Pablo
Dec. 19th, 2025 11:57 pmDespite having technically finished work yesterday, I did log on for one meeting today because it looked so incredibly useful, and it was. And it was done at noon so I still had time to help pack and get stuff ready and we got going on time.
We had a pretty smooth journey to Birmingham and a delightful time visiting
barakta and Kim and seeing their new house before we got here.
Now we're at D's sister's. Her husband and son arranged to get her a sourdough starter from a from a friend of the kid's.
Of course the first thing they have to do with it is name it.
I joked that it should be called Joe Ryan of course. Or Pablo López. (They are starters for my baseball team, you see.)
So now it's called Pablo.
The kid once called it Pablo Escobar and now its full name is Pablo Escojar.
Friday Squid Blogging: Petting a Squid
Dec. 19th, 2025 10:06 pmVideo from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a—looks like a Humboldt—squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Splat
Dec. 19th, 2025 11:20 am
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
They quietly cruise into a carwash and try to put his body in the trash.
Today's News:
you can't spell "sexagesimal" without "ages"! and i have NO IDEA what that implies
Dec. 19th, 2025 12:00 am| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about |

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December 19th, 2025: And that is IT for 2025, everyone!! I'm taking the rest of the year off (AS IS TRADITION) and will be back on January 5th with some BRAND NEW COMICS for you!! Mostly new, anyway. They might have the same pictures?? Thank you as always for being a reader - it means the world to me, and it's what has allowed me to have An Entire Career, so "thankful" doesn't really cover how I feel. You are the best! Yes, you, the person reading this! See you in 2026 :0 – Ryan | ||
AI Advertising Company Hacked
Dec. 19th, 2025 12:02 pmAt least some of this is coming to light:
Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.
The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself.
Slashdot thread.
Interesting Links for 19-12-2025
Dec. 19th, 2025 12:00 pm- 1. Combining over 650 "Greatest Comic Book" lists to find the critical consensus on the 200 Greatest Comics of All Time
- (tags:viaLinkMachineGo comics recommendation )
- 2. Jury trial reforms: How did the court backlog get so bad?
- (tags:uk law austerity )
- 3. Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links
- (tags:facebook business )
- 4. Heart and Kidney Diseases, plus Type 2 Diabetes, May Be One Illness
- (tags:heart disease diabetes )
- 5. Christian couple who believe homosexuality is 'wrong' blocked from fostering children (case went to the high court)
- (tags:bigotry adoption LGBT UK religion )
- 6. 2025 in polls
- (tags:uk polls politics )
- 7. £100 UK contactless card limit to be lifted from March
- (tags:uk money Technology )
- 8. YouTube bans two popular channels that created fake AI movie trailers
- (tags:youtube ai trailers fraud )
- 9. How Dinosaurs Thrived in the Snow
- (tags:dinosaurs snow weather cold )
Bolted! Game – Designer Diary
Dec. 19th, 2025 07:53 amMy game Bolted! has under 48 hours left on Kickstarter, and I’ve written a “Designer Diary” about some of the game’s development process — parts of which which longtime readers may recognize!
I like sharing this kind of stuff, even though it might spotlight some of my more doofus choices and missteps, because I trust that some people will find the process interesting, and take heart at how a polished outcome can be the result of a long, winding, and setback-filled process.
Does that mean that the final result is definitionally awesome? Well, yes, of course.
This is mainly written for an audience new to the game and new to my work generally. I submitted it to BoardGameGeek for their blog of designer diaries (which will reach an audience that mostly has never heard of me).
I don’t actually know if they’ll publish it, but I wanted to make sure it was published SOMEWHERE, so while I wait to hear back from them, here it is!

