Dickens of a Blog – The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

A Day in the Life #17694: B’s Back in Town, Mail Call, Spices, Halloween, Exercise

On 2025-11-07

In Belgium, Brussels, Daily Life, Exercise, Food, Horror, Music

In my last post (The Pillow Washing Incident), I mentioned a bit of a catch up. This post represents that, mostly. I’m sure I’m leaving things out but to kind of enshrine a log for myself.

B back in Town

Barbara’s school had their annual “adventure camp” conclude today. It was a week-long trip somewhere in Belgium [I, oddly, do not know specifics, though I am sure I have been told] where the school as pretty much a whole — minus the early year students and some others that have opted out for various reasons — goes and does a lot of camp-type stuff. Swimming. Playing. Music. Talent shows. Eating in camp cafeterias. That kind of thing.

I’ve never exactly been to that kind of camp. I have done some volunteer work where we go out into the woods and clean up a bit or fix old playgrounds. Kind of similar, just a bit more hammer-and-nail and less friends-playing-games. And I’ve gone camping plenty of times. Lots of hiking and such.

I’m glad she got to experience it. She said it was mostly ok. Food was her biggest complaint.

Oddly enough, she seems to have more energy than I do now that it is concluded.

Kaz and I had a week to ourselves but we got the edge of a cold and for other reasons mostly just hung out and took care of a few things around the house and rested up. The parent paradox. Kids are gone for a week and you just choose sleep. Well, sleep and watching The Substance (my second time, Kaz’s first).

Take this as advice: it is a terrible date night movie.

It also ranks up there with Under the Skin as far as movies go where you get to see someone who is undeniably attractive in the nude and the overall vibe just outright punishes you for it.

Mail Call

On the left is the UK Blu-Ray of Southbound. On the right is Florence and the Machine’s new album, Everybody Scream, the “Chamber Music Edition.” Not pictured, because I picked it up digitally, is Robert Rich and Markus Reuter’s Incubation.

I have watched Southbound once, years ago. Likely near the time of release. Back then, I liked it better than the V/H/S movies. Ironically, I ended up rewatching V/H/S a good bit more. I have been doing a rewatch of that series and kind of felt like Southbound should join. I’ll likely write up my thoughts at some point on Doug Talks Weird.

As for Everybody Scream, I’ve been a fan of Florence and the Machine for a good while and am excited for this one. I have heard a couple of the singles and they fit well into my expectations. A good witchy album. We’ll see how the “Chamber Editions” of the songs go. It was supposed to hit on Halloween but there was a delay so I got it a week late. That’s ok.

Halloween

Speaking of… Halloween is not quite a big deal here in Belgium. There are lots of parties and lots of decorations. Schools have costume wearing events. I’ve heard there are even haunted corn-mazes and such. Here on our sleepy street, we were pretty much the only one to do anything.

That’s “Sam,” my very quickly done pumpkin using Sharpie. I decorated him on Halloween evening and put him out in a chair with a little hat because it was quite chilly. The hat got deeply rained on so I tossed it into textile recycling but still have the pumpkin. Not sure what we’ll do with him. Maybe consign him into the garden and let nature take its course.

Barbara (and Kaz) went to a classmate’s house and did some minor trick-or-treating. It seems like a few neighborhoods organize stuff.

She was Rumi from K-Pop Demon Hunters. She is of the age for that movie to hit big and wide. Got her the soundtrack and everything.

Spices (and Beans) from Foods of Asia

One of the things Kaz and I did while B was out of town was hit up Foods of Asia in Brussels/Evere and dropped around 100€ on spices. I am not talking any crap at all about Belgium, which actually has an ok assortment of spices in most shops, but there were a few that I really missed getting in proper bulk. I don’t like the tiny little jars of spices when I want to cook.

We got cloves, coriander, cumin powder, whole cumin, nutmeg, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, asafoetida, and some other similar things. Also some ramen and a mid-sized bag of jasmine rice.

Oh, and butterbeans, which I grew up knowing as limas. It was a pretty big staple for our family growing up (only bested by black-eyed peas in the legume category). We had a bean we called butterbean which was probably just baby-limas picked fresh. I don’t know.

