Darkoshi

I came across this short article yesterday while reading about "Blake" and other names; I thought it was well written:

Why You Should Vote for Kamala Harris

Why is a baby name website endorsing Kamala Harris for President?

Names are at the heart of the issues most crucial in this election. Donald Trump has made a campaign stunt of mispronouncing Kamala’s name. But when he ridicules her name, he’s also disrespecting not just Harris herself but women and cultural diversity in general.

Names are our identity. The names we choose with love and care represent who we are and who we want our children to be.
...

I cast my ballot during our early voting period, Friday a week ago. I stood in line outside in mostly full sun for an hour, but was relieved to get it done.

I still haven't figured out the solution word to the Semantle Junior game (#1000) which I started playing on my phone while waiting in line. I haven't played the game often, but this is the first one to stump me so badly.

Time.com: Your Vote Is Safe (2024/10/24)

Wiktionary: kayfabe
(professional wrestling) The act, situation, or code of portraying staged events, performances, rivalries, etc as authentic or spontaneous.
(figurative) Similar fakery or suspension of disbelief in other contexts.

Wikipedia: kayfabe

I came across the term on this page:
James Holzhauer Delivered the Greatest ‘Jeopardy!’ Burn of All Time, which reposted one of James' tweets:
Thanks to kenjennings and bradrutter for a hell of a match. Ken and Brad are great jeopardy players but even better people, and have been incredibly good sports about my kayfabe feuding and trash talk.

That confirms suspicions I've had after hearing those type of contestant interactions a few times on Jeopardy, that (while amusing) they were likely to have been scripted.

If you have the ublock plugin:
https://github.com/aelipsi/WordleLowerCase/blob/main/WordleLowerCase.txt

Otherwise, if your browser lets you set a custom stylesheet*, the following works for making the letters in the top game section lowercase:

div[class^="Tile-module_tile__"]
{
	text-transform: lowercase !important;
}

This works for making the letters in the bottom keyboard lowercase:

button[class^="Key-module_key__"]
{
	text-transform: lowercase !important;
}

*If using Firefox, you can create a "userContent.css" file with the above content.
Then navigate to your Firefox profile folder. If it doesn't already has a "chrome" subfolder, create that folder.
Place the userContent.css file in the "chrome" folder.
Then open the about:config page and bring up the "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" setting. If it is false, change it to true.
Close and re-open the browser.

I started playing Wordle on Jan. 8, although I forgot and missed several days since then.

So far I've played 16 games and lost once.

The number of guesses it took me each game so far were:
6, 6, 4, 4, 4, 5, (lost), 3, 5, 4, 3, 4, 4, 2, 2, 2.

My first few games, I played in hard mode ("Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses") without realizing I was doing so.

Then I began to choose words with completely different letters for the first few guesses to more quickly reveal what letters the final word had.

When that began to feel easy, I went back to doing it the "harder" way. 3 days ago I switched it to "hard mode" in the Settings panel, as I was playing it that way anyway.

Those last 3 days' games seem odd to me. I guessed the word correctly on my 2nd try, three times in a row now. The first time I thought I was lucky. The 2nd time I thought I was very lucky. But now the 3rd time, it feels weird and suspicious. How can I be that lucky?

Based on the 2 or 3 letters I guessed right in my first guesses, several words could have fit. Yet I chose the right one each time, apparently.

My 2 year old grand-niece reminds me of baby Groot sometimes. They must have modeled Groot on a toddler. Unlike baby Groot, she's going through a learning-language phase where she makes a lot of conversation sounds, all the right kinds of intonations like someone having a long discussion on the phone, without saying actual words most of the time.

She has a small toy shopping cart with assorted (empty) toy food boxes in it, as well as a few plastic fruits. Also a wind-up fish toy that twirls its flippers.

She's come to me with the shopping cart 2 evenings in a row. I was trying to finish up work, but oh well. It's not nice to ignore a two-year-old. The first time she took each item out of the cart and put it on the table. Then put them back into the cart. Then out on the table again. Etc. Back then I was still trying to avoid touching her or her toys to prevent spreading germs. So I only talked with her, discussing the toy grocery items. Later she tried winding up the fish toy but was having trouble. I gave up and helped her wind it up. Eventually she took the items out of the cart again, this time putting them on the desk right next to me. I unflattened some of the boxes. We stacked a few of them. I counted them out loud. I juggled two fruits, which she then tried to emulate. Etc etc.

Only today with her not here, did it finally occur to me that maybe she expected me to play the cashier, to scan the items and put them back into the shopping cart. I slightly recall someone else saying "beep", simulating a check-out scanner... maybe they were playing that with her before.

That feeling when you start humming and singing a song (without actual lyrics), and get really into it, and then realize you don't know what song it is. It must be on one of my CDs, but which one? I tried singing it to Google, but Google said it couldn't find any close match.

After thinking about it for a bit longer, I had an idea of which artist it is from, and then which song. It's from one of my cassettes. But now I've discovered I somehow missed copying the songs from this particular cassette to my computer; it's not even in the folder where I have the remaining raw files which I haven't finished processing. Maybe I'd been planning to buy the MP3 album instead. But this means I must not have listened to this song in years! Yet it jumped into my head just like that.

This is it:
Dead Can Dance - Saltarello:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwRhQpJFvkU


I've been playing the game "Journey", which came out in 2012 for PlayStation. I saw some previews of it back then, and liked what I saw, but haven't owned a game console since the Atari I had as a kid. Getting one for just one game wouldn't have been worthwhile. But now a version of the game has been released for Windows PC, and at the moment is on sale for $5 instead of $15. So I got it.

Until reading a couple of articles on the game, I didn't realize that the occasional other characters in the game are other actual people playing it. I thought they were computer-generated.

One article I read said it takes 2-3 hours to finish the game. That disappointed me a bit as I didn't want it to be over that quickly. But considering that I played it last night for about 2 hours, I played some more this evening, thinking maybe I'd finish it. At least another hour and a half. I got through another level or two, but still have no idea how much more there is. Maybe I'm slower than average as I like exploring, and I'm not very experienced with gameplay in general.

Here's another version of that song, one I hadn't heard before:
Corvus Corax - Saltarello
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIXV2NhLb_0

I seem to be in a good mood. I wonder if it is because of that game. Or simply related the fact that I've taken the time to play a game. Yet I also feel good that I got several other things done this weekend. It's been very rainy & stormy the last 3 days, so doing yardwork was not even a consideration.

Maybe it's because of the sand dunes and ruins. That kind of imagery speaks to me.
Desert Day Dreaming - this is an old poem of mine (or very short story or whatever one might call it) with that kind of sandy dune desert context.

Words with Friends. Qiao exclaimed: "My highest score is lower than your average score!"




Usually only Serena sleeps on this bed. This time, Zorro got to it first.




Serena's thyroid levels were low, so the vet put her on medication for that. She also had a yeast infection in her ears which required treatment for a week.

Ok, the game goes much faster and easier the 2nd time through. But I still can't figure out how to keep the graveyard ghost from repeatedly killing me, other than random luck. Have any of you figured that out?

update: Well, this page ( says... )

Based on playing the "Words with Friends" game/app, you'd think "qi" and "qat" were some of the most common words in the English language. What other words contain the letter Q but not U?

If you've ever been a geography buff*, you'll probably enjoy this game: GeoGuessr.

* when I was as a kid, I read all the National Geographics I could find, and my idea of fun was to memorize the names and locations of all the Shetland, Orkney, and Hebrides islands.


via andrewducker