Bolted! A Game of Creative Necromancy
When you combine different things, sometimes the result is a chemical reaction. Other times, it’s a surprising creative breakthrough.
I’m the author of the comic strip Wondermark, which is created collage-style out of vintage illustrations. So I’ve long been a champion of “creative re-combination.”
Making comics from collage has both freedoms and limitations. I get to hitch a ride on beautiful artwork from ages past, but I’m also constrained in storytelling (to a degree) by the images I can find.
It means the artwork itself is a creative collaborator. The gestures, expressions, and style of the artwork inform the stories that I tell with them…
Christmas is the time of year to worry about two things: running out of money, and playing board games. To mark the festive season, Tim is joined by creator of Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield, for a special Q&A about economics and game design.
How should you go about designing a game? Will Magic ever be made into a movie? Why was there an intentional crash of the Magic stock market? Why do so many people hate monopoly? Plus, Richard has a bone to pick with Tim about a previous episode of Cautionary Questions.
For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, our monthly newsletter and behind-the-scenes conversations with members of the Cautionary Tales production team, consider joining the Cautionary Club.
Resizable arrays in optimal time and space.
Dec. 18th, 2025 03:32 am- 2025‑12‑18 - Resizable arrays in optimal time and space.
- https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~imunro/cs840/ResizableArrays.pdf
- redirect https://dotat.at/:/GCM4N
- blurb https://dotat.at/:/GCM4N.html
- atom entry https://dotat.at/:/GCM4N.atom
- web.archive.org archive.today
fuzzy matching: still a mistake
Dec. 18th, 2025 10:29 pmNo, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!
(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)
Liminal time
Dec. 18th, 2025 09:00 pmThis morning I mused that today is in that liminal space where I cannot yet eat the cheese we bought for Christmas but there are mince pies on the countertop and I could have one for breakfast.
I did have one for breakfast. (With a slice of regular cheese because mince pies are too sweet for me on their own and taste really good with strong cheese.)
D and I are off to family Christmas celebrations tomorrow, so I signed off work this afternoon for the last time until 2026!
In the three previous years I've had a white collar job, I've never taken this long off, I've always worked a little between Christmas and new year. I kinda like it for catching up on stuff when work is quiet and people leave me alone, and long stretches of unstructured time isn't good for my mental health.
But this time, I'm so ready for this. This year has been so long.
(I know myself well enough to expect that I'll be horrified on the 27th of December when I have a whole week ahead of me with nothing to do. But I can worry about that when I get to it.)
I'm a little sad to be missing queer club's Christmas party this evening, but my carefully planned after-work itinerary fell apart almost as soon as I made it, when my friend L texted and asked if I could come over because he and his husband (also my friend) were having a bad mental health time thanks to the DWP (they are both disabled).
I almost literally dropped everything and left the house, because L isn't the kind of person who gets in touch spontaneously, has the energy for social stuff, or can ask for help easily, so for him to do all these things felt like a big deal to me.
It felt kinda weird to leave in what felt like an emergency and arrive only able to offer hugs and silly, distracting conversation. But I'm assured that it did help. And I'm glad I could do it, I like them so much. It was a good use of my social spoons for the evening.
Mudlarking 73 - dark and drizzly
Dec. 18th, 2025 08:35 pmThere’s another bit of a J Bourne bottle that says 1860 on it, and there’s GL, which was probably G.L. Ashworth, and that has a 3 on it, so maybe that’s from the 1930s?
I am not sure what “kha” is from - probably not the mayor.
“Woo” could be Wood & Son.

(You need a permit to mudlark or search on the Thames foreshore.)
Tiff & Eve Crossover Comic
Dec. 18th, 2025 06:59 pmThis comic was created as part of a “Secret Santa” comics exchange on Reddit. These characters are Tiff and Eve, and this strip was written by Fran Sundblad, the author of the comic Tiff
& Eve, and rendered in Wondermark style by me.
- Here’s the original Reddit post
- More Tiff
& Eve comics are on Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, and Patreon - Check out this post for super secret behind the scenes info
Santa Claus is still a woman
Dec. 18th, 2025 05:56 pmThe first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to navigate the task of choosing them. It is a mark of your columnist’s slow wits, then, that after 20 years of writing columns about the economics of Christmas, he has only just noticed the connection between Christmas gifts and women.
The classic study of this topic was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1990 by Eileen Fischer and Stephen J Arnold. Fischer and Arnold interviewed almost 300 people about their seasonal gift-giving attitudes and behaviours. Many men refused to answer, suggesting that they didn’t know anything about the subject and that the researchers really should interview their wives instead.
The men who did answer the questions were presumably more progressive than those who refused, but even so the results were stark: women bought gifts for a larger number of people (more than half as many again) and started shopping earlier. They also took more care, spending more time per person, spending less money and, as far as we can tell, giving fewer gifts that needed to be returned or exchanged. Buying, choosing and wrapping Christmas gifts was widely regarded as women’s work.
(A subsequent study, published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing by Michel Laroche and colleagues, also concluded that women started shopping for Christmas gifts much earlier in the year, were more diligent in gathering information about what products were available, and finished the task earlier.)
Men, meanwhile, had a tendency to buy gifts that were as much for their own pleasure as anyone else’s. Any woman whose boyfriend or husband has thoughtfully given them elaborate yet impractical lingerie will no doubt nod in recognition, but these “self gifts” also include toys for the children that dad thinks might be fun to play with.
For men, Christmas gifts are either somebody else’s problem, or they are frivolous and fun. Many women may not see them quite like that.
In 1984, the sociologist Theodore Caplow published an ethnographic study of Christmas rituals in Muncie, Indiana. Caplow described a complex set of unwritten rules, to which most households adhered even though nobody had ever quite seen them articulated. Several of these rules concerned the role of women: “Women were much more active as gift givers than men, and did nearly all of the gift wrapping”; and another bombshell, “Although married women were largely responsible for Christmas gift giving, they did not favor their own relatives over their husbands’.”
In other words, many a wife was responsible for buying the gifts not only for her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, but for those of her husband too. Caplow added that 57 per cent of women were solely responsible for wrapping gifts, but only 16 per cent of men. In a slightly earlier study, Caplow also concluded that women were responsible, either solely or jointly with someone else, for 84 per cent of all gifts. One suspects that most of the “joint” gifts from married couples were in fact arranged by the wives, but even excluding joint gifts, women were responsible for more than twice as many gifts as men.
How seriously should we take studies of gender roles that are decades old? After all, as Corinne Low describes in her new book Femonomics, a lot has changed in the past few decades. By 2015, US women aged 25-45 were averaging about 10 hours a week more paid market work than in 1975, and about 10 hours a week less housework. Shouldn’t we expect these old attitudes to Christmas organisation to evaporate?
Perhaps not. Low notes that women also spend six hours a week more time on childcare. (Men’s contribution to childcare has increased, but less and from a much lower base.) And housework contributions are stubbornly unrelated to economic incentives: “A man who earns only 20 per cent of the household income does about the same amount of housework as a man who earns 80 per cent!” writes Low.
In any case, argues economist Bernd Stauss in his 2023 book chapter “Gifts and Gender: Santa Claus is a Woman”, there is something particularly stubborn about gender roles at Christmas. Stauss reviews the literature and concludes that women still seem to be the ones buying the joint gifts and wrapping all the presents. Why? Perhaps because many gifts, particularly those bought by women, are about maintaining relationships with the extended family. (Or, as sociologists call it, “kin keeping”.) All year round it is often the women making the phone calls and arranging the family visits, and at Christmas that extends to writing the Christmas cards and co-ordinating the round of hosting and visiting — and, naturally, to dealing with the Christmas gifts.
As Caplow points out, the unwritten rules governing these gifts are surprisingly intricate. Gifts are supposed to match the (also unwritten) value of the relationship. A son-in-law or daughter-in-law is supposed to get the same value of gift as the blood relative they married; it would be extremely awkward to give a more valuable gift to a niece than to a daughter, or to give very different gifts to two of one’s own offspring; parents are allowed to give cash to their offspring, but never vice versa, even if everyone is an adult. These rules represent a social minefield, and accidental detonations are not uncommon. Frivolous and fun it is not.
This is not to deny that some people enjoy the whole business. (Despite my annual warnings against wasteful gift-giving at Christmas, I confess a fondness for the task.) But the point is that choosing and wrapping Christmas gifts is a job that seems optional for men, whereas for women social pressures make it all but compulsory.
Women chafing under this unequal responsibility have some scorched-earth tactics available, including flat refusal or, the path chosen by Corinne Low, divorcing hubby and marrying a woman instead. If that seems radical, there is always the option of a frank conversation and a his-and-hers checklist.
Or just grin and bear it. Fischer and Arnold interviewed several women who “described their shopping in terms that indicated that, in their minds, it was real work that had to be carried out efficiently and effectively”.
An efficient and effective Christmas! That sounds like a job for an economist — and for my next column.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 November 2025.
I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.
- 2025‑12‑18 - MuseAir: A portable hashing algorithm that heavily optimized for performance and quality, incorporating structures never before implemented.
- https://github.com/eternal-io/museair
- redirect https://dotat.at/:/MJFKI
- blurb https://dotat.at/:/MJFKI.html
- atom entry https://dotat.at/:/MJFKI.atom
- web.archive.org archive.today
Someone Boarded a Plane at Heathrow Without a Ticket or Passport
Dec. 18th, 2025 04:41 pmI’m sure there’s a story here:
Sources say the man had tailgated his way <https://uk.news.yahoo.com/fury-passengers-major-london-aiport-152235291.html>through to security screening and passed security, meaning he was not detected carrying any banned items.
The man deceived the BA check-in agent by posing as a family member who had their passports and boarding passes inspected in the usual way.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Where
Dec. 18th, 2025 11:20 am
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
We could build this NOW. The future of damaging children is HERE.
Today's News:
ORG End of Year Review 2025
Dec. 18th, 2025 01:55 pmDigital rights in 2025
From age verification and digital ID to crime-predicting tech and attacks on migrants’ digital rights, this year we had to fight harder than ever against Big tech and government policies that threaten our rights. Here’s what we achieved with your help.

