Month: January 2026

*Snagged from mattdinnamin.com. Used without permission but you should click that link and find out more. Trust me.*

Something of a sysadmin style notice, but if I clicked the right clicks then this will be the first post where comments are turned completely off by default. There will probably be “discussion” posts, not that anyone discusses things on my blog, but due to all the normal reasons that people hate leaving comments over – reasons #1 through #10 being annoying spam and reasons #11 through around #24 being variations of security issues – it will only be the odd post out that has comments. I’ll leave on pingbacks for the moment, partially because I use those to form a matrix of ideas but I am not precisely attached to having to have them.

Now, on with the show…

Reading Induced Insomnia, Rank: 7 Days

I have gone too bed too late for too many nights in a row. Due to reading. I know from experience that being in a relaxed state and reading an hour or two past my sleepy-bye time tends to leave me almost nearly as rested as sleep but this past week it has gone on a bit too much so I have to cut myself off for a few nights. Grammpy Doug needs his 22:00-22:30 bedtime or he gets the fuzzy brain, Space Pilgrims.

The reason for it?

Dungeon Crawl Carl Series, Rank: 4 Books and Counting

The reason for this is exactly due to one thing, I’ve been reading through Matt Dinniman’s rather delightful Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I’m on Book Four – The Gate of the Feral Gods – and remain thoroughly invested.

It is a series that has been on my radar for a couple of years though I had misunderstood the basic setup this whole time and so a lot of references to it made no sense to me out of context.

I knew the general LitRPG concept, books where characters are player in a game and are aware of the concepts, which is funnily enough how a lot of people play their actual RPGs. “I cast magic missile using the mirror, which should give it +1 to hit!” The kind of thing that their characters wouldn’t really be able to suss out with precision, though it’s the kind of detail that would pretty unfun to try and always encapsulate in purely in-world terms. To each their own.

The misunderstanding is that I was under the impression that the Earth had been turned into the Dungeon World by using existing structures. I was expecting something kind of like a violent take on The Mall World concept. Fitting into a particular flavor of 1970s-1990s dystopian film and novel where death games were played out in bits of the real world.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a lot weirder than that but I’ll leave it to the reader to find out how. It’s probably more spoiled everywhere now, as the series is picking up more and more steam.

At any rate, I enjoy very nearly everything about the books. Carl and his caring but righteous indignation. The sassy chaos of Princess Donut. Most of the NPCs and other PCs. The skill systems and nearly ineffable game rules. The violence and extreme solutions. The cosmic horror tinged with corporate horror as people competing in death games far over their heads deal with horrors that are kind of a parody of the earth but also glimpses into a universe that very nearly makes no sense to humanity.

Carl would likely have resonated even harder with a younger Doug back when I was a bit more self-righteously angry about things, but as a slightly mollified older man with a child and having to navigate – *gestures at everything happening in 2026* – I can still enjoy a person that fits like a broken cog in a machine and getting away with it.

If you like stuff like fantasy-tech ARPGs with complex skill trees, dramatically soul crushing developments, a bunch of soon-to-be-dated references that are pretty timely at the moment, huge explosions, and sarcastic humor while people are covered in gore and being lectured by an increasingly unhinged AI “gamemaster,” give it a shot.

There are a lot of reviews out there. This is not really a review. Just an acknowledgement that in a little over a week phrases like, “Goddamnit, Donut,” and, “NEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!,” have entered a kind of general vernacular in Huis van Bolden.

Some of the foot-fetish humor, and especially the degree that the character’s distaste in being forced to engage in it while friends and companions more or less laugh at him for feeling sexually harassed is an odd glitch note in the text. I mean, sure, he’s also being forced to bash in the heads of people. It just hits funky.

Becoming Mostly Ok with Audiobooks, Rank: 1(ish)

At least around 30% of my “reading” the series has been via the Audible exclusive (?) audiobooks narrated by the absolutely phenomenal Jeff Hays. To put how good his narration is, if DCC had been a flop for me I would probably have just tried to find more books narrated by that man. He is great.

