Less than 12 hours to finish a book and meet my reading challenge goal…

I just learnt that Jackie Cassada, an acquaintance from my old White Wolf/RPG writing days, has passed from COVID.

A lovely person and a great talent, lost. Heartbreaking.

How I’m embracing a life in Tier 4 lockdown.

Beach life in Tier 4: where better to take your permitted exercise?

Evening on the beach.

Storm Bella has passed, but it’s still very blowy down on the beach.

Maybe just regretting a little that I offered to handle the live-streaming of midnight mass tonight.

Lovely weather for a Christmas Eve beach walk.

Oh, elf. How I hate you.

🙀 What real estate agents are finding in empty offices right now

I can vouch for the accuracy of this feature: Six things only people who were forced to do social dancing at a Scottish school will remember

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Oh, do you remember when we used to go to “coffee shops” and other people would make coffee for us?

Kids today wouldn’t believe that.

Love a bit of garden office porn.

Oh, my. A year before the Brexit vote and the Trump election, I linked to reporting about how Russian misinformation was sowing discord in US communities.

If only people had taken that a lot more seriously.

I suppose that I should be working systematically through One Man & His Blog’s archives, upgrading them and correcting problems left over from various platform moves.

But it’s more fun just to chose a random tag — like seashore.

Managed to resurrect all but one of the broken links on this 14 year old post. (The reason why is a subject for another post).

Looking back on the 2006 web - pre-social media as we know it today - I can’t help feeling that many aspects of it were better and healthier than what we have now.

We really need to talk about trust in journalism.

Breakfast of champions.

This eco cabins are just irresistible to me. One day. One day.

These two things can both be true:

1. Herd immunity is a real, valid scientific concept.
2. Attempting to achieve it for COVID19 without vaccinations would be inhumane.

You don’t have to deny 1. to argue for 2.

Listening to my daughter’s Zoom singing lesson is making me very proud and a bit emotional. As someone who can’t carry a tune in a bucket, hearing her blasting out songs with incredible precision and confidence is quite something.

And now COVID19 is [hitting the coffee supply chain]sprudge.com/covid-19-…).

Enjoy that cup of joe while you can…

This is interesting, and ties in with what immunologists I know have been saying for a while: disinfecting surfaces is basically COVID theatre, and wasting money we should be using on countering aerosol spread.

There’s plenty of discussion of journalism business models. There’s some discussion about emergent journalistic forms. There’s rarely any deep connection between these two discussions.

And that’s why so much of the industry is still struggling.

I’m not saying we’re deep in middle age, but there is considerable excitement in this household about the arrival of a new washing machine tomorrow.