I’m not saying I feel like that today, but some days.
General
Magic cats
I had to watch this several times to realize it’s just two cats, one of them being very sneaky, and not some weird AI thing.
Atmospheric river + actual river = River++
This past weekend, October 19 and 20th, an atmospheric river passed through the area, bringing a whole lotta rain and the attendant issues that accompany a whole lotta rain, like flooding and such.
Over both days I went through Lower Hume Park and the Central Valley Greenway that follows the trail next to the Brunette River, getting shots of local flooding and water, water everywhere.
I’ve collected the most interesting shots below.
For the record, I prefer my rain light.
There’s something in the air
Specifically, an atmospheric river. It seems like just a few short years ago I’d never heard the term, now it pops up every fall. I live in a region known as temperate rainforest. Rain is right in the description, so rain is not unexpected.
But rivers of rain? In the sky? That come down to be with the land I walk upon?
I do not like this.
But until U.S. Democrats can perfect their weather machines (topical joke), there’s not much I can do but put on my big boy booties, jacket and suck it up. Well, not literally suck it up. That would be a lot of water. And it would probably taste funny, too.
Here are cats in the rain:
Circle beats the squircle: A Birchtree dream
Last night I had a dream featuring Matt Birchler. I have never met Matt. He is a celebrity of sorts in the Apple tech scene, who has a YouTube channel (A Better Computer), a blog (Birchtree), a podcast (Comfort Zone) and probably half a dozen other projects. He writes articles for various tech sites. He also has an unrelated full-time job in UI/UX.
He is a busy guy.
I came across him via his blog and follow him on Mastodon, where much of the former Mac community from Twitter has migrated to.
One of his passions is UX and design (which works out well for him, because it’s also his job). In the dream, we are hanging out in a living room (?) somewhere and discussing design, as one does. Specifically, we are nodding in agreement over how circles provide more space for information over squircles (the rounded-off square icons you see everywhere on Apple devices these days). This is, of course, nonsense. Literally the opposite is true, but in the dream we were right, and the world was wrong.
Then I suggested we play something on “Game Center” on an Apple TV nearby and the dream ended, or at least my recollection of it did.
I’m not a big squircle fan, so I think the dream was just trying to accommodate that. Thanks, subconscious!
That whole WordPress drama, again
An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:
- I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
- I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
- To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
- I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
- When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.
I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.
While I’m wishing for ponies
I have a bike and enjoy riding it. I don’t ride it much because I live in a vast urban area that requires me to ride the bike (I have no vehicle to load it into/onto) along busy streets not designed for bikes before I can get to the nicer areas with bike lanes, dedicated bike paths and further out, trails and other places where riding a bike is actually calming and relaxing.
I wish there was some master plan for the Lower Mainland (Metro Vancouver) to add proper, separated bike lanes on basically every major route. Instead, we get weird piecemeal projects like New Westminster’s upgrading of Columbia Street (two blocks adjacent to the Royal Columbian Hospital, which is why it’s happening) and Sherbrooke Street (same reason). It’s nice and so far it looks great (work is expected to be complete in February 2025), but it’s just a few blocks, like a tease of what could be before you’re just dumped back onto the regular street with nothing but a white line separating you and your bike from every vehicle.
But without some central plan that de-prioritizes cars and prioritizes bikes, this is probably the best we’re going to get.
Maybe we should learn French and move to Paris, where they seem to have figured this out.
What does this mean?
Also, I am really leaning into “posting whatever pops into my head (or social media feed)” lately. I’ll have more substantive posts, too. I’m pretty sure, anyway.
I present cat on shark:
I would give credit, but none was attached. I like the ambiguity of “Is the cat attacking the shark or is it just using the shark as a couch?”
I love this duck
I was searching for a random duck GIF (I mean, who doesn’t do this?) and this one delights me to no end.
I successfully spammed my way to 60 posts in September
That means you get a cat.
More and possibly better content soon™.
I’m probably cursing the seasons by posting this
But I find this pixel art animation of snow gently falling on a city scene at night both mesmerizing and peaceful.
An autumn cat
It turns out there are probably millions of these images, some very earnest, some very silly, some kind of straddling the line, like this one.
Here’s to the best part of autumn. And cats.