Exposing eVisa harms
The UK’s shambolic eVisa scheme has left migrants unable to prove their right to work and live in the UK — with devastating consequences, including people losing job offers, university places and even being made homeless. We spoke abouit this at an event in parliament, chaired by John McDonnell MP.
Joint research revealed the emotional and practical toll the scheme takes and forewarned what could happen if digital ID is rolled out to everyone.
After finally obtaining the Home Office’s DPIA, we found it incomplete and misleading, and in breach of the Home Office’s GDPR and equality duties. 19 organisations joined us in calling for the ICO to investigate.

Taking on Stalker Ads
Meta may have settled with activist Tanya O’Carroll, but they’re still determined to bombard the rest of us with invasive “stalker ads.”
This year we investigated how Meta’s targeted ad system both fuels discrimination and spreads misinformation but also published a roadmap showing exactly how Meta could adopt healthier, rights-respecting advertising models.
We helped the public to formally object to targeted ads and even visited Meta’s offices to ask why they were ignoring us. They’ve since announced a flawed ‘pay or consent’ model – so this fight isn’t over!

Investigating Election Canvassing apps
Our investigation uncovered major privacy gaps in the canvassing apps used by UK parties — including questionable uses of voter data that may even breach the law.

Challenging dangerous ‘crime-predicting’ tech
Three-quarters of UK police forces are already using so-called ‘crime-predicting’ technology.
We took the fight directly to the National Police Chiefs’ Conference in Westminster, challenging these harmful automated systems that reinforce bias, erode trust, and threaten civil liberties.

Fixing the Online Safety Act
2025 marked the year Internet users were forced to hand over personal data to unregulated age-verification companies just to content and app features. This was not just about stopping kids from seeing porn – we found health advice and content about Palestine being age-gated.
We tracked this creeping censorship, issued guidance to organisations navigating the Act, and published a major report on how the OSA can (and must) be fixed.
We also united organisations to demand regulation of age-verification providers and warned the public, MPs and regulators that the next wave of OSA rules could suppress young people’s expression and censor political protest.
One way parliamentarians can keep us safer online is through existing competition powers so that users can choose their content prioritisation and moderation engines, and switch their social media provider, without losing their networks of contacts. In our interoperability report, we outline what needs to happen for this to come about.

Defending encryption
When the UK government pushed Apple for backdoor access to encrypted products, we stepped in. We successfully fought to ensure that at least some of Apple’s appeal would be heard in public, recognising the huge global implications for secure communication.
With help from our supporters, we worked with lawyers to make sure the perspective of technologists and privacy services, alongside their users, would be put forward in that case. And although the government has reportedly backed down on forcing Apple to break its own security, the dangerous powers remain on the books. We’ll keep fighting until they’re gone.
Our Practice Safe Text campaign underscored why encryption matters for us all but particularly the LGBTQ+ community who rely on encrypted services to find community, resources and support.

Protecting political protest
The UK’s overly broad terrorism definition, combined with the Online Safety Act, risks pushing platforms to suppress content about Palestine and Gaza.
As reported in the Guardian, we raised urgent concerns with Ofcom and major tech platforms, and highlighted the broader dangers this poses to political speech and rights to protest.

Fighting for your data protection rights
We challenged the harms of the Data Use and Access Bill, which weakened all of our data protection rights and leaves us vulnerable to future changes to how our data can be shared and used without proper parliamentary scrutiny. We also warned that it could lead to the EU Adequacy agreement being struck down.
This year, the ICO reached a new low: refusing to formally investigate the MoD after one of the worst data breaches in UK history — a spreadsheet exposing over 19,000 people fleeing the Taliban.
We brought together over 70 organisations and experts to expose the collapse in ICO enforcement and called on Parliament to launch an inquiry. The Chair of the Science, Innovation & Technology Committee responded, acknowledging “institutional failure” at the ICO.
More to come in 2026.

Revealing the harms of Digital ID
Digital ID will be one of the biggest stories of 2026. We gave written and oral expert evidence to the Select Committee, highlight the risks these plans pose to privacy, equality, and civil liberties.
We know from the eVisa scheme how digital ID could impact people in their everyday lives. We’ll be fighting the introduction of this already expanding scheme next year.

Empowering people to exercise their rights
Our latest toolkit gives migrants and people working within the migrants’ rights sector advice on how their data and digital technology are being used for immigration control and the tools to access their own data. We also provided migrants with free VPNs to help them keep their data secure.


