I feel the increasing need to take action on keeping LLMs out of my personal life. My work life is already tainted, and I know it may be difficult to keep these completely divided, but I see no benefit to outsourcing my thinking on projects that I actually enjoy.

This list of "Open Slopware", with some helpful suggestions on alternatives, has been an informative read. Projects can be flagged as Vibecoded, having a Permissive AI policy, or even just allowing AI code reviews. There's a thoroughness to this that I appreciate. I would strongly recommend a full read through this for anyone knowledgable about tech - there will certainly be a few items here you weren't before aware of.

Multiple items of software that I use have appeared on this list. I can't purge them all, but I can make significant progress, and hopefully make some incremental improvements along the way.

Static Site Generators

Image Manipulation

FFm(p)reg

Media Players

Torrenting

File Transfering

Web Browsers

Note-Taking

Operating Systems

The "Oh I Can't Be Bothered" Section

Magic the Gathering is a fun and intricate game, which is why I complain about it so much.

I tire of the four-hour games, the fourty-minute wait for your turn, the way players instinctively shut down perceived threats in irrational ways^[1]. I've watched some interesting videos that critique ways casual players build their Commander-format decks: board-wipes without purpose, lack of clear win conditions, and sluggish build-up that results in an overbearing board presence that cannot be shaken off. I am guilty of most of these at some point in time.

I am also an ardent follower of the school of thought of Get The Fuck On With It. Perfect optimisation is a waste of time. Humming and hawing over how to play the perfect turn, getting it wrong anyways after 10 minutes, and begging the other players to revert so you can pull it off this time, is insulting to everyone involved. This card game essentially simulates a war raging over a massive battlefield: lean into that! Jump rashly into a course of action that may or may not play out! You'll learn more either way!

Some people share this train of thought, and still turn up to the table with a pre-constructed deck that generates tokens that they don't have cardboard for. I've decided to be more proactive in my pushing of my clearly superior ideology.

Hells Cube is a community dedicated to making incredibly stupid cards, sometimes overpowered, ideally pushing the limits of what a MtG card should do. They can reference silly memes, build on top of in-community jokes, and create their own game-ending spells with suitable grandeur. Humour is of the utmost importance.

This captures the essence of why we play this silly game - to pull off some insane bullshit, and have fun. If the bullshit has a semblance of balance, even better. I fell in love with Hells Cube designs a few months ago, and set to work on creating my own tailored set, aiming to create a full Cube of cards to torment people with.

There were some hefty challenges here. The minimum recommended cards in a Cube is 360, going up to 720 for beefier Cubes. 360 custom cards is ludicrous even by my standards, so after the font of inspiration began to run dry, I returned to the Hells Cube 9 and 9.1 sets, and pulled about 150 of my favourites into my own Cube. The rest are custom-built, home-reared, kink-referencing nonsense. I love them very much.

Next Image

Previous Image Next Image

Previous Image Next Image

Previous Image Next Image

Previous Image Next Image

Previous Image

Hey I forgot I implemented expandable images!

• White remains underpowered, outside of some bizarre battlefield-reshaping mechanics. Players becoming creatures is one I enjoy toying with.
• Blue is for petty control, hypnosis^[2], and the silliest "counter target spell" justifications I could find.
• Black destroys/manipulates things, in ways that aim to punish enemy players for mis-stepping in amusing ways.
• Red is about POWERRRRRR with no semblance of control, because that makes me giggle and teeheehee~
• Green takes its usual approach of mana ramp and counters, but makes them dependent on kinks. Because, again, teeheehee.

Eat your fucking heart out Mark Rosewater.

For someone who hates modern tech, I still take pride in the dwindling amount of tech that I enjoy. This site remains a tiny beacon of love. One that I wish I put more time and effort into, and simultaneously am glad that I don't.

I've left plenty of things slide in the last few months in particular. An increase in journalling has reduced the amount of posting I create here. Various to-do items, some of which I posted on the Home page as a strange source of pride, have withered. Some of this was a natural slide, and some of it came from negligence.

Recently, two more technical items of maintenance popped up. One was that the domain lease was expiring. I only purchase it once per year, exploit the "introductory" rate, then jump ship to the next cheap provider. This year, the leap was from Maxer back to Blacknight, who were my hosting provider two years prior. I don't have much to say about either provider. If they're cheap, they're absolutely fine to deal with.

The other item was that of site hosting. Up to a year ago, I rented some servers for seedbox and website hosting. It was interesting and engaging to start with, but once I got established and comfortable, the hobby became little more than maintenance. This says far more about me than this interest - I could have made far more use of remote servers with dedicated IPs and enormous HDD storage, but chose not to. The signs of burnout were already there.

When I got uncerimoniously booted from Big Tech, I cut costs down, and server rent was an easy item to chop. I moved hosting of Sandy's Palace to GitHub Pages, and thought little of it. When Microsoft, who own GitHub, turned as gleefully nasty^[1] as the rest of the Big Tech bastards, I had to take some form of action. Even if they weren't receiving any money directly from me, being associated with them was too much. I took pride in de-googling myself a few years back, and this was a logical next step.

I took an interest recently in Codeberg. They are established in a European country^[2] , have the capability to host sites via Codeberg Pages, and took a resilient stance in telling AI slop to fuck off. This was more than enough to sway me. In contrast, GitHub's embrace of Copilot, wedging it into every crevice possible, is simply exhausting. The moral choice here was not difficult^[3] .

