(Bis) Was it a steam train?

[Rosie] Nope, just an emu. Though there was a preserved steam train in Hanover.

Emus can't even fly, let alone pull trains.

When I was in middle school, I had a student teacher who had gone to Australia. She said that emus weren't smart at all and would run straight into fences, not even TRYING to miss them.

Electric Multiple Units, like their Diesel Multiple Units counterparts, are trains with no locomotive and localised (one or more motorised carriages pull one or more non-motorised carriages) or distributed (all carriages have motors), all controlled from a driving position at either end of the train.

I did my initial trainspotting on the Oxted line. Bloody Fairburn 2-6-4T's but their exhaust could blow your ears off.

[Rosie] I think we all need some proof of this aural sectioning that you experienced...

*waves from war-torn Paris*

(Bis) The interior of Riddlesdown Tunnel is littered with severed, now largely decomposed, auditory appendages. They are, or were, mine.

[nights] on holiday in the City of Light burning cars?

Yesterday was apparently the warmest day globally since records began. Here in B it was colder than normal, but amazingly windy.

(Bis) Ackshully it was the month of June that was the warmest month in a rather precisely defined area known as Central England. It was also the warmest, unsurprisingly, that I have personally recorded here at Plas Huws (= Hughes Hall) over the 40 years I have been an amateur weather nut and before that a professional one. Gotta be precise.

I wish I could be back in my home, but it's not ready yet. It's not even ready for living in one room. My contractor is trying to get it so I have a room and a bathroom and there's air conditioning and the outside is all okay. My vinyl siding was shipped, but delayed the last I heard.

[KS] oh my... we should bake a cake for the third(?) anniversary of the demise of your house. What's taking so long?

[Bis] Just passing through, back home now in lovely Strasbourg where no-one cares enough to set fire to anything...

Eek, they don't!

Another year, another OS upgrade, things sort of work, but also sort of don't... I seem to have broken the Whoops! feature.

It probably hasn't worked for ages, knowing me

There's nothing like working on a live site... staging, we've heard of it. Seems to work now, of a fashion

I think I've used it quite recently. Within the last couple of weeks, surely?

I am an Australian. Last week. Saturday, in fact.

What'd you do, Stevie? What'd you do?

It worked on some games, not others. Somehow, an index had got out-of-synch with the actual gameplay, which caused the de-whoopsing to fail. This is a brittle misfeature of the server code, motivated by a desire to keep the number of SQL queries to a minimum, which is probably a somewhat redundant optimisation given the tiny amount of data involved.

Glad to hear that the feature is used by people, though, as going backwards in time is not so straightforward.

Last day of working before two weeks off. It'll be a staycation mostly (we've both had a lot going on this year and we need some space to just be), but we might nip to France for a night to eat the food and stock up in a French hypermarche. On my shopping list: French washing-up liquid, which comes in lots of flavours that are way less boring than the Dutch ones, and a dozen of those glass jars of pates and rilletes that last forever. I'm hungry now.

Where are you going?

[Bis] Wherever it isn't going to be raining in Nord Pas de Calais or Normandy - a comfortable few hours' drive from home in the Netherlands. We're watching the weather radar like a hawk now...

I suggest you bring your ironing with you. Many hotels have a steam iron in the room.

[Pen] say hello to the hydrangeas from me. And it's been non-stop rain in Belgium. The choice seems to be drowning in the North and burning in the South.

I found an old forum game and it was simply, "Things You Don't Want to See in Your Living Room." But, the point was to be brief, but outlandish. I had put, "A really hairy gorilla shaving his armpits while he sings Handel's Hallelujah chorus."

[KS] Sounds... interesting! Give it a go - is there a free slot or do we need to make one?

Well, we could put it on Orange if we want guaranteed fast turnover.

[Bis] August 20 was third anniversary of my house being destroyed. Insurance quit paying everything and had to hire a lawyer and only FINALLY got settlement back in March! I used up ALL of my funds as the lawyer didn't provide any advances for living expenses, so things are always tight for me right now, though trying to get online theatre classes started once I get all of my lessons made.

