Caoimhe’s bog

🐘 Leafing though a book a friend was given as a preset by their family called A Geek in Japan and this is one of the most orientalist things I’ve read in my life. An example quote:

2026-07-06T18:25:53+01:00

Leafing though a book a friend was given as a preset by their family called A Geek in Japan and this is one of the most orientalist things I’ve read in my life. An example quote:

In manga, there are usually many female characters dressed in maid costumes, which fascinate the Japanese.

🐘 It’s still very funny that Nintendo made a game with an opposite counterpart to Hyrule and just called it Lorule with a princess named Hilda.

2026-07-03T08:58:30+01:00

It’s still very funny that Nintendo made a game with an opposite counterpart to Hyrule and just called it Lorule with a princess named Hilda.

🐘 Because I’m a generic freak, and I am normal.

2026-07-01T22:47:53+01:00

Because I’m a generic freak, and I am normal.

This site’s code now contains game spoilers

2026-06-25T09:22:00+01:00

This post demonstrates CSS that won’t render in an RSS feeds or older browsers.

I have made one¹ post about Baba Is You and so obviously I banged up a quick and dirty lexer for my website’s syntax highlighter and CSS to display rules text from the game using animated images pulled from the Baba Is You Fandom wiki that you can still highlight and select to copy text from.²

If you are unfamiliar, Baba Is You is a block-pushing puzzle game where the rules that dictate interactions between blocks exist as text within the levels themselves that be rearranged to change them. Watching the trailer for the game will get this across better than I am able to explain it. I have not finished it but it’s a great little game and I would encourage anyone to check it out and discover all the incredible little things it does with this concept and I am looking forward to seeing what lies in store for me.

And I decided, because I could (because HTML and CSS are genuinely wonderful expressive media), if I was going to talk mention the game on my website I wanted to display the rules text as it is displayed in game: With cute little animated squares of text.

The end result is that I can type something like this in the Markdown that posts are written in:³

```baba
rose is red
violet is blue
flag is win
baba is you
```

And it will render thusly:

rose is red
violet is blue
flag is win
baba is you

And you should be able to hightlight the text above and then copy and paste it somewhere else and have it remain legible.

I build this site using Jekyll, which uses Rouge for code parsing and syntax highlighting. All I needed to do was add a new lexer:

Jekyll::Hooks.register :site, :pre_render do |site|
  require "rouge"

  module Rouge
    class Token
      module Tokens
        token :Noun, "noun" do
          token :Rose, "noun rose fourletter"
          token :Violet, "noun violet longword"
          token :Flag, "noun flag fourletter"
          token :Baba, "noun baba fourletter"
        end

        token :Oper, "oper" do
          token :Is, "oper is"
        end

        token :Prop, "prop" do
          token :Red, "prop red"
          token :Blue, "prop blue fourletter"
          token :Win, "prop win"
          token :You, "prop you"
        end
      end
    end

    module Lexers
      class Lua < RegexLexer
        title "Baba"
        desc "Baba Is You (https://www.hempuli.com/baba/)"
        tag 'baba'

        state :root do
          [Noun, Oper, Prop].each do |group|
            group.constants.each do |word|
                rule Regexp.new(word.id2name.downcase), group.const_get(word)
            end
          end

          rule %r/\s+/, Text::Whitespace
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

This parses over the text looking for matching tokens and then assigns them a set of classes (noun, rose, fourletter, etc.) that will be used by some even more hacky CSS to display them:

figure:has(> pre > code.language-baba) {
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 0;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

pre:has(> code.language-baba), div.language-baba.highlighter-rouge pre {
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 0;
    background-color: #080808;
    border-radius: 6px;
    padding: 6px;
    border: 0;
}

code.language-baba, div.language-baba code  {
    background-color: #080808;
    border-radius: 6px;
    hyphens: none;
    display: inline-block;
    text-transform: uppercase;

    .w { font-size: 0; }

    .noun, .oper, .prop {
        font-weight: bold;
        white-space: initial;
        height: 24px;
        width: 24px;
        align-content: center;
        font-size: 9px;
        text-align: center;
        line-height: 0.9;
        font-family: "Comic Sans MS", "Comic Sans", "Comic Mono", "Chalkboard SE", "Comic Neue", sans-serif;
        background-size: cover;
        image-rendering: pixelated;
        display: inline-block;
        overflow-y: hidden;
    }

    .noun { color: #D9396A; }
    .noun.rose {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/rose.webp);
        color: transparent;
    }
    .noun.violet {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/violet.webp);
        color: transparent;
    }
    .noun.flag {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/flag.webp);
        color: transparent;
    }
    .noun.baba {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/baba.webp);
        color: transparent;
    }

    .oper { color: white; }
    .oper.is {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/is.webp);
        color: transparent;
        font-size: 15px;
    }

    .prop { background-color: #D9396A; color: #080808; border-radius: 6px; }
    .prop.red {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/red.webp);
        background-color: transparent;
        color: transparent;
        border-radius: 0;
    }
    .prop.blue {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/blue.webp);
        background-color: transparent;
        color: transparent;
        border-radius: 0;
    }
    .prop.win {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/win.webp);
        background-color: transparent;
        color: transparent;
        border-radius: 0;
    }
    .prop.you {
        background-image: url(/styles/baba/text/you.webp);
        background-color: transparent;
        color: transparent;
        border-radius: 0;
    }

    .fourletter { font-size: 13px !important; }
    .longword { font-size: 10px !important; }
}

I am applying some styling to the underlying text to try and make it line up with the images (which you can see when highlighting it), though some of this like setting the text and background colour is then hidden by the more specific element styling that sets images for each token. It’s a bit pointless but it pleases me that, even if it’s invisible, there is styling there to make everything look more like the game elements aside from the images pulled from the game.

I’ve cut the example here down to only the words used in the poem, but the version in my actual code doesn’t have the full lexicon of the game either, just a few more words that I wanted to use on the site. A large part of the experience of playing Baba Is You is slowly discovering all the ways it plays with its rules. Loading up a level and seeing a new word and chewing on it, thinking through all the implications it could have, is a wonderful experience that evokes a strange mix of whimsy and dread as one realises the possibility space that has just been opened up. As such I have not looked up a word list to fill out my lexer more fully (and it would probably be tediously long anyway) and there is one word in particular defined in the CSS file that I think it is better to discover oneself by playing the game than to know it exists going in, so I don’t suggest going to look at it yourself if you haven’t already played the game—and do play the game, it’s great!

1 ↩
caoimhe is normal⁴ ↩
Examples used in the footnotes of this post are a bit more hardcoded as my Markdown parser did not like me mixing those two things together. ↩
Extra symbols generated by Robot is Chill, which frustratingly only exists as a Discord bot and not a openly accessible tool. ↩

🐘 Couldn’t sleep last night till I got back up to try two different things in a pair of levels in Baba Is You that I had played earlier

2026-06-24T08:46:46+01:00

Couldn’t sleep last night till I got back up to try two different things in a pair of levels in Baba Is You that I had played earlier.

The game continues to be existentially horrifying in ways that are difficult to describe (compliment).

One thing did not do what I had hoped but had a funny result and the other confirmed something that I had suspected.

major progression spoilers for Baba Is You

level is baba

made me want to throw up (positive)

🐘 What programme do people use for writing prose in plain text?

2026-06-21T13:03:13+01:00

What programme do people use for writing prose in plain text? I usually just write in Markdown format and at the moment usually in Sublime Text, but I was wondering if anyone had other recommendations for writing prose specifically? Needs to be something offline (an actual programme, not a website) geared towards editing and saving out to plain text formats and run on Linux.

I am trying out Novel Writer.