The only bean that I have not been able to find, precisely, is pinto beans exactly like what we had in the Southern US. There are pinto beans here, but maybe just a bit more mature? I’m not sure. They taste a bit different and are a bit harder. It’s not too bad, though. Just a minor shift in cooking.

Alright, that’s probably enough note-taking. It’s sunny here in Grimbergen. I’m about to get out and go blink at this so-called “day star”.

OH, before I go, here’s my bike ride stats. Pushing to over an hour. Roughly of an average of mid-20s km/h. Intensity up to around the half-way mark on the bike (equivalent of mild uphills). The middle of the ride was more intense than the end but there’s no way to take a picture of the whole route so I just have the snap of me doing the wind down to finish out to the 17mi mark:

The Pillow Washing Incident

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-11-05

In Daily Life, Discoveries, Home Care

I have a little bit of a backlog of stuff going down so will do some catch up, starting with this: The Pillow Washing Incident.

I have used the same pillow for years. I don’t know if twenty is the right number, but it feels right. To be safe, we’ll lean towards fifteen-years since I started using the pillow.

The kind of pillow that is neither the same color nor shape that it once was. The original structure has been consumed by time and replaced by a strange new realm.

And it slept perfectly.

But like all such things that once were pillows, you have to wash them to keep the gods-of-nightmares away and it has been some time since I have washed it. How long? Well…

It has been a time.

I figured last Friday was a good time to wash it up and threw the vaguely orange tesseract into the vortex of a Hygiene+ wash cycle. It went perfectly fine for the first 95% of the process. Then, right at the end, when it should have just been bringing the ray of light to Doug’s sleep-land, something occurred.

The stitches on the corners of the pillow-esque thing popped out in the final spin cycle and two-decade-old (give or take) fluff, albeit clean and once again white, exploded into the washer and as it went to drain out the water, the water-saturated fluff got sucked into the works.

How many works, you ask?

The drum had fluff in and around it. The drain hose was clogged. The filter was clogged. Water was spewing out of the system. There was the extra spice that it was Halloween when this occurred and Kaz and B were off doing some Halloween-themed things. Which meant it had to wait until we could teamwork it.

I had a washer half full of water, half full of a poem entitled “The Deconstruction of What Was Once a Pillow,” and half full of despair. It was a 150% situation. I did what you do: I watched Blacula and Trick ‘R Treat.

The next day (November 1), Kaz and I had to work on clearing it out and getting some of the water and still-water-saturated fluff out of it. Thanks to some YouTube videos and finding an English-language version of the manual, we got the drain hose out and slowly got the excess water out and then was able to get the filter clear.

I did not take any photos of the process, which is a shame, but you can roughly replicate it by just staring at Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” especially the right-hand piece.

Then we had a few cleaning washes to get the rest of the fluff out.

As of right now, the system is working as intended and, thanks to some sunny weather, we are getting some speed drying done to make up for the backlog.

What lessons did we learn, Space Pilgrims?

LESSON THE FIRST, wash your pillows more often.

LESSON THE SECOND, either tie off the pillow case or get some sort of laundry bag that zips up, just in case.

LESSON THE THIRD, every screw up is a good time to learn some new valuable life skills. In this case, how to drain and repair and gunked up washing machine.

We have yet to figure out LESSON THE FOURTH, which is where in the heck do I buy a new pillow in Brussels? I suppose at some point in time, I’m going to figure out what the IKEA is like.

In better news, here’s a blurry photo I took last night before bed to show off how bright the full moon was. My phone camera is not the best at night photography, but I appreciate the mood.

The Devil Has a Lot of Fairs in Grimbergen + Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-28

In Belgium, Daily Life, Memories, Words

We seem to get a lot of sunshowers [LGT: Wikipedia] here in Grimbergen, BE. The weather mix where it is raining while sunny.

Back in Alabama, I feel like you’d maybe see it once or twice a year. In Belgium, I’ve already seen a good dozen times over the three months I’ve been here. I have no idea if it is normal, or if I have some magic touch. Though, since the Flemish word for it seems to be Duiveltjeskermis (Devil’s Fair), “magic touch” might have a cursed connotation there.

You can probably not see much rain in either photo. Consider this something like a trust fall.

It’s also non-Summer Belgium, so you can barely see any sun. So it goes…

Three fun facts in which one is a follow-up of another:

(1) I had the window open [obv] in that second photo and while taking the picture, noticed the wind had shifted enough that it was starting to blow rain inside. Before I could shut the window, a quantity of rain poured all over my radiator, electric cords, power bank, and so forth. I had to rapidly shut everything down and unplug stuff while still covered in rain water.

(2) Whenever I see sunshowers, the Southern US phrase “The devil is beating his wife” pops in my head, which is frankly some Punch and Judy-level nonsense.

(3) Only that specific phrase doesn’t. My brain loves to say “God is beating His wife.” Which is potentially more blasphemous, though I’d argue that the extra-Biblical depiction of “The Devil” is plenty enough to go around to start.

Anyhow, the linked Wikipedia article has lots of fun phrases. My second most used, after “X is beating his Y” is “fox wedding” because I’m a weeb at heart.

I did have to check, though, because I was sure I had blogged about this before. Which I have. Though it seems like the actual discussion was on my old Livejournal, which has gone the way of Punch’s baby.

BONUS PHOTO: Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago

Ten years ago, today, Kaz and I were on our way to Providence, RI¹. It was a nice trip. Since one part was visiting H.P. Lovecraft’s graveside, I might post during spooky week.

That photo shows our toilet in our compartment. If you notice, it is right up against the seat. Meaning either you had to sit next to the person pooping or you had to sit across and stare them in the eyes. Good times.

That’s not even the worst “toilet business on a train story” I have. The worst was on a trip back from New Orleans when I was trying to pee. I was standing because I was not trusting the cleanliness of the shared seat. The train took a corner at speed which caused me to slip a bit and, well…

Sorry, Amtrak folk who had to wipe that down. I did do my best but it was a bit past what you could accomplish with train-quality toilet paper.

You can go ahead and put the “whoops” GIF here, too.

The photo was tagged by Google as being exactly a decade ago. It might have been the day before, since I would have had to get to a good connection to upload it. ↩︎

NYTimes’ Connections just Admitted the TRUTH [spoiler free, I promise]

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-27

In Games, Humor

Kaz and I both enjoy playing New York Times’s Connections. It is a nice puzzle for me to solve each morning. However, I have been a bit irked at how much it obviously borrows from Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall.”

While I appreciate you cannot copyright gameplay algorithms and mechanics [we’ll leave the idea of Nintendo having a patent on fall damage for a later date], the fact that a “homage” to Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall” was called Connections is perhaps a bit on the nose. When the style of gameplay and three of the four colors are obviously in line (an image of a potentially actual (?) Connecting Wall , found on Wikipedia):

I had a bit of a smirk this morning when today (2025-10-27)’s Connections puzzle started with the following in-joke [it is semi frequent that a few fun messages like this are embedded]:

JUSTICE!

Obviously, I am being a bit cheeky but I found it very nice.

And to shout to the Connections team, I appreciate they have found a way to take the format and make the puzzles mostly approachable. Only Connect is the only game show I have ever seen that regularly leaves me feeling like a complete idiot. It’s that good.

I would not thrive in a Connecting Wall environment.

Credits

The image from Only Connect was taken from the Wikipedia article linked above and is credited as by Wdcf – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22950288.

The screenshot from Connections was taken by me. Featuring content from October 27, 2025’s Connections #869 by Wyna Liu.

Just deleted most of my Patreon follows, including the free ones

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-22

In Internet, Rants, Technology, The Algorithm

This morning I got a message from a Patreon Creator that was a simple “Hey” but based on previous interactions, I know any response to it would result in this person asking for more money. Let’s call them Person K.

I one time, now years ago, actually did send them some money outside of Patreon. I eventually said I wasn’t going to send them any more and after a few exchanges stop replying. Over the next few years, they sent me a lot:

I obfuscated it because I’m not interested in real naming-and-shaming but that should give you an idea. Each of those blue-boxes is a message, more or less. Most are friendly. Some are a bit insistent. All are basically asking for money. I skipped a few because I think I had enough to establish the point.

Not a single Doug-reply is in there. I left their Patreon a bit back, including the “free tier” [they sent me a “bye Doug :'(” response]. Then they kept messaging me. Not so frequent that I cared all that much.

