Adam Vartanian @flooey@mastodon.flooey.org

I was reading a thing that described monthly updates as “a version of social media that respects attention and focus”, and it’s made me want to start a monthly update series.

Ms. 5: Moon cheese isn’t a thing!

I learned today about the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson*, who made books that had things like holes in pages so you could see what was going to happen later in the book or middle chapters that you could read in any order, which sound fascinating. I’m also really curious if he had any part in inspiring Bloody Stupid Johnson from Discworld.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._S._Johnson

KitKat has a dark chocolate mint flavor in the UK and it’s the closest thing to Thin Mints that you can get in this country

@mjd My objection to the sun moving clockwise across the sky is not that I think it moves counterclockwise, but that it obviously doesn't move at all. If you look at it, it's clearly stationary. Yes, it's at different places in the sky at different times of day, but it's definitely not moving.

(This is pretty much my instinctual feelings about the sun, I think because I spend so little time outdoors in a single place paying attention to it, so I effectively never experience motion.)

We've been in Amsterdam for the past couple days, and I'm here to report: It's neat! Good food, fun vibe, pleasantly compact, lots to do.

Also, any vampires that come here are _fucked_. Canals _everywhere_.

I'm filling out a form for a medical thing and I just... look at this weight dropdown. What happened here? How did any of this come to be? I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how anyone looked at this and was like, "Yep, that seems fine."

@gruber I don’t think you’re wrong that Apple execs didn’t know it was happening, but I’m delighted by the idea that Apple’s low-oversight capricious App Store management is screwing them for once rather than some poor developer.

You know it’s a bureaucracy night when you need to use three different SIMs in your phone.

I had always thought that the Great Pyramid was some distance out into the desert.

Turns out it's like 200m from urban Giza, they just always take pictures from the city side so it looks like it's all on its own.

I wrote up my impressions of Zig after using it for this year’s Advent of Code, check it out!

https://flooey.org/zig.html

In a delightful Americanism, you have to pay for passports by swiping a card and then signing the receipt. Feels like home!

Having been here a number of times (the new embassy opened in 2018), it’s a very nice place. I think the old location was better — hard to beat the heart of central London — but the citizen services room was cramped and they were clearly struggling for space.

Ms. 4 is almost Ms. 5! And that means an early morning trip to the US Embassy to renew her passport.

It’s Start the Year Off Right Day in the Gortanian household!

Every year, we take December 31st to do all those lingering chores that we’ve been putting off forever, so that we don’t need to bring them with us into next year.

Hang up those photos! Sort through that pile of paperwork! Mop that floor! Answer those emails!

It’s a great tradition.

Yesterday we went to a British panto for the first time, and it was fabulous. I'm honestly surprised panto isn't a thing in the US, it seems totally accessible to American audiences and it's a great time.