Category: Humor Page 1 of 2
I’m not going to lie, when I first spotted ScienceDaily’s article about an Australian experiment on tree thinning’s impact, I was pretty much convinced Google News was announcing the Third Impact…
No? Ah, well. Better luck next time, eh?
I know what you are are thinking about today’s (26 Sep 2026) strange oddity spotted in the Geoguessr Daily Challenge, that strange insect-shaped dark spot is 100% definitely…aliens.
BUT…hear me out. What if instead of aliens, it is the weird floating giant thing from Senritsu Kaiki Film Kowasugi?
At any rate, I’m sure Australia is fine.
I like to play Geoguessr’s Daily Challenge on No Move so I do a lot of panning and zooming and in one location from 23 Sep 2026’s challenge I seem to have panned and zoomed on a man taking a probably well-deserved bio-break (link goes to the initial tilt for the round, look pretty much directly north from there and zoom a bit to see the picture below, or click the picture below to have it done for you, lazy bones…):
I was initially going to make a Manneken Pis pun but stupid yellow+green censor bar was enough hilarity today.
And just to clarify two points just in case:
- I am 100% not offended by this and recommend everyone stay hydrated AND micturate regularly. For HEALTH! And SCIENCE!
- There is a non-zero chance that he is simply pouring something out and/or pulling a gag [said gag possibly being taking the piss].
Couple of nights back, I was getting B to bed and we were talking about how she had worked hard that day. On the way downstairs from her bedroom I turned around and said, without a trace of irony:
HARD WORK MAKES THE BED SOFT.
Space Pilgrims, it was like I was temporarily possessed by an aphorism-spouting southern grandmother.
Like I passed, in that instance, into the age where you are a movie stereotype of the gray-haired man who shows up to gives speeches on a porch to the much younger, and much more attractive, protagonists.
Lord.
Anyhow, time to embrace this new silver age, because if you don’t hold on to what you got you might get nothing at all.
Bonus, I looked it up to see if this was a phrase I had read somewhere before and Google’s AI keeps jumping into the conversation to claim it is a “well-known phrase” and offers absolutely NO evidence of such a thing.
Sounds like the folks at Gemini need to be WORKING harder, eh?
I’ve been using Google Photos for a LONG time now, probably too long, because it has all the ammo in the world to incriminate me. Which it does on a regular basis through its various “take a look at these wondrous photos of yesteryear, kind sir!”
And yesterday’s “3 Years Ago” was headlined by this absolute beauty:
First off, how dare you?
Second, just in case there is some confusion, this is from some Swedish movie, likely horror. “The End.” Pronounced “sloot” (or, for the Dutchies, “sloet”).
My all time favorite of this comes from the last moments of The Phantom Carriage. While it wouldn’t have been my first time experiencing it, it was probably the first time where my brain semi-broke while it happened.
Look, it’s pretty impressive – at least, I’m impressed – that very intelligent people have mapped out the structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. I adore finding out more about our local system.
BUT…
Several pop-sci and pop-gen news services have gone for a slightly more tongue-in-cheek article title:
…and I also adore that.
Especially when the graphic just oh so slightly does not help.
I had another bout of reading-induced insomnia last night and so when my alarm went off at 06:00, I slapped the snooze button with a mix of despair and elation. The former for the fact today is going to be a snoozy mess and the latter because that was 06:15 Doug’s problem.
Then Kaz, in bed, asked me to get up so I could help them take care of a spider.
“It’s big,” they said.
To put this in perspective, this is a rough depiction of what happened next…
For a less silly depiction, keep these measurements in mind. There is a carafe that we use to bring water up to refill a cat fountain. I have not measured it but I would assume the top to be around 8cm wide. The spider, aka Shelob the Ancient Terror, was big enough that she maybe had 0,5cm clearance on either side when I aimed the carafe to capture her.
After summoning enough energy to actually capture and not outright kill the foul hell beast, I finally – with only one instance of the spider trying to bolt – got it in the carafe and then the spider actively leapt to the back of the carafe like she was trying to eat my hand. Sure, sure, I appreciate she was probably just going for something she could hide in, but it made me think really hard about this scene:
I grabbed an index card to act as a temporary lid and then had to semi-gently hold it down to trap the demon, who preceded to charge the lid as the obvious weakpoint in her containment.