The migration of my domain host has been completed for the delightfully low cost of €7.37 for one year. Sometimes technology is wonderful in enabling a gay little project like this, allowing anyone around the world with a semblance of tech proficiency to view my silly ramblings, for a tiny price like that. The migration from GitHub Pages to Codeberg Pages being free for my level of usage is perhaps even more impressive.

Though, I'm well aware of where the "free" tier of products inevitably lead companies, or even non-profits, to. Reading Codeberg's last newsletter, they are trying to grow with a shockingly small amount of infrastructure and staff. Perhaps some money being sent their way will be more useful in the long run.

Helped from the motivation of completing the above work, I have another draft of small tweaks I want to make to Sandy's Palace. Mostly just tidying up some dead links, cleaning the home page, before I start building any thoughts of developing this site further. Doing this migration work, and typing up a little summary, has reignited a small amount of interest in tech independence. There is wonderful work being done, and even having proximity to it is fun.

I've written a little bit before about burnout creeping up on me while I didn't notice. It has most certainly hit me harder than I would have expected.

Plenty of factors in my life have shifted in the last few months. I returned to work in May - I was sufficiently healthy and able for it, and it's gone smoother than initially feared. Unfortunately, as most full-time jobs do, it annihilates most free time we have. In my case, I wasn't making good use of my free time to begin with, and noticed far too late how little my hobby satisfaction changed.

Some of my existing interests had dropped off. I stepped away from F1 media archiving, after feeling that I'd reached the majority of satisfaction from my achievements, and had shifted into more of a "maintenance" approach. I was putting increasing amounts of time and money into maintaining what had already been built, for the benefit of a larger community which couldn't really see how much work was required for it. So I withdrew, giving a full year's notice to those in the know that others needed to step up in order to keep the annual improvements going. I don't intend on discovering how this resolves.

Picking up new interests has been extremely difficult for a long time. I tell myself that it's not worth it to try something new unless I'm absolutely sure it'll be enjoyable, which is obviously impossible to assess in advance. As a result, I shirked away from a lot of media - virtually all new TV shows, films, and video games pass me by.

I got into the Lancer TTRPG this year. Overall it's a fun mech-based game, with plenty of ways for players to explore and exploit the various systems. The group I'm in is wonderful as well. Unfortunately, like most TTRPGs, the sessions take up a huge amount of time, which has been a drain on my energy. I simply can't handle what most others easily can, and I'd rather be proactive about this versus reacting far too late.

There's been plenty of other endeavours. I've hugely expanded my social scene, getting involved with more people, doing more activities^[1], and overall feeling better about my standing than a year ago, two years ago, and certainly three years ago. The time I spend with others is always worth it and leaves me satisfied that I'm doing the right things for the right reasons.

But the burnout is still there. And it's getting more and more difficult to reconcile that.

The effort of keeping up with Everything in the modern life feels increasingly impossible. I reduce the amount of Discord servers I'm in, and I check them less frequently. I simplified and reduced what I read online daily. It achieved shockingly little.

There's been several tabs in my browser, containing interesting reads for my next iteration of What I'm Reading. I haven't looked at them in two months. Every time, the brainpower telling me that I "should" engage in them dwindles. There's very little left. The tabs are now just a spot of colour in the corner of my vision.

I applied myself to a high commitment long-term project late last year. Not the type that can be discussed openly, even/especially if it's important. I was hoping that some satisfaction would come off achieving a good that extended way beyond myself. It has struggled to take off. Not due to any meaningful failure, but because of its inability to grab other people's attention beyond soundbites and empty promises of assistance. That has shot my confidence more than everything else above combined.

So I sit here, trying to force my brain to be honest about what it fixates on every day. Some positive - like the lovely people I have surrounded myself with, even if I pine after them quite a lot - and some negative, mostly about the state of the world. I can only control so much. I'd like my brain to be one of those things.

More has to change for me to be able to recharge. I know what activities, and what people, bring me joy and leave me in a better place. Leaving the rest behind has been more difficult than expected. ^[1]

I haven't written much here recently. There's been a reasonable amount of activity on my RSS feed, and I do keep up with it, but on a slower schedule. I don't think I could maintain the same routine as before, even if it only took up 20 minutes of my day.

Part of this has been down to me resuming journaling. I picked this up in the middle of 2025, and it helped me flesh out thoughts into relatively simple wording. There was a lot going on at the time, and looking back on the notes is fascinating. My prose is unromantic and direct, and even this reamins an interesting read.

I dropped the journaling for a few months, then resumed it in June of this year. The paragraphs were much longer this time. I had piled up thoughts on a lot of my close connections, some of the projects I was working on, and too much had accumulated in my mind. Getting even straightforward words out of my head helped to free it up somewhat. I was able to re-appreciate so many of the great people and things in my life.

One downside of this is that there's less headspace to put trains of thought into Sandy's Palace. Some of these thought processes, or projects, or emotions, weren't appropriate for this medium anyway. But by nature of being able to easily scrawl thoughts away, there's less energy available for putting a big delightful rant on this blog.

The other reason for less posting here has become more obvious to me in the last month: I am shockingly burnt out and disillusioned. I've put so much time, energy, and enthusiasm into projects that cannot take off, because nobody outside of me will give me the time of day where it counts. Trying to focus on me is a fool's game - I wouldn't know what to do with personal free time if I granted myself any more of it. So I threw myself at worthwhile goals that fizzled out as inevitably as the fucking tide.