Novelty Automation

2026-06-16T13:30:00+01:00

I spent this weekend past in London with Caoimhe³ and other than seeing Hadestown and bankrupting ourselves eating out¹ one of the things I was looking forward to was bringing Caoimhe to Novelty Automation, which I had been to once before.

Novelty Automation is one of the most British things I have ever experienced and somehow I mean that as a compliment. It’s a small shop with a collection of homemade, satirical, mechanical arcade machines made mostly by Tim Hunkin. Hunkin has been making these since the ’80s but is still at it, parodying Airbnb and Amazon warehouse conditions. Each machine is coin-operated and vary from the mostly scripted, like the Autofrisk machine, to the more game-like The Small Hadron Collider, a converted pachinko machine, and The Expressive Photobooth makes for a good souvenir.

One of the reasons I wanted to drag Caoimhe out to it, other than just to show it to her, is because I wanted to have another go at My Nuke a machine where one loads fuel rods into a nuclear reactor with a mechanical arm that feels like something out of The Crystal Maze. I have said before that I love a game that feels like operating heavy machinery and this is one that is much more literal example. Sadly I did not prevent a meltdown on my second go at it, but maybe on a future trip my third time will be lucky.

Breakfast in Fallow and dinner and cocktails at Kinkally are two of the best meals I’ve had in my life. ↩

SEO optimisation in the age of AI IQ

2026-06-09T09:06:20+01:00

A caoimhe is a type of charm that you can make out of bird feathers, twigs and twine.

Lay out three twigs in a triangular shape.
Lay the ends of the feathers at each intersection and tie the twigs and the feathers together tightly, tight enough to break it.
Pour all your grief into it.
A shell is sometimes used for the head, for example, fish.
You might be tempted to use the chick that you watched bleed to death living room floor whose screams woke you up at five in the morning after the cat dragged it in, but that didn’t have any feathers yet.
Step three didn’t work for me.
Bury the charm somewhere safe for a week.
Think every day about how you plan to dig it up again you just need the time and energy for it.
How has it been ten years.
Wow I came across your poem and it really grabbed my attention. It felt so powerful and I think it really deserves to be brought to life as a visual novel like comic. Imagine it really coming to love in a way readers can actually feel. ………………………………………………………………………………… Get back to me and we can talk about adapting your work into a manga style. My prices are very reasonable.

A little bit in the Irish dub of Adventure Time that I liked

2026-06-06T13:00:00+01:00

TG4 (Teilifís na Gaeilge Ceathair) is an Irish-language public broadcast television channel that has original programming as well as producing Irish dubs of mostly children’s films and cartoons. Unfortunately most of the dubs they’ve done have never had a physical media release and were only available for streaming on their website for a short period of time after broadcast, if at all. Many of them are not archived anywhere (except hopefully somewhere in TG4’s own offices) and the ones that people have archived can be very difficult to find online. The internet, sadly, does not preserve everything.

One thing I do have an archive of myself is Am Aachtraíochta, TG4’s dub of Adventure Time, thought I believe they only ever covered the first four series and even within that some episodes are missing. Learning and practising Irish is not something I have successfully made time for with a long time, and honestly much of the show in Irish is beyond my ability to understand or keep up with, but there is one little moment in the dub I really appreciated that I want to talk about. It demonstrates and uses a feature of the Irish language in a way that I really like.

Towards the end of Memory of a Memory there’s a brief exchange where, after Marceline learns that her boyfriend Ash had been altering her memories, Finn asks “Are you going to be okay, Marceline?” She responds with a quick “Yeah,” before quickly moving on to say thanks and then being interrupted by Ash returning.

This seems like it should be a straightforward thing to translate, but Irish actually does not have native words for yes or no¹. Instead, the standard way of repeating affirmatively or negatively is to repeat the verb that was used in the question that was asked without the subject or object².

Ar léigh tú an leabhar?

Léigh.

An gcaitheann sí buataisí?

Ní chaitheann.

Still, it doesn’t make for a difficult translation. There’s a straightforward way for Marceline to respond in the affirmative (it would make it quite difficult to communicate in the language if one couldn’t), but the translators chose to reword things slightly in a way that I like.

An bhfuil tú ceart go lear, Marceline?

Beidh.

In the Irish version, Cuimhne ar Chuimhne, Finn asks Marceline the question in the present tense: “Are you okay?”, but her response, «beidh»³, is the future tense. Sighed out in a single syllable Marceline has said “I’m not okay right now, but I will be.” It’s a small change that adds a bit of depth to the conversation and shows the differences in experience and perspective between the two characters. Finn is concerned with how she is right now but Marceline, for being a bit immature, is a thousand years old and has been through heartbreak and betrayal before. She knows herself and knows that she can recover, even if things are difficult right now.

I am perhaps overstating things; this is not revelatory storytelling. But it just struck me as a neat piece of writing where the translators saw they could add another layer to the dialogue while still sticking to the original rhythm and tone. That the word «beidh» fits so neatly in and can be said as casually an noncommittally as the original “yeah”, but can convey a bit more if the sentence before it is adjusted slightly.

As I mentioned in my review for Say No! More, it uses «Ní dhéanfaidh mé é» in its Irish voice option for “no”, which only sometimes makes sense in context. ↩
Unless it’s a synthetic form of the verb, where the pronoun is merged into the end of the verb as a suffix, e.g. «ithim», which means “I eat.” ↩
Guillemets are not the standard quotation marks in Irish but I decided to adopt it as my own weird little pretentious way of signifying that I am quoting something in a different language to the main body of the text. ↩

🐘 Seto Kaiba would start taking œstrogen because the texture changes to her skin give her a 5% better card grip.

2026-06-05T20:11:02+01:00

Seto Kaiba would start taking œstrogen because the texture changes to her skin give her a 5% better card grip.

I’m having another birthday!

2026-06-02T19:11:00+01:00

I have made it through another year in spite of the horrors. I am doing a lot better than I was this time last year but then again that is a low bar. If I wasn’t doing better that would be very, very concerning. But I am genuinely doing very well at the moment. As little selfish plug if anyone has developed a bizarrely intense parasocial relationship reading this bog and want to make my birthday even better I have a Throne wishlist that you can use to buy me things.

But I recently moved in with Caoimhe³ and it has been really lovely. It’s broken me out of some bad habits, it’s helped motivate me to cook a lot more again, and it’s just really lovely to wake up next to someone and nice to have other people around rather than being on my own with Easóg so much. And now even when I am the only human in the house there are two more cats keeping me company: Muffie and Sandy. Easóg is not well socialised with other cats but she has acclimatised to the new place faster than I expected and is tolerating the strange cats quite well, though not without some bapping.

Violence!! Photo taken by Caoimhe³.

I am looking forward to spending my birthday with Caoimhe and we are using it as an excuse to go on weekend trip to London. The only thing we have booked, other than the travel and accommodation, is restaurant reservations, and we will structure the rest of the trip around those. I don’t love excessive amounts of sightseeing and I adore food, so I am enjoying this strategy and may use it for further trips.

I want a non-evil version of Bump

2026-06-01T12:20:00+01:00

A month ago I saw this this Tumblr post screenshotting a Twitter thread about Bump and was enthralled by both its maximalist aesthetics and how utterly evil it was. Now, before I continue I do what to emphasise: Do not install Bump. It is horrendously evil.

Do not install Bump.

The linked post gives you both a good idea of how invasive Bump is and also what is repulsive but also potentially alluring about it: It records as much as it possible can about everything you are doing through every means it has available to it as a phone app, which is quite a lot. This is, as the thread says, shared with everyone that you have linked with on Bump. That of course means it is also recorded and sent to Amo, the company that makes Bump. People often have a very defeatist attitude about privacy, that so many companies are already tracking everything you do anyway, but Amo really go above and beyond with trying to hoover up everything they can about you and with the way this app works I doubt that internal safeguards are much of a priority. A reminder before I go on: Do not install Bump.

