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January 2026 Five Questions

Source.

What do you do when someone you don’t know on a social or business network site tries to become a “friend” or otherwise connected to you?

I don’t use social networks. If I receive a connection request on LinkedIn from someone I don’t know, I ignore it.

Do you worry about the data being collected by websites and search engines and what do you do to protect yourself? What do you advise for those who are not as technically skilled yet concerned nonetheless to do?

Somewhat. I use a privacy-focused open-source browser not affiliated with a for-profit company, LibreWolf, in its default strict protection setting My searches all go through my own little helper. I don’t (knowingly) use websites that egregiously track users or otherwise try to violate end-user privacy. I pay for my email hosting. I don’t use Cloudflare to terminate my TLS, and the analytics I use I collect myself.

For those concerned, I would start by recommending using a similar browser — an enormous amount of our digital life is negotiated through browsers, so it makes a difference. Firefox is OK, but you might as well use LibreWolf or Waterfox (nice!) or something. There are probably similarly-oriented Chromium-based browsers but I haven’t looked into it deeply — I use ungoogled-chromium when I need to test in one. (Please don’t use Brave, they consistently engage in shady practices.)

Next is probably email, because it’s typically full of personal stuff! There are many good email hosts that aren’t Google or Microsoft. If you don’t have to pay for your email hosting, there is a reason, and it’s not good. I use Fastmail. Here’s a Lobste.rs “ask” post with more suggestions. Ideally find something in a jurisdiction close to you. Or not, if you live in the United States.

How do you reward yourself for completing a difficult task?

Make a cup of tea, though that often happens at both ends. Lately I’ve been playing little bits of games between larger or more difficult tasks, or reading.

Have you or your family been affected by a natural disaster?

Not particularly. Australian drought culture of the late 90s/early 00s felt a little bit like one. Does a pandemic count?

Have you ever called in a request or a dedication on a radio show or online radio stream?

Nope!

grab bag

garbage

I fucking hate reading LLM-written/assisted drivel, or worse, probably slop, waiting to see if the same bullshit tropes repeat too many times to be coincidence. This demeans all of us. Especially you.

hades Ⅱ statue%!!

Having 100%’d the achievements, I felt like I was pretty done with the game, but one little thing kept bugging me: the last of the three statues, which don’t have an achievement other than the feeling!

I’d managed the 24 Fear Overworld run component while playing through, but the 32 Fear Underworld was pretty darn Hard. After a bit of time off from the game I found myself doing a single 32 Fear Underworld run every few nights, noticing what was making it hard and what I felt like I could deal with, and then tonight after switching weapons and adjusting a crucial component of the Fear, voilà!!

I think the Fear is the bit that most needs “solving” to make this completeable (and to a much, much lesser extent, Arcana), so I’m linking them instead. Arcana and Fear — don’t look (or keep reading) if you wanna figure out what works for you on your own!

ROT-13 discussion of what I found key:

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Build log showing the text “checking the size of void *… 0. Something has gone wrong getting the pointer size”

Image of a girl with the name “void *” pointing at nothing