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Saturday I stayed home with a cold
Feb. 28th, 2026 11:00 pmNo walk or visit with M., because this isn’t allergies. In fact, my normal allergy symptoms are almost completely in abeyance, which usually means my immune system has found something else to occupy itself with. So the productive cough is for sure not allergies. No party for me tonight! Alas. R. went to a Parker’s Maple Barn (yay!) and out to a show in the evening.
I spent a chunk of the day on my But Why Did The Great War Start Then project, a subcomponent of my Everything is the Fault of the three Piuses Theory(the theory USED to be the two Piuses, but it has expanded, and by later in the day, as I learned more about what happened in the lead up to and actual unification of Italy, I’m really going to add more Piuses to the mix. In fact, at this point, they are all sus, and I probably should make an effort to better understand how these guys name themselves when taking the throne, because they are for sure telling on themselves). That was fun and depressing, and I now have some extremely specific ire directed at Raymond Poincare for making bad situations worse (probably while having secret interactions with at least one Pius) and Laval. Because Fuck Laval. I’m not actively hunting for people who were socialists in their youth and fascists in late middle age because that is 100% a Thing. I am going to pat myself on the back a bit for noticing early in the Laval story that he was one of Those People, by which I mean, “I hate politics” people who nevertheless are engaged in the more dishonest end of same. I’d like to say that he probably thought he was being sincere, at least part of the time, but I don’t think he really was. I think he was just trying to be on the winning team before they won, and he didn’t guess right very often and lacking morals, over the course of his life it looked terrible. Smart is not everything.
I also rented Sarah Millican’s Bobby Dazzler on Amazon Prime Video for $2.99 and watched it in its entirety with A., after reading some random Xkcd comics. We resorted to the explain xkcd site in an effort to understand the red spider thing, but I can’t say we ever got that one. Sarah Millican is very funny and very, very British. She is apparently now Mancunian, but grew up near Newcastle (so that’s the accent), but it’s funny to be listening to someone who has lived in Manchester for a bit, when I recently Linzi Day’s Gretna Green, whose protagonist lived in Manchester for a long time between living in Gretna Greene while young and during the course of the book. I sometimes wonder how this happens to me. Is it weird coincidences that I notice and that seem like they mean something but are totally random, or are there subtle similarities that algorithms lead me to. I was reading a ton of kindle unlimited fantasy novels that were written by Australians, and did not initially notice that, but after I did, it made a lot of the tropes within the books make more sense. And the whole trend started not long after reading Geraldine Brooks’ Foreign Correspondence.
In any event, I’d seen some Sarah Millican on TikTok, and enjoyed it, and since the David Nihill special worked out (saw bits on TikTok, liked it, so watched it on Amazon Prime Video, free in that case), I thought I’d try Millican (even tho the Iliza special didn’t do much for me). And indeed, we laughed a lot. I’ll see what else I can find in the way of comedy specials that I might like, based on what I’ve already seen on TikTok. It really does seem like social media might become the discovery mechanism we all wanted a decade ago.
Oh, and super weird to wake up to the Dowhatever they call it now doing something very noticeable and very, very different from the online war with Anthropic yesterday.
I spent a chunk of the day on my But Why Did The Great War Start Then project, a subcomponent of my Everything is the Fault of the three Piuses Theory(the theory USED to be the two Piuses, but it has expanded, and by later in the day, as I learned more about what happened in the lead up to and actual unification of Italy, I’m really going to add more Piuses to the mix. In fact, at this point, they are all sus, and I probably should make an effort to better understand how these guys name themselves when taking the throne, because they are for sure telling on themselves). That was fun and depressing, and I now have some extremely specific ire directed at Raymond Poincare for making bad situations worse (probably while having secret interactions with at least one Pius) and Laval. Because Fuck Laval. I’m not actively hunting for people who were socialists in their youth and fascists in late middle age because that is 100% a Thing. I am going to pat myself on the back a bit for noticing early in the Laval story that he was one of Those People, by which I mean, “I hate politics” people who nevertheless are engaged in the more dishonest end of same. I’d like to say that he probably thought he was being sincere, at least part of the time, but I don’t think he really was. I think he was just trying to be on the winning team before they won, and he didn’t guess right very often and lacking morals, over the course of his life it looked terrible. Smart is not everything.
I also rented Sarah Millican’s Bobby Dazzler on Amazon Prime Video for $2.99 and watched it in its entirety with A., after reading some random Xkcd comics. We resorted to the explain xkcd site in an effort to understand the red spider thing, but I can’t say we ever got that one. Sarah Millican is very funny and very, very British. She is apparently now Mancunian, but grew up near Newcastle (so that’s the accent), but it’s funny to be listening to someone who has lived in Manchester for a bit, when I recently Linzi Day’s Gretna Green, whose protagonist lived in Manchester for a long time between living in Gretna Greene while young and during the course of the book. I sometimes wonder how this happens to me. Is it weird coincidences that I notice and that seem like they mean something but are totally random, or are there subtle similarities that algorithms lead me to. I was reading a ton of kindle unlimited fantasy novels that were written by Australians, and did not initially notice that, but after I did, it made a lot of the tropes within the books make more sense. And the whole trend started not long after reading Geraldine Brooks’ Foreign Correspondence.
In any event, I’d seen some Sarah Millican on TikTok, and enjoyed it, and since the David Nihill special worked out (saw bits on TikTok, liked it, so watched it on Amazon Prime Video, free in that case), I thought I’d try Millican (even tho the Iliza special didn’t do much for me). And indeed, we laughed a lot. I’ll see what else I can find in the way of comedy specials that I might like, based on what I’ve already seen on TikTok. It really does seem like social media might become the discovery mechanism we all wanted a decade ago.
Oh, and super weird to wake up to the Dowhatever they call it now doing something very noticeable and very, very different from the online war with Anthropic yesterday.