abadidea

the hex is silent

professional source code complainer, Pwnie Awards 2014 Best Song, will decipher ancient writing systems for free

Access to Odin photos is a privilege contingent on not being the reason I’m regretting the internet today.

English: native; Nederlands: nog niet helemaal vloeiend; 中文：走马观花

Amsterdam

Public Key

npub12k5xjkuu7vvsm88ps5z8c0udy6t8hqghxxvke59x9m58vt6ujm8sjg9sc4

NIP-05 Address

0xabad1dea@infosec-exchange.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9t2rftww0xxgdnnsc2pru87xjd9nmsytnrxtv6znza6rk9awfdncpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxjar5duh8qatztqf5e8

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

relay.ditto.pub

relay.damus.io

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

Author Public Key

npub12k5xjkuu7vvsm88ps5z8c0udy6t8hqghxxvke59x9m58vt6ujm8sjg9sc4

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 19:33:21 UTC

a breakdown of my Bad Replies, given that the worst-of-the-worst instances are of course blocked by my moderators:
- 80% users from major mainstream servers, especially mastodon.social, who have poor netiquette or the stink of subconscious misogyny about them
- 15% single-user instances owned by people who have already been banned from every open-signup server and sincerely believe that every single one was completely unfair and tyrannical
- 5% kolektiva users openly planning war crimes in my mentions
but, to be clear, I get a lot fewer Bad Replies here than I ever did on twitter while getting a similar number, if not more!, Good Replies
(including from kolektiva users. they're not ALL planning war crimes in my mentions)

2026-10-27 16:49:56 UTC

The Dutch reviews of Classical Chinese are in: “eww”. Harsh…
(It stands for eigenschapwerkwoord, an awkward attempt to capture the non-Indo-European verb semantics. The registered trademark is apparently for “radical”…)
#classicalchinese
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/513/898/801/295/009/original/1aea3c2220ad515d.jpeg

2026-10-27 13:19:48 UTC

I have come into the office for the first time in a Very Long Time and was astonished to discover that the tram, the Delft university tram that has languished unfinished for years and years as I navigated on bike or foot through its muddy open-ditch ambitions, has actually been finished, actually began operating two weeks ago, and goes STRAIGHT from the train station to the office park. It’s a Halloween miracle

2026-10-27 09:18:10 UTC

Odin has learned that the flower booth lady is VERY impressed he can put his paws on the counter and stand like a customer, so now he eagerly springs up there so she can kiss his forehead

2026-10-26 17:30:02 UTC

As the 🎃Ritual🎃 approaches its climax, be sure to cloak your realm in sufficiently spooky boops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=henyMRqMBws
#chiptune #music #halloween

2026-10-26 15:10:38 UTC

the timesheet software my employer uses is unspeakably awful, and remarkably, not because of AI nonsense being shoved in – I'm pretty sure it hasn't actually been maintained in any way since roughly 2005. Of its many lacks of obvious expected functionality and inscrutable bugs, I think my favorite might be where you open it and it quietly decides to show you the work calendar not for this week, nor for whatever week you last looked at, but a random week at any point in the last several years

2026-10-26 10:14:57 UTC

I find it funny that the middle and high school kids “mevrouw” me when I have Odin with me, and only when I have Odin with me

2026-10-26 07:19:41 UTC

something that really surprised me about the Netherlands is that mayors are not elected by the local citizens, but appointed by the national government
anyway, the Amsterdam news did a piece on how the youths have decided that Mamdani should be mayor of Amsterdam too

2026-10-25 20:42:01 UTC

So, my previous apartment – it was in Leiden, on a narrow medieval street, and the buildings were all quite old so they weren't all built to the same standard floor-height, and the windows were all huge. As a result, I could look out my window and have a crystal clear view of the floor of the living room across from me, where some college girls lived.
One day, they had some guy-friends over. And I happened to glance out the window and see one of these boys, mid-conversation, casually and smoothly drop to the floor, execute The Worm with flawless undulations, and spring back to his feet all in one effortless motion, carrying on like nothing happened.
I'm haunted by it. Haunted by this impossibly cool guy I was never meant to perceive, this stolen glimpse of perfection. Where is he now, and is he doing The Worm?

