette playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Our protagonist stands in the middle of a slightly run-down village square, in adventurous outfit: long brown boots, brown breeches and suspenders, a tan blouse, a purple bow, with her brown hair tied back neatly in a bun. A disinterested little girl sits by the village fountain, in a long green dress. A wooden cart sits by a stone wall. A shoe-shop appears to have closed down. The village church stands beyond the other houses.

Let's go back to excavating Hob's Barrow. Or rather, finding it. We'll do a few recent Thinky Dailies first. Starting in 5 minutes. twitch.tv/clockworknet...

Hmmm... maybe...

A red crayon, which seems to be the main Apple and Android choice. This is the Apple one in particular.

A green crayon. I think this one is from Microsoft Windows. Like all the others it's clearly trying to look like a Crayola.

An orange crayon, from Facebook. (At least, according to Emojipedia.)

A blurry pink crayon. This one is apparently used on Playstation.

lol of course platforms can't agree what colour the crayon is supposed to be.
You know, I wouldn't mind variation as much if they would sodding tell me what the emoji is supposed to be. But if I search for "red" and you show me an unlabelled red crayon I'm gonna assume it's supposed to be red.

A pair of brown leather boots (being worn). One has warm princess pink laces. The other has pillarbox red laces.

Pink 🌷🌸🩷 or red 🍒🖍️💋?

Once you master a gender you can equip the freelancer or mime genders and acquire the stat bonuses and passive abilities of all previously mastered genders.

Annette, a woman with long red hair and glasses, holding up her "Learned People Cast Great Shadows" coin. She's sitting on a red sofa.

No need! :D

Where do I get short braces. Like the ones for holding up trousers or a skirt? I have a pair of Y shaped braces and the unadjustable back part is way too long for my height and where I want my waistline to sit, putting the split at the back of my neck. But nowhere seems to sell different sizes.

1 star review by Eddy, in the original French. Ne vaut RIEN J'ai achter 3 paires au début elle tenais très BIEN après 2 semaines les pinces lâchait le pantalon toutes les tres minutes. J'ai du les jeter as la poubelle. Petre d'argent hélas. Je ne conseille absolument pas de las achter.

The same review "translated from French by Amazon". Very happy I have different straps I bought this one they are very thin but very supportive I bought a 2nd pair. I am happy.

What is it with shockingly bad machine translations lately. Bluesky translations suck. Amazon translations suck. My French might be dire but I can tell this bears zero relation to the original text.
But, like, Google Translate isn't like this. Who provides these and why are they so terrible?

Uaaaaaaa adorable!

Do I think I was in actual danger? No, just uncomfortable and anxious. But does this give me confidence they would handle an actual dangerous situation well? He considered the crowd an annoyance and a distraction, not his priority or responsibility.

Transit entrance gates are an indignity. Exit gates are an insult.

I don't even understand the point of tap out exit gates in a closed circular system where all trips cost the same.

I tried to explain how this feels unpleasant and unsafe and both are like "there's absolutely nothing we can do, it's not our fault". These guys are gonna cause injuries one day.

Instead of opening all the working gates and telling people to just go through without scanning, they have a confused annoyed guy trying to fix the broken gate and telling people to queue for the others. (At least one of which is broken but looks like it's working.)

Really not happy with Glasgow Subway. Just got to the top of an escalator with people piling up at the exit gates, multiple out of order, having to push around to get to an empty space to get out of the way of the people behind me.

Photo of the South of Scotland regional ballot paper for the Scottish election on 7th May 2026. Added text identifies the "INDEPENDENT GREEN VOICE" as "NOT the Green Party" and "SCOTTISH GREEN PARTY" as "The actual Green Party".

Anyone who received their postal ballot today in the South of Scotland region, please be aware that "Independent Green Voice", which appears second on the list on the peach regional ballot paper, is NOT the Scottish Green Party. This is in fact a deliberate vote spoiling attempt by right-wingers.

Annette streaming. She's on the Thinky Dailies season 2 page, with various cute cyclops creatures illustrating the puzzles. She has completed up to day 38, and there are days up to 44 available so far.

Ill-advised late night puzzle stream. Just going to try to catch up on Thinky Dailies and try to remember where I was in DEG. Maybe stream for an hour or so. twitch.tv/clockworknet...

Screenshot from Higurashi. Rena, a teenage girl, is dizzy and blushing, overcome with emotion. "The restaurant's uniforms... sooo kyuute!! Hau~ ...I want to take them home~...!" Shion, her bottom swaying while carrying the parfaits, was being chased by an equally swaying Rena.

Shion, her bottom swaying.
Rena, her eyes uncovered.
Shaka, when the walls fell.

The old Twitter fail whale, being carried through the air above the ocean waves by eight little orange birds carrying a net in their beaks.

GitHub's angry pink unicorn with a rainbow mane.

I understand having a whimsical internal error page. It's kinda "oooops, lol, sorry. we're fixing it we're fixing it." And I understand *not* wanting one, to avoid sounding like you don't take your customers seriously. But wtf is the deal with the angry GitHub unicorn. "It's broken, fuck off."

That's LLM coding agents for sure.

Able to perform feats that seem magical to humans, temperamental, alluring, don't really understand humans despite being able to mimic them (convincingly if not reliably), impossible to tame, holding an elliptical relationship with the truth, the doom of those who pursue them in greed and hubris.

SLIMY OOZE approaches the party. SLIMY OOZE lets out a piercing howl,
"Microsoft is requesting permission to drive your car. Approve/Uninstall?"
You check your inventory, there are no car keys there. You cannot remember where you parked.
MILO is dazed in confusion.
PYRA is dazed in confusion.