Myself and Caoimhe³ both installed it, added each other, and then deleted our accounts after a couple of days. It was even more of an invasive nightmare than I was expecting.

If you do not allow access to your contacts straight away it repeatedly badger you to do so. I think it asked me five times before it reluctantly allowed me to continue without doing so.
It obvious asks your location permission to work. The basic point is broadcasting your location to people, but even if you grant it location permission it will display constant red warning signs on the main map screen and lock you out of features until you grant Bump permission to read your location at all times, even when the app is closed.
It will then also repeatedly ask you to disable power management features for Bump so that it can always keep monitoring you even when your battery is dying.
It has a feature to add live widget to your phone’s homescreen that constantly tracks a specific person. Like, stalking your friends at all times is kind of the selling point in the first place, but bloody fuck.
It doesn’t just want your raw location it is also interested in what places you hang out in and business you frequent. It locks features behind adding a certain amount of favourite locations that it can log you as being at. Each location also has public leaderboards that shows who is there most often, potentially showing where to find you even to people you never linked with in Bump.
In its quest to log and display everything it goes as far as to display your live battery percentage to everyone (so you can’t feign low battery as an excuse for not replying or wanting to go out).
Features are locked behind linking with enough people, so even if you were fine with sending all this (live, at all times) to a few people, it will push you to expand that circle.

And yet, I do see some of the appeal. The dwindling of third places gets talked about a lot and I think that something that facilitates spontaneous gatherings by being able to see when friends are nearby or in a group could have value. Back in the day this would be having a local pub where you would go without a plan in the hopes of running into people, but the cost of drinks are so goddamn expensive these days and most people do not want to be functionally alcoholic in order to have a social life any more.

Do not install Bump.

I think a non-evil version of this is possible, thought it would not be straightforward or easily. Something that provided some of this openness, at the discretion of the user, with many safeguards, that did not store any data, and was end-to-end encrypted, could actually have benefits. But it would also never, ever be profitable and would never have the backing that it would need to push it to large-scale adoption. And of course the intersection of people who are safety-focused enough to want these kinds of safeguards and people who are lax enough about privacy to want something like this in the first place is probably quite small.

The other thing about Bump is its maximalist aesthetics. It’s like a ’00s Nickelodeon children’s sitcom’s idea of what smartphones would become. A partner thought that it was aimed at young people who may not have been around for the Y2K aesthetic old web but have seen it evangelised through nostalgic lens. I do find it genuinely quite charming, especially its chat, which allows you to not just customise your textboxes in garish, clashing fashions but allows all elements to be freely moved around, rotated and zoomed, creating an utterly nightmarish form of communication that I kind of love.

Caoimhe urging me to look at her boy.

I do kind of want this as its own thing. Give me the secure, end-to-end encrypted, privacy-focused, overstimulation nightmare group chat. I would probably get bored of it relatively quickly but I feel like I would have a good time for a few days and then again every few months when I’m feeling particularly silly and whimsical.

Say hi to Nanao!

Do not install Bump.

🐘 Would you rather take me hit with one attack for 99 damage or ninety-nine attacks for 1 damage each?

2026-06-01T08:32:24+01:00

Would you rather take me hit with one attack for 99 damage or ninety-nine attacks for 1 damage each?

🐘 Revising Japanese basics and making notes

2026-05-26T10:11:26+01:00

Revising Japanese basics and making notes. Breaking down kanji into components mostly just because I really like etymology and partially because I think it will help me remember them.

What I’m reading vol. XIV

2026-05-22T17:00:00+01:00

Vols.: Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ, Ⅵ, Ⅶ, Ⅷ, Ⅸ, Ⅹ, Ⅺ, Ⅻ, ⅩⅢ, ⅩⅣ

I keep accumulating links in a drafts for these roundups and forgetting to every post them! Whoops!

I am nearing the end of Furuhata Ninzaburō so in honour of that the musical accompaniment this time will be this remix of the main theme from Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix.

History, Sociology, Psychology

I Might as Well Explain the Joke: Underwater Basket Weaving — Grayson Davis

The first people annoyed by basket weaving were not students or faculty but soldiers returning from World War II. Basket weaving was one of many activities used in the relatively new field of occupational therapy. Weaving, knitting, and other crafts were (and still are) believed to help people with mental disorders, which included traumatized soldiers.

I have seen a few people linking to this blog now but I think I may have first saw it mentioned by Laura Michet. Davis dives into the history of terms and jokes that have become so cliché as to fade into the background of culture, their original origin or point unclear. They’re all worth reading but this one in particular shows a fascinating lens on how industrialisation changes culture and the perceived value of skills and how different assumptions that arise from those changes can clash.

Why the English stopped opening the windows — Luke Jones

The whole design of the traditional English house was based on this peculiar form of life and its associated norms of thermal comfort and management. The English preference for single glazed sash windows and open hearth fireplaces over European-style double casements and stoves was, among foreigners, a baffling but charming eccentricity, generally understood as an adaptation to the wet oceanic climate.

I am a simple girl. Give me an article on how societal conditions shape culture over time and I will probably read it.

There are no psychopaths — Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen

Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.

It is very difficult to kill an idea, even if that idea has little foundation.

Media

M’lady Moon — Kevin Houlihan

How would an anarchist society enforce traffic laws?” and “how would an anarchist society deal with rapists and other violent criminals?”, and similar, are perennial questions in “anarchism 101” type spaces online. I read an interesting answer on the former question recently. If the goal is increasing public safety, simply demanding that people obey certain rules is not very effective.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a book I have never really known anything about except its title, but I enjoyed this view into it and comparison of it to The Dispossessed and how they illustrate the difference between left- and right-libertarianism.

IDW Sonic: On Lanolin the Sheep, and the problem with Sonic Twitter — Bobby Schroeder

Another big part of the problem here is the way people engage with stories like this. (Especially young men in their teens or early 20s.) They treat it like it's not a story with ups and downs, but a sport. You root for your favorite characters, and when bad things happen to them that means you're losing.

I am disconnected from fandom spaces in general. Sometimes I catch site of a post, it often involves the phrase “it’s okay to”, that is clearly in response to some utterly baffling piece of internecine drama that reminds me that this is the correct path to follow. Similarly here, but in much greater detail, Bobby Schroeder outlines how angry fans made the character of Lanolin in the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog a central point of hate that I had no idea of. Lanolin was not my favourite character (though I do quite enjoy Adam Bryce Thomas’s little side comic with her and Shadow bonding over coffee) but the level of toxicity outlined here sounds exhausting. I do think that Schroeder might be ascribing more force to angry fans on Twitter than is warranted in motivating certain creative decisions, but it is easy to see why getting personally dragged into this stuff constantly would colour your perceptions of its impact.

Games

Becoming a Video Game Scientist Part 1: Archipelago — Natalie Weizenbaum

The core problem was this: because it was so difficult to figure out how to do anything at runtime in these games, the only thing the mod was really able to influence was the moment the player received an item. They could see which items the player was getting and replace them with something else. What's more, this didn't work with items purchased from a shop.

Interesting high-level description of making a randomiser mod.

Protagony Three: Gordon — Ian Danskin

Mapping time to space to make a subjective real time that spans a greater period than is temporally possible. Making time hyper-real. That is beyond Oscar bait. That is Golden Lion. It's not quite Palme d’Or, but it’s definitely Grand Prix. But in video games it’s basic literacy.

I am including a video and you can’t stop me! Danskins puts into coherent words some thoughts that I have had about games, and specifically about Half-Life 2, for years.