2026-10-25 16:32:55 UTC

It is a strange feeling, how quickly and easily I can open Google Maps and zoom out from my house in Amsterdam, scroll a bit across the Atlantic, zoom back in on the Appalachians and find the three little rectangles that represent my late grandparents' house, workshed and barn on a dirt road in the woods 5500 kilometers away

2026-10-25 14:47:58 UTC

you: trying to figure out how the first anvil was forged without an anvil
me: wondering how Ludwig Ernst Hans Burmester made the first French curve without a French curve but more importantly, why are they called French curves if the inventor was German

2026-10-25 09:53:09 UTC

A young boy that I suspect was probably a Ukrainian refugee came up and asked in English if he could pet Odin "because this is my favorite breed of dog," and then clearly began arguing with his mother in their native language that see, it's fine, he's ready for the responsibility of a dog over twice his size
then we ran into Ace; despite living in the same building, we hadn't seen him in weeks. He's grown enough to be more of a fun playmate for Odin, shown here being very Normal about it
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/500/929/490/180/639/original/38e7753582b610ea.jpeg

2026-10-24 17:12:06 UTC

If you'd like a small little thing to try for #NewSkillNovember , how about this tutorial for how to sew-bind a small book https://www.baum-kuchen.net/blogs/analogue-stories/how-to-make-a-simple-hand-sewn-book-a-c

2026-10-24 16:54:27 UTC

my husband's at a local fighting game tournament and he's beating the guys that a year ago were his personal Red on the Mountain

2026-10-24 08:59:00 UTC

Thinking about when Odin was such a baby, even more baby than now, that he had not yet grasped the causal relationship between walking towards the park and being in the park
He HATED walkies the first several months of his life. He didn’t want to go anywhere and got scared if he lost sight of the house. I literally cried with joy the first time we took him out for a few hours without him getting upset, I think he was 9 months old
He’s completely fearless about new places now, he trusts us that everything will be okay

2026-10-23 18:36:27 UTC

I have long noticed that the ancient Greeks had a compulsion to attribute everything to an inventor, often implausibly so to someone very famous; I think I have found the apotheosis of this tendency in Aristotle attributing the invention of the baby rattle to "mathematician, music theorist, statesman, and strategist" Archytas.

2026-10-23 17:41:52 UTC

I just wrote this in my own notes about Greek philosophers taking the slave underclass for granted, and I invite you to weaponize it against the deserving: "He sounds like the kind of man who expects his mother to come do his laundry at Walden Pond."

2026-10-23 14:39:00 UTC

well, I was able to get a spot in January for the citizenship exam missing from my list, I was worried that they'd just not hold any for months and months and shrug about it

2026-10-23 14:12:48 UTC

whoops
#aliexpressfinds
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2026-10-23 09:45:29 UTC

I am so vulnerable to ye olde "L2/L3 confusion"
Practice question for Dutch exam (in Dutch): name a few foods that contain a lot of sugar
Me: uh... 糖

2026-10-22 18:17:46 UTC

I feel like you can glean a lot of profound lessons about infosec, process, safety and design from this Minecraft video where one team digs a giant hole in front of their base, everyone on the server knows about the hole, and yet people keep falling into the hole, including the ones who dug it in the first place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78j9zqDp2-M

2026-10-22 14:50:46 UTC

Guide to understanding Amsterdam news:
“400 cobras found in shed”: they mean fireworks, it’s fine (it’s not fine)
“Python in console”: no, programmers fleeing PHP, don’t stick your hands in there, it’s a literal snake.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/485/118/606/408/561/original/6ace7b30df4c8d0f.png

2026-10-22 14:30:14 UTC

“It’s a poor worksman who blames his tools” has always been complete nonsense. No-one complains about imperfect tools faster and louder than a master. A master will yank a cheap or damaged tool out of your hand and yell at you for not blaming it yet
Cheap, lousy tools come from middle managers who don’t know how to do your job. Blame the hell out of poor tools and those who demand you use them

2026-10-22 06:35:41 UTC

In the Netherlands, first we got a national news alert that all government websites were shutting down because of the PHP bug, and then our national comedian-newscaster Lubach did a bit about it.
so yeah, containment was breached

2026-10-21 15:12:54 UTC

eMudhra, the company that made 4 the new funniest number, put out a press release that said the problem was discovered "possibly with AI assisted techniques" to make it sound sophisticated and difficult and not something that just anyone could discover
No, what happened is that someone bothered to run a basic cracking script on all trusted certificates to see if any of them were actually THAT damn broken, and they were. There's probably other actors out there who noticed months ago and didn't report it, keeping the broken certificates in their back pocket for a rainy day.
https://emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-statement-distrust-global-tls-intermediate-root-ca

2026-10-21 14:47:44 UTC

ugh. the patch is massive 🫩 the bug is based on causing an OOM condition and no-one ever accused the php interpreter of being neatly and elegantly architected, so the fix touches everything 🫩 the bugs go back many years but backporting the fix to all those versions is wildly impractical 🫩
the exploit was developed with AI assistance but it was based on existing human research, including by my old nemesis Stefan Esser. I don't remember why he's my nemesis, I assume we got into a stupid twitter argument over nothing like 16 years ago

2026-10-21 14:04:58 UTC

Our router rebooted itself and started blinking ominously a few minutes before the embargo ended. I sure hope that was the ISP pushing updates for its rinkydink management interface and not someone installing a bitcoin miner in its rinkydink management interface

2026-10-21 12:34:06 UTC

Odin got bored waiting for daddy outside the grocery store and decided to see how many Festive Autumnal Decorations he could get stuck in his fur
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/478/918/965/118/102/original/e5538e8a94a6381c.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/478/918/959/986/371/original/0443d1970f8e1f7c.jpeg

2026-10-21 11:20:33 UTC

So, no matter how bad the PHP fallout proves to be, I have to concede that they *have* cleaned up their act quite a bit in recent years and these sorts of bugs out of PHP are much, much rarer than they used to be
Did you know that, when I was a fiery young programmer in my 20s, I ran a hate blog dedicated to the PHP manual and how bad, unreliable, and unhelpful it was? Here are some highlights:
Special snowflake not-actually-a-function isset() https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/52082199266/unsettling
The notorious strcmp() footgun https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/44634822304/i-am-so-comically-angry-right-now
When 1 equals 4096 https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/33023415508/when-does-one-byte-equal-four-kilobytes
PBKDF API designed to trip you up https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/66426423275/i-cant-spell-pbkdf
And, my favorite, a review of the complete original PHP 2.0 manual from the late 90s: https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/65544023819/php-20-a-review-in-retrospect
(The picture of Espurr in that post links to a domain that used to play the Lavender Town theme. Please put on Lavender Town yourself for full effect)
All these posts are 12 to 15 years old and do not necessarily reflect the current state of either the documentation or the code. Gods, I hope they don't.
#php

2026-10-21 09:19:19 UTC

Double ADHD marriage be like: realizing we both completely forgot about our anniversary weeks ago

2026-10-21 08:38:36 UTC

I have a headache after trying to understand someone's blatantly Claude-generated writeup of the PHP bug. It's like dazzle camouflage for useful information

2026-10-21 06:31:00 UTC

last night: I take the time to watch a funny Skyrim challenge video instead of worrying about anything important. The number 4 breaks the internet
this morning: I sleep like a functioning healthy human being. PHP breaks the internet

2026-10-21 06:04:40 UTC

while we’re all discussing single-digit numbers, we could solve so many rhythm problems if we all agreed to retcon seven to “sen”

2026-10-20 20:14:18 UTC

okay, I’m way too late to post xkcd “4” comic and still be funny, so instead I will have to write a serious post
Could this disturbingly severe mistake be because someone asked The Cat for a certificate? Hypothetically, yes. But there’s absolutely no reason to jump to that conclusion with self-righteous confidence when all serious infosec experts have been screaming for THIRTY YEARS that our programming languages are designed to maximize the probability of catastrophic mistakes in cryptographic code even when handled with care by experienced professionals.
Here’s what we know: several signing certificates from the same issuer with private keys that are, in their entirety, just a number below 256, all the way down to the comical “4, just 4, that’s not a typo, the private key is 4.” This strongly suggests a bug where the first byte of the intended key, treated as an array, was used rather than the whole key. A bug that’s absolutely, positively trivial to write in C and its descendants. I’ve seen proposals for how to gotcha yourself like this in Go as well.
I’m not saying The Cat isn’t involved, it could be. But you absolutely, positively do not have to ask a mischievous clawed agent for a random number for it to go this horribly wrong. We’ve always had the human strength within us to fuck up this bad all along
(And I do assume it’s a fuckup and not a backdoor, because there’s no reason to design a backdoor such that the next random enthusiast to run a sanity check script on public certificates will instantly spot it and start screaming)

