Antony

New sofa. Our old one was a two-seater that was begging for death. Had a good run but nothing lasts forever. This new one has the toddler seal of approval, it appears. I'm in love with the earthy green colour, personally.

One minor parenting perk: my three-year-old has these tiny fingers that make my crusty little rat paws look like normal-sized human hands by comparison.

Thinking about provisioning another VM from @OpenBSDAms@mastodon.bsd.cafe when I've got a bit of spare coin. I'd like to move my personal blog over there.

There's nothing wrong with my Debian box from Hetzner, I just prefer OpenBSD and I like that the lads in Amsterdam pipe a bit of their earnings to the upstream project.

Parenting a toddler while being a person with anarchist leanings and just a smidge of nihilism is kinda funny sometimes. He's sitting there playing with Silly Putty, I'm thinking about possible applications for Serious Putty (C4). Purely theoretical, of course. Personally, I strive for nonviolence. The toddler? Not as much.

Listening to 'Love Like Blood' by Killing Joke. It, like most of the music I listen to on a daily basis, was released in the '80s whereas I was born in the '90s. It's got me wondering if there were people born in like 1961 who spent the '80s and '90s listening almost exclusively to 1950s acts like The Cardinals. Must've happened, but I find it weird to imagine for some reason.

On international women's day, I'm thinking about two women in particular: My wife, whose strength and compassion amazes me. She works in A&E at the same hospital which has failed her in terms of treating her endometriosis. An incredibly painful lifelong condition which receives a fraction of the funding/research that male pattern baldness gets. And someone I won't name. She's passed now, but growing up she was a big presence in my life, one of the kindest and most positive influences on me when I was a kid. I don't remember how old I was when I found out she'd done time for murder, but as soon as I heard the story I was on her side. She'd been beaten by her husband for years, told she'd be killed if she tried to leave. The police refused to get involved in a 'domestic dispute,' ignored the threats and broken bones. So she ensured her freedom through the only route that remained. This was before I was born. Would the police do better now? I don't know. We've still got work to do.

Catching up on the new Mock The Week. Hadn't realised how much I missed it.

What with being born in the '90s and growing up in Cambridgeshire, this guy was basically the boogie man to me.

#cambridgeshire

https://www.elystandard.co.uk/news/25913037.soham-murderer-ian-huntley-declared-blind-attack

Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi

#indieweb - https://ferenbrooke.com/index.html

#horror #horrorlit #weirdfiction #webfiction #shortstory

RE: @katemorley@hachyderm.io

I'll most likely be voting Green in the next GE. Been a loyal Labour voter for my entire adult life (except my first election – 2010, I voted Lib Dem. Whoops!) but we need to pull the Overton window back to a sane position.

RE: https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUK/116147553248382659 I'm just an autistic layman with a contrarian streak, so I could easily be talking out me arse, but I can't help but feel 'theory of mind,' a bit like the concept of 'general intelligence,' is psychological dark matter. It looks like there's something there but we don't know what it is or how it works, or even whether it's one thing or a bunch of phenomena we don't know about interacting in ways that are unclear to us, so chuck it in the neatly labeled box and let's all pretend we have some sort of coherent model of how things work. The big difference is that physics is a lot more easily testable and far more objective, so even if nobody knows what dark matter is, we can be pretty sure it's there and not just the tester's confirmation bias wearing Groucho Marx glasses. I might be being really unfair to researchers here, I don't know, but I keep seeing headlines like, 'It Turns Out Autistic People Can Feel Complex Emotions' and it's giving me acid reflux.

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@82mhz/116138397359698786 Definitely gonna steal that idea for a blog post.

New entry in my #personalblog - Gemini Takes Flight I'm a big fan of Gemini (not the chat bot). I lurk in BBS, I read news on a Guardian mirror, and I check aggregators for new and interesting gemlog entries. Now that I've got both my sites mirrored on there, I thought I'd write a little post about it. #geminiprotocol - gemini://antonyfb.com/blog/gemini-takes-flight.gmi #personalwebsite - https://antonyfb.com/blog/gemini-takes-flight.html #SmallWeb #indieweb

Finally getting around to converting all my blog posts to gemtext so I can have my personal site on the #geminiprotocol – not quite done yet, but I hope to have it deployed by end of next week.

On his bloody birthday. Delicious. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2026/feb/19/police-arrest-former-prince-andrew-mountbatten-windsor-sandringham-latest-updates

New entry in my personal blog! I read another small press horror title, the wonderful Straw World and Other Echoes From The Void by Erik McHatton. Ligottian horror with a hint of Clive Barker and plenty of nods to old-school Weird Tales. A nihilistic edge combined with real heart. Well worth your time. #horror #books #bookstodon #HorrorFiction #horrorcommunity #weirdfiction #horrorlit https://antonyfb.com/blog/reading-straw-world.html

Happy Friday the 13th to those who observe.

Just listened to the most recent episode of @firesidefedi with @haubles@hachyderm.io – really fun conversation. It's got me feeling pretty positive about #mastodon and the #fediverse more broadly.

As a non-American who isn't really in touch with popular culture, the US seems whimsical as fuck right now with all the 'bad bunny' and 'superb owl' stuff. There's clearly some tension about the place, but it sounds very The Wind in the Willows.