Yoooou bird-brained liar!!! (“Bird-brain” is a weird insult, though. Birds are known to be rather smart. Like anyone who played The Button knows, due to the crow facts.)

This also reminds me some rather wholesome news: Scotland recently passed a law, requiring new residences to have some bricks with holes for swift nests. I guess those male swifts will claim they built whole human houses, uh.

My cat, in the meantime:

• checks the glass door to the inner patio
• it’s raining there, eeeew
• goes to the front door
• meows incessantly until I open the door
• notices it’s also raining there (what a coincidence!)
• turns 180° and goes to bed

brain.exe stopped working. I need to reboot rebooze it.

Suddenly carcinisation becomes too spooky!

Thanks! That’s the idea - make it memorable, not necessarily expensive.

A shame she flat out refused to let me cook for her tomorrow. I’ll do it today, though (it’s one of her favs at least).

Mother’s Day this weekend, so my sister and me have been cooking something up for our mum: a breakfast basket with some of her favs. Mostly small portions of a bunch of different jellies, she loves those.

I toyed with the idea of an orchid, since she likes those too, but she already got enough she complains about taking too long to water them.

Mum also decided to treat herself buy buying some salted cod, and told me I should be off the kitchen for the Sunday. Okay~ another thing to look forward*. (I’ll be probably cracking open my Pinot Noir to drink alongside it, bought last time I went to Argentina, a year ago.)

Ah, and I’m glad my nephew found some perfume for my sister! He spent the afternoon checking for some with my mum, so the odds it works well for my sis are fairly high.

*I wish I could help her in the kitchen, but… eh. Four hands cooking with her is complicated.

One of mine does this sometimes. Yup, it’s damn cute. ♥

When one of my cats decides to sleep with me. I know they decide where to sleep based on the weather, but I can’t help but feel a bit more loved when they do it.

That “pawn barrier” at the queens’ side hints badger lost the rook some time ago. I can picture how; they likely advanced it, moved it to column b, at the black pawn there. Eventually the black pawn from a advanced enough to eat it, but badger was distracted (or let it be on purpose).

Then I can carry all my friends

Open the door, get on the floor. Everybody walk the dinosaur!

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Either way it’s cute to think one is teaching the other.

I think the badger kept advancing that pawn because they’re new at the game, and the rabbit let it be because they’re teaching the badger how to play. I’m saying this because the rabbit is in a clearly better position, but it seems they’re holding back, the white pawn in 5a is also vulnerable and they seem to be ignoring it.

Whoever is the next to move. Rabbit has material advantage (a rook vs. a pawn), but if the badger is the next one to move they can capture the rabbit’s queen and promote the pawn. The promoted pawn will be short-lived, but now badger has the material advantage (a queen vs. a rook).

And reminder you don’t need to be good at chess to have fun with it. Those two got the right idea: get comfy with a friend and have fun.

Happy how my seafood paella turned out yesterday. I’m always a bit anxious before trying a new recipe, specially if I need to adapt things: no paella pan (more work for the wok), no bomba rice (long grain was the bomb), no saffron (no suffering, used turmeric), and no bola pepper (smoked garden pepper kept it rolling).

Surprised to see my mum eating so much as she did. She’s now talking about me making the recipe in special occasions (like Easter; not for Good Friday though, that’s sardine barbecue day for her).

My “boss” on the other hand is always getting in the way of my work. She keeps tapping my arm, as if saying “pet me! pet me!”; I need to stop writing, slap her butt a few times (that’s working place harassment, I know!), and then she’ll stop pestering me.

From my childhood? It wasn’t quite a cartoon, but a puppets series called Cocoricó. It was about a city kid living with his parents in the countryside, with talking animals and all of that. If that doesn’t count it’s probably Babar or Marsupilami.

If counting things I watched through my adult years (yup) it’s mostly anime. (I’m watching some right now, by the way. I’m 40. I should be working, it’s early morning, but I have no shame.) Then I guess Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?

Nope. Even if the government (Brazil) controlling my homeland is one of those shitting “think on the children! [because we don’t]” laws.

I don’t know if this is related to my browser reporting my geolocation as NZ, and the default page language being Italian, it’s possible bad design is helping me out.

I don’t bother with Calibre or anything similar; I simply use the directory structure. Easier to show it with examples than explaining it.

You get the idea, right? No additional software needed, any automation tool to move/rename files can be used to help you out, and since metadata isn’t used for the organisation you can take your sweet time checking and fixing it. And sharing it across my network means simply sharing a directory with everything in it.

Key points to use this approach effectively:

1. Keep it simple. If you need to think on where an item should go, you’re probably over-engineering your sorting.
2. Keep it objective. For example, genre is usually a bad sorting criterion, as the same piece of media can belong to 2+ genres. Author, franchise, set (season, album, etc.) are typically better.
3. Keep it flexible. It’s fine and good if each subdivision has its own sorting criteria. Just be consistent with it.
4. Keep it accurate. Names are part of the sorting structure, and should be descriptive.
5. Keep it clean. Don’t add unorganised items to the file structure; if you must, keep a separated “to sort” directory elsewhere.
6. Keep it broad. You’re probably already used to this due to the Johnny decimal system, but broader categories are usually better. Just don’t create artificial divisions to arbitrarily nest divisions, though; remember #2.
7. Keep changing it. Ultimately the goal of a sorting system is to find your stuff; it is neither to be a control freak, nor to follow the advice of some random internet person like me. So if something is not working well for you, change it.

Ah, on automation:

• GPRename and Bulky are useful to… well, bulk rename files.
• EasyTag can do it for audio files, based on the metadata and/or info retrieved from the internet.
• Wikipedia “$series_name list of episodes” for descriptive names for anime or live action seasons. Often you can copypaste the whole text bloc into a text editor, and use some find-and-replace to get rid of everything except episode number + episode name.
• Calc (yup, the spreadsheet program!) is a godsend. Specially with the above, plus a terminal; it means you can create on the spot a bunch of commands like

mv 01.mkv "01 - The Sphere.mkv"
mv 02.mkv "02 - The Inhabited.mkv"
[...]

Let me guess: you were trying to pirate Windows games and software. Right?

If yes, look at it this way. You’re pirating games for one system, and trying to run them in another system. Of course it’ll involve one or two additional loops to make it work. It’s like baking bread on your stove, you know? It can be done, but it isn’t as streamlined as using your oven.

That said it isn’t really difficult. I have a bunch of pirated Windows games installed in my Linux. Steam helps by a lot, because of Proton; add the game to Steam as a “non-Steam game”, then force it to use a specific Steam Play compatibility tool. You can do it without Steam but it streamlines everything.

You’re still better off looking for native software, though, made for Linux. A bunch of good games have Linux versions.

I always wrote the year with four digits, even back in the 90s. So even if I write the date as 2026-01-31 (I do it for files) or 31/01/2026 (everyday), it’s completely unambiguous.

The actual problem is the internet, because Americans use that weird MM/DD/YYYY convention. To avoid confusion for those I often abbreviate the month instead of numbering it; e.g. 01/Jan/2026.