Microposts
Minute Cryptic - 10 February, 2026 “For example, an elephant over 50 reproduced three times” (10) ⚪️🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 1 hints – 4 under the community par (95,093 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
Minute cryptic’s a scunner today. But good maths.
I’m listening to the current Accidental Tech Podcast to see what they actually say about ’AI’ after much recent Mastodonage about it and them.
Lunch in Richmond today. Quick look at the Ted Lasso location by the Green, and the shop. Didn’t bother taking photos, but nice to see it.
Why are certain tracks on certain albums unplayable for me in both Apple Music and (just as a test) Spotify? For example, ‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’, the opening track on The Fall’s Perverted by Language? Greyed out, no length shown, and it just won’t play.
📚 Currently reading: How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin
The sequel to one I read last year. I got that for my birthday, this for Christmas.
I’m enjoying it, though so far I’ve got to say it’s not quite as good as the first.
And the third one is coming out this spring.
Yesterday there were people marching through London, ostensibly in support of Palestine, flying the Flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and pictures of Khamenei. They might as well have had swastikas and pictures of Hitler. I mean what the actual fuck is going on in these people’s heads?
Watched early in the new year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 🎥
This is fine, a perfectly acceptable addition to the Spider-Man films. Though I have to say, a few weeks later, I remember little of it. And I blame that partly on its incompleteness: the fact it’s part one of two. Frustrating.
You know what’s a great album? The Absolute Game by The Skids. Who I’m going to see tonight.
Watched just before Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner 🎥
James Stewart, a Christmas movie, and not that one? Not specifically a Christmas movie, but part of it happens then, so why not?
Two shop workers hate each other, but fall in love with their mysterious pen pals. Guess what?
Not bad.
Watched: Hamnet 🎥
This is a fabulous film. It’s about motherhood and magic, and grief and how a genius can turn it toward one of the world’s great works of literature. And also about the special bond between twins.
But mostly it’s about grief. It is heartbreaking, yet also deeply life-affirming.
Minute Cryptic - 27 January, 2026 “Wolf pack roved with uncertainty, initially turning back” (6) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 2 under the community par (55,613 solvers so far). www.minutecryptic.com
In answer to my earlier question: like this! I’m not sure it all quite hangs together, though. I’ll have to watch Angas’s video.
Every word in today’s Minute Cryptic could be an indicator. Every. Single. Word. How am I meant to solve that?
Watched: Now You See Me 🎥
I believe the third of these recently came out, but we hadn’t seen any of them at the start of the month and year when we watched this. A group of stage magicians — so good they seem that they might have real powers — do heists. Or do they?
A decent romp.
Watched: Office Space 🎥
Some of my work colleagues recommended this to me. I was vaguely aware of its existence before that, since it’s been around since 1999.
It’s a comedy about office workers — amusingly enough, they’re specifically software developers working to prevent the year-2000 two-digit date problem, or ‘Y2K Bug’, as it was usually called. Amusing, because I did some of that myself. Or at least tested the system I worked on at the time to make sure it didn’t have the problem (it didn’t).
As to the amusement value of the film itself: it was fine. Not that great, but not a total waste of time. Probably two and a half stars, if M.b had stars like Letterboxd.
Watched: Mrs. Dalloway 🎥
I still haven’t caught up with posting about the movies we watched over Christmas & New Year, but never mind. Watched this yesterday. I read the book about seven years ago, and would have thought it close to impossible to film. Far from it. This actually worked pretty well. It’s not as rich as the book, of course, but it hits many of the points the book makes. The shellshocked veteran of the First World War, Septimus, I though was particularly well played, by Rupert Graves. Who, I learn, played LeStrade in Sherlock.
In the unlikely event that anyone reading this uses the London bus routes 19 or 38, you have until today to comment on TFL’s terrible proposals to reduce the services.
I was wondering why my iPhone was refusing to download my full Obsidian vault.
Had a look at its storage:
Whoops! I’m gonna need a bigger phone.
Existential question: in Springsteen’s ‘Open All Night’, if it ’takes [him] two hours to get back to where [his] baby lives’, why does he later call her on the phone to say he’s ‘got three more hours but [he’s] covering ground’? Where has he been in the extra hours???
📚 Emily Tesh wrote the best SF book of the last couple of years (not just my opinion, it won the Hugo). Now The Incandescent is an incredible fantasy book, a magic-school story for adults.
She’s so good she almost scares me. Yet she just seemed to appear out of nowhere.