I don't plan on changing my approach for now. It validates me so much to have meaningful work and achievements completely ignored because I'm not popular enough. Plus, it gives me good material to journal about.

The timing has been excellent. Energy independence has been on the mind of a lot of Irish people. The invasion of Ukraine forced up gas prices. The pointless bombing of Iran sent oil prices into a spiral. The knock-on effect on petrol and diesel prices provoked a cascade of protests nationwide. It’s very difficult to convince the Irish to protest.

I was buying a cheap electric car^[1] during that week of protests. The multitude of blockades meant that getting the car transported from [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] was shockingly difficult. It was a fascinating experience that week, navigating blockades both in-person and logistically. It very much reinforced that these external events have always happened, will continue to happen, and the tech to circumnavigate them is only getting better.

My house sits on a convenient North-South orientation, with standard 30 degree roof sloping. Despite the small-ish size of the roof area, it’s absolutely ideal for solar panels. Of lesser convenience was the size of the house walls - the battery and inverter needed to be mounted to a sufficiently sized wall space, and this was quite tricky to find.

We fitted 10x 470W panels to the south-facing roof, squeezing in as much as we could. With the two spare, those got planted on the north-facing roof, with some optimisers also installed on each. In arrays where the panels are not all facing the same direction, these optimisers are essential to ensure that the maximum amount of power can be extracted from all panels. The general estimate was that these north-facing panels would work at about 50-60% efficiency versus the south-facing panels. In this specific installation’s case, the contract was for 10 solar panels and 2 more being provided for “free”, so it was still worthwhile to add the optimisers. I don’t think it’d be worth it to add panels+optimisers to fill the entire north-facing roof.

With a total system capacity of 5.6kWp^[2], I’ve been glued to the output of the system inverter, to see how it’s been impacting the household.

Panel Output

Ireland is not known for its gorgeous weather. Despite this, on bursts of direct sunlight, we’re seeing 4-5kW coming through these panels pretty consistently.

During overcast weather - far too often - it’s more like 1-2kW. What’s fascinating is that this is still sufficient to cover a huge amount of household energy usage. Outside of some peaky usage - cooking, using washers/dryers - our energy usage is consistent and low. Two PCs almost always running, some household appliances, maybe some additonal electrics, but nothing crazy. The panels cover all of this, at all times of day.

There is always power to spare, and I love watching and optimising how this is fed into the other systems. There is a 10kW battery installed, which would otherwise cover a massive chunk of daily usage. The inverter keep this topped up as a first priority. At any time, there’s at least 5kW on backup to keep us independent of grid usage. As a second priority, the inverter will feed power back to the grid. This fuels my smugness to incredible rates.

This pleases me to a concerning degree.

See above for an average day in summer so far. PV is the solar panel yield, Battery is showing whether it’s charging (positive on the y-axis) or discharging (negative on the y-axis), Grid shows whether we’re exporting/selling (positive on y-axis) or importing/buying (negative), Load shows total household electricity consumption, and SOC is the 10kW battery State of Charge.

From sunset to sunrise, the 10kW battery can handle the entire household. The solar panels kick in around 08:00, and just keep ramping up. This example had some decent sunlight available, and it shows. Every power spike in the house - most likely the clothes washer or dryer - is comprehensively covered from multiple sources.

On the handful of days so far with data to analyse, I’ve seen 15-30kW of power generated from these panels. They keep the household running, they hold energy in storage, and they sell back to the grid. Really impressive stuff that I’m struggling to fully articulate in text form.

Infinite Optimisation

Of course, I can never approach a project normally. This one had an expensive outlay, and has swathes of data to fawn over. I’m going to be spending a long time working on this.

There are several areas where this setup can be pushed further:

Battery and Inverter Capacity

By evening time, when the solar panels are retiring for a nap, the 10kW battery is always sitting at 100% charge. Depending on how much electricity we consume in the evening, we can drain the battery down to as little as 20% if there’s high-usage things like EV charging, or as much as 60-70% if there’s little going on. This is all free power, totally independent of the grid, which is wonderful.

Of course, we can do better, because we can also sell that battery power back to the grid. If the solar panels come back online at 08:00 the next day, and there’s still plenty of charge left in the battery, is this not wasted power? I’ve been trying to devise targets for determining when the inverter should discharge the battery and start selling, once everyone has gone to bed and that power would otherwise be sitting there. It also depends on whether the EV will be charging, and at what time.

In summer time, I feel that charging the EV earlier is ideal, especially if we can do it during the daytime. The EV charges off a 3kW granny plug - its battery is depleted as hell and it doesn’t need any more fast charging in its life. The solar panels and 10kW battery combined can easily grant it 3kWh with no concerns. At night time, charging off the battery seems to be fine. This is mostly due to the fact that morning-time energy usage in our household is low, apart from one item, and the battery doesn’t need to contain massive charge going into the morning time.

The sole exception to this is the electric shower. We have a 9.5kW unit, and it’s exposing one weakness in our setup: The inverter is rated for 5kW at any given time. Meaning that if the electric shower is running, the battery can only cover 5kW at any given time, and the rest has to be pulled from the grid, regardless of charge levels, or time of day. Despite the slight cost of this, it also means that the 10kW battery doesn’t need to hold full charge in order to handle morning showers.

Currently I’m targeting the battery to have minimum 50% charge going into the mornings. If the EV isn’t charging, it never even falls this low. If only one person is cooking, and only using the induction hob, we go into the next morning with 80% charge. If two people are cooking, maybe it’s 60%. This gives us a lot of additional flexibility in optimising this setup.

Consumption Timing

We should also consider the winter months. Taking this data as reference, we will have 8-10 hours of sunlight, versus 14-16 in summer. Plus, the sun will be arcing lower on the horizon, reducing its angle of attack on the solar panels. This effect is significantly more noticable on the north-facing panels, and I expect them to produce very little in these months.

How does this impact optimising solar panel output? I imagine the panels may still cover daytime household energy usage, but only for a few hours total, and will struggle to top-up the battery. We will be pulling much more from the grid, and this is where I’m looking to focus.

Using the inverter, I can issue guidelines on charging and discharge the battery:

• What times of day it should start/stop
• Should it trigger when the battery falls to a certain level, and when it should cut off
• What maximum level of amps can be charged/discharged

Keeping the battery level sufficiently charged in the winter will be trickier. There won’t be the same flexibility of knowing that we can recharge easily off solar panels, and trying to charge via the grid should be kept to a minimum.

Delicious Arbitrage

There is another external factor at play: Electrity rates that are variable depending on time of day. These are relatively new to the Irish market, and are known for their duality in either exploiting or being played by consumers. There are a few different types on sale, and I’ve targeted the type that has a specialised rate at night-time, usually from 02:00-05:00. Here is where grid usage is at its absolute minimum, while the power plants still need to be running, and there is excess capacity that’s on sale for competitive rates. As a trade-off, daytime and especially peak rates are much higher in these energy plans.

Those with home battery storage are able to take advantage of this disparity best. Pull as much as possible from the grid at 02:00, and use it to charge up your battery, ideally to full. Then use this battery power instead of drawing from the grid in the daytime. Pretty straightforward stuff.

However, this can be pushed further. Households can now sell power back to the grid, as of 2023. Plus, the current microgeneration rate of 18.5c per kWh is lower than the night-time consumption rates of 8-10c per kWh. I think you can see where this is going.

If our household goes through the whole day and has power left over, it makes a lot of sense to sell this back to the grid. Even more sense to force-sell it back to the grid, right after you bought it at a cheaper rate. I am assessing a few different windows of opportunity here:

• Option 1: From 00:00-02:00, discharging the battery down to minimal levels, just before we can buy back from the grid at cheaper rates
• Option 2: Charging the battery up to 100% by 05:00, then discharge down to ~50% from 06:00-08:00. Arbitrage profit of 8c per kWh, and leaving electricity to spare for morning usage
• Optionally: Selling back to the grid with excess solar panel output where possible

This has yet to stand the test of winter. But I desire backup plans within backup plans. For, yknow, that sweet 8c per kWh arbitrage. It adds up 🙂‍↕️

Bringing Everything Together

The inverter has a huge range of controls, most of which I don’t understand, but appreciate being in control of. Modern tech should know its place more like this.

I have few controls in place at the moment. The summer months make it easy. The inverter is automatically set up to power the household, then charge the 10kW battery, then sell back to the grid. An abundance of sunlight, even in Ireland, means this setup is not jeapordised. For now, all I’ve additionally instructed the inverter is to ensure the 10kW battery is only charged by the grid while it’s below 50%, and only at the discounted 02:00-05:00 rate.

This target of 50% can likely be lowered. We’re not using 5kW of electricity in the morning, and if the shower burned that much (approx. 30 minutes), due to inverter limitations, the battery would only cover half this usage anyway. So I will incrementally drop this figure and see how energy independent we remain. I’m hoping to reduce this target to 30% with minimal issues.

I will soon experiment with an arbitrage setup, starting with selling energy back to the grid via the battery, rather than just the solar panels at the moment. In summer months, given that the battery will rarely charge off the grid, we can likely sell off excess battery power without having to buy it back at another time of day.

My first experiment will be discharging the battery (selling off to the grid) before 08:00 each day, until the battery reaches a certain threshold. It should be a step higher than the above target. So for example, if the battery is at 60% in the morning, sell power back to the grid until it reaches 35%, then stop. This should be timed such that it sells off electricity just before the solar panels begin to provide power. Tricky but doable.

Moving into winter, I anticipate setting up an additional series of rules. In particular, the 10kW battery charge levels will need to be more tightly controlled. As the solar panels will not consistently cover household load, particularly in the morning and evening, it’s ideal to ensure that the battery is charged off the grid at the ideal time: 02:00-05:00. This is the cheapest rate possible, and maximising this rate will ensure that daytime energy usage costs are tightly controlled.

The rules for battery charge and discharge will be significantly different in these months versus summer months. They will be more focused on arbitrage, rather than coasting off solar panel output. Selling off excess power at 00:00-02:00, and selling off cheaply purchased power at 05:00-08:00, will be key here. The profit here should also be carefully considered against the additional wear this imposes on the 10kW battery. If it reduces the battery life too much, I will drop this experiment, and just focus on reducing daytime costs.

Also: Yap about these plans an insane amount. Everyone is looking forward to that :3

Previous iterations:

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Volume 5
• Volume 6
• Volume 7

Serious Reads

Kill Chain

Clausewitz had a word for everything the optimization leaves out. He called it “friction,” the accumulation of uncertainty, error, and contradiction that ensures no operation goes as planned. But friction is also where judgment forms. Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is. The staying is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called what unfolds when you refused to notice a “war on paper,” a plan that proceeds without resistance because everything that connected it to the world it was supposed to act on has been taken out.

When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.