The Serious Zone

Our Visibility is Somehow a Threat to Power — Margaret Killjoy

I think this gets at the fundamental threat we pose to fascism, and to authoritarian structures more broadly. Authoritarianism relies on classification and stratification, on strict social order. Yet here I am, not only telling everyone in the world that I’m a girl, but having everyone either believe me or politely accept that I see the world differently than they do.

We are going to keep going.

Britain, the Ungoverned Country — Simon McGarr

Starmer's Government followed a plan by FG transplant Morgan McSweeney, to tack hard to the right to chase Reform on immigration, bigotry towards trans people and, weirdly, flag-shagging.

This so upset its voters that they got up and left, going to the Green party or just staying at home. It won them precisely zero votes from people who wanted Reform-style policies, who just voted for Reform.

An Irish look at British politics.

Kill Chain — Kevin Baker

Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it. Clausewitz called what unfolds when you refused to notice friction a “war on paper,” a plan that proceeds without resistance because everything that connected it to the world it was supposed to act on has been taken out.

Really good read on how automation is actually being used, the ends it is being used to justify and the failure to talk about these things correctly.

🐘 Is it possible to make a home screen shortcut in Android that when pressed will run a script to generate a filename based on today’s date and possibly other parameters, create the file if it doesn’t exist already, and then open it in my phone’s default text editor?

2026-05-18T21:47:55+01:00

Is it possible to make a home screen shortcut in Android that when pressed will run a script to generate a filename based on today’s date and possibly other parameters, create the file if it doesn’t exist already, and then open it in my phone’s default text editor?

🐘 The protagonist of Girls × Vampire is named ルルナ

2026-05-18T09:17:46+01:00

The protagonist of Girls × Vampire is named ルルナ. The scanlation on Mangadex has transliterated her name as Ruruna, while the Kinokuniya USA print has gone with Luluna instead. Only the people doing the German translation at Dokico seems to have noticed that it says Ruluna on the cover art.

illustration of a vampire biting someone, showing blood

🐘 The Japanese for “goo morning” is ｢おはようぐーざいます｣

2026-05-16T09:24:36+01:00

The Japanese for “goo morning” is ｢おはようぐーざいます｣

One Year On

2026-05-15T13:20:00+01:00

This time one year ago Ellie’s body was growing cold in her bed. It was only three weeks after our first anniversary of going on a date together and only two weeks after she had told me she was plural. The only other person she had told outside of some online spaces that she alluded to was her therapist. It was also just a few weeks after a local annual lesbian event that I had brought her to for the first time. At the opening ceremony I had mentioned going for the first time in 2022 with my friend Hellen, who had then died suddenly in 2024. I did not expect to be repeating the same thing again this year, bringing Caoimhe³ along with me and talking about Ellie. If anything happens to Caoimhe I am never going again.

I had a lovely time with Ellie the evening before she died. I had been texting her during the day about trashy manga scanlations that I was reading and other silly things. In the evening after work I attended a local queer event discussing the then-recent anti-trans rulings by the UK supreme court and then called to Ellie’s flat to see her for a bit. It was a really love time. We talked a little bit about her plurality and some serious things but it was mostly just an hour or two chilling and cuddling on her sofa. We watched an episode of Wolf’s Rain, an anime she was showing me that was important to her as as teenager. She was really excited for Blue to show up as a character in the next episode.

I headed home just before ten. I would have liked to spend the night but I have sleep apnea and wouldn’t have had my CPAP machine and we both had work in the morning. The last message she sent me was at half ten. The next day she wasn’t responding to messages and I got increasingly worried the more the day went on. We were meant to see Rūrangi in the cinema together and I called to her flat after work before the movie to knock on her door but there was no answer. When I tried to call her I could hear her phone inside. I really, really hoped that she had just accidentally left her phone at home and hadn’t gotten back from work yet, but by the time the movie was over I was utterly sick with worry. A few friends went with me back to her flat and we called the Gardaí to do a wellness check. Eventually they got the key from the building manager and found her inside. There was a lot of waiting around. They needed someone to identify her and I asked to. A body that has been dead for a day is not a pretty sight but I wanted to be able to see her that last time.