Today was just a different sort of day, though. The kind of day where I was ready to delete most of the flack off my digital landscape.

I figured out how to block Person K — which gave me a message that Patreon had removed me from their page, so I guess somehow I was a zombie there — and gave a pretty big think about how I wanted to use & engage with Patreon if I kept using it. The final answer, after around thirty total seconds: not much. Very nearly none.

My problems with…well, sort of with Patreon but buckle up because Doug’s about to go off

I have always been a moderate- to lower-tier user, even at peak. There are lots of reasons why I have never gotten deeper into it. Let’s come up with something like a starter three really quick (# given is roughly the order I’d put the problem):

(5) The interface is fairly poor for a website that is one of the major backbones of the indie creator scene.

(3) It quickly gets costly. While backing a couple of Creators is not a whole lot of cash, it is easy to end up backing 10+ and seeing a monthly bill rivaling old school cable bills. Especially with how many Patreons have that stupid “$20+ a month to get your name at the end of my videos” thing.

“I’d like to thank DickMaster2000, the Might Gooble, Tom the Tominator…”

I personally don’t tend to engage with content on a subscription basis, ever. (4) I do things in little bursts.

This means I would back a podcast, listen to some of their backlog, wait a few months (paying the whole time to not use them), and then do another backlog. At this point I might leave or I might wait another few months to pick up another backlog.

If I ever left, if I ever downgraded, I might be losing out in months of content that I could access as long as I kept paying.

Which brings me to a fourth reason which is #2 in the final list, though this is less Patreon-specific and more the whole damned thing that is happening right now:

(2) Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic: freemium memberships, gachas, crowdfunding with backer-exclusives. Even when they enable some creators to make special content for their best supporters, there are very few safeguards for the backer-side and drive creators to work around this “value added” model.

FOMO is a billion-dollar industry driver across its many facets and a major slice of a lot of the modern hobby landscape. Apps that allow extra features, sites with minor upgrades, games with a few bonus aesthetics, gacha pulls, overspending on crowd-sourcing for extra features, member videos, etc.

I am not necessarily blaming all content-creators. Some do try to take care of their content-consumers. Some are in a place where this is the best way for them to publish their content. Some work very, very hard to make it worthwhile.

And, to clarify: exclusive content is not necessarily evil, no more than having a unique painting for sale at an art festival is evil, but when combined with the structure of the modern content marketplace, it has to be careful.

These massive third parties that run the websites and portals make it a constant focus for content-creators [from big media empires to smaller creators] to drive content-consumers to enter into a buy-in relationship. Break the old game with new characters. Make your character look more unique. Get a campaign exclusive t-shirt that you might never wear. A bonus chapter for your favorite book series. An exclusive series of videos shot in the director’s bedroom!

Come inside, friends, here is exclusive!

Which is where we get to #1 in the ever growing list:

(1) Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.

In many cases, they force consumers to spend a lot of time and effort to keep engaging with these communities and hobbies. Not just with the central creators but also the other members of the community, including trophies for heavy interaction and fake incentives to share memberships and similar addiction-driving behaviors.

We all lose (maybe not the platform owners)

These last two feed on each other. Creators are driven into increasingly less-profitable time-sinks to push a business model that has the real capability of driving consumers into feeling actively responsible for the well-being of their favorite creators.

That latter point cannot be stated loud enough. Whether it is time [like, comment, subscribe, share] or actual money and effort, our relationship to content creators is in a terribly strange place now. With many smaller creators having no other real options but to encourage the same predatory behavior that enables other entities [larger content creators and platforms] to also feed upon those same consumers.

Platforms like Youtube and Twitch have created a new type of rock star for us all to want to be. One with the doors kicked wide open. Only, the rules keep changing. The revenue keeps dropping. The user experience gets worse. Creators start tacking on Patreons, memberships, donation drives, subscription drives, an all sorts of behaviors that take away from the core experience that justifies the content creator even being on the damned platform to begin with.

Too often, your success is not about whether you are good or talented or just in it for fun and having a good time. Over and over the message is driven home: success is doing exactly the sort of thing that increases profits for the platform owners, the revenue handlers, and all the people who use them for advertisement. Keep your fans engaging so their data can be more widely shared with entities that are barely required to even admit they in the food chain. .

