Quick bits:

• I did my taxes! I always feel like I’m doing something wrong when filing them — so many form fields to fill out — but I believe I got it right.¹¹1 Frankly, if I thought I had made a mistake — or worse, intentionally changed some numbers — I wouldn’t admit to that in public, would I now?!  My extended unemployment means I’ll get some tax money back, which will be nice!

• My Season of Writing is over (2025 Q1) and there hasn’t been any single quarter where I have spent less time on writing. Maybe I picked an anti-theme by accident. Ironically, too, is that since the beginning of April (2025 Q2), I’ve done more writing than in the last three months. I am Opposite Man.²²2 I wonder if setting a theme for Q1 made me assume, subconsciously, that things would just happen automatically without putting effort into it. 

• My Internet connection died yesterday, and the lack of connectivity was a breath of fresh air.

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Shower thoughts:

• Worried about breaking a streak? Try the anti-streak method, in which you try for as long as possible to not restart a streak. My Wordle streak is 0, but my Wordle anti-streak is through the roof!

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Look, I don’t need a new project… but Filip Hracek’s Unsure Calculator has inspired me and I’m rather tempted to implement my own version of this.

But I’d do two things quite differently:

• No simulation. I’d use an approach that uses fuzzy mathematics (fuzzy intervals/numbers). Doing 1 000 000 iterations is a waste of time and energy when other perfectly cromulent approaches exist.

• Real intervals. In the Unsure Calculator, the 10~15 notation specifies the 95% confidence interval, which means there exist numbers way outside this range, too. Instead, I’d use proper intervals.

With my solution, you’d be able to create an interval like this:

fuzzy_number.NewBetween(1, 3)

Under the hood, this would likely create a triangular fuzzy interval. Or a trapezoidal one. Or a gaussian. Or a uniform (which would be a special case of a trapezoidal one).

You’d be able to add and multiply numbers:

monthsInyear := fuzzy_number.NewCrisp(12)

monthlyGroceriesExp :=
  fuzzy_number.NewBetween(150, 300)
monthlyEatingOutExp :=
  fuzzy_number.NewBetween(125, 250)

montlyFoodExp =
  monthlyGroceriesExp.Add(monthlyEatingOutExp)
// => 275–550

yearlyFoodExp =
  montlyFoodExp.Multiply(monthsInyear)
// => 3300–6600

This is an implementation using triangular fuzzy numbers, but even just using regular intervals (foregoing fuzzy intervals) could make this useful already.

Could be interesting to build out! I can see a use for it in creating budgets and estimating project cost.

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I was in need of doing some worldbuilding for a story I’m writing, and I felt that the map-making/world-building tools out there aren’t really what I was looking for.

So I spent some time in Affinity Designer and came up with this, as an experiment:

I am making heavy use of Affinity Designer’s styles. For example, the railroad is simply a Bézier curve with a style consisting of three strokes: a thick black stroke first, then a slightly thinner white stroke, and finally a dashed stroke at the top.

I’ve also sorted the objects into three layers: areas (farmland, meadow, forest, built-up), roads (including paths, tracks, and waterways), and labels. It’s simple, but remarkably effective.

This might be the most I’ve ever used Affinity Designer.

Why is this so much harder in other tools?!

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Entertainment:

• Season 2 of Severance³³3 Severance, directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, written by Dan Erickson (Fifth Season, Red Hour Films, 2022).  falls, I fear, in the trap of being weird for the sake of being weird. I find it exhausting.

  That said, I still enjoyed the second season. Particularly episode 8, Sweet Vitriol, stood out for me: more grounded, more relatable, and less weird than any other episode.

• Season 2 of Silo⁴⁴4 Silo, written by Graham Yost (AMC Studios, 2023).  is literally so dark that it is borderline unwatchable. With my display brightness cranked all the way up, I still cannot figure out what the fuck is happening on the screen. I finished episode 1 and I could not tell you what it was about.

• I’ve already cancelled my Apple TV+ subscription. What shall I watch before the month is out?

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Toots:

• “Universal Basic Income would remove the incentive to work”, say people with enough money to never have to work again but who mysteriously carry on. (Jason Gorman)

• Simon Tatham on “observation theory of luck”: Insightful!

Links:

• Post-Credits Scenes Need to Die (Patrick (H) Willems): Yes!

• What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (Kōdō Simone): A bold thought, but an attractive one for sure.

• Scandal-hit creative writing website NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years (Ella Creamer for The Guardian): I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo, but I wrote about it in Week­notes 2024 W36: That NaNoWriMo thing, and I’ll repeat what I said there: The good news is that creative writing of any sort can be done entirely independently from NaNoWriMo.

Political links:

• Stop Looking for Methods in the Madness (Paul Krugman): I was struggling to understand the value of Trump’s tariffs but I’m clearly not alone: “I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”

Tech links:

• CSS Crimes in the Public Sector (Andrew Taylor): Delightful!