From Brian.

It is what it is, I suppose.

Teabagging

June 05, 2025

It’s morning. I need to take my morning dump. I also want tea. It takes about 60 seconds for the water to boil. The tea needs to steep for around 4 minutes. The plan is simple: boil the water. While it’s boiling, prepare the cups. Add the teabags. The water finishes boiling. I pour it into the cups. Now the next timer starts. Four minutes to take a dump. Obviously, I end up doomscrolling Instagram for more than four minutes, but that’s beside the point. My legs are asleep. My butthole is ready t…

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Pop

May 14, 2025

It’s very easy to shit on modern pop music. It’s too vulgar. It’s too predictable. It’s quantized to perfection. And you’re not wrong. It’s all those things. Figuring that out does not make you the next Chomsky. And I ask you; so fucking what? The tension that builds in the verse and the relief that’s provided to you in the chorus is very real. Go ahead, fire up “…baby one more time” and try to listen with your heart. Let Britney’s voice riding the rhythm of the song take you away for a moment. …

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The Cheekiest of Pints

May 09, 2025

I love a good pint. The cheekier the better. What makes a pint cheeky? I’m not one to tell you what makes a pint cheeky or not. Follow your heart. But let me tell you about my cheekiest one. A cataclysmic one. In 2022 my marriage was coming to an end. You know those books that start off really good? And then as you get halfway the writing gets stale and boring. You realize you’re not really enjoying the book anymore. But it was so good in the beginning, so maybe the next chapter is going to be b…

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Contingent on Chickens

May 05, 2025

Another gloomy post. I’m not really sorry. I need to write about this to clear my mind. If you’ve read my blog, you know I recently lost my thyroid. Rather, it was surgically removed. But the end result is the same: no thyroid. No thyroid means no thyroid hormones. No thyroid hormones means hormone therapy is needed. Your body is generally amazing at regulating itself. The brain has a gland that secretes hormones (TSH) to tell the thyroid to make more hormones. That same gland has sensors for th…

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An Abstraction of Reality

April 28, 2025

Chasing a nostalgia high, I recently installed Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC or VC) on my computer. It’s a game set in 80s Miami, heavily influenced by movies such as Scarface. You could say it’s “Scarface: The Game” and it would be hard to disagree with you. GTA:VC was made in the early 2000s when compute power wasn’t anywhere near what it is right now. The PC requirements start at 128MiB RAM, which in this day and age is unthinkable. But back then it was used to create a rich game world …

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Cancer Part 4: Theatre In Use

April 21, 2025

What sparked the cancer diagnosis in December was thyrotoxicosis. A thyroid storm. A lil’ rave thrown by your thyroid, and your whole body is invited. That beautiful, butterfly-shaped organ wrapped around your trachea controls your metabolism, heart rate, body temperature, mood—among other things. Usually, it just does its job. But sometimes, it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t? Everything speeds up or shuts down. The end result is the same: you feel like shit. So in addition to cancer, which was Lo…

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A Choice of Languages

April 15, 2025

When my daughter, Megumi, was born in 2014 I made a conscious decision to speak to her in English. My reasoning was that the English language would get her a lot further than fluency in Dutch at an early age. I tried to talk Dutch with Megumi when she was four years old, but alas the proverbial ship had sailed and she resisted learning the language of (50% of) her home country. She now speaks English and Japanese fluently, however. She aced her Eiken not too long ago either. A small humble brag,…

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Spiced Cake

April 12, 2025

Here’s my spiced cake recipe. No backstory. Ingredients: 250 g all-purpose flour 8 g baking powder 150 g dark brown sugar 8 g ground cinnamon 1 g ground cloves 1 g ground nutmeg 1 g salt 2 eggs (approx. 100 g total) 200 ml whole milk 100 ml neutral vegetable oil (e.g. sunflower) 50g of raisins Recipe: Turn on your oven, preheat it to 170~ degrees C or around there. Add the dry ingredients into one bowl, wet ingredients in the next. Mix together the dry ingredients. Make sure to use a sieve or …

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The 2025 Famichiki Great Server Move

April 12, 2025

We recently moved our Mastodon server Famichiki to a Japanese VPS. It used to be hosted on servers of an American company, but given the state of the U.S. and the increasingly hostile rhetoric toward its allies, it felt inappropriate to continue to send money to U.S. companies. Also, being an instance for users in Japan, the very least we could do is spend our money on a Japanese company to provide us with hosting. So now we’re hosted on Conoha, a Japanese company whose parent, GMO, is arguably …

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Cancer Part 3: Don't worry, it's Cancer

March 30, 2025

Last week the kind doctors at Hospital B performed a biopsy on my thyroid. I have never done a biopsy before, and I wish to never do one ever again. However, I don’t think I’ll escape that. And you’ll find out why in a bit. If you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’re probably familiar with these two phrases: You’re now breathing manually You’re now aware that you’re blinking And just like that, you have become aware of two parts of your nervous system that are highly automated and that …

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