Prop Bet

So by partnering with these betting markets, news organizations — from the legacy entities like WSJ or CNN to the burgeoning new media platforms like Substack — have undercut themselves two ways: first, by commodifying information and then by effectively endorsing competitors who can pay for that information; and second, by serving as advertising for prediction markets, making their audience vulnerable to getting ripped off by insiders. It is unclear to me how helping gambling companies rip off your audience serves the public interest, which is, or at least once was, the point of newsgathering.

The Waters Are Already Muddy

So they push this "think of the children" narrative that has essentially removed all of those boundaries. It used to be that there were adult spaces and kid spaces but now, it feels like every space has to be safe for a 6 year old. Which means no space is safe for an adult. We’re all walking on eggshells, self-censoring, saying "seggs" instead of sex, "unalive" instead of kill, and turning our language into this infantile mush because the algorithm punishes reality.

Inside Nepal’s fake rescue racket

Once a “rescue” is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger’s insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors’ knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment.

Mind the Gap

The liberal democratic assumption is that legitimacy flows downward: from elections, constitutions, institutions. And that if the system hasn’t recognized your demand, then your demand has no standing. This is why middle-class Ireland felt entitled to judge the protesters this week- because the middle class has proximity to those institutions. They work in the civil service, in the professions, in the organizations that interact with the government daily. Their legitimacy is pre-approved. And importantly, their complaints travel through recognized channels: union negotiations, professional bodies, well written letters to TDs, the pages of the Irish Times. When they suffer, it is understandable to the establishment.

But when a haulier in Kildare suffers, it is not understandable. That is, until he parks a tractor on a bridge, and translates the grievance into the language we all understand: traffic times, fuel prices, appointments. At which point he is condemned for using the only channel the system left him.

There are no psychopaths

And this is perhaps the strongest evidence that psychopathy is a zombie idea: for as long as scientists have been studying the idea there has literally been no advancement in evidence-based knowledge. Instead, there has been rapidly growing evidence to suggest the idea is a dud. Yet scores of researchers continue to be interested in it, perhaps propelled by little more than their own bias and the idea’s infectious appeal.

Light Reads

RAF clear 'exploding' Tunnock's teacakes to fly after 60 years

But in the summer of 1965, a captain and student pilot forgot they had placed unwrapped teacakes above their instrument panels.

When the captain pulled an emergency depressurising switch the iconic Scottish treat erupted - leaving a sticky mess over the airmen, the instruments and cockpit canopy.

Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels

But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea.

Study Report: Can astrologers truly gain insights about people from entire astrological charts?

Despite their high-degree of confidence in their performance, astrologers as a group performed no better than chance - that is, their distribution of results closely resembled what you'd see if they had all been guessing at random, and the number of charts they matched correctly, on average, was not statistically significantly different than random guessing either. Not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of 12 answers correct - even though, after completing the task, more than half of astrologers believed they had gotten more than 5 answers correct.

It turns out Fortnite isn't the forever game after all

Even if the obsession migrates rather than disappears, Fortnite's story should still serve as a cautionary tale. Cultural dominance is fleeting – and it usually isn't really dominance at all, especially in a world of such fragmented and broad-based culture. Scale buys time, not immortality, and no amount of celebrity collaborations, brand relationship management, or live-service design can elevate a game outside and above culture itself or make it immune to the fickle tides of audience tastes.

The Busiest Place You've Never Seen

Conditions can change hour by hour, reshaping the day’s work on the fly. “On Tristan,” says James Glass, a descendant of Cpl. Glass and Tristan’s head of fisheries at the time, “you need a good-weather plan and a bad-weather plan.” Most days, islanders end up using both.

Left 4 Dead’s Graffiti Is So Memorable Because It Was Made By People — A Whole Lot Of People

Flash forward to today, Pinkerton still draws on lessons he first learned while turning Left 4 Dead’s walls into his urban Sistine Chapel: "The graffiti specifically and the environmental storytelling in general has always stayed with me, in terms of story being told in the margins instead of as something you're being hit over the head with. Maybe a character shares a little more if the player lingers, maybe you can stumble on a little nugget of story if you look a little harder. Just the idea of rewarding people looking for the story without bothering the people who aren't.

The Boring Internet

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

Exploring our collection: The canary resuscitator

So why is this my favourite object in our collections? Firstly, while I don’t advocate the use of animals in testing dangerous conditions, I am pleased that Haldane spared a thought for the canaries themselves and worked to make their job as non-lethal as possible. My impression from hearing about canaries in coal mines was that they were expected to die to warn people, so when I came across this object it was a huge relief (though my research on the topic has found less thoughtful cages).

Cool Sites

Black Hole Simulation

1D-Chess

Bodega Cats of New York

This To That

Techno-Optimism Archive

Videos

The Tekken 8 Bot That Won Games with Only Left Kicks

How Traffic Lights Actually Work

Most Confusing Place on Earth (Queens, NY)

As a teenager, a relative of mine brought me to their office one night. They were in a mid-to-senior level position in a prominent newspaper, and the late-night excursion felt like a secret little school trip. Only this time, it was relevant to me, and actually interesting.

The office itself was nothing radical. What made it interesting were the stories of how the newspaper did its business in a radically changing environment. It was the mid-2010s, digital was yet to succeed print as the main revenue generator, but it was only a matter of time. The paper shuffled its teams accordingly. My relative was on the digital team, on a funky night shift that allowed them to set the tone for what people would wake up to the following morning. Plus it gave them a cool as hell schedule in which to socialise.

