On the weaponization of political discourse—and the necessity of enforcing values.
At one of the supermarkets I go to, I found these ice cream bars, what the Japanese, especially Kansai (west Japan) people call, "ice candy"These are made by Kubota Ice, a company in KochiWhat I like about these is that there aren't many ingredients in these, just milk, sugar and the fruit or "flavor"Back in March I tried this strawberry & milk bar and recently this matcha barSo
The latest ArchRivals Collector Fest took place today, and it was an extremely fun time! There were tons of vendors with trading cards, comics, toys, and other collectibles. The guests were very snazzy as well; I definitely enjoyed myself.Jessica MathewsEarly Bird entry kicked off at 8AM with a crowd eager to check the show out. I immediately said hello to my good friend Jessica Mathews. She had many of her awesome books, and we discussed how at the upcoming ToyMan show (July 12th) she would…
Awkward, to be developing an affection for Alvin that is not romantic nor absolutely platonic, and as a result feels abjectly transgressive. But, by God, defer your judgment of me for just one moment. Let me plead my case. Remove the cuffs from my wrists and drag me, on bloodied and knobby knees, in front of the pigs at the trough. In the long rectangle of the shaky spotlight, I say: Please, it isn’t my fault that there isn’t a good name for a relationship with a man twice my age with whom I…
There is a reason John Scalzi is one of my favorite authors in the world. He is outspoken about issues that are close to his heart and like most authors he is not a fan of AI. In fact he has a clause in his contracts that all artwork, translation etc on his books will be done by actual humans instead of AI. The creative crowd doesn’t like AI because the models are trained on media & text without licensing and thus without paying the original creator and the content it creates is actually quite…
The drive from Oklahoma into Kansas was mostly on two lane highways and without any breakdowns or unpleasant surprises. We pulled into Hillsdale State Park in the early afternoon and took Callie on a walk around this huge park with multiple campgrounds. Then we headed into town for some Kansas bbq at Poppa C’s.On the next morning, there was a beautiful quiet sunrise.We spent that day relaxing. Julia rented a kayak for a couple of hours. We picked up supplies at a local grocery store. I’ve never…
TED KOSMATKA “The Art of Alchemy.” First appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books, 2009) and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2009 Edition, edited by Rich Horton (Prime Books, 2010). There is a recurring th4eme to a certain number of similar stories, perhaps not as many as there used to be, in which an inventor of an improved means of propelling…
A letter dated this month (June 2026) and reproduced below makes it clear that the Friends