At best, it is a terrible stop-gap for a broken creator-consumer relationship where a few entities own so much of what we can consume while more indie folk are constantly trying to stay afloat [and here comes GenAI to tighten the screws further while eating the indie creations to learn how to emulate them].

At worst, this is an active abuse of psychological principles that have plagued humanity all the way back to our hunter-gatherer tribal roots. The need for community. The need for recognition. The need to provide. The fear of scarcity.

[Recap] The list in order of importance and slightly expanded

Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.
Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic.
Patreon quickly gets costly if you support more than a small number of Creators or feel the need [see #1 and #2] to engage at a higher tier.
I do things in little bursts, which systems like Patreon take advantage: you either engage constantly or you generate a backlog where you keep paying to avoid missing the content you already “own.”
The interface is fairly poor for a website all about connecting Creators to their consumers, which again means you have to engage frequently or spend time navigating past other temptations.

Um…Doug? We were talking about Patreon…

Right. RIGHT. Sorry, I get a bit ranty when I have a headache.

Also, like…when I don’t have a headache. Just, you know, in general.

The above thoughts had been on my mind for a while. The three “about Patreon” parts (#3, #4, and #5) are really why I just never could enjoy Patreon, personally: the UI, the cost, and the way I actually like enjoying the things I enjoy.

I didn’t like going to the website very much. I refused to get the app. I would get notifications and sometimes actually follow the link to get whatever file or post it was about. I would sometimes skip a month or two and just miss stuff. Every time I had a backlog I would just get frustrated trying to figure out what stuff for which I had “paid” was actually available [note: about that paying for…it’s complicated for such a model].

I still kept it up for a small handful of creators, some just a month or two, because I liked to support them. What’s that, did I feel responsible for them? Yeah, kind of. That is part of the problem, see? You start to feel like you, the viewer, are somehow beholden to pre-pay for content you may or may not enjoy because a lot of those content-creators are nice people with a dream.

However, when Person K from the first section of this post contacted me, it was a breaking point.

I went through a list.

Every Patreon I followed, paid or not, that I primarily enjoyed off-Patreon, I instantly unfollowed.

If I like their content on Patreon but was only there for short glimpses into the background “behind the scenes” type commentary [i.e., one that played, inadvertently or not against my sense of FOMO], I unfollowed.

If I was just there to support them for a bit and had already accomplished that, I unfollowed.

If I was only keeping one around to eventually get around to getting the content to which I had already subscribed but hadn’t actually consumed, I unfollowed. Yes, I lost all that content.

And on a personally selfish level: was I getting my money and time back or more? If not, I unfollowed.

Finally, was it sparking the hell out of some joy..

…if not? Yep.

There were times these points clashed. There were some that actually sparked joy but had exclusive tiers I didn’t want to bother with. Some were worth it but I would rather engage with them elsewhere.

Absolutely none of the people I unfollowed today were honestly bad actors (Person K is the closest to an exception but I can understand wanting money). They were all lovely creators. Just Patreon and all those points above showed up on a day when I headache.

The two which remain + some bonus shout outs

To end this on a kind of positive note, here are the two that survived all the cuts:

Witch House Media: I have been following them since their HPPodcraft days and they put out regular, good content about a niche genre that I adore.
Tana Pigeon | Mythic: I use Mythic a lot and I love reading the magazine. While I do get to take part in some polls and such and ask questions and whatnot, the Patreon is well worth the fee since I would have spent that money on the books and zines anyhow. It also lets me get some news about something that is a major hobby of mine. Excellently run.

Two that I did not keep for various reasons but did deeply appreciate are Dean Spencer Art and Brandon Scott. Dean Spencer puts out some of the best stock art for content creators and has regular posts and engagement. I just would rather go back to buying the pieces I will use, when I use them. Brandon Scott makes wonderfully creative stuff. He is the most likely candidate for someone I will go back and refollow once my headache clears.

Bonus shout out: Cracking the Cryptic. Lots of interactions, lots of content. I just reached a point I’d rather watch them on Youtube and buy their games/books.

Credits

The “Empty Tunnel”: Photo from from Getty Images via Unsplash+ License.

