Tootfinder

Wow, my first ever power outage in this house. That atmospheric river must be rivering hard.

Wow, my first ever power outage in this house. That atmospheric river must be rivering hard.

Living a charmed life. I just installed a new video card and it took like 5 minutes, worked first try. (My old 1080 Ti with 8GB served me well. Just got a new 5060 with 16GB. For all my AI projects, of course.)

Nielsen: Tony Dokoupil's CBS Evening News debut week averaged 4.17M total viewers, a 23% drop from ~5.4M in the year-earlier period; 25-54 viewership fell 23% (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/cbs-evening-news-tv-ratings-ton…

CBS Evening News' Viewership Slips in First Week Under Tony Dokoupil
CBS Evening News' Viewership Slips in First Week Under Tony Dokoupil

Just got a new monitor, an ASUS ProArt PA32QCV. First time I've had a high density display for my Windows desktop. It's nice!
(Eloi friends, you are welcome to mock me on this one: it took Windows forever to catch up on Retina and it's still behind.)

This may be an important step in better understanding delusions.
Ritunnano R, Littlemore J, Nelson B, Humpston CS, Broome MR (2026): Delusion as embodied emotion: a qualitatively driven, multimethod study of first-episode psychosis in the UK. The Lancet Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(25)00341-4

Been starting a habit of writing down story/game ideas as I have them even though most of them will never seriously get started, let alone finished. It's been fun since writing things down gives me a chance to think them through a bit more than just pondering them in my head. Anyways, here's a #GameDesign idea:
"Grand" - is a "reverse metroidvania" in which as a grandparent, you slowly lose movement options as the story progresses, requiring more and more convoluted routes through the map to reach the same areas. You do still explore "new" areas in memory mode (and unlock movement options like a bike in your memories) before traversing the areas again in the diegetic present. The story follows your quest to protect a grandchild from the machinations of a Kafkaesque state, first trying to track them down within the system and then trying to get them released. Each "boss" is "fought" through an abstracted conversation system where memories, keepsakes, and various kinds of emotional/logical appeals wear down your opponent's nihilism and/or fear until they're willing to help you. Normal "enemies" are just people on the street who might bump into you and drain some of your stamina as you pass by if you don't issue a properly-timed "excuse me" or the like.

@… I'm using groups.io for the first time. (I know! Sorry, I usually avoid mailing lists.) It's very good, thank you for running this valuable service.
I found the locked topics feature very interesting. It never occurred to me to have that in a mailing list, since the underlying tech doesn't allow it. Does it work well in practice? Do people use it? The group I'm on uses it extensively.

This week in small town paper headlines:
Vegan Circus serves up cruelty-free carnival delights
Joey Chang to bring unique cello-beatbox performance to Nevada City
911 caller reports truck with flames coming from undercarriage
Hospital announces their first baby of 2026 (Jan 5)

One of my favorite emojis is the "hugs" emoji 🫂. Or an "okay_blob" custom reacji that my favorite Slack uses. I use it all the time to indicate "I hear you and I know what you're saying is emotional. I support you".
Another very progressive Slack I'm on has a "hugs OK?" emoji you are supposed to use first. Only if the other person responds with the "hugs OK!" emoji are you then allowed to respond with an actual "hug" emoji.
I think I'm a pro-explicit-consent person. But it strikes me that this careful three-way handshake, all for 16x16 pixels in a virtual environment, may be a little much.