#AdventOfCode Day 2 in #Vim keystrokes:

:s/,/\r/g
qaqqa:%s/\v(.*)-/\1\r&
:v/\v-|^(.+)\1$/d
:sil!g/\v^(.*)-\1$/d
:g/-/norm ⟨Ctrl-A⟩@aq@a
vipJ:s/ /+/g
C⟨Ctrl+R⟩=⟨Ctrl+R⟩-

Explanation(ish), avoiding fifthglyph, and part 2: www.reddit.com/r/adventofco...

I think somebody who's *chosen* to follow you online might more likely to respond because it's a choice to have you in our lives?

Anyway, that's my excuse for saying:

Just be you, and if other people find your brokenness to be boring, that's on them?

#AdventOfCode Day 1 part 2 in #Vim keystrokes, stupidly inefficiently, but it allowed re-using @a from part 1 unmodified:

qbqqbylxD@-"0p⟨Enter⟩@bq@b:%s/\v.@<=.@=/\r/g⟨Enter⟩
:%s/L/⟨Ctrl-X⟩/|%s/R/⟨Ctrl-A⟩⟨Enter⟩:%s/^/1⟨Enter⟩{O50⟨Esc⟩

www.reddit.com/r/adventofco...

And I tried to open door 1 in my advent calendar, but got this instead: bigdave44.com/2025/12/01/d...

Also, today's unrelated book review is ‘How to Solve Your Own Murder’ (a novel, not a guidebook!) by @kristenperrin.bsky.social, which I very much recommend:
bigdave44.com/2025/12/01/d...

Ditto — and I've seen The Tremoloes live!

I knew Bow Wow Wow and had a feeling that a Spice Girl had also done it, put picked the wrong one. #PopMaster

Also, I know a beginner who's trying to learn from the site and concluded that some guesswork or leap is often needed to get the final answer from the components — making crosswords seem more impenetrable than they actually are.

When I eventually worked out the definition (a considerable time after getting the wordplay!), it did make me smile … but I'm not keen on an adjectival phrase being used to define a noun.

‘Hapgood’ — featuring double-agent spies and the maths of the Bridges of Königsberg!

RIP.

Yes. The options were beefburger, chicken burger, or plant-based burger. It didn't mention what they'd be adorning them with!

A colleague took a bite of theirs and remarked “Oooh, that's *very* plant-based”, making that not sound like a good option either.

And then the Harrogate Theatre website went down …

That was a tense half-hour of refreshing.

Phew! Got them eventually.

I had no idea that @bellowhead.bsky.social provoked Glastonbury/Taylor Swift levels of demand on web servers!

Re-added some tickets, clicked through the same bits again to pay, first 3 pages seem to be going well, and then … the Cloudflare error has been replaced by a direct web server error:

Finally the Harrogate tickets site reloads … only to complain that my basket is empty — which is very much the site's fault, not mine!

(Well, partially mine for double-timing it with a different event in another tab.)

So they're fine with the idea of satire, just so long as it dosn't satirise any views that “many [people] actually believe”‽

Good luck with that!

Ah, thank you — I had been wondering why I'd never noticed the mansion on top of Boots Opticians, but that explains it!