I am E-Z to please, just get me a < $3 can of coffee for Christmas. That’s coming up, right? [LQQKS at calendar] “Huh.” Well, Arbor Day. Anyway, I was buying up fat stacks of some coffee ($1/can) from Grossout, not really knowing what it is. I just read the ingredients, took a ballpark guess at caffeine % (not listed, but lower than normal, turns out), went w/a can a day. Many cans later, finally looked on the bottom. MFG 2025 EXP 2026. Okay, so a company died or something. “Florence By Mills Coffee.” What in the Sam By Hill is that name. Main URL is tot. More research. Blah blah actor blah. Okay. More. Oh. It’s Eleven from Stranger Things, a show I’ve seen approximately seven minutes of many years ago. So. Stapling everything together, looks like this coffee jazz took a dive mid-2025, and they dumped the remaining cans on the secondary market. The fun reason I mention this is because there are five skabillion articles about the celebrity starting various businesses and zero articles about any of those things ending. Except now, you’re in the know. It’s a service I provide. I might be wrong. But if there’s no website for six months and Walmart is out of stock of every flavor ... going with dead. I still have some cans left. To the Ebaymobile!

The strip for 2025 is now available. I wrote about how this is created here. YMMV. Less blathering than last three years; I was off doing something else like sorting my frozen food dinner tray collection by weight ... also I am now putting my endless carping about videogames in separate accessible webpages instead of here. I have smashed the whole strips thing into a mess, seen below.

Drew’s Campfire: The Hidden Order in Chaos ‒ 4,000,000 Double Pendulums [26min]. (via jon)

One of my new year’s resolutions is to block even more useless/annoying sites at the hosts level. One particular site already makes my skin crawl with all of their haughty users “answering” questions by openly insulting people/rejecting the question outright/answering completely incorrectly (this is nothing new, I think it was the CEO who acknowledged some of this years ago) ... there’s this jackass sidebar of unrelated slop for every post. This was half of the garbage on a test query “duh global variables function python duh.” B L O C K E D

I like chewy info-dense websites but this can get stuffed in a bin.

The Birth of the Internet, according to Jon Bois [50min]. Part one of a four-part series. This is a must watch. Even if you have, like myself, “extreme negative interest” in the television franchise shown in the thumbnail. It is not about that at all. The subject is what the title is (see earlier in this paragraph, enclosed).

Top Ten of 2025, no particular order.

- social media pause to stop onslaught of Horseshit Days™
- ebike
- dogs
- cats
- throwing things out
- licorice
- cinnamon coffee cake muffins
- sleep
- throwing more things out
- replacing someone else’s garbage code with my own garbage code

i am using nicegui to make the beginning of a front-end for my little feed program

it’s terrible and aggravating and overly-poorly documented and somehow the problems i’m having with it over and over are not explained anywhere ever as if i’ve gone batty

like two of the problems first no error messages and second you update the code and you run it and it’s running older code

two great things that will drive you up a tree very quickly

i don’t like coding anymore

did i ever like it

i don’t remember, i can’t remember what i had for lunch yesterday

what am i

but i’m more productive with coding than with writing

writing non-fiction historical stuffs sometimes you actually move the needle forward by removing two sentences in a day

i have a few projects that have been going on for decades

the programming ones, some i use every day

the writing ones, they’re never done and just sit around like someone without bones, just a big useless blob

then i look at for example singer-songwriters who chirp about writing some massive hit in an afternoon during errands

and i think well i chose poorly

also what is the stuff on ant feet

they’ll show up to drink up the last drop of whatever liquid you’ve left in a mug

twenty nine of them

and you’ll shake the mug and wash it off and blow on it

and there will be seventeen left and some of them are yelling “do you mind, mate, i’m having a slurpy-slurp here” etc

i say we extract this feety material and implement it in some technological fashion

what a boon for science and humankind

you’re welcome

Megalag: Exposing Honey’s Evil Business Model [52min].

