I wish people would talk more about how programmers get, essentially, groomed into thinking we're special. We get told we're geniuses, and high achievers, and compared to ninjas or rockstars or whatever. (That's their justification for asking you to sign away your right to overtime, and killing off any unionisation effort and any sort of solidarity with other workers.) But we're not rockstars. We talk as though we were a profession, but we're not. We have no regulatory body. We have a representative body that most programmers have never heard of. If we're high flyers then so are the electricians and the plumbers, but you never hear about that.

In "This be the Verse", when it says " Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself." Get out of what? I'd always assumed it meant life, but maybe it just means your birth family.

The hills are alive [oc]

Can anyone tell me whether the Sunday Times Magazine of October 6, 1985, contained an article called "The death of a son" by Dr John Diamond?

Many of you probably know I have a life-long constructed language called Nimyad. This week I have begun the long-overdue task of gathering all the documents together, from the last thirty years or so, and consolidating them all into the Book of Nimyad. As part of this, I was delighted to discover a conlang font (Fairfax HD, by Kreative) which contained the glyphs from the Amlin script in the private use area. I knew the names, but the glyphs themselves had been lost to me. Thus I have been able to reconstruct some sample text today. #conlang #nimyad

Kudos to whoever wrote this: "Shackleton's expedition failed to accomplish this objective but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance." ("Endurance" was the name of his ship)

Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition - Wikipedia

Fun fact! Everyone remembers that the newton is named after Sir Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity, and that the kilogram is named after Lord Humphrey Kilogram, who climbed trees to drop apples on Newton. But few remember Pierre de Litre, who introduced water to France.

England, 1649: the king has been executed, the monarchy has ended at last, but it's been replaced with a dictatorship. Yet suddenly we're back in the morning of the world. It's a mindset. In the evening of the world, life will always go on as it's gone on before. If it changes, it can only get worse. In the morning of the world, everything seems possible. Into this churn of chaos, worry, and excitement steps a 40-year-old man named Gerard Winstanley. He has a story and a plan.

Outside the surgery are some roses. I am certain that I am the only one pruning them. The fact that there are blooms all year round is therefore down to me, which must make people happy, which is a small thing I'm proud of. (I can do this with my thumbnail. There's a knack to it)

I was reading a collection of graffiti from 1731 called "The Merry-Thought" last night— Nigel Rees before Nigel Rees— and somehow I had not expected this joke to be so old. More about the book:

The Public Domain Review

Loos, Lewdness, and Literature: Tales from the Boghouse

In the early 1730s, a mysterious editor (known only as “Hurlothrumbo”) committed to print a remarkable anthology: transcriptions of the graffit...

I can't now find where I found the scan, but Gutenberg has the text:

Project Gutenberg

The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1

Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.