So far, so good

t has been nearly 24 hours for the new arrivals and they seem to be coping OK. I spent many hours working on them yesterday, checking their condition every 10 minutes or so until going to sleep. Time-consuming? For sure. Even gave me a physical headache. But the first few hours or days are critical, I wanted to be sure the creatures all get along and, if not, intervene before it’s too late.

Learned from experience…

I don’t expect this week to be busy anyway. Many things have calmed down, people go back to work, and this coming week/days/weekend there are many fans walking past the streets here to concerts, including the very weird fans of Melanie Martinez. The music scene has gotten truly bizarre.

had a very productive day today, especially all the “fish tank” stuff. At one point we discussed the options available to us, then I left home just in time to reach the pet store at 9AM (when it opens). I spent a long time looking at all the animals and could see the people who ran the shop really love animals. One was hugging the lizard while cleaning its cage; the lizard would not let go when he came to the fish section to help and advise me. They also checked things on a computer system to give me expert advice when I asked questions.

There used to be a pet store (another multi-floor shop) closer to us, but it shut down not long after COVID-19. Their fish section was a lot smaller and they kept some fish in very tiny containers (maybe 2 litres per fish), which looked and felt cruel.

Black and pink (blackpink?)

am glad to say that we have 20 fish right now and they are all healthy and seemingly happy. They get plenty of human attention. They’re not being neglected, abandoned, or malnourished (except when nasty men engage in lawfare).

Aside from the loaches and penguin tetras we not have some pearl danios in the cold tank and many flame tetras in the warm tank along with cardinal tetras as seen in this photo:

Almost the entire time (that is observable by me) they do characteristically move in schools, always together or nearby, unlike some other fish we’ve had. The fish in the cold tank are very close to me as it is 5 inches from my keyboard and below the screen that I type articles on. The hundreds of shells are doing well, but they are slow-moving. They don’t steal attention.

I’ve joked with a friend that I should write a script to generate passwords from their movements, no lava lamps necessary.

I’ve noticed the danios love swimming against the current that’s coming out from the filters and they always move quite tightly in groups, which means they’re a very social fish and they will grow a LOT more over time. We’ve calculated their projected final size to ensure the tanks won’t get too congested, overcrowding would make grumpy fish.

Just in time for our anniversary.

Coping better

T is day one for the new arrangement of the shells here and so far they seem to be doing OK. They were getting a shocking rinse yesterday, so they went into their shells and now, slowly, they are coming back out and moving around on the surface. Soon we’ll add the filter and some decorative items.

The change was months overdue.

Snails/shells

vening time today was spent transferring all the shells (I estimate over 200 of them) to a bigger tank and setting it all up. As far as I can tell, all should be able to survive the transfer and I didn’t see any dead one.

They might need companions soon – a task for the coming week or maybe only a few days.

Death came

ur next-door neighbour died this weekend. She was almost 80. We didn’t get along (almost nobody got along with her, both past and present), but at times like these we must all be human beings and compassionate towards grieving relatives. This was not shocking or surprising because this past year the ambulance came here a lot and there was gradual deterioration, often very loud screaming and doors being slammed.

My thoughts about this situation are very complicated. I don’t believe people suddenly become saints or impermissible to criticise because they die. But common sense or popular sayings urge us to keep quiet if we have nothing positive to say.

Rianne will pray for her. We hope her husband can cope.

High-profile publisher

n some sense, today was a special day.

It’s about science, not football.

I did not watch this London match, I only followed the score, hoping both teams would lose points (more so Arsenal).

While keeping an eye on the score I noticed having been cited in a major publication. As it turns out, an old article of mine has just been cited in ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and it’s about Gemini Protocol where my writings became more prominent in recent years: