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:

Life goes on

think it is fair to say that our life this year has been good and we’re more productive than ever before. Tomorrow it’ll be exactly two years since we sued Garrett. We sued him in September 2024 [1, 2]. We didn’t invest much in our lawsuit because, according to legal professionals, even if we won, he would not pay. He was already broke (his wife shed light on that), he lived in another continent, and he had really bad character.

We move on with our lives and we do what we can do best. We curate links and publish many articles.

Be prepared

rowing up with many dogs, I loved dogs. Don’t get more wrong, I’m a “dog(s) person”. Years ago we thought about getting a dog ourselves. We ended up delaying and we only bought things for a dog, except the dog. Delays delays…

We have one neighbour with a Bully XL. I don’t like those dogs (the breed) because I don’t trust them. I’ll probably never trust any Bully XL, not just because of what I read in papers (they even murder their own elderly owners sometimes) but the actual ban on such dogs (and sometimes “culls” too). The UK identified them as unworthy of the risk.

I’ve had to mentally prepare for a scenario where this one Bully XL goes berserk and decides to attack me. I’ve decided that because this dog is short-legged and clearly overweight sprinting away from it would be effective enough; he cannot catch me and I can run for a lot longer before stamina becomes an issue. This Bully XL is around 60-70KG, it’s very short, and it’s just a “fat boy” basically. Second option is, hop on the roof of a nearby car. This “fat boy” cannot even jump over his home’s fence, surely a car would be “too tall” for him. Failing that, in case I need to wrestle such a dog, avoid neck bites or falling to the ground. Fatalities won’t be possible due to a bleeding leg or hand.

Of course they could just put a muzzle on this Bully XL. But guess what… of course they don’t and lecturing an old lady about it ain’t “my cuppa tea”.