2026-10-20 13:03:13 UTC

the most Public Transport Odins of All Time
#publictransport #trains #tram
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2026-10-20 06:47:04 UTC

A decade ago I was too sick to get out of bed and take care of myself, and I’m still having dental surgery about it to this day 😞

2026-10-19 11:27:46 UTC

Can’t stop thinking about the guy with the mechanical organ rowboat. He has a website: https://reiniersijpkens.nl/index.php?pagina=notedop
The boat’s name is the Nutshell

2026-10-18 18:50:21 UTC

I just watched the first episode of Colombo with my husband and one of Colombo's gotchas, one of his "no sane innocent man would ever do this"s, is "Why, when you were at your vacation home four hours out of the city and got a call that there was an emergency at home, why did you drive back and not rush to the airport and get on the next flight? There's one every half hour, everyone know that"
The idea of rocking up to an airport spontaneously and buying a ticket to get on a plane leaving in fifteen minutes, as if it were a local bus, and that the whole process from door to door would be meaningfully faster than four hours, is completely culturally illegible to those of us living in the glorious future

2026-10-18 14:55:02 UTC

I see your "Tiffany is a valid medieval name" and raise you "Alexander the Great's wife was named Roxanne"

2026-10-18 09:44:55 UTC

Odin’s at the Amsterdam marathon! Yes, many of the competitors smile at Odin as they pass, and one lady gave up a few seconds off her result to stop and pet him. There are party boats blasting music up and down the Amstel. One of them’s just a guy in a rowboat with a trumpet and a hand crank organ tooting Aan de Amsterdamse Grachten
While I was typing the alt text, two more runners pet him
#amsterdam #marathon #amsterdammarathon
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/461/266/555/959/893/original/53352f5b9d08c739.jpeg
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2026-10-18 08:36:05 UTC

I was listening to a Dutch true crime reporting podcast (not sensationalism) and got a little concerned when they advertised they’d launched a true crime podcast for children
Turns out it’s about recovering a teddy bear that was stolen on the train. It’s called “waar is Apie?” if you or your children speak Dutch

2026-10-17 17:11:01 UTC

very normal vocabulary list from ali express
#aliexpressfinds
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/457/334/891/131/592/original/528ae769366bf3f7.png

2026-10-17 14:12:16 UTC

My husband ordered a handmade arcade controller from a mysterious man named Alpenmeister who does in fact live in the Alps and who is known to always take several months longer than anticipated to hew each circuit board from primordial Alpine silicon, but every serious button-presser simply Must have one
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/456/625/060/513/818/original/bf6386430b50ef54.png

2026-10-17 09:39:06 UTC

Bystanders report traffic blocked by fluffy baby. Just the biggest fluffiest baby they have ever seen. No one wants to ask him to stop rolling around and make way for them to pass
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/455/581/538/841/462/original/8ed85f2c78341833.jpeg

2026-10-17 09:00:49 UTC

We ran into Odin’s favorite hobo. He got a little weepy at how excited Odin was to see him. “Everyone else in this city says, ugh it’s him again, but at least *someone* here likes me.”
I know perfectly well he’s an obnoxious alcoholic with an anger problem who gets thrown out of shelters. But he’s always been sweet and kind to Odin, who adores him. I hope a positive relationship with one creature on this earth will help him find the inner strength to begin repairing his relationship with society

2026-10-17 07:42:42 UTC

He is listening to One Winged Angel
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/455/123/839/577/117/original/fae7cb5fc68bf2bf.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/455/123/849/585/603/original/d9f521f6e594f401.jpeg

2026-10-16 21:14:25 UTC

My reward for escaping The Hague Dimension and getting home substantially later than planned, in the rain, is the abounding love and relief of a creature that I’m told was curled up in bed with my husband whimpering because mommy missed her bedtime
I’m sorry baby, mommy will never go to a work meeting again if she can help it :neodog_cry:
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/452/653/321/323/635/original/73e8f044d9cbfa65.jpeg

2026-10-16 19:38:49 UTC

I have once again had the sort of day where, unintentionally and through no fault of my own, I find myself stuck in The Hague

2026-10-16 19:16:26 UTC

I heard a young man in a poorly lit back alley ask a young woman “do you want to feed ducks for two weeks, and get paid for it?”
This is the first time a young man’s proposition has ever caught my attention.