Kaz, who has pretty notable arachnophobia, had to take point at this, um…point…because my legs are not stable enough to go down stairs while holding a paper lid to a glass carafe with the fifth horsewoman trapped inside.
Kaz got it downstairs and then set it outside by the hedges and fled the area to a minimum safe distance.
While it is not freezing here in Grimbergen, it is cold, and I realized that if the spider was unable to get out of the glass carafe then it could be in a bit of trouble and I felt bad for it. I got on enough clothes to go outside and see if I needed to tip the carafe over and it was like a scene from a horror movie where the clearly dead monster is now gone.
There was the glass carafe, empty, and the paper lid on top had been knocked over and was a few cm over right at the edge of the hedges, like it had been dragged with force, with no spider in sight. You could practically hear the John Carpenter soundtrack playing. The spider you don’t see, and all that…
I picked up the carafe, and brought it inside, a single strand of thick web on the lip of it the only sign it had been used for that purpose.
It was only around fifteen minutes later that I realized what the index card had on it and that I was going to have to go back outside and reach into the edges of a hedge bush that statistically now had more giant spiders than it had before, and had to get it.
Why?
Because this was what was on the index card…
![can you figr out who this is from? I love you Kaz and Douge. you two are the best parints in the world. [then there is a heart with K+D = B and an explanation of K = Kaz, D = Douge, and B = Barbara...which maybe negates the secret love letter angle a *tad*]](https://dickens.wyrmis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SpiderQueen-1024x576.jpg)
…and I wasn’t going to allow her to keep it.
Anyhow, I’ll accept my Dad of the Year Award, now.
BONUS HORROR MOVIE VIBE: Right as I was finishing this post I reached up to brush at the side of my face where I could feel something, and there was a long, thick strand of spiderweb in my hair, because I guess I had brushed my head against the hedges.
Once again, cue John Carpenter music.
First off, and last in the title, I am still recovering from the two-fer. The cold feels in retreat but we’ll see. The ankle is still a problem. Here’s hoping tomorrow continues to improve both.
Second in the title, and second in the post, today (2025-12-05, een vrijdag), is a Bandcamp Friday. Those are days where (at least supposedly) 100% of the proceeds go directly to the artist. They are nice moments and another reason I like Bandcamp as my central hub for acquiring music. Some musicians time releases to show up on them, or have other promotions.
In this case, it wasn’t one of those I was interested in, but I had been eying Fabo Music for a minute and saving it up for one. Lots of albums which are unofficial soundtracks to Dungeons & Dragons adventures and the like. Kind of stuff I like to play while engaged in solo roleplay. One slight wrinkle is that Fabo Music often includes one-hour loops of their songs which makes sense in the context of playing as background music for RPG scenes. The downside being that it makes the zip files of the albums bigger so it is taking some time.
While fiber ever approaches (at least is showing up on the streets near us), we are still under the auspices of the older Belgisch internet. These downloads will possibly be an all morning task. I even gave up on my usual Snag-the-FLAC habit because some of them were in the 6gig range. AAC, only, for now.
And now to first part of the title. I have been using Duolingo to help learn Dutch, though it has been the, well, Netherland flavor of Nederlands. Last night, something happened where not only did my Duolingo lessons jump several degrees of difficulty but also started including more stuff about Brussels, Bruges, Leuven. Etc.
I think in technical terms I got added to some AB testing or whatnot. Who knows? It is kind of fun, though. The speaking and listening exercises are now less “De eend draagt geen schoenen” (the duck is not wearing shoes) and more, well…
This means they are less about listening and saying words and phrases I know and more about parsing sentences I do not know. The kind of thing where you jump straight from “Mijn naam is Doug” to “Je speelde als een poffertje zonder suiker!” I am very rapidly learning a lot of edge cases of the Dutch language.
At the same time, I have no idea if these are anything like actual phrases but I like them. “There’s no polder without a leevee.” “I am playing like a poffertje without sugar.” The third one is from some sort of Amsterdam noir.
“It was a quarter to eight and I was waiting at the canal…”
This means the practice rounds went from taking me around a minute to taking me more like 8-10 minutes each, but so it goes.
In the middle of this I have learned some things. Like how to say “the boys wear dresses” and “no pants, please” in Dutch. My favorite so far is: Vanwege het weer hebben wij een bakje troost nodig.
Because of the weather, we need a cup of comfort.