This, known as bastet to its friends, has been around since at least 2005. I heard of it today. It's a variety of Tetris, but one that will always queue up the optimally worst next piece. ("So kinda like normal Tetris then", I thought.) And there's a devilish mode in which it will not tell you what piece is up next either. That one was too hardcore even for me.
It's available in the Ubuntu package repositories as bastet, and on Homebrew for the Mac, and apparently there is even a Windows version.
You may have heard of the Tetris effect; I wonder what damage this hilariously evil variant could do if you played it enough. The stuff of literal nightmares?
It took me five years to find one of these in usable condition. And even then I could not find one! Instead, my brother did, because he has a weird skill of finding parts that don't exist. Back when he owned it, he somehow managed to source rear seats for it (the owner before him removed them and binned them, because racecar), and what might have been the last three 323 GTX rear arch repair panels in the country. And Alex delivers again! He managed to find a parcel shelf in the United States, priced at $100 (plus the usual horrific shipping costs).
The interior, then, is now complete, other than the boot carpet situation, which the parcel shelf allows me to ignore. The parcel shelf definitely needs a clean (that'll be my lunchtime project for tomorrow, because working from home is pretty great), but otherwise it's in awesome condition.
Today's episode of "shipping from the US is madness" thing (previously): I have still not worked out whether and under what criteria I will be paying import VAT for anything I import from abroad. I had to pay £28 on this $100 parcel shelf, yet paid none on my short shifter & bush kit, or on my as-yet-unfitted digital dashboard (all of which are worth substantially more than $100). If it's not actually random, the criteria are obscure enough that it may as well be!
Unrelated story from today: A chap spots my car outside the shop - as I learned, he is a mechanic by trade and a petrolhead - and told me that he's heard it driving around but can't work out whether it's turbocharged or whether it's supercharged. Yeah, maybe I really should stop ignoring that timing belt whine...
It's calming. Sepia-toned. Traditional. But did you know there was a parallel, almost word-for-word and shot-for-shot identical advert in the United States? (For my friends in the United States, just read this blog post backwards and it'll make more sense.)
Also...You know how we associate the sweets with Grandad and cardigans in the collective consciousness? According to the font of all truth, it only adopted the name "Werther's Original" in the 1990s, so for Grandad to have first tried them when he was four years old would have involved time travel. And that means...someone who is 35 years old today, and is statistically less than likely to be a grandfather, is older than the name "Werther's Original".
Although, if you look at the UK advert, the name on the packet Grandad first enjoyed as a four-year-old was "Werther's Echte". That name dates back to 1967, so at the earliest Grandad in the advert was born in 1963. Which means (yeah I'm jumping in-and-out of Werther's Universe here), he would have been in his late twenties when the advert was made. Well, that's not so implausible; I didn't age so well...
But wait? Echte? Well, Werther's are made by a German company, and are named after a town in Germany called Werther. That's right kids, you've been doing it wrong: the correct pronunciation of Werther is not entirely unlike "vair-tear":
The only positive side effect of my Facebook account reactivating itself (it is now scheduled for permanent deletion, since Facebook won't play nice) is that I got to find out about a car meet on Saturday with Only Fools & Motors over at the Coach & Horses at Tilney All Saints on Saturday. It seems that this would be the last event of the year, and not just because of that thing that is going to forbid gatherings of more than six people. And so everyone's (my) favourite sleeper Mazda 323 got to have her first outing!
So, before my car returned to the road at the start of August, I had not even left my village since lockdown started. With the car done, I did get to go further away, but this meet was the first time I have socialised and mingled and generally been around a non-trivial number of people, and it felt good.
It was a nice way to burn about three hours. I didn't expect that at any car meet my 1987 Mazda would be about the median age of vehicles in any particular place, but that happened - the variety of cars was huge! And I met some old friends (there were more than a few drift friends there) and I got to make some new ones too.
There are a lot of posts & questions & other things in various places online wherein people are complaining about this happening to them.
Usually there's someone to tell them that nope, it's something you did.
I can guarantee that it is not, in fact, necessarily something you have done.
Because it happened to me (which totally changed my opinion about Facebook being an awful company), and I went to specific lengths to ensure that Facebook would not reactivate my account when I deactivated it. Specifically:
I did not sign in from any other devices. I do not have the Facebook app on any of my phones, and never have. Only two things have accessed it: my desktop computer and my laptop. After deactivating my account, I cleared the cookies on my laptop to be sure.
I do not have any apps that could have reactivated it, because there are NO apps connected to my account.
It is entirely implausible that anyone could have logged into my account with my credentials. My password is extremely long and complex (it is "hunter2"[1]). In the unlikely event that someone guessed a 28-character password, they decided to...do absolutely nothing with my account. But I'll reiterate, nobody guessed my password.
From what I have read, according to some rando on Quora, there is a "This is temporary, I will get back soon" checkbox?! Hmm... I'm not actually saying this is impossible. But when I deactivated my account I specifically checked for sneaky things like this because Facebook is an awful company staffed with terrible people, and if I trust them with anything it is that they will reliably do whatever thing gives nice values on the "Engagement" axis on a graph.
So...either Facebook does in fact randomly reactivate your account, or Facebook is doing some sneaky shit in which you have "agreed" to randomly reactivate your account. They are either betraying you, or they are using dark patterns during account deactivation such that someone who is actively looking for dark patterns is tricked into "agreeing" that they will reactivate it. Either way, it is being reactivated without your consent. Anyone that tells you otherwise is gaslighting you.
...this seems like a good idea.
This was just shy of £25 on Amazon, and while I doubt I will need to use it because I totally trust this car to not set on fire,
there's no reason I should not have one handy. £25 and a tiny bit less boot space is a small sacrifice for not losing four years of work.
Also...the boot, where the extinguisher is bolted in, was not part of my interior cleanup rampage, and it looks absolutely terrible. The carpet is a Mazda carpet, but it is not from a Mazda 323; it has a nicely-sewn Mazda logo suggesting it is a carpet made for a Mazda Something but it has been cut about to fit inside the back of the GTX (which is why I didn't mind drilling a hole through it). It is also hopelessly warped by the car not being watertight when I bought it. I'll look into my options.
My brother Alex came over in his E30 to make my driveway look much cooler. 80s car friends, yay! 💕 We've been meaning to get a photo of them together, when they are both working, so we did!
Actually, the goal today was not to add even more obnoxiously loud colours to my driveway, but to get Alex's clutch working on his 1963 Land Rover, not pictured (yet). That did not work, because of a lack of parts. We thought the clutch slave cylinder was dead, because Alex had installed it upside down (which means bleeding it will not work as as it should). With the slave cylinder installed the right way up and with the system bled appropriately, the clutch still didn't work, which means the master cylinder is probably dead in some way. We didn't have a master cylinder, so that should have been the end of the day.
Except...once you start, you're sort of committed to doing something that day, so we decided to save it by getting stuff done in lieu of getting anything done that we actually wanted to, like cleaning up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted.
HEALTH AND SAFETY VIOLATION! Always wear a mask while spraying. You do not want to inhale paint. If you sniff paint fumes too much you'll end up like me or Alex.
By which I mean Alex cleaned up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted. I mostly sat around making stupid jokes and offering encouragement and giving the occasional good idea. The work itself didn't require a second person.
But, I did get to hang out with my brother at a sensible distance, we had a day of fun and of getting things done that we didn't intend to do and of decades-old in-jokes, we consumed food, and Alex departed with a wicked rolling burnout down my street to round it off.
Sometimes, an unproductive day can be a good day. ❤️