2026-10-16 15:44:50 UTC

The Delft train station has a design flaw: there’s a big glass wall along a coffee and seating area, there’s a rotating door in the glass wall to exit to the plaza, and then right next to it, multiple normal non-rotating glass doors that look like perfectly normal exits you’re supposed to use. Except they’re only meant to be emergency exits, and touching them sets off an alarm. If you don’t read Dutch, this is NOT obvious.
So yeah, some poor lady just tried to use the door and stood there mortified as station security casually sauntered over to disable the alarm for probably the seventh time today… There was a guy eating borgor next to her who was casually like “oh, yeah, don’t touch those.”
I think this is another case of the Dutch signage not being very internationally legible. A pleasant green and white icon of a little guy moseying out the door just does not scream “you will die of embarrassment if you touch this Peril Door when there’s no emergency” to me

2026-10-16 14:48:46 UTC

Thinking about this again as the train stops at Schiphol and an exhausted stewardess collapses into the seat across from me while three young boys swing their suitcases around dangerously taking selfies of their first trip to another country

2026-10-16 12:22:38 UTC

The Funny Number Paradox states that there is no least funny number, because while the theory informs us that the least funny number is 68, that actually makes it incredibly funny

2026-10-16 08:27:53 UTC

My husband got a new computer game that kept crashing. It turns out that the issue was that it has a system to dynamically drop the resolution and use AI upscaling to compensate when the video card can’t keep up, and this defaults to on. But… if you do in fact have a high-end video card that can keep up, and the AI upscaling never gets called off the bench, the game crashes on a scale of about 15 minutes.
I suspect it’s just endlessly speculatively creating frames that never get used, and then it doesn’t free them because the freeing happens somewhere down the cold path where it’s called to action.
Nnnnot a great bug to slip through QA, and surprising because usually the problem is that game studios do too much testing on high-end machines and not enough on mid and low-end ones. It suggests the upscaling system was slapped on last second because a manager heard it was AI.

2026-10-15 19:37:57 UTC

Current Albert Heijn supply chain crisis level: the police are publicly “inviting” Albert Heijn to actually call them about this criminal hacker that they say stole the national cucumber reserves
They forgot to call the police.

2026-10-15 18:02:05 UTC

Flabbergasted by this guy on Mario Kart whose display name is just “Mike”, his character is just Mario, and his player sticker badge is the default one. And he’s quite good at the game. A man whose gender truly is Just A Guy

2026-10-15 16:10:22 UTC

When Odin was two months old, we caught him chewing on an HDMI cable. We told him to stop and he never chewed on it, or any other cable, ever again. (He's remarkably agreeable about this sort of thing.) And I've been re-patching it with more electrical tape every few months for almost three years now 😂 it started dropping frames like crazy today, I guess it's time to let puppy teeth entropy win and buy a new one

2026-10-15 13:43:10 UTC

People ask me what I miss about the United States.
This, this is what I miss. The cold yet sunlit rocky reaches of my childhood home, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, proud and tall in her autumn raiment. And also goldfish crackers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54U1kdfH_Sk

2026-10-15 10:06:13 UTC

Well I guess I'm getting an early start on #NewSkillNovember by studying for an exam that, unfortunately, borrows a terrible idea from the Americans: a test to prove I'm really Dutch by answering a bunch of inane trivia questions that many native Dutch people would get wrong or vehemently disagree with

2026-10-14 19:11:56 UTC

I'm not impressed with the Dutch government website for signing up for the tests you need to become a citizen. It's a confusing labyrinth of unclear information, one of the tests that is absolutely mandatory is simply not scheduled at all anywhere in the country forever, and now that I'm signed up for what *is* scheduled, I am informed that I must report to "Rotterdam" to take them. Where in Rotterdam, exactly? Well telling me would spoil the fun!

2026-10-14 08:35:16 UTC

Behold! I can make a power drill magically begin maintenance tasks outside my window at will
[I begin Chinese listening exercises]

2026-10-14 07:22:57 UTC

so, Albert Heijn, one of the main Dutch grocery chains, has had a major IT disruption because of some sort of ransomware attack, and this has caused stores to not get deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables
Some passerby was quoted on the news as saying to chin up and stop whining because "it's nothing compared to third-world countries" (their phrase, not mine)
The type of places they mean typically have a *fantastic* selection of fresh fruits and vegetables. A city running out of vegetables overnight is a situation you only get yourself into by complete dependence on hyper-optimized centralized computerized supply chains...

