@brucelawson I’ve pretty-much given up on best-ofs. Even when the artist has the depth of back catalogue to justify the title, I do not want to listen to 20 to 40 of their songs in a single sitting, thank you.
This Sunday, a chance to play the new board games you received for Christmas. 2pm onwards at Waterside Tap, Birmingham.
https://afternoonplay.co.uk/post/804378044169142272/afternoon-play-january-2026
@sil I was thinking of Nick Cave's earlier band, The Birthday Party, but I don't know the story either.
@sil I think people mostly used to prefer third-party apps for services for the things they did that that the official offering did not. We seem to have moved firmly into a world where people prefer unofficial apps for what they do not do.
@sil If you're using Reddit often enough to justify installing a mobile app, third party ones such as https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader still exist.
@sil Richard Hawley. Frank Turner.
@sil Nick Cave. Björk.
@sil OTOH, if I don't need to know the backstory, how about Sophie Ellis-Bextor?
@sil In most cases it's hard to be sure why the the band split up, but there's a fly-on-the-wall documentary, Our Most Brilliant Friends, about Rebecca Taylor leaving Slow Club, and it's because she wanted to be a pop star.
@sil Don't they say designed, rather than written? In any case, I think the interesting part of that story is "... because he thought he was going to be implementing Scheme, but then Marketing said it had to look like Java", and we have to try to imagine a world where we're all Lisp programmers, VSCode is considered a straight-up Emacs rip-off, etc.
@sil I did something along these lines once with Cairo/Pango (varying the font size and the number of lines to fill the space vertically, rather than horizontally as you're doing, but still). This was so long ago that I don't think GI was a thing yet, mind.
@sil Did anyone ever get one of those typed-in progams to work, though?
We've a new venue for Sunday November 9th: Waterside Tap on Gas Street Basin. It'll be our 15th birthday. Do come!
https://afternoonplay.co.uk/post/798291401565765632/afternoon-play-november-2025-at-waterside-tap
@sil Morris was my guess, when I saw their socks and top hat in another hostelry this evening. No performance for us, sadly.
@bigcalm I found the argument convincing that one should use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. It was the reality that you /cant't/ configure the tab width everywhere that brought me back to all spaces.
@v Pushdrop uses a couple of little wooden rails and an elastic band to turn the box into a tiny 2p machine. It's a delight!
Update @beasts Dynamic DNS, using systemd timers:
@penguin42 @sil Mainframe folks don't still pronounce the Z "three-sixty", then?