Some other interesting tidbits stuck with me. The property supplement was, adjusted for expenses, by far the most profitable aspect of the paper^[1]. How journalists positioned themselves in order to deliver not just the next headline, but the insight into why things were happening the way they were. And which journalists - most of which had moved onto other pastures - were dull or weird as hell.

At this point in life, I still held enthusiasm for being a journalist. I had been able to read the newspaper from around the age of three - my uncle whose paper I borrowed still loves to bring this up. I held this eagerness for more than a decade, using forays into blogging, photography, and writing as potential entry points into the profession. But even then, the opportunity was narrowing. My relative warned me of the flattening of hierarchies that digitalisation would bring. Writing just about what a politician said, or what a "famous" person did, would ensure you get squashed by someone who wrote the same thing, but cheaper. And this was before AI entered the picture.

Their subsequent advice still stuck with me: If you want to be a journalist, focus on the subject matter in which you need to be an expert in, rather than how to write about the subject. Learning the former takes decades, the latter years - sometimes less.

The advice was strong and well-supported. I took a degree in a business area rather than a pure journalism degree, feeling that I could build expertise working in the field, then pivot into writing later. As it turns out, working in my business field turned out to be a grueling never-ending slog of repeatedly stretching myself to breaking point, busting my ass for people who didn't care if I dropped dead the next day, for a dogshit salary^[2]. I escaped, and found myself in better pastures. Still working hard for pointless endeavours, but getting paid better for it. The desire for journalism had long drifted.

There is some enthusiasm still lingering. The art of persuasion via slow-form text still appeals to me. Though the profit-making side of the world has moved on from it.

I now look at Ireland, and wonder how I ever could have thought becoming a journalist was possible. The starting routes are all closed off; the only entry-level positions available are ones churning out slop for media entities that will cease to exist once the tide shifts. There is no ladder to climb. The Irish Independent and Irish Times do not hire young recruits - they pull in a never-ending slew of people pushing lazy opinion pieces, mostly via pay-per-article contractor agreements. No other private media enterprises in Ireland are profitable any more, and surely will inevitably fall amidst the shifting tides.

Senior editorial and correspondent roles in journalism become advisor positions in government, with disturbing frequency. This is reflected in the pieces that are written about consecutive Fianna Gael governments. There is simply no incentive to rock the boat. Political roles are far more stable than modern journalist ones, so why not kick the ladder away for everyone else and save yourself?

Where is the anger about catastrophically bad healthcare coverage [1, 2, 3, 4], nonexistent infrastructure [1, 2, 3], or a diabolical housing crisis caused entirely out of vested interests and deliberate inaction [1, 2, 3]? It does not come from those who've positioned themselves close to power.

Here is the current political editor of the Irish Times in action. The original headline read: "Choose a €20 bottle of wine, not a €40 one, and other life advice from a political editor". In a cost of living crisis, this thinly-veiled sneering is all they had to muster. The Times often change their headlines once a sufficient amount of clicks have been achieved, in order to retain its self-imposed respectability.

And here is the duty editor. Consider my linked articles above on healthcare failures. This is all they have in reponse - running straight to the founder of an anti-trans hate group to push the bar of "debating" our existence even lower.

What do I have in common with these people? They have cushy jobs, and another guaranteed one after this one crumbles. They own the roof over their heads, and hold private health insurance. They do not go to the same social circles as you or I. It's a private club, and the door is firmly shut.

It's my opinion that not a single journalist works at the Irish Times, nor the Irish Independent. There is no in-depth reporting, no insightful coverage, no digging through the sea of lies. There is only the obvious clickbait, and the subtle clickbait.

I can name some actual journalists in this country. I've interacted with one, and had good interactions with them. Another keeps the masses well-informed during elections. And one keeps our national broadcaster a little bit more honest. But it's a pathetically small list.

Of course, intelligent long-form analysis still exists and is appreciated. The Guardian's The Long Read still stands out as having thoughtful insight, and is the sort that should be the cornerstone of every semi-decent newspaper. Plenty of interesting articles have been picked up and posted on this little site. I just wish it was even the slightest bit more viable.

Wrapping up my tour of their office, my relative and I walked home, at close to midnight. They gauged my future plans; I probed their political opinions with, in hindsight, silly naivety. It was the last time I ever felt such enthusiasm about uncovering how the world operated.

I'm not apologising for whatever formatting that title breaks.

Elden Ring released in 2022 to never-before seen levels of hype. Open world! George R.R. Martin is involved in the writing! There'll be a poison swamp somewhere! The announcement trailer set a strong bar for the story to follow, and dropped some fascinating aspects of the story that only became clear after playing the game fully. Big fan of that approach.

My first few hours in this game were mesmerising. Ultimate freedom, you could hop on your horse and charge in whatever direction you wanted. With the open-world design, this wasn't even excessively punishing, as the game gradually ramped up the challenge in a way that felt natural and encouraging. You were free to yeet yourself 100km across the map to blast through the game, but why? Take your time and take in the sights, and the locals. There's plenty of them!

There's no shortage of anything. Hundreds of weapons, armour sets, areas to explore, bosses that land in the middle of a clearing with little warning apart from clever environmental hints. In its early stages, Elden Ring felt limitless. Plus, with some revamped mechanics, it felt like a genuine joy to explore and learn from scratch. Most old tricks didn't work any more, and adaptation to the Lands Between was key. You didn't know what to expect any more, and that was wonderful.

