Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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This year it'll be 10 years since webcomic A Softer World ended its 12-year run. If you missed it, you can still go back and read them all, starting from asofterworld.com/index.php?id=1
But in the meantime, here's one of my very favourites:
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Did not attempt GC3KQKM RRR12 2nd tree downstream
This checkin to GC3KQKM RRR12 2nd tree downstream reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Did not attempt to find, today: an angler was sitting almost right at the GZ, enjoying the peace and quiet that my geokid would have quickly disrupted! So we moved on...
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Did not find GC4B6QJ RRR 13 Not that Alder - incy wincy!
This checkin to GC4B6QJ RRR 13 Not that Alder - incy wincy! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. No luck here for the geokid and I. He speculates that perhaps "down came the rain and washed the container out."
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Found GC4B6QP RRR 14 Put that Rod Away!
This checkin to GC4B6QP RRR 14 Put that Rod Away! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. A quick and easy find in a brilliant hiding spot. I was helped by the geokid with the reaching. Lovely spot for a great hide, FP awarded!
AltDan lifts a child up to … -
Found GC3KQK8 RRR11 Pillow talk!
This checkin to GC3KQK8 RRR11 Pillow talk! reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. My partner Ruth is, by installments, attempting to walk the entire Thames Path. Today, I'm on transport support so I've driven ahead of her to Culham Lock and the dog and I are walking back to meet …
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I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.
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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.
The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
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Somebody's doing a kickass job with these adverts on the Tube.
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Photo of a parody advertisement on a London Underground train, showing Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute. The fake ad is for 'Elon's Musk', 'parfum de 1939'.
Found via https://bsky.app/profile/strictlychristo.bsky.social/post/3ljobtnidrk2s; there are other examples in that thread.
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My love of the yesterweb forced me to teach myself just-enough Blender to make an animation for a stupid thing: an 88x31 button representing "me" (and, I suppose, my blog, whenever I next end up redesigning its theme).
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88x31 animated GIF button in the Web 1.0 style, reading "DAN Q". The letter Q is spinning.
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The same image, but expanded so it's larger.
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How do birds hear the calls of species of bird other than their own? Is it like background noise that they can talk (sing) over, filtering out everything but the calls of their own kind, like how you can talk over the murmur of a cocktail party until the second somebody says your name? Or is it more like something they consciously observe and work around, like waiting for your turn to speak in a group conversation flitting between several different topics?
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Early springtime view of bare trees over green-brown fields under a sky dappled with clouds.
Either way: is such communication strategy an instinctive or a learned behaviour? It seems likely that at least part of birdsong communication is gained after hatching because birds from noisy cities are louder than their country cousins (although you wouldn't know it, to listen out of the bedroom window of my rural home, this morning!).
Just a moment's curiosity for the morning.
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A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
Right after I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built, I began reading its sequel A Prayer for the Crown-Shy and... it's also wonderful. It takes a different-but-similar approach to the philosophy of identity and purpose, and the story provides a deeper look into Dex's world, but it's still a familiar-feeling continuation of a beautiful story that's comforting and sweet.
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Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This'll work, right?
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Pizza built with bean chilli and mixed grated cheese, ready to go into an oven.
Update: yeah. This works.😋
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Finished pizza, looking delicious.
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What's the equivalent phrase to "hair of the dog", but for caffeine?
I've always been pretty sensitive to it, and while I'm less-so now, it was still definitely a mistake to eat several portions of tiramisu right before bedtime.
So now I'm going to need more caffeine, this morning, to compensate for the lack of sleep.
What do we call that?
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AI vs The Expert
Inspired by an 11-year old comedy sketch, I asked a GenAI to solve an unsolvable programming problem... and (for at least some models) it failed in exactly the way I anticipated: claiming to be able to solve it and delivering code that just... didn't. What does this teach us about AI trustworthiness for problems that might be solvable, but for which the human operator doesn't have sufficient comprehension to verify?
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
While I've been ill I read A Psalm for the Wild-built by Becky Chambers, which had been on my reading list for a while. It's a comforting and compelling story about purpose and identity in an environmentally-conscious utopia, and it's flipping awesome.
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After most of four days spent primarily in bed with what's probably a norovirus infection (or something like it), this afternoon I got up and went outside. 🎉
It felt like a huge achievement, even if I ran back in to the warmth the very second that the dog I was supervising had finished her business.
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A white man stands outside a white house, looking cold. His hands are buried in the pockets of his checked pyjama bottoms, and his upper half is wrapped tightly in a Tumblr-branded grey jumper. Various childrens toys litter the garden around him.