You can get away without the width, height, alt text and trailing slash but they're nice to have, and watch out for accidentally posting a page-filler sized image. If the file you want to link to doesn't end in gif, jpg, jpeg, png or possibly webp it may not work. And some dumb web sites will occasionally post a jpg file but name it as png or something, which is another rake in the grass to be aware of. It usually works anyway, but it's kinda rude, and always makes me question the competence of whoever put the image up in the first place. And it's easy to get caught out in turn because one usually trusts file extensions to be correct. The concept of a file extension isn't that difficult to grasp, although MS have been valiantly trying to obfuscate it for everybody for years.

If you post a file link (.zip, .jpg, .md, anything) inside an <a href="...> you get a clickable download instead of a web page opening.

Finding the right URL for the image tends to be fiddlier these days. Right-clicking and choosing 'open image in new window', or 'copy link to image' may be needed. And some image links will will broken by the remote server if you attempt to reshare them. It was simple, once upon a time. Then techies, marketing, sales, the bean-counters - people, basically - got to it, and we ended up with the current mess.

       .
    __/ \__
    \     /
    /.'o'.\
     .o.'.
    .'.'o'.
   o'.o.'.o.
  .'.o.'.'.o.
 .o.'.o.'.o.'.
    [_____]
     \___/

We wish you a merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas
We wish you a merry Christmas
Not wearing your pants.

So, did you festoon the sails of the mill with fairy lights for Xmas?

Apart from all the other stuff like antibiotics and heart valves and electronics and like that.

There's just nothing to say to that.

Not only am I unconvinced on the preferability of debit cards, I still don’t understand how one hires a car without a credit card. Or reserves a hotel room. When I went to Canada I used a debit card, but it only worked because my US debit card could be processed as a credit card. The Canadians at the hotel and airline were adamant a Canadian debit card would not process that way and therefore would not be accepted for payment. I had to insist they tried each time I needed to do it as they didn’t think it would work.

So I ask again, how do you rent a car without a credit card?

Which suggests that Holland is like anywhere else in that the norm is you need a credit card to hire a car (but that this company might let you do so with a debit card; restrictions apply). I knew Steve Martin couldn't be that wrong.

Testing...

Possibly. The debian release schedule is of the “it’s done when it’s done” type, and also it requires me to go and check their website to see if there has been a major release since last time I looked. This was one of the few upgrades that didn’t break anything, apart from forcibly deleting PHP for reasons I still don’t fully understand.

*Seriously, I don't need to - there are enough idiot drivers causing tractors to take avoiding action and there are spuds all over the roads.

Death Tick
Death ticks are clockwork menaces resembling ticks, but about the size of a man’s hand. They are programmed to seek out a living target, jump onto that target, and siphon the victim’s life fluids. Once the enemy is a dry husk, the tick returns to its sender. Any tick failing to reach the sender in 10 hours releases a corrosive acid and destroys itself.

Prairie Tick
Prairie ticks are the scourge of the High Plains. These horrid bloodsuckers live in underground burrows and are controlled by a single, giant queen that rules over each nest.

And then, thinking back, I noticed other things - such as the fact that you rarely have conversations with other people in dreams, and that most people, if they can find a dream-book to open, find nothing useful or intelligible inside.

And then I thought, these kinds of limitations are quite understandable - after all, your brain is literally inventing an entire fantasy environment around you in real time. Looking at it like that, it's staggering how realistic dreams are, in spite of their shortcomings. On the Crescent sites, a lot of us are creatives of some kind - including writers - so we know how hard is is to produce something halfway realistic in real life. In fact, it suddenly struck me to ask, 'Looking at the sheer amount of creativity that goes into a dream, and knowing how much mental effort it takes to do anything similar when up and about, how come dreaming isn't more mental effort than being awake??'

Or in the words of Humph, "The teams can say any word they want, limited only by their own imaginations.
... It's stiff, that rule."

To maximize the fun I did not realize this had happened until the thaw, when I went down to the basement and discovered a nice new paddling pool.

The water had sprayed up the side of the house for about a day and a half and frozen in many interesting patterns, but had also soaked into the ground and waterlogged it, causing many leakes through the basement wall and seepage through the floor itself. I took over 40 gallons of water out using the wet-vac, a submersible pump and a stream of class four Words of Power.

Phase 1: gotta get a cat flap, or no one will even consider me for entiddlification. That's due for this Thursday.

I had never really considered getting a cat at this address before, because I'm right on a main road and I'm not really willing to accept even a low probability of a poor mog getting squished.

But then I belatedly realised (belated by $%&^$% years) that if I got a cat that was elderly, defective or otherwise unable to go out, then the road wouldn't matter nearly so much. So that's the plan. Find an old slow animal that can't be bothered to move much and spoil it rotten for its retirement

I've laid on Bird TV for it already, so we'll both have something to look at out of the window