Photo: Absolute Unit of a Slug

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-21

In Belgium, Discoveries, Photos

After this morning’s rainy walk, there was a lot of waiting out the rain to finish. Got in my work out. Showered. Ate “second breakfast” [read: a banana]. Drank tea. Did some online errands.

Finally, got a slight break before what looks like round 4 or 5 hits, and so went outside to pick up a couple of things that had gotten blown around a bit like the bucket we use to our restafval¹ and just checking the outside plants. Remember, one of the previous storms took out our granny statue.

Anyhow, while knocking water out of buckets and such, I saw this absolute unit of a slug:

I would guess around 10-12cm. Not the chubbiest I have seen but still an impressive chad.

Translation: residual waste. In Grimbergen, we divide our waste up into various types. PMD [Plastic, Metal, Drink Cartons]; P&K [Paper and Paper Cartons]; GFT & SH [Food Waste and Clippings (groenteafval, fruitafval, tuinafval, en snoeihout, to explain the acronym); Glass [not including beer/beverage bottles, which we return to stores]; Bulky items [grofvuil]; and Small Hazardous Items [klein gevaarlijk afval]. Restafval is essentially everything else. ↩︎

Rainy Walk to the Bus

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-21

In Belgium, Daily Life

Dear Space Pilgrims,

I will see yesterday-Doug’s Still Getting Used to Dark Mornings and raise him with this morning’s rainy walk to the bus.

Note, these pictures are a bit blurred out because of, you know, rain. It was relatively impossible to actually wipe the moisture off the lens without adding additional moisture. Take them as mood pieces, if you will.

My weather app keeps insisting it’s going to stop raining, soon. It has been doing such since around 20:00 last night.

The above is actually waiting at the bus stop for B’s bus.

Here is the walk through the woods between our house and the bus stop:

Yes, I’m taking the piss just a little. No, that’s not just a black PNG like last time. It’s a photo I took, in the rain, of some very dark woods. Toss in the sound of crackling branches and running water and not being able to see a dang thing.

If there were ghosts there, I probably would have spotted them. An unearthly glow would have been welcome.

This is the last one where coming out of the woods into a rain-drenched, leaf-strewn street makes an interesting juxtaposition where nature ends and my ability to see began…

I should probably get a better camera for taking dark, rainy photos. I have a feeling I am about to see a lot of them.

Still Getting Used to Dark Mornings

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-20

In Belgium, Daily Life, Discoveries, Expat Stuff, Memories

I know it’s a common features of expat blogs, of which this tangentially one, to focus on “10 things which shocked me!” type content but while there have been two dozen stacks of things to which I have had to adjust, I am not sure if many are really “shocking.” There’s a few I might share because of humor and anthropological studies type reasons, but overall I am pretty boring in that regard. Stuff is kind of the same but definitely not the same the world over.

There is one thing of which I was previously aware intellectually but in everyday practice has taken a bit of adjustment: the later morning sunrises.

That was taken at something like 07:08 this morning [2025-10-20]. My phone camera slightly lightened it. The sky was more true black at that angle though the light pollution of Brussels was pushing through a bit to the south.

I think you should at least get the idea. Squint a little while looking at it.

I appreciate this is a reality for millions of people and not really a big deal. It is fairly new to me, though.

I grew up in southern [aka Lower] Alabama in the United States. For most of my life, there was a rough idea of sunrise and sunset being similar throughout the year (there’s a four hour swing but Daylight Savings Time imbalances this to the evening side). 7am was pretty definitely post-dawn. 4pm was pre-Dusk. It got fuzzier after that.

Up until my 30s, all of my travel was across the American Southeast region. Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Probably in that order, though maybe more LA than GA. I think the furthest north I had ever been was Norfolk, VA. The furthest west was near-ish New Orleans, LA.

Occasionally I would read books like Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and it would talk about the sunlight fading at 11pm [aka, 23:00 in here terms] and I would be confused. I was aware of stuff like the so-called “midnight sun” but it took me a long time to really appreciate the difference. Even when I traveled to places like Boston, it never quite stuck.

My trip to Scotland, near Glasgow, in 2018 was probably the first time where I had that all important realization of proper first-hand experience. Around midsummer, the days were delightfully long which was probably terrible for jet lag but it was nice having a practicum.