Ellie had a lot of trouble sleeping and had prescription sleeping pills and sometimes also took the type of cough syrup that makes you drowsy for the same effect. The pathologist who examined her reckoned that she took something to help her sleep and then passed out face down, suffocating while the drugs stopped her from waking up. Hellen had a sudden blood clot while bedridden after breaking a leg. Both took at least a day to be found. I don’t like sleeping by myself or living alone any more.

Thankfully I am planning on moving in with Caoimhe very soon. She has been wonderful for helping me get through this last year and I very much look forward to living with her and her boys. There will be some effort and friction bringing my stuff to Sandy Lane and figuring out the shape of our lives together, but I have already been enjoying planning through all the little things with her as we prepare for the move. We have been looking after each other and we have both sorely needed it.

I’m going for dinner tonight with her and some other friends who where there with me when Ellie was found. We are going to keep going.

🐘 There was a notice in the university toilets saying to leave them clean in English and Irish but seeing it was in the languages building the grammar for the Irish on many of them had been corrected.

2026-05-14T11:15:23+01:00

There was a notice in the university toilets saying to leave them clean in English and Irish but seeing it was in the languages building the grammar for the Irish on many of them had been corrected.

It said “fágtar” instead of “fág” - The passive voice rather than imperative. In effect saying “The toilets are left clean, please,” instead of “Leave the toilets clean, please.”

🐘 going to a Japanese class with my girlfriend tonight 💙

2026-05-13T12:21:35+01:00

going to a Japanese class with my girlfriend tonight 💙

🐘 fondly remembering the time The Guardian quoted Pixelated Boat’s tiny train world post as an actual excerpt from 1984

2026-05-12T20:54:33+01:00

fondly remembering the time The Guardian quoted Pixelated Boat’s tiny train world post as an actual excerpt from 1984

https://web.archive.org/web/20170125201854/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/26/i-tried-moving-to-the-country-now-i-spend-the-savings-travelling-to-sydney

🐘 I am in my weakened state (we have been undermining government infrastructure for some time)

2026-05-12T20:28:28+01:00

I am in my weakened state (we have been undermining government infrastructure for some time)

🐘 a friend was watching me play Baldur’s Gate 3 and got sad because I was being evil 🥺

2026-05-10T21:11:35+01:00

a friend was watching me play Baldur’s Gate 3 and got sad because I was being evil 🥺

♻️ How Old is the Name Fiona?

2026-05-09T17:30:00+01:00

🐘 What if there was a Japanese detective who was a very stealthy donkey

2026-05-09T16:43:23+01:00

What if there was a Japanese detective who was a very stealthy donkey

Furuhata Ninjaburro

Sign my guestbook!

2026-05-08T19:00:00+01:00

I have a guestbook page now! This is something I kept meaning to set up for a while but kept forgetting to. Seeing as I already have a comments system with Comentario I have set it up just as a mostly blank page with a comments section and some extra styling. The homepage is also displaying the latest guestbook message and a link to the page. You don’t need to make an account.

I generally do be tinkering with the site a lot without posting about most of the changes. Recently I’ve added more tags, including adding new tags to existing posts, and making custom icons for some old tags that were using emoji as icons.

🐘 The “archeologists will identify your skeleton as male” thing is funny and almost telling? Of course transphobes see the human body in terms of its Ruinenwert. Fascist deathcult mentality.

2026-05-08T11:23:30+01:00

The “archeologists will identify your skeleton as male” thing is funny and almost telling? Of course transphobes see the human body in terms of its Ruinenwert. Fascist deathcult mentality.

🐘 I think this George A. Romero dude might be a pretty good director. Anyone know about this guy?

2026-05-07T22:07:09+01:00

I think this George A. Romero dude might be a pretty good director. Anyone know about this guy?

🐘 this man is doing video alchemy

2026-05-02T17:33:41+01:00

this man is doing video alchemy