At the end of the first major open area, the game clamps around you, pushing you through a Legacy Dungeon, a stunning set piece that could have been a game all by itself. Stormveil Castle is the first major challenge for new players, and it tests your ability to adapt to unfamiliar conditions, amusing challenges^[1], and a boss that feels suitably tricky and satisfying. At this point, I felt on top of the world in a way rarely felt since Dark Souls 1.

The best moment of Elden Ring also peaks soon after this. Spotting an innocuous looking magical elevator hidden in the forests, following it deep into the bedrock, and finding another humongous stunning area was an absolute masterclass in surpassing expectations. Just when you thought you had a grasp on the game, it expands in a wonderful and eerie way.

The bar has now been set supremely high. I've spent something like 15 hours in Limgrave and have combed the hell out of it. Now I can see Liurnia of the Lakes up north, and Fucking Caelid over to the east. How many times am I going to keep doing this?

The game carries on, carefree. It drops its lore slowly, spread over increasingly wide areas that welcomes you with open arms. I take on my second Legacy Dungeon - Raya Lucaria Academy - and the enjoyment is back in near-full force. The bosses are a little bit odder here, but it's still a fun experience. Again, after victory, my character feels a bit fuller, a bit closer to the full picture. I saunter into more hostile areas, get pushed back, but know that they can be beaten later. All still good.

Many hours later, mostly spent figuring out that the massive elevator to the seeming endgame is looking for two specific key items hidden away who fucking knows where, you arrive at the outskirts of Leyndell. Visually, thematically, everything has been leading here. The hype builds yet again. Soon after, the cracks begin to show.

Before entering Leyndell, there is the Altus Plateau. Once again stretched over a massive area, you begin to spot that you've seen these bosses before. Mostly optional, but the urge to comb through the game still persists. You have no idea which way is the correct way, or where a valuable or necessary item is, so you feel the need to beat that one dude again. And again. And again. After all that, you push through, and you're not actually at Leyndell yet. You're now in Capital Outskirts, which is its own big area. Yippee.

There are also dungeons, as distinct from Legacy Dungeons, which are story and mechanical centrepoints. Regular dungeons follow a conceringly similar gameplay loop, traversing through caverns and catacombs that all begin to meld together and look the same. After the first few, you begin to realise that the rewards for these areas are stretched thin to the point of absurdity. There are 61 regular dungeons in the game. Most of them only contain (at most) one useful item, mostly after the main boss of the area. But the bosses are increasingly all the same. You fight Erdtree Burial Watchdog SEVEN different times. This was a huge contributor to my growing exhaustion.

But! You push through it all, and arrive in Leyndell! You fight through another dense, difficult area, fighting the increasing urge to run straight through and just get on with it. You have a visually engrossing, loud fight with a Very Important Dude - three separate ones, actually. And for being this late in the game, you think, the reward must be enormous. What you actually receive is: the Erdtree tells you to fuck off. Go to this brand new area and figure shit out. It's an overwhelming let-down.

After a bit more time of figuring out where to go, you're now in Mountaintop of the Giants. Big final reveal, right? No. It's an endless snowfield, with dungeons that achieve little, and setpieces that only serve to annoy you. After another 5-10 hours spend trudging through this, abandoning the idea that 100%-ing these areas is a good idea, you take on another lore-relevant gigantic imposing boss, with a diminishing idea of what the hell the point of this is, you behold the sight of a previous area burning to the ground. It's a new area now. Go explore it :)

At this point, the retrospective opinion of the experience turns sour. What was the point of the entire Weeping Peninsula area? Did Dragonbarrow only exist for one dude at the very end? All those hundreds of items I picked up in the wild - why are 99% of them never used?

The tone of the game relentlessly ramps higher all the time. The boss doing its infinitely flipping bullshit, before unleashing a 27-hit combo that you're supposed to dodge perfectly somehow, all to the chorus of loud orchestral crashing, all melds into one. Did the previous sentence describe Margit the Fell Omen, Godrick the Grafted, Red Wolf of Radagon, Starscourge Radahn, Lichdragon Fortissax, Ancient Dragon Lansseax, God Devouring Serpent, Rykard Lord of Blasphemy, Morgott the Omen King, Fire Giant, Mohg Lord of Blood, Malenia Goddess of Rot, Godskin Apostles, Malekith the Black Blade, Godfrey First Elden Lord, Hoarah Loux Warrior, or Radagon of the Golden Order? I'll wait.

I still recall the exhaustion that came after beating the final boss. I was totally checked out on what the concept of a final boss even looked like at this point. Just keep killing Big Important Dudes until I can get the ambiguously-translated ending with my wifey of choice. Same as everyone else's wifey, but never mind that.

Buried in all this rambling, the story is enjoyable! The charaters are a mixed bag, but they're memorable! Areas like Siofra River, or the evolution of the Roundtable Hold, had me gripped! The game would have contained all its wonder, compressed into half its size, and would not have burned me out to this degree.

The DLC had all the choice to amend these issues, and focus it into the beautiful experience it was always capable of being. Instead, it doubled down. Massive, ultimately pointless areas. Bosses that ramp the volume up to 11 and spam those attacks like you would not believe. The biggest disaster was Scadutree Fragments. Affecting only the DLC, these items raise your offensive and defensive capabilities, and are absolutely necessary to traverse and climb your way through these areas. THERE'S FIFTY OF THEM. WHY.

I still enjoyed the story and the characters, who were particularly strong in this DLC. The bones of the game always remain good. However, the final boss was nothing short of an absolute disgrace to the series.