It was similar to student-era me figuring out that integrating a curve = acceleration & area under curve = total distance traveled by an accelerating body. The kind of thing I could rationalize but actually using the math to predict real life objects and extrapolating that into new formulae was a big deal for me in my astrophysics days. Or when I began to work out multidimensional math and how frames of reference could be shifted and calculated in high school.

All that said, moving from a place with something like an 4-hour swing to a place with an 8-hour swing has been kind of neat. The ultimate practicum. I’m sure I’ll be fussy around mid-winter but we’ll see.

A Day in the Life: #17673, Mostly Music Stuff and Sickness Stuff

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-17

In Health, Music

For the second time of this Autumn/Winter season, we are starting to fall into sickness [pun!]. Barbara was the first to go after a week or so of having sniffles. Kaz and I are getting hit about the same time.

The first usual harbinger that announces I am getting ill is that certain smell/taste that my sinuses get. I don’t know how else to describe it but to say it is something like stale turpentine plus a kind of organic earthiness. Like a cup of black tea left out for a couple of days in a rainy pine forest. Can you picture that smell?

The second harbinger is a bit grosser. Not lose your lunch gross but I’ll be kind and obfuscate it: q mgX o XPu5B 1OVX OC igVI 1O3V 1KgoX. bPusB “CgigV 1KgoX.” qX 1POK1 3H Bust OC VostOfUI ost u1 VosB XO fg. q’ig oHOUOmuxgt FgCOVg oFO3X uX XO HgOHUg F3X OXPgV1 Poig XOUt fg XPgI 5os’X 1fgUU uX. bPg Fg1X q 5os m3g11 u1 XPoX uX 5Posmg1 XPg 313oU 15gsX gsO3mP XPoX fI FOtI XoBg1 uX o1 1OfgOsg gU1g’1 1fgUU ost uX XVummgV1 o Vgi3U1uOs.

The third harbinger is when my bones feel like that weird disorientation that your brain gets when you feel deja vu. Know what I am talking about, like your brain is in a hole slightly too large for it but yet your brain fills it? That, only it also slightly hurts.

Usually fourth harbinger is just getting sick and by then we are pushing the definition of an harbinger pretty hard. If the fourth sign that God is showing up is He is standing next to you, you are perhaps past Revelations.

I’m somewhere between #2 and #3. The last sickness that passed through the house, my body decided to fight it off long enough for me to build up a huge viral load and then I got knocked around with bonus dice.

Here’s hoping my body just compromises this time. Just get it over with. Don’t be a hero, body.

Music Stuff (at least, part of it)

I was actually going to talk about some of the new music and stuff I was doing today but in typing that it up, I realized it was really its own post. I’ve cut-and-pasted into a different post and will work on that one tomorrow.

The tl;dr is basically that I am back to getting physical CDs where I can and have been playing on ripping those to both AAC and FLAC formats. FLAC goes to my file server for longer-term storage. AAC I then keep on the computer and upload to my media server. Also copy over to my phone. I miss OGGs but enough players whine about having to touch them. Feck it, maybe I’ll just switch back, anyhow.

While doing this, I ran into the ghost of an old problem I had practically forgotten all about. Back deep in my Linux days {which I miss}, mplayer was my boy for playing music. Then, as I started using more devices, I gravitated to VLC for most of it since it was more compatible with more things.

Only VLC still has issues with gapless playback despite years [decades?] of people requesting it. For a lot of things, such as shuffling your playlist, it won’t matter. For some albums where each track is supposed to blend the next track, it starts to annoy having that quarter second reset.

The long and short of it is that I decided to give foobar2000 a spin. My very short “have played it for around 2-3 hour” review is: it works. It’ll take longer before I know for sure if it is for me but I don’t really see why not.

I guess that exposes a lot more of my musical tastes than I was planning on but I doubt anything is a shock.

Quick Review of the Two Albums Shown

Two of the four “test cases” for the workflow of backing up things are shown in the active playlist: alt-J’s 2022 The Dream and Ado’s 2024 Shinzou. The other two albums were Paul Simon’s Graceland since that’s one I’ve ripped a couple of times (first into ogg, later back into mp3) so it was a good baseline and Babymetal’s Metal Galaxy (I got their Metal Forth, recently, and really liked it so am moving back through their catalog).

The two I have played the most are the two shown, a couple of times each. My quick reviews are…

Ado’s Shinzou

Absolutely phenomenal album. The concert video is also top notch and immense fun to watch, but has enough flashing lights to make it a bit rough for me to watch in a single setting. The double CD that came with it has the audio-only portion and there are so many moment’s to love. The screaming her voice to the brink and then bringing it back down.

It’s hard to explain how entertaining she makes a concert designed around not showing the star, but here’s a sample (just keep in mind that whole “flashing” thing I was talking about):

alt-J’s The Dream

I have enjoyed playing this album but something I noticed on the second round through is that there doesn’t feel like a single song that really reaches out and punches me. The album feels more like a whole, a sustained mood that satisfies the “alt-J vibe,” but one where the whole fits more into the background of the day. Looking into it, there does seem to be singles from the album but even listening to them out of context feels kind of off.

A good album to space out into the liminal.

Also, the limited edition comes with a cool facsimile copy of the handwritten notes leading up to it.

Credits

“Forest Tea” is Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.

A Day in the Life #17671: Cool Snail, “How Dare you, Wordle!?,” and Website Whoopsie

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-15

In Coding, Dougiverse, Games, Photos

First off, while out fixing our doorbell this morning and cursing the curse of tiny screws, I saw this cool looking snail:

How Dare You, Wordle!?

Second, how dare you Wordle!? It is October for goodness, sake…

And yes, I partially posted that just to see if I can work out the mechanics of a “spoiler” type image. It should “enlarge” to the unspoilered image. If it doesn’t, I might just remove this whole section.

Just in case you don’t want to do that, here’s my explanation (click to expose spoiler): 2v Zo oj336s oS0o35, o3 2 J0o vEZ56Z5h vE0v W0szS vES J3RI J3pYI zS blxx4 05I h3v S9mZvSI 0z3pv Zv. n3JSkSR, V3RIYS jY0sSI WS YZ6S 0 M33Y!

EDIT: I’m going to leave it like th at for now, where instead of opening into a lightbox it opens another tab with the unspoilered version. I really don’t think it’s worth it, but I’ll give it a think about how to do it better without needing plugins.

Big Old Whoops on the Website Backend

I have been cleaning up a good bit of the backend of my old wyrmis.com website and today was chunking out a few hundred-ish tiny files from the file structure that were no longer used and at least potentially, therefore, a security risk [at worst] but just a hindrance to sort through, at best.

I ran what I took to be a basic rm -rf * type command but apparently the software does it a bit more complicated than that (and even has the option to move the files into a local recycle bin).

~~This was treated as me {moving | uploading | downloading} a lot of files and triggered an automatic kick. The software got booted from the server and I am at least on a temporary ban.~~ My assumption here was very wrong, see UPDATE below.

I can still log on to the server through other means, and the website seems completely unimpacted. Now I’m waiting an hour or two to see if it clears up on its own or I might have to contact someone for some technical support.

While I can still edit the website in a number of ways, I had a nice workflow going.

I’ll spend the time, instead, building up a tool that might help me to semi-automate some of the process of fixing hundreds of HTML files and then like, get back to house repairs, instead.

Now I am off to take some photos of damaged bookcases that the shipper broke and wants more photos to prove despite sending them a number of photos.

[2 hours later] Update to Website Woes

Turns out my previous assumption was just plain wrong. The [re]moving of a large number of files might have exacerbated the situation by making it harder to tell what was happening, but the actual culprit was that after I backed out of the directory that had the files, I thought it was sending me {Doug's Directory} while instead it was sending me {The Directory ABOVE Doug's Directory} and then, because the program I was using had the option to recall last directory, it entered into a loop where it kept trying to enter a forbidden zone.

I figured this out when at a whim I tried to enter directly into a sub-directory, which failed and then kicked me back out into the directory I was supposed to be in and I realized what was wrong.

The reason it wasn’t immediately obvious before was because when it kicked me out it essentially prevented me from even seeing what sort of directory I was in. It was the sort like finding a NO ENTRY sign in the middle of a very dark room and having to guess your location. Only every time you re-enter the room, a helpful guide runs up and escorts you to the same place you were just told you not to enter.