Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has the absolutely best visual flying experience I've ever seen. Younger me, who had to settle for a lot simpler graphics, would have had his little mind blown. But in what I consider one of the premier fumblings of product management, Microsoft and Asobo Studios turned Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 into Microsoft Dashboard Simulator 2020 by not making it possible to turn off the virtual cockpit. There is even a Home Cockpit mode they taunt us with that claims to do that but, alas, it doesn't work, never did, and likely never will.

Early mornings and sunrises often result in spectacular atmospheric effects. This morning was no exception.

I think we got something like 30cm of snow in a day. It was, of course, chaos.

Google Maps doesn't support the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query, and therefore remain bright even when the rest of the website has gone dark. But you can get something close to a dark mode Google Maps with a little bit of JavaScript.

A soft ice sheet that bunches up in the water.

Even more color.

An entity that sounds human, can process language and talk to you - but has no consiousness and no idea what it's talking about? I've seen that before. A couple of years ago I read a book, Blindsight by Peter Watts, that described an encounter between humans and an alien that had intelligence but not consciousness. The alien was described as "a Chinese room"; while it gave syntactically correct replies to the messages the humans sent, it became obvious that it had no idea what it was talking about.

With ChatGPT, we now have that alien here on Earth, and I thought I'd see what it would make of some of the messages sent by the humans.

Sometimes the sky just explodes with color.

There was this melancholic statement that made the rounds on Swedish Twitter:

Have you thought about the fact that once upon a time you went out and played for the very last time?

— A M A N D A (@kaptenamanda)

I particularly like the snowflake tree.

A walk along the water through the new snow.

It's way too cold for the fountains to work, but with some light strips we can have winter fountains anyway.

Ending the year with a bang!

A line of lights. Shot with Nikon 35mm f/1.8 DX on FX, f/1.8 and 1/6s, handheld at ISO 100. Would not have been able to get this level of shadow detail and dynamic range with any other lens that I have.

Man tager vad man haver, you take what you've got, as Kajsa Warg said. I wanted something for my Nikon D600 that was wider than my 50mm, but not as wide as my 15mm, fast, but not heavy.

...and when it snows it pours, too.

A walk from Husby Gård to Akalla.