The "Holiday" part of the Holiday starts today. Starting with a 5-hour drive to the south coast, where we will be for the next week or so. Denmark to maybe as far as Esperence.

Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Gurhtie. Actually, just about anything by Arlo Guthrie and his dad, Woody.
Indian Ira Hayes by Johnny Cash. It's not very long, but a poignant story that shouldn't be forgotten.

We have all been there. These days, I usually screw up timing. I always under/overestimate how long something will take and end up with part of the meal ready and getting cold while the other part is 15 minutes away.

This is the time to make these mistakes. While nobody else is waiting for you or having to eat what you make. You're getting a huge head start on your peers, half of whom won't actually cook for themselves until they move out of their parents' in their mid 20's.

Is it just me, or were boxing Day sales cancelled this year? Went to the shops today for the regular weekly groceries, and it was pretty normal. No extra crowds, stores had regular looking signage and patrons.

I know it was Boxing Day +2, but still it would have been busy still on previous years.

I haven't seen any amazing deals go past my feeds online either.

I might have 18tb total storage capacity in the house (5 phones, 3 tablets, 5 laptops, two servers, one desktop and external storage). I sure as hell don't have 43 tb. What the hell are you transferring?

I'm glad I don't need to watch the amount downloaded on the home Internet any longer. Between my kid downloading most of his Nintendo Switch library to his shiny new SD card on Christmas night and me downloading 100 GB or so off Steam tonight, it would have blown away whatever limits my account had.

To think, I took a screenshot of an especially heavy download session one time in the 90's, where I managed to stay online for almost 24 hours and downloaded 139 MB! One session!

I saw a Japan v. Australia World Cup qualifier match at the MCG and I don't remember even that crowd being so one-sided as a BBL game.

I wonder whether this is something the league can work on? Maybe have better crowd coordination of the "away" supporters sitting together?

Big W supposedly have Lego 60423 on clearance, but every Perth store has sold out. If you could grab one (or actually just let me know if you spot it in stock), I have a kid who will be very grateful.

You're not wrong. The first innings of the cricket last night while Perth was batting was lively and boisterous. The second half of the game was utter silence except for wickets. 41,200 people all with nothing much to say can be eerie.

There's nothing like it. An AFL crowd always has a decent portion of opposition supporters. The Rugby State of Origin is almost 50/50. While I'm certain it wasn't, BBL felt like it was 100% home crowd.

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.

To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:

• Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called "Starfield".
• They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
• Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
• Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
• Nexus decided they don't want to host this mod. It's hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.

That's about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don't even play the game. They're just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they'd just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.

Given how many millions of people must have used Amazon to order stuff to work from home over the past 3+ years, this is a really weird position to hold. You'd think this guy would be all about everyone kitting out their home office spaces.