Sad to say, the first thing that popped into my head when Maomao said, "It was a woman," was, "For someone who grew up in the pleasure district, you sure lack imagination." I guess I'm incorrigible.

When in the past ten years have they ever been okay?

It does bring the constant closures (actual and threatened) in Thessalon, Ont. into perspective a bit, though.

Which is traditionally a sign of distress . . . Maybe not entirely inappropriate, at that.

They have less power density than other lithium-ion chemistries when both are new, but the dropoff over time is also less. That means that unless you replace your power banks fairly often, the LiFePO₄ version is likely to have higher density for much of its lifetime. They also tolerate at least double the number of charging cycles.

Not sure how to go about marketing that in our current disposable society, though.

Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren't quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.

There were two different animated PNG extensions, MNG and APNG. Neither of them ever really caught on. I guess they're hoping to do better by baking it into the core spec.

It all depends on whether Parliament wants the tariffs gone so badly that they'll back bad moves by Carney (technically, even the DST hasn't been repealed yet, because Carney doesn't have the authority to do that by himself—it's been paused, but it's still law until Parliament reconvenes and votes on it). Write your MP. Make it clear to them that you'd rather have tariffs than give in to the US on any of this.

Technically, being Deaf doesn't mean you can't speak, although fine-tuning for intelligibility is obviously a lot more work than it is for hearing people.

So they're outsourcing causing scandals to an LLM? I suppose that's a novel use of the technology.

People who wonder why I use a Linux desktop environment whose appearance and behaviour are basically unchanged from what they were 20 years ago, and daily drive a browser that forked from Firefox 27 and still uses that UI: this is why.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines . . . but they're not even trying.

Silly Awards Time!

• Toilet Humour Award: Apocalypse Hotel, which was surprisingly good despite the number of times poop came up.
• Most Overhyped: Lazarus, which was an okay popcorn action series but didn't deserve anything like the amount of promotion it got. At least it was better than Fractale.
• Most Deceptive First Episode: Kowloon Generic Romance, whose first episode plays like, well, a generic wallflower x pushy asshole romance setup. Until you hit the very end and realize that it's something else entirely. Runner-up: Yami Healer, whose first episode was just awful, while the rest of the show was okay brain candy. Honourable mention: Once Upon a Witch's Death—I haven't finished it yet, but as of the midpoint it seems to be morphing from tearjerker-of-the-week to having a larger plot that affects more than just Meg and her town.
• Biggest Missed Opportunity to Transmit Lore: Your Forma. Instead of repeating the "amicus robot" blurb at the very beginning of each episode, they could have put different sequences in there each time to provide direly needed explanations about other aspects of the setting. The only way to figure out what "your forma" actually is is to read the series' description blurb on a website; it's never explained inside the show.
• Dishonourable Mention for Harm to Kitties: Your Forma again.
• Most Confusing: Bye Bye Earth, still. The reveal in the next-to-last episode explains some of the weirdnesses of the setting, but not others. A lot of the lore surrounding the swords is still incoherent, for instance.