Audiobooks and I have tended to never quite get along. The reasons are many. My reading speed tends to be a bit faster than reasonable narration. I like to glance back and forth a good bit to check charts, footnotes, or whatever. Just to sometimes compare scenes and get a feeling of the writer behind the words.

While I tend to read fairly fast, I do sometimes like to slow down and think more about the situation, enter into a kind of liminal reading space. Audiobooks have ways to mitigate this, especially in conjunction with ebooks that track the progress between the two, but I can’t imagine audiobooks ever really replacing that mental space in my brain. Especially those with mediocre or particularly slow readers, which ends up just draining me and making me kind of hate the book in question.

Another reason is a bit more petty and barely holds up to scrutiny over time. Back, around 20-years-ago, when I was in library school there was the rise of three “variations” of literature among the librarians: young adult fiction, audiobooks, and ebooks. None of which were new but all of which were being simultaneously pushed as a forefront for helping to inspire reluctant readers.

For the lattermost two, there was this tribal desire to try and claim only one format as being “authentic books.” I heard multiple library students say they hated ebooks because they preferred the { smell | feel | texture | taste | whatever } of “real books” but then they would talk about how 90% of their reading was listening. “Amazon actually owns all your Kindle books,” they would taunt as they downloaded another low fidelity book via Audible [which was bought out by Amazon around this time].

These arguments are partially why I tend to refer to physical books as “Dead Tree Fetishism” (where the act of owning a bit of dead tree is more important than enjoying the text via that medium) though I obviously adore physical books.

My irritation at this, despite accepting one aspect of their argument – that good audiobooks are akin to a transformative work that approaches the material in a different way – made me cranky at the wider audiobook world.

A more reasonable final reason is that my brain is slightly incompatible with audiobooks. I tend to dance around the threads in my brain and audiobooks always had the effect of only occupying perhaps one of them at most, and sometimes the other threads would just be a bit too loud to focus. With some mental practice, I have been able to more overcome this.

I have no specific numbers, and refuse to make a specific goal, but in general I think I will try to get my “Tolerates Audiobooks” to at least a Rank 2 or 3 skill before the 2026th floor collapses and we are thrown into whatever chaos exists on Floor 2027.

Just picture, Space Pilgrims, next year’s Doug: *gestures at all that stuff going down in 2027*.

At any rate, I’m so sleepy I just dropped my keyboard while typing in some act of physics rebellion I do not understand, so I’ll wrap this up, here.

The “Cool Vegan” Letter

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-01-08

In Rants, Vegan

You occasionally come across a response or opinion that catches you off guard. The world is a rainbow and there are spectra within spectra, so I am never expecting everything to make sense to any of the MillionBillion Dougs, but still…

*Name is obvious retracted, but the source was The Guardian which kind of spoils my obfuscation but I like to cite my sources.*

Apologies for any readers with sight issues, but I’ll not quote it in full [see link in caption to find more] but the gist is that the person wishes to see more foods catering cool vegans and vegetarians. The opposite given would be foods like “vegetarian curries and chilli dishes.”

The first thing that caught my eye was simply the use of cool in the presumed context of “people who do not like spicy.” It is potentially a double entendre of sorts, the non-sexy kind. I tried to find if that was a common speech pattern [“cool foods”] and mostly found a website dedicated to more carbon-neutral eating and another blog that hasn’t posted in a few years.

In principle, it reminds of a complaint I read years ago in the comments on Vegan Black Metal Chef‘s videos: that vegans can only stomach their food by making it too spicy. There was a period where it was one of the gotcha arguments against plant-based diets. You can still find some remnants if you search online.

The broad argument, which I am absolutely not claiming is being cited by the letter writer [it seems more likely that they had a few dishes that were all of the spicy version and is making an incorrect generalization], is asinine and untrue. The fact that it almost always coupled with the sibling argument that meat-based foods are just more filling, flavorful, and satisfying without requiring spices is a fake you are being tricked into accepting as face value.

This is leaving aside that some variations of these arguments are clearly framed in racist tones. It’s ok, you also have arguments that veganism is inherently racist. It’s a balancing act.

I’m not sure what the logical fallacy would be called but the structure would go like this: Option A is a problem (based on Opinion C, which may or may not be related to either A or B in truth), therefore Option B must be better though I will avoid discussing it at any depth.

For example, countries with snow can make snowmen and snowmen are fun for children therefore countries without snow are bad for raising children. I’ve created an arbitrary line to judge two elements and then stated those two elements in the context of this line in a way that makes the responder think they have to respond directly to context of the line. It’s the big sister version of “Yes or No, X is bad” and then not allowing any nuance. Tracks great for snippets but not in the real world where very few things are that simple.

Because the spicy plant-based/forward food option is overwhelmed with evidence to the complete contrary.

Not only do many of the same cultures that spice their vegan dishes also spice their non-vegan dishes, the implication that someone craves meat at all times is just false.

Tastes vary greatly by all sorts of factors. As a plant-based American in Europe, I can say from some experience that most “spicy” dishes here are far below the spice tolerance that would be expected back in the States. In our recent trip to Glasgow, even some of the spiciest dishes barely triggered a proper spice response in myself (the Hot Cock is the main standout, thanks Buck’s). The only inverse I have seen is that Delhaize sells a vegan burger [sorry, EU] that has a bit too much cumin. Making it taste more like a sausage patty than expected.

A huge amount of our food stuffs are just naturally plant-based and plant-forward. Yogurt. Olives. Mashed potatoes. Fries/Chips. Bread. Scrambled eggs. Cheese [minus the rennet]. Tofu. Seitan. Hummus. Beer [minus the isinglass]. Ice cream [whether it is made with soy or cow’s milk]. Beans. A lot of soups are so close that it is trivial to cut out any meat. Gravies [at least can be made such]. Puddings. A lot of breakfast cereals that do not have gelatin-based mini-marshmallows [including the vast porridge family]. Muesli. Fruits. Vegetables. The list is extensive. Pizza and pasta is already right there and they are especially easy to play with.

In the usual “food pyramid” type structure, the only bit that isn’t plant-forward is the meat/fish/fowl segment(s). And with the notion that many breads and “calcium-group” items can be made or “replicated” without any animal products at all means only the minority is non-vegan. A few lentils, beans, quinoa, or what have you can cover that gap. It’s actually easier than that to get plenty of protein.

However, a huge amount of food-centric dialogue tries to claim that the second narrowest slice of the food plate/pyramid/etc [only “snacks” is smaller] is the core of the food experience. Sometimes aggressively so.

Fun fact, the Belgian food pyramid (or, at least, one of them) is inverted and has white meat in with the melk-en-kaas category and puts bread up in the eet-meer category, which feels so properly Belgian (though they put beer, chocolate, and fries in the “little as possible” category which is a shocking betrayal).

Inverted Belgian Food Pyramid — *from https://www.gezondleven.be/themas/voeding/voedingsdriehoek*

“Vegans are giving up an important part of their diet and abstaining from the full experience,” is another common fallacy that tries to liken abstaining from meat eating as something akin to self-hatred. Most food is veg*n. By centering every maaltijd around the vlees, you ignore so many flavors and structures inherent in meals.

My advice, then, if you are looking for “cool veg*n” foods, to just take a look at what you eat and eat that. Toss in some ready-made vegan food if you need (Beyond Burger, whatever). If you are at a restaurant, then ask them to tone down the spices where possible.

Another option is to use something like HappyCow to look up plant-based and plant-forward or at least plant-forward-friendly restaurants in your area.

If you need quick meals, then start with the fruits/veg options and toss in some hummus and bread. Tweak, ad infinitum, to your heart’s content. Once you stop having to start with the question of “What goes with the chicken?” you start to realize that food has so many variations that have been broadly locked out by the so-called common sense of the meat-and-two-sides meal structure.

Snow Days to Kick off the Year

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-01-06

In Daily Life, Grimbergen

It started as the wettest snow I have ever seen. I struggle, a bit, to explain it. You hear “wet snow” and you might think something like “wintry mix” but that’s not a good explanation. Think snow. Run-of-the-mill white stuff falling from the heavens. Only wet. Moving like clumpy rain.

