I went to Youtube one evening and the site recommended that I watch some streamers’ playthrough of Photopia, so I clicked through to see what they thought.  At the end of the video, they had the following exchange:

“Shout out Photo-topia⁠—who made this?” 
“Aaron… Aaron Reed?”
“Shout out Aaron Reed!” 

Note: they were playing this on my web site.  On the screen as they were saying this was a tab that disagreed with whatever hallucinating LLM they had asked:

However, they did correct themselves before the video ended, and credited the game to Canadian poker player Adam Cader.

Speaking of my web site, I have found that spam filters have become aggressive enough that they throw away a lot of emails I wish that I had seen, but they do let enough actual spam through that I do get one or two spam messages every day.  Amusingly, the spam that gets through is probably whitelisted because it bills itself as urgent messages from the HR and IT departments of adamcadre.ac.  I really do need to slim down my support staff.

This month were the California primaries, winnowing large fields of candidates down to two for each office, and down in L.A., there was some hubbub when it initially looked as though facing off in the mayoral race against incumbent Karen Bass would be Donald Trump’s preferred candidate, fellow reality TV alumnus Spencer Pratt.  At least, that’s how I’d always heard him described in articles tracking the race⁠—I didn’t know what show he’d been on, or when.  But then I ran across an article that said:

Pratt, the former reality-TV villain and registered Republican who announced his campaign at a January rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of the L.A. wildfires, has built most of his platform on the destruction the fires caused.  His and Heidi Montag’s home was destroyed, and Pratt said he was running for mayor because he was upset over the city and incum­bent mayor Karen Bass’s response to the devastation.

And I thought, wait⁠—his name is Spencer… and he shares a home with someone named Heidi?  Where have I heard those names before?  And then it clicked.  Here is something I wrote back in 2010 in my article about The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons:

And the so-called celebrity magazines with complete strangers plastered on the covers, identified by first name only as if I’m supposed to know who “Spencer” and “Heidi” are… c’mon, I majored in pop culture, and I’ve never seen any of these people in my life.  How famous could they be? 

Well, I guess now I know who Spencer and Heidi are!  (And the answer to “How famous could they be?” turns out to be not famous enough for that fame to carry one of them to the general election, as Nithya Raman wound up passing Pratt to make it to November.)

Though our top-two primary system needs to be replaced, one of the many reasons I am grateful to live in California is that it’s not Pennsylvania, and thus when I have registered with my state’s Department of Education I have not had to answer janky security questions like the top one here:

As we hurtle into the future, my brain is finding it hard to process that the years coming up actually are years.  My bank issued me a new debit card, and the back said, “Valid through 7/31”.  I immediately thought, wait, this is only good until July 31st?  That’s only a month away!  Then I realized.

My new(-ish) apartment is the first place I’ve ever lived where I not only have to pay for gas and electric service but also for water and for garbage collection.  The latter two are handled by a company called Livable, and are not metered, but rather billed based on the number of residents in the unit⁠—and the information for this entire complex is avail­able on the web site, so I now know how many people are living in each of these apartments!  Livable is also one of the increasing number of companies who charge a hefty fee for credit card payments, so to avoid those, you have to submit your bank information.  To verify my bank account, Livable deposited $0.01 in my account, and the memo line for the transaction contained a six-letter code.  I then had to go to the Livable web site and enter that code.  And to get the code accepted, I had to GIVE THE PENNY BACK.

I passed a food truck selling a dish whose central ingredient was oyster mushrooms.  The sign called them “nature’s chicken”.  Is… is there something about actual chickens I haven’t been told…?

Finally, this was the month that gave the world its first trillionaire.  It seems like it was only yesterday that I was rolling my eyes at X-Force #117: