Where the hat has been today. And christ am I tired.

People don’t realise that “Just get a Brother laser; it’s fine” is the highest possible compliment for printers. If you want a printer to (1) sit near-dormant in deep sleep for weeks or months on end, and then (2) immediately print what you send to it, properly, every single time and then go to sleep again, then… just get a Brother laser printer. Somehow, in this world of madness, it does the thing you buy it for with no bullshit. If you can even remember what that’s like.

It’ll just be cockroaches on their refurbed Nokia 3310s, figuring out how to send print jobs to those things. That’s all that’ll survive.

When the aliens get here, amidst the ruins they’re going to find a bunch of Brother mono laser printers, still on the included toner cartridge, sitting there on the network ready to roll and wondering why nobody has printed a return label for five thousand years.

It’s also been to the wee supermarket, out with the dog a few times rambling around, in the car, and so on. Very windy up here, but it’s yet to be blown off.

Places the hat has been today.

Hello from the Highlands where we’ve indulged in a private compartment on the steam train.

"Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate."

https://futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai

No it bloody doesn’t.

Get the luggage trolley if you're flying and pay for more luggage, or put the roof box on the car if you're driving. You're going to be doing multiple trips in from the car anyway, so do a couple more and bloody enjoy yourself.

My packing advice as a younger man was to pack lightly and efficiently. Minimal set of actually-used stuff, capsule wardrobe, dual-purpose items. My advice as an older man is fuck that. Put all your daft tech and hobby stuff in your massive family car and take it all with you, and then when you get there, make a point of using all of it. The nice camera and the laptop you still want to tinker with and the videogames and the three different hats or whatever your own personal madness is.

It’s been 7 months since I last had any alcohol. A few days became a week, and so on. It’s also been well over 10 years since I last had more than a single drink in any 24-hour period, so I wasn’t exactly drinking a lot before, but it had become a bit too routine, so I thought it best to just quit altogether.

Some things in my life that I truly appreciate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRavw1KcPn0&feature=youtu.be

My 286th free weekly mini-story "One Silver Shilling" is out, and you can read it here: https://mattgemmell.scot/books/once-upon-a-time/stories/one-silver-shilling/

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#amwriting #fiction #shortstory

I should add that I’ve always been a complete wimp about that stuff… until becoming a dad. Then a switch is flipped and, who knew, you become some kind of unflappable combat medic for the whole family.

Seems that my towering intellect and almost half-century of life experience didn’t prevent me from using my fragile human fingers yesterday to compress the recycling that includes razor-sharp can lids. And at dinnertime during a solo parenting week with a 5-year-old. 😫

Managed to completely conceal the gusher from him (he’d have been very upset). Thanks to past me for having a med kit with dressings, zinc oxide tape, and sport wrap. Thankfully mummy is home now and it quit bleeding overnight. 😅

If anyone still has Flickr Pro, they’re putting the price up by ~25%. Then they do the Adobe thing where they give you 20% off the new price if you try to cancel, which is an insta-cancel from me.

You’re suddenly valuable (valued) when you’re leaving, not when you’re staying, just like in an abusive relationship. 👎 If you’re doing it like Adobe, you’re doing it wrong.

To those who celebrate!

Loving the weather in Edinburgh the now, except for the dug!

(Put the new lower-patio garden furniture together the other day. Also previously built the workshed behind where Whisky is, built my son’s fort on the grass, and redid the inside of my wife’s greenhouse. Now I feel obliged to wash the car.)

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@patrickhadfield/116764869389163807

Ha! We watched the Scotland game the other day and I saw the flags draped over the upper ad displays, and I thought: it’s really unamerican to not be cracking down on people who are obscuring corporate advertising. Called it.