One (1) free Mr. Beast rictus with purchase

i am sorry

i should blur it out

it’s upsetting my plants

Trying Japan’s “Unfriendly” Restaurants [1min].

Arc Raiders: May your strings echo through the Rust Belt. [20sec]

Achievement unlocked: guitar. That one-song recorder thing needed a lift. I would just play a few notes, walk a bit, play a few notes. There’s a sort of unwritten rule not to dome recorder players, not that that’s followed 100%. “We’re putting the band back together”

So far I only have two nicknames for the ro-bots. Mr. French for the crawly thing that shoots five bajillion machine gun rounds BRRRRRTTTTT, and Sky Asshole for the fella you just saw in the video. It’s subtle.

Got a letter in the Cardhouse mailbag the other day.

Hey, I dig your cynical takes. I’m interested in your services; can you give me a quick rundown of pricing and what’s included?

That’s the full message. “Services.” Uhhh what TYPE of services, there’s a lot going on under the hood here at Cardhouse dot com. Advertising? There’s no advertising on the site. Sexual? You can’t afford me. Writing? What is writing, am I right? Write. The letter was sent from a domain that doesn’t have a webpage but a TLD I am not familiar with, so let’s gooooo to the researchmobile. “ShortDot has positioned .CFD as a short, memorable, three-letter domain extension that is ideal for clothing brands, fashion houses, fashion designers, models and influencers, apparel manufacturers, footwear businesses, cosmetics companies, and online retailers with a flair for artistic expression and appreciation for stylish clothing and creative fashion design.”

Memorable SNORT. They don’t even mention what CFD stands for soooOOooo memorable Okay, right, you want my cutting remarks on today’s casual disposable fast fashion (TLD .CDFF), perhaps in the form of infectious “Tick-Tock” content. $3000/dance, E-Z. Next. Wait ... hold the line this is hilarious. The domain .CFD was originally created for some bizzy-biz hi-faluting financial horseshit “Contract For Differences.” Let me quickly, painlessly explain Difference Contracts: If I have a stock and hold it then zzzzz sorry I fell asleep twice. However, much later, in a bizarre twist, this ShortDot thing snapped up “CFD” to use for fashion because: logic. There’s a .party TLD, so there’s gotta be a .fashion TLD, right? [LQQKS] yeah .fashion. Wow. What? Wow. Am I going to tour the CFD domain? No, I have fresh-drying paint to stare at.

$4000/dance. Snooze? Lose. Does this include a free bike bag I’m trying to get rid of? For you, no. Anyway, this idiot was part of a pack of three; the other two wanted some bike lock recommendations; one of those also used the term “cynical.” All of them have skeevy addresses that bgp.tools doesn’t like so they’ve all been binned. They’re that desperate now, I guess, to make a poor AI sit and read my crap and figure out how to make me barf out a reply. Maybe the two bike lock ones were trying to dovetail into some pig butchering scheme. I should have known, I took the email address off of the website years ago and the contact page directs people to ko-fi or patreon. I thought for a brief moment that someone read this website I todally didn’t spend 15 minutes crafting a ridiculously long email about bike locks to send to an algorithm trying to scam me what a cap to 2025 hats off the writers have done it again LOL WTF TLD CFD DPZ XXX OOO XXX [FX: throws hat up in busy intersection, gets creamed by a car or two]

Still, not as bad as the algorithm that rammed hundreds of letters in my email box back when it was a submission form. The algorithm for whatever reason decided to chop up a very important message about Oakley sunglasses into tiny chunks ‒ 61 bytes, to be exact (“This style of ingenuity and innovation h” plus a few status bytes etc.) ‒ and send each of those chunks, one at a time, over the course of a few weeks. I forgot to piece them all together I guess.

Evan Edinger: This Gas Station Drug Nearly Ruined My Life [25min] & My Kratom Video Uncovered Something Weird [26min].