2026-10-13 18:16:09 UTC

Anthropic is bragging about rolling their own from-scratch in-house version control system because git couldn't keep up with their 30,000 commits per day, and it doesn't seem to occur to them for a nanosecond that they are not fixing the actual problem in their engineering practices but making it exponentially worse

2026-10-13 10:32:27 UTC

Everyone, I have a suggestion: New Skill November.
#NewSkillNovember
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/433/132/901/646/098/original/a5232ad4dba88d85.jpg

2026-10-13 07:56:49 UTC

I collect public domain images of women reading or writing, btw. If you ever want to cheer me up, dig out an obscure old engraving of a woman with a book

2026-10-12 18:54:01 UTC

hey, could the Youtube product manager who decided that when a Dutch household puts on a video from the Dutch national news, the audio should automatically be replaced with a TTS voice reading a machine-generated English translation, come meet me in the darkest corner of the Amsterdamse Bos where there's no cell coverage? I just want to talk.

2026-10-12 17:02:14 UTC

“Based on a sudden flurry of comments, someone must have boosted this old post. Was it @nprofile…7q7j ? It was catsalad.”

2026-10-12 14:55:55 UTC

Odin is looking for Mila… but will we find her?
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/117/428/515/813/735/861/original/423045c6ee032e75.jpeg

2026-10-12 14:08:27 UTC

Just had a conversation with peers that was like:
"my friend says github's changed their SSH key fingerprint again and it's generating scary warnings you have to ignore"
"oh? it hasn't changed for me"
"or me"
"can't find any documentation on them having changed it since 2023"
"... uh-oh."
If you get a scary warning about Github's ssh fingerprint changing: STOP! it's scary for a reason! You might be a victim-in-progress! Don't proceed unless and until you know exactly what's wrong!
Alas, I suspect the fact that Github really did have to force a key rotation a few years ago has planted the recollection in everyone's minds that this is a normal Github failure mode.
(Yes, messages have hastily been sent to warn people about the possible account compromise.)

2026-10-12 12:57:37 UTC

So, this silly recall is real, and it’s because the sand filling is contaminated with asbestos. How did I verify that? well, not simply by going to gov.uk like the announcement says!
The front page of gov.uk does not have a header for “recalls”, “product safety” or anything of the sort. Okay, but there is a search box. So I entered “recall”. And yes, it brought up a recalls page featuring several toys, but not this one.
On that page is a subtle link to the real, full list, that I completely missed despite actively trying to verify that these malevolent poison gnomes are real; I had to backtrack to google to find a deep link. Terrible web design, 1/10, gov dot uk was designed by a murder gnome.
https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-recall-primark-halloween-gonks-2610-0004
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2026-10-12 12:26:43 UTC

completely concur: the United States is a failed civilization except for Nyquil. If you can just buy Nyquil because you’re in a situation that would be improved by some Nyquil, and it’s never occurred to you that it could be otherwise, you have no idea how lucky you are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXeDzx2V9A

2026-10-11 18:30:05 UTC

Odin watching EVO with daddy
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2026-10-10 18:50:57 UTC

The steakhouse said Odin could come in, and he was a very good boy who did not steal anyone's steak even though his mouth is above table level and there's absolutely nothing anyone could do to stop him
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2026-10-10 10:29:46 UTC

the actual main difference between ancient Greek and ancient Chinese philosophy, visualized
#philosophy
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2026-10-10 07:04:31 UTC

I don’t like this negative pattern of social media interaction:
Post: if you want to x, you can just x! I encourage you to embrace any desires you may have to x and just get started! It’s not as hard as you fear! You don’t need a permission slip to x! 💖
Reply, received in a hundredfold variations: but I don’t want to x! I don’t like x! I have a rare disease that will kill me if I x! My parents were murdered by a clown while pursuing their dreams to x! 😡
okay! sorry to hear about the clown, but you also don’t need a permission slip to NOT follow general encouragement that wasn’t aimed at you specifically! You don’t need to defensively justify yourself to a stranger about it, you’re not being accused of being a bad non-x’er! it’s okay!

2026-10-09 19:13:54 UTC

"Socrates," answered Euthydemus, "you may rest assured that I fully appreciate the importance of knowing oneself. But where should the process of self-examination begin? I look to you for a statement, please."
Socrates: [another fucking question]

2026-10-09 06:10:23 UTC

Europeans never met a map they couldn’t fuck up even worse

2026-10-08 15:30:21 UTC

Who could say no to this face? Me, because if I didn’t overcome Odin’s god-tier cuteness several times a day, I’d never get to eat my own food again
[user was slimed while typing this post]
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2026-10-07 14:26:24 UTC

You can just be 38 and decide to start grinding a skill. They can’t stop you
#fountainpen #handwriting #cursive
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2026-10-07 10:14:15 UTC

without Halloween and Thanksgiving to put up even token resistance, Christmas flavored food has already invaded Dutch grocery stores

2026-10-07 09:46:21 UTC

today’s Good Deed was helping a tourist on the tram discover she was en route to the suburbs and not Amsterdam city center

2026-10-06 12:51:38 UTC

I browsed the prompt lists that go around this time of year (prompts for artists! for ARTISTS!) to find some prompts that are suitable for depicting my own characters. This one's "in the clouds", starring Payl, whose dad really gets so worked up about the littlest explosions
#gloryinthethunder #mastoart #watercolor
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2026-10-05 21:07:50 UTC

I think a moderator at mastodon dot social had the very good idea to construct a feed that’s just replies from their instance to the fediverse’s top one hundred most illustrious women. Because I won’t even bother reporting a low-grade troll and yet their account is nuked an hour after I block them anyway

2026-10-05 20:31:52 UTC

good evening to the South Korean tourists who were getting the maximum Amsterdam experience by Blazing It on a public bench in their pajamas at 10:30 at night. They loved Odin

2026-10-05 19:54:34 UTC

My favorite professor from university just emailed me out of the blue to ask how I was doing :neodog_melt_sob_heart: to be clear I graduated 16 years ago.

2026-10-05 10:57:56 UTC

Help the Pope safeguard our humanity today, read a queer atheist woman's completely 100% handmade passion project
https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1
#gloryinthethunder #fiction #lgbtq
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2026-10-05 10:00:43 UTC

weewoo #weewoo #netherlands

2026-10-05 08:37:30 UTC

he’s baby
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2026-10-05 07:42:17 UTC

y’all, the problem with the corporate overlords not upgrading the woefully inadequate server my coworkers need to do their job has gotten so bad that someone just called for a strike in the company chat. A strike over RAM and hard drive space

2026-10-04 19:04:50 UTC

pssst hey
Glory in the Thunder Act 1 updated with Chapter 4
a queer autistic first crush story with magic powers, told through the medium of interlocking toy blocks of a brand none of us shall name because they don't endorse stories where kids die, probably
there is an HTML5 version linked from the itch page. everything is free-to-read
https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1
#gloryinthethunder #writing #fiction #visualnovel #lgbtq
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2026-10-04 18:12:32 UTC

Odin, stop drooling on mommy's notebook, Plato needs to know mommy thinks he's a fascist clown advocating for the extinction of human culture
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2026-10-04 11:03:45 UTC

It took me a while because I kept getting sidetracked by life, but I’ve finished the second volume of my hand copy of my Classical Chinese textbook (all book text + my own original translations of every example sentence). I should be able to fit the rest into one more volume.
#classicalchinese #fountainpen
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2026-10-03 19:27:34 UTC

My husband wanted to set the record straight that I couldn't figure out where I bought that maki-e pen because he bought it. So it was a gift, and I am a bad wife for forgetting. :neodog_blush_hide:
But, I do know that I knew how much it cost and was surprised by how low it was at the time.

2026-10-03 17:32:55 UTC

them: you need to read the Great Conversation of western civilization
me: okay fine, hit me with your best shot
the first chapter in a book dedicated to the best excerpts of the Great Conversation: Change is inherently evil. If children play a game with different rules than their forefathers, civilization is basically already over. Music that I, Plato wearing a character mask, don't like should literally be illegal. Also, you don't actually need to sleep. Just sleep less, every night forever. Civilization will be great if everyone's sleep-deprived and overworked
me: 😩
this same passage, somehow: also women's rights. go Amazons
me: why did the Great Men of Western Civilization adopt everything from this chapter of Plato EXCEPT that one

2026-10-03 14:47:34 UTC

Just had a recollection of doing standardized tests in US public schools and getting in-class coaching on "test-taking strategies" that were completely divorced from the knowledge being tested. I was specifically told, by a teacher, that statistical analysis of past tests shows that "C" is the most common answer, so if you don't know the answer at all, guess "C".
This was at the school that I was shipped to in order to artificially inflate their test scores. Theirs were so low that the state was threatening to take away their teaching licenses. So the county opened a "gifted magnet program" and transferred the kids with the highest test scores to raise the average. I spent three hours a day on the school bus, had immense pressure from the school to get good grades and no support, and had a breakdown after getting a D in math and dropped out of sixth grade by registering as a home schooler. (Before the end-of-year tests, so they never got my score boost.)
Why was the school a mess to begin with? Vicious cycle of racism, mostly. Decades of getting the least funding and the last pick in teachers because they had the most black students. Of having cops stationed in a middle school and arresting kids over minor kerfuffles instead of calling their parents. Of having metal detectors at the door and treating it like a foregone conclusion that twelve-year-olds were violent criminals in progress. I don't remember the kids there acting any worse than they would in any other school; I don't remember anything violent or shocking happening. The kids weren't failing the system, the system was failing them.
And they tried to fix it by importing some white autistic kids who test well and coaching them to pick "C" if they're not sure.

2026-10-03 12:39:15 UTC

It's interesting how words from your second language can infiltrate your core vocabulary in ways you don't anticipate. I just thought to myself that I now have a nice "stapel" of fountain pen friendly A6 notebooks to keep me busy. It just sounds more correct to me for books than "a pile" or "a stack".
Of course, I'd never deprive you of a chance to admire the stapel...
#fountainpen #notebook #paper
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2026-10-02 14:02:44 UTC

This Platinum 3776 was rattling around the bottom of my collection. I don’t remember where I got it or why I bought it, but I feel like I probably paid forty bucks for it? It wasn’t a gift, I’d remember that.
I just realized, inspecting it, that those cranes are not a print but hand-painted and signed by the artist, and the nib is not gold colored but actually gold. And that this model of pen goes from anywhere from €200 gently used to €600+ right now on European pen store sites.
I definitely wouldn’t have paid that much for it, this isn’t a “grail pen” to me. Why do I have this?! 😂 I guess I should try harder to appreciate it.
#fountainpen #fountainpens
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2026-10-01 19:22:14 UTC

🎃The Ritual🎃 has begun, so here's a reminder that I already made the perfect spookyboops playlist for your Ritual activities this month https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=henyMRqMBws
#halloween

2026-10-01 16:10:43 UTC

GLORY IN THE THUNDER ACT ONE now updated to include Chapter Four!
Ravelin goes to the ruins of a city destroyed by natural disaster to help document what remains of its cultural heritage. Yaaay! A goddess unveils her full glory, splendor and terror to personally warn Ravelin not to use any godsdamn time travel in this accursed place. Well that doesn't sound very fun at all!
More info + Windows build: https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1
A web export that you can play directly in your browser: https://xn--hmr.net/gittlego
The web export exceeded 500MB, so itch refuses to embed it anymore; you have to go to my personal website. I do not control whether it works well on your device, that is between you and your gods.
There are chapter links directly on the title screen, you do not need to replay Chapters 1-3 if you've read them before.
#gloryinthethunder #visualnovel #renpy #lego #lgbtq
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2026-10-01 14:07:52 UTC

A "saved by backups" story:
I was doing a final from-the-top playthrough of the new build of Glory in the Thunder Act 1 to make sure everything was well and truly in order before I uploaded it. And lo and behold, the engine started spitting image-not-found errors halfway through Chapter 3. Two background images that absolutely, positively were there before had disappeared. I have no earthly idea how.
Fortunately! I had zipped backups, plural, of different points in time of the entire project folder exactly as it was. It was easy to find the missing assets and replace them. (If I only had one most recent backup of the assets, there's a risk that the bitrot was already captured in the backup at that time.)
And note that it's not just backups that saved me, but the instinct to never trust a computer and replay the visual novel from the top even though chapters 1 through 3 were already completely in order last time I checked.
#gamedev

2026-10-01 08:41:32 UTC

Good morning to a boy who has a routine checkup at the vet this autumn morning
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