I’m sure in the vast volumes of weather descriptions, there are words for it. Thompson’s Snow or Merriweather Flakes or some such. I could look it up but as for now, I’ll just call it Merriweather. Sounds, appropriately for this blog, Dickensian.

The above photo I took around 18:20 on 2025-01-02, a Friday, putting it at one of my first photos of the year. It is a mediocre-sliding-to-terrible photo in most metrics, but I feel it captures the essence of Merriweather Flake.

By Saturday (3 Jan), it turned into more legit snow. Here’s a photo of B and our two tuxedo cats enjoying the first or second aftermath. [Photo by Kaz]

The sun was at least partially out in this photo and the snow had stopped. It returned later that day. Then a very bright moon came out (not pictured). Then the snow returned. Then it cleared.

That was the pattern for several days. Remember how I have talked about there’s a stretch of woods we have to walk through to get to civilization? Here’s what that looked like on Sunday (and, presumably, today) [photo by Kaz]:

For those paying attention, this means B is now in the select group of people who can say they had to walk through the dark and snowy woods [sunrise is currently after her school day starts] just to get to school. There’s even an uphill, there.

A bit back, I talked about how often it rains during sunshine, here (The Devil Has a Lot of Fairs in Grimbergen + Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago). I can now attest that it also snows in the sunshine. This is around 08:30 this morning (2026-01-06):

You have to have faith there is snow in that picture. There is. Much like the last time I was talking about it, you also have to have some faith there’s sunlight in that picture.

Shortly after, the snow ate the sun and it degraded to this:

And now, circa 14:50, the sun has again taken the lead:

We are expecting more snow and, this time, a proper wintry mix over the next several days.

I’m Southern US enough that I’m still mostly fascinated by the snow. There is the downside that my post-injury stability is so low that I pretty much cannot step foot outside while there’s any chance of icy or slippery terrain so I’ve been largely stuck indoors since Friday night with only short excursions.

That is kind of ok. I just get to be the creepy guy staring out the window as folks walk by…

“It’s Gonna Be Our Year!”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-01-01

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Grimbergen, The Algorithm

I don’t know who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to let me have so many green-tea-and-gins last night but they were a complete idiot.

Name probably rhymes with bug or rug or something similar.

Funnily, it wasn’t the gin that was the real problem. Had I mixed 2-3 shots of gin with a liter of water and drank that I’d probably feel pretty swell today. It was the couple of liters of green tea that kept me up to something like 03:00.

One year I’m just going to go to bed for New Year’s. Since Belgian parties are just getting started at midnight, it probably won’t be for a couple of years, mind.

It’s a gray day in Grimbergen which is just sort of saying, “It’s a day.” Kind of nice, though. Not too cold. Not too loud. Windy in a pleasant way. Noon but feels either earlier or later. A kind of liminal space.

I’m sitting here next to two open windows letting in 5C air and giving a thought to the standard thought that we all do on 1 Jan: resolutions. I swore off the whole thing a few years back, mostly, but sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they are hopeful.

Over on the Doug Alone, I talked about (mostly) leaving crowdfunding. That’s one of them. We’ll see how that goes.

A couple of other bigger ones in a more general sense of things (since crowdfunding is pretty much 100% tied into my solo roleplaying hobby) are (a) reducing gamification in my life and (b) generally increasing privacy awareness. And (a) is going to impact a lot of other potential resolutions.

“It’s Going to Be Our Year!”

Before I get to that, let me give you some insight into the core Doug experience. Last night, after getting the first green-tea-and-gin in myself, I started sending out pre-Happy-New-Year’s messages to a few friends and while the messages tended to be personalized, in very nearly all of them I joked about the phrase, “This is going to be our year!” Those who get my sense of humor appreciated I was both making fun of arbitrary goalposts and whispering the foulest curse of them all: hope.

It helps you have say it with a shaky voice like a person saying, “Maybe the cave troll isn’t home, we should go into the dark cave and find out.”

Joyfully nihilistic curses aside, maybe it will be. I don’t know. I just take things as they come, mostly.