A rough outline of the point-of-sale situation in the US: Kratom is currently illegal to sell in skeevy gas stations etc. in six states. The rest are either legal or “regulated.” There are cities in which consumption of the drug is illegal, but legal everywhere else in the state. There is a pro-Kratom association playing creepy footsie with states let’s make it safe for people to get hooked easily and a few states have bought into the hustle this is my shocked face: [editor insert image of non-shocked person here]. There’s a 2022 80-page paper “Kratom: Summary of State Laws” [pdf] created by the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association if you want to dial it in more.

I quit coffee recently due to increasing bouts of dizziness/foggy brain. I wasn’t looking for something to replace it, I just happened across this randomly. Honestly nothing is worth the bother but this stuff should be not be POS legal.

Meditations for the Anxious Mind: This is why everyone is a DJ now [4min]. (via Jon)

Shawn Grows: How Jackfruit Could Solve World Hunger in 7 Minutes [7min].

The Evolution of ARC Raiders EP3 ‒ Building ARC Machines [22min].

Not Just Bikes: Keep these Stupid American Trucks out of Europe [14min].

A Quick Fond Look Back At Online Dating. I have some stories, but I ran across this short, impactful message exchange from n years ago and thought I’d properly archive it here.

Message from [user]: I laughed at your profile, though it was a bit much. It made me wonder if you are kind of exhausting, or if you just try a little too hard to impress in writing. Maybe we should IM sometime?

Me: Yes. I am exhausting, and I try a little too hard to impress in writing. No, we should not IM.

And that’s: A Quick Fond Look Back At Online Dating.

Still workshoppin’ gravestones. It’s imported.

LOSE WEIGHT FAST ‒ ASK ME HOW!

---

I met a traveller from a discount land
Who said “Two legless trunks
stand upon this proficiently-engraved pedestal
[FX: slips engraver a ten spot, winks in past tense]
on which these words appearinate:
look upon my stuff, ye suckos, and cry lol
sand whispering on the whispering sand something.”
         ‒ Ozzy Osbourne Computers

---

n/a

---

scared and alone,
snickers™ really satisfies!
promotional consideration paid for
(i don’t know what this means)
(chisel that last line in)
(not that one though)
(or that one)
(etc.)

---

Goddamned do I fucking hate Pinterest
so glad i’m DEAD
(because Pinterest)

nick the photo traffic
nick the time people spend gathering the photos
put your ads on other people’s work grabbing other other people’s work
gatekeep it
“build your brand”
shit in your own hand!

maybe ai will destroy pinterest
is ai destroying pinterest
oh no
is pinterest okay
revenue: US$1.86 billion (2024)
greed always scales
PS: shit in your own hand again #thankyou
PPS: put you in the hosts file

---

does anyone remember vruit
vruit?
[lqqks] not that vruit
the fruit/veggie drink vruit
that was the boss move
leaning on your amc concord
neckin’ vruit to sweet 8-track jams
vruit
Vruit.com This domain is for sale: $2,795

---

this is party time
and you’ve got to say it’s better than a war
         ‒ Jazz Butcher

---

Welkom in mijn hoekje! Oort cloud Jansport

---

who?

---

Keep honking! I’m slowly decaying to reach
Earth’s delicious inner chocolate core

I was thinking it would be nice for people to bring a small, tasteful rubber duck to place on the stone but eww plastic. Are we done with plastic yet? Haven’t been watching the news. Better idea, dirt bed instead of grass, bring native flower seeds. Plant them and maybe they’ll get a bit of me for nourishment. “Here you go, flowers.” “Thanks, deady.”

Anyway, for more about the guy what yanked the actual Ozymandias statue, see Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities: The Circus Strongman, His Archrival, And The Pharaoh’s Tomb [57min].

and of course the James Acaster bit on the British Museum [3min].

New British Canon: Exploring Tricky & Maxinquaye: The 90s Bowie? [36min].

Taskmaster: 2,000,000 Subscriber Treat ‒ Taskmaster Set Tour [15min].