Radahn, Consort of Miquella is everything wrong with modern FromSoft boss design. Spinny flippy leaps and attacks that make no sense. The soundtrack blasting your ears to bits. His attacks result in blasts of light from the sky, which are so bright you cannot see a single thing, while he charges his 0.1 second 1000+ damage attack. Every cheap tactic employed to make the experience as miserable as possible. And to top things off, this unforgiveable atrocity:

This killed my enthusiasm for the game stone dead. There was nothing waiting for me after this.

I truly hope FromSoft have had enough of this. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 were truly creative, flawed, pieces of work. Everything since then has been iteratively built on the same engine, same design methodology, same trains of thought. They have not forgotten how to make good games from start to finish, but they feel misguided, pulled by the shouts of the masses that ask for the same old tricks, ramped up yet another notch. Give us that spark again.

It's been a while since I last did one of these. My time away from this series has tempered my enthusiasm for it somewhat, even when nostalgising.

Dark Souls 3 was first announced in early 2016. I distinctly remember a post I made on Tumblr at the time, calling it "franchise milking".

The cynicism wasn't fully realised at that point. Dark Souls 2 had released under 2 years prior, and its improved version Scholar of the First Sin came out in 2015. Bloodborne also came out in 2015. The fact that there were two separate development teams hadn't really registered with me - I was more concerned with the speed these games were now coming out.

The game trailers leaned slightly away from the "You Will Die So Much Hurhurhurhur" slop that had dragged it down in recent years, though its influence still showed. The game released to enormous fanfare, and the best sales for the series yet. Thankfully, it was pretty well justified.

This development team had worked mostly on Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, and lessons had clearly been learned. The fast combat of Bloodborne was adapted nicely into the Dark Souls framework, while still giving players the wider freedoms in weapon/armour choice that they so craved. Balance, as usual, took a few months to iron out. But from a single-player perspective, the game was tight, had a strong vision, and executed it well. There's very few blatantly weak areas, bosses, or themes.

On the flip side, the additional refinement of 3 resulted in the beloved jagged edges of this series being somewhat lost. Dark Souls 1's glee in yeeting the player into any area if you were enthusiastic enough was beloved by speedrunners and lunatics (read: me), but saw criticism for being unintuitive and excessively punishing. 3 guides the player through a more strict tour of the world, with a few carefully placed deviations and alternate paths. Less chance to get lost, less chance to learn the tough but fun way.

On world design - the ability to warp to/from any bonfire from the beginning of the game is a huge loss, in my opinion. It reduces the player's willingness to search around, truly understand the boundaries of what they can do, and eliminates the crippling fear of being stuck in Tomb of the Giants with no visible way out^[1]. Demon's Souls justified its warping - there were five separate regions that you needed to hop in and out of, with a clear central hub to ground the player. Dark Souls 1 was a masterclass in world design, and the joy of seeing how areas looped back into each other was stunning. Later, the Lordvessel's ability to warp you between bonfires feels like a genuine huge victory. With 3, there are loops within some areas, but they feel increasingly contrived. You see a closed door or a gate, and your stomach sinks, knowing it'll either be locked or only opens from the other side. Who was the architect for this place, again?

Another disappointing period came about 60% of the way through the base game. Two areas in particular - the Profaned Capital, and Anor Londo. The former is a massive let-down, with the vague lore of the game hinting towards the Profaned Flame having huge importance. It doesn't; it's a glorified cup that shoots fireballs at you. There's like 8 enemies and none of them are fun to deal with. And the boss, Yhorm the Giant, is a monstrous failure, railroading the player into a single path to victory that's visually impressive but ultimately hollow.

The latter is a clear re-hash of a Dark Souls 1 area without rhyme of reason. The developers knew what the players expected, so they gave it to them, in the form of a watered-down experience that simply served as aimless nostaliga bait. Plus, Yorshka being there derails a massive amount of lore, and for the sake of sanity I'm choosing to ignore her.

At this point, my understanding of the game was that it felt like a world tour of a band that knew what the crowd wanted. They played their Greatest Hits, and the fans cheer. They push a few new songs, and the tempo lulls. All the while, a banner is descending on the stage reading "This Cannot Continue". Ironically, this isn't the worst summary of the actual plot of the game. Mechanically sound and satisfying, but lacking organic joy like it used to.

Despite having improved playstyle variety in a game that's now far better balanced versus its release date, I replay this game shockingly few times. Despite my understanding that the game is the most polished, refined of the three games, or perhaps because of it. I did the tour before, I know what it's like.

The two DLCs take interesting approaches to make themselves distinct. Ashes of Ariandel is too short, drops some cute lore hints and little else, though culminates in a massive theatrical boss fight that would later be done to death. The Ringed City is a great return to form; a stunning world that culminates the story of all Souls games into one massive frothing cacophany. Plus a superb send-off final boss that feels like a beautiful goodbye to the series. Also the weapons from there were sick.

I didn't spend much time doing PvP in this game. At this point, the tryhards were out in full force on Day 1, screeching about which builds were ABSOLUTELY INSANE and herding players into mashing R1 all the time. The most disappointing thing about this was: it worked. It revealed that being particularly inventive about your character build or playstyle was getting you needlessly killed. This marked a decline in my enjoyment of these games for a long while.

Ultimately, the core experience of this game is good. It just feels like it could be unleashed a bit more. Be a bit weird about it! The devs' future vision, for the most part, did not agree with me.