(a) Reducing Gamification

This is frankly the biggest one for mental health and general well-being. I have no specific numbers (which feels like a pun) but the gamification of every single aspect of our life feels like it is increasing. Earn points for purchases. Day-week-month streaks in every app. Add five friends to earn a point. Allow GenAI to access your data? Well, we’ll do it anyhow but if you give it away you can get a badge to show off on your profile that no one will ever click.

I pay money to upgrade the “freemium” experience of Duolingo, Geoguessr, and NYTimes Games. All three are big about pushing daily plays and uses [“Please stay addicted to our services”]. Badges. Achievements. I “buy” (lease? not sure what the proper legal term would be) books on the Kindle and it sends me notifications about not letting my streak expire. When I started deleting social media, I was seeing it more, there. Stuff that has no business setting weekly/monthly/annual goals have started bundling it.

Back 20 projects on Crowdfundr.ai? You get platinum status. There are no benefits but still we love you like your parents never did. Spend $2000 on gachas? You get 1.25 points per $100 spent instead of just 1 point.

It’s an incessant noise. And the fact that so rarely do hitting any of these milestones unlock anything besides maybe meaningless in-game currency shows how effective it is to just offer up a hexagonal png to keep people reaching for a goal that only exists to increase company profits through addictive behavioral programing.

When I was first workshopping this resolution, I thought about flat out cutting out any app or system that had such systems baked in only I realized, relatively quickly, that I would more or less be able to not access the things I actually use.

Instead, the idea is to simply ignore the badges, achievements, streaks, and other stupid bullshit designed to increase addiction. If I didn’t read today, no more panic reading a chapter to keep my Kindle streak going. If I don’t feel like doing Duolingo, just let the streak die. In some cases, this will likely be tied into getting rid of some freemium upgrades. So it goes.

The irony of this is that it kind of negates the concept of resolutions. I do want to read more. Play more of my old favorite games. I want to solo play more. Take bigger risks. Lose weight. Work on fixing my ankle.

I will likely have to compromise to some degree. It can be hard to lose weight without tracking calories somewhat. It can be hard to budget better without a budget.

Just absolutely no apps to do the data for me.

(b) Increasing Privacy

Which brings us to the other major resolution. Find ways to increase my overall privacy. This one is harder to specify without sounding a bit like a conspiracy nut. Or, perhaps, it is easier to specify:

Stop giving private information to unlock upgrades,
Use more offline stuff and fewer things that require third party tracking,
Avoid using cloud-based systems more, especially now that so many cloud-based systems have decided that using them is akin to giving your personal documents to their AI systems,
Using my own storage back-up solutions, own media servers, own email servers, etc.
Using more encryption that isn’t designed to expose the data to the host,
etc

There are so many little ways this one will show up. It makes me think of something that Northerlion (the Twitch Streamer) said. He mentioned that getting cash from the ATM feels like a borderline criminal act because you get the cash and then no one really tracks how you spend it. The sense that if we just use the stuff we own, we are going dark.

After the move to Belgium, I have been watching more stuff streaming from my personal server and through physical media, partially because I would have to use VPN to watch my American-media-libraries despite paying a lot of real money to build them up and still being an American citizen.

And one of the aspects of this is that when I put in that DVD/Blu-Ray/CD then no one but myself really knows what I am watching or playing. If I play a CD a dozen times, it doesn’t get tracked and used to sell me something. I can watch a movie a dozen times and it is up to me to watch trailers to see what else I might like.

We’ve been so conditioned to accept The Algorithm(TM)’s “help” to fill every waking hour with media that we are giving up the ability to own these pieces of happiness. It is becoming increasingly obvious how much companies don’t want us to own our own media now that I kind of have to own it to enjoy the things I enjoy.

Just look at videogames. Now you buy a code in a physical case and you attach that code to your account and if that library every goes away, you bought a physical case in a store to temporarily lease a game.

Or movies where you buy a blu-ray and they want you to use the “free digital copy” code so they can keep better track of who has what. Some Blu-rays and DVDs have features that require you to access the internet to see fully.

“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is a lie. You are the customer, always, but also the product. It’s kind of up to us to set the line and we are currently losing and pretending its inevitable.

And that’s…madness.