[pen] Last I saw, a new slot needed to be made.

[Kagome] much sympathy.

Gotta put this in even though I wrote it in 2010. It's the 65th anniversary of the best thunderstorm I have ever seen, even allowing for distance lending enchantment and teenage impressability. Spoilt for life at the age of 15.

Important service announcement: You may or may not be aware that the UK government has recently passed the Online Safety Bill. This applies to all sites with 'user-generated content', with only a handful of exemptions. (Witless below-the-line comments and fake product reviews will still be allowed.) So this site will be in scope.

OFCOM guidance is apparently forthcoming, but from reading around the Bill, my understanding is that I will be required to ensure all users are of age and further to act proactively to prevent any harmful content appearing on the pages. The consequences of not doing so could result in bankruptcy-inducing fines and/or imprisonment.

Now, obviously, this is ridiculous. This site has been running for just over twenty years (slightly miffed to have missed the anniversary in January, but there we go) in the spirit in which it is intended (notwithstanding the ever-present risk of the Morden spiral and the harm that can come from falling into one of those). So thank you all for being responsible and permitting the existence of a site that is clean, fun and requires zero moderation.

However, unfortunately, unless the guidance this is forthcoming allows the legal obligations to be performed in a light-touch and quasi-autonomous way, I don't see any alternative to pulling down the shutters and saying goodbye to this place. It's not even obvious to me that an archive of the pages can be maintained without verifying the age of anyone wanting to look at it. So archivists might want to get archiving.

In the most sweeping interpretation of this bill, the UK government will have the choice of either fully providing and even externally imposing the verification system -- a stupefying technical undertaking of something like wartime scale -- or forcing nearly every web forum, wiki, etc., that's hosted in the UK out of business or at least offshore and under non-UK proprietorship. I do not see this going well.

Yeah, maybe I'm being melodramatic. I guess we'll have to see how it shakes out with OFCOM. In the meantime, I've make a few twerks which means that the shutters will fall on any finished game that goes uncommented on for three days. If things pan out as badly as we expect, I'll disable new game creation, and we'll just play everything out...

Three days is a bit optimistic, no?

It's slightly ironic that Orange MC, which is being spammed to death, is the one site which won't be subject to these new rules as it seems to be hosted abroad.

[Superman] Yes and no. When a game finishes (which hasn't happened for a while), it hangs around on the front page for three days, then you have to delve into the bran bucket of eternity to find it again. Until now, it's been possible to resuscitate games from there, but now it won't be. I don't recall that last time that happened for a reason other than spamming activity, so I don't think anyone will be too put out.

MCiOS is located in outer space, so will also duck the legislation. It's possible that OFCOM will set a threshold of as to what constitutes a 'significant' number of users, which I am sure we'll fall well below, so maybe we'll not be affected after all. On the other hand, the fact that each and every word we post is visible to the entire universe, maybe we will.

Well, given that every participant passes an exam (aka Cymraeg Epistolariat) and can create and close forums at will, one can only conclude that everyone is an approved moderator and thus exempt. As for exposing the tender masses to the awful, pornographic reality of wordplay and transit stations, well; I've been at some pains to discourage spidering. I don't see how someone with the brains of a modern UK cabinet minister is even going to find the place.

"In the meantime, I've make a few twerks..."

No wonder they want to shut you down.

Could be a pun game in this... "Britain isn't twerking" or somesuch... "Twerking 9 to 5"

Go to twerk on an egg (the title of almost least four TikTok videos)

Pay's good but t'werk's 'ard.

Hi ho, hi ho...Here's an approximation of what the associated dance number in Disney's live-action remake of Snow White will look like.

I'm so sad and crying at times. I had to make that terrible choice of saying goodbye to one of my dogs, Niblet, on November 27. I talked to him and asked him if he wanted to go to heaven or stay o earth. I always had a way of communicating with him by showing him the fingers and he could nose or lick the choice.

His kidney enzymes were so high that the computer coulndn't read them. He could no longer walk correctly. I tried to feed him a tiny piece of ham and he wasn't able to eat it even though he tried. His tongue was so dry because he was dehydrated.

He was my Mama's dog first. When she was really bad in a nursing home, all she would write was "take care of Niblet." I loved and still love that little baby so much. I truly believe he is in heaven, but it is difficult.

Thankfully, my little service dog, Radar, is just fine and is with me.

Also,

I was wondering if y'all could help me brainstorm. I'm trying to figure out ways to promote my online theatre classes. As a friend of mine said, it just takes the one right person to get the ball rolling. I've told a few local connections about the classes and that they'll let people know if they know of anybody.

Also, perhaps on how to get more followers on TikTok. I'm VERY SLOWLY gaining followers. If I get to over 1,000 followers, then I can be a guest on the LateTok show (I'm pretty sure the reason for that is simply because that's what you need to go live on TikTok) and obviously, I could also go live on TikTok to answer questions about theatre - like I see vocal coaches go live to answer questions about the voice and singing. So, if you have ideas, please let me know!

And if you are interested, you can find more info at https://theatregeekery.neocities.org

[KagomeS] I'm sorry about your dog - they have such short lives compared to the amount of life they bring to ours. We just have to make sure that those short lives are the best.
And this theatre thing... maybe - maybe - the way to bring TikTokkers to your theatre skills is ... to make TikTok content that tells people how to put theatre skills into their TikToks, or identify the theatrical techniques that TikTokkers are already using? I'm thinking of something in parallel with the linguists and etymologists who keep appearing on my Instagram reels. They make post after post by digging deep into language and introduce their mini-lectures with a trending TT reel or something newsworthy or a factoid, give a burst of proper intelleckshual linformation in very ordinary and usuable context, and then encouage viewers at the end to 'Follow along if you feel like it. I'm thinking in particular of https://www.threads.net/@abraham.piper with 600,000 followers.

Ooh, I think Pen's is a great idea. "How to stage a play in 180 seconds"

From my own experience slowly building a followership on Google plus (I worked up from a couple of dozen up to the high hundreds), consistent posting is overwhelmingly the most important thing. Doesn't matter what the frequency is, but you gotta stick to it. I wasn't really trying, but I did make a point of ensuring some activity 'every few days'. If you were a regular weekly visitor you would have seen something new every week. Vital to pace yourself and allow a good amount of slack. Also mentioning and cross-recommending other good posters is a great idea; even if they don't reciprocate (and they probably will), becoming a good 'hub' is highly valuable.

Once things start getting serious, which I hope they will, then it becomes worth setting up automatically scheduled posts and building up a buffer. I never got to that point and as it was only vanity posting I probably wouldn't have worried about it. Even so, if I'd ended up with a really big followership I might have decided they deserved more care and set things up properly.

[Simons] I'm not really sure how to use Google Plus. I have a Google One account. I bought that back when I thought I was going to be home a few months back and had a bit of money.

[pen] I'll have to look for videos that could go with my stuff. That's a good idea.

[KagomeShuko] Google plus is long dead. I strongly recommend doing everything you can to limit your exposure to Google products. They're notorious for killing them off. YouTube and Gmail look all right for now, but I wouldn't count on even them long term. See https://killedbygoogle.com/ for what I mean.

A merry foodmas to you all, hope it's a restful one and that you're all safe, warm and have some treats.

Happy Christmas!

Merry, and Happy, everyone
And thanks as always to the Rabs, the Dans, the Dunxen, and all the other past hosters of international silliness.

HNY all. First snow of the year here in NL - a decent dusting of big wet snowflakes, enough to white everything out and make a mess with slushy tracks holding ice cold water along all the paths. (And a flash of lightning and a big clap of thunder this morning at 7am too).

[penelope] HNY2U2! I got snow here too, but it only just reached the point where you could no longer keep count of individual flakes. Pathetic.
But it's freezing out there now. And the garden is lightly scattered with older unmelted ice chunks cracked out of the bird bath. I am worried about the sparrows. I still have my regular starling visitors but haven't seen any of the sparrows since before Christmas. They had to go a few days without mealworms because I was away; I hope they didn't all starve when their worm supply was interrupted. They did have fallback fatballs but they're barely touched.

We had 11 cm of snow here in Belgium (between 4 and 5 inches). It's still around as the temperature hasn't got above freezing. We're having a real winter for once.
Looking for animal tracks in snow-time is fun - last night we got some strange ones that I'd almost swear are rabbits, and our red squirrel is still there. We're in a typical suburban area with gardens.

Woke up to a crashed mail server this morning. Closer inspection revealed that it had found the disk full... which was due to this site generating reams of warnings in the webserver logs, due to what used to be bona fide PHP convenience shortcuts now being considered bad programming. The easy way out was to stop the warnings being emitted. But I never take the easy way out, so have tried to track down all uses of the shortcuts and replaced with their more explicit counterparts. It's been a game of whack-a-mole so far... but I'll keep monitoring the logs and keep whacking as you (or, more likely, search engines) find cases I've missed.

Looking good so far.

Nicely does it.

Got some fox tracks the day after the rabbits. Was most pleased. Yesterday the temperature went from -2 to +9 and the snow simply disappeared as a front came through.

It was quite a front, though - a bit blowy! The snow didn't completely disappear until Sunday afternoon, and there was still some ice on little stretches of water. Today was the best lunchtime dog walk for ages: no nasty weather to contend with (I had to take off me hat and gloves after half of it) and the dog set up a pheasant, which has made his day.

[rab] Thanks for the hard work to ensure at least two MC servers stay up :)

The appendix to Stovold, hidden these many ages long in the CAMREC library, include the prophecies relating to the demise of the universe, in which those who may reach Mornington Crescent will be announced as the late arrivals, while all others will be put in spoon, to be knidded by ostriches throughout all eternity to the sound of the trombone. There's something about Felicity Kendal as well, but it's disputed.

still taking into account everything said here. Also, looking for contractor fraud lawyers in Louisiana. The contractor that I hire is threatening to sue me if I go public with the information of how she hasn't done the work she's been paid to do.

[KS] Sheesh... Sorry you're going through this over such a long time. is there a contract clause that states "we can do what we like and you aren't allowed to complain, same to you and no returns"? How do they deal with people giving them negative reviews on social media?

Happy Easter!

Happy? You're not a Chelsea supporter, are you.

Nope, Chelsea is not important to me. I do follow another blue-clad side, but they're not even as high up in the leagues as Chelsea.

So coy, Bismarck!
It's a very good time to be a fan of blue-clad Ipswich Town at the moment. And I've just stuck my cricket fixture calendars up, so am hoping for some dry weather to enable more sporting joy!

The man from The Grauniad reckoned that hard as Chelsea tried to lose the game, as usual, they nevertheless won it 4-3. They were playing Man U, after all.

[Bis] Pretty much. Like, they don't require them to have contracts and they don't require them to follow the contracts if they have them. Then lawyers don't take contractor fraud cases.

I'm technically back in my house as I am in the house, but it's not great. There's no heat, but there is air. Thankfully temps seem to be 60F and up. I certainly hope it stays that way. I can then bundle up.

I don't have hot water. I don't have a kitchen. The tiny passageway of a hall makes it so I can JUST get trhough using a rollator, not even my transport chair. This contractor is a hue jerk. I'd have much stronger words, but I'm not putting them here.

In February, when the place I was staying was shut down by the fire marshal, we had one night in another hotel and then I was literally TOLD that I was going to be at her house. She said that I would be there for one week and she wouldn't let me have my little service dog. There was only one day where she wasn't trying to break my spirit with all of her yelling at me and insults.

I was so distressed that one day, I called the police to help get me out of that situation. They didn't help. Instead, they call her and talk to her, despite my protesting. I didn't give them her information. A guy that was living in her guest house called her. She's claiming to be traumatized by that. She wasn't even at the house. I was outside waiting for the police. She's just a huge jerk. Only reasons she would be traumatized are that she already has a record and if she doesn't, she absolutely knows that she's done wrong.

[Kagome] Anything I can do to help?

reveal

[Tuj] Congratulations! reveal

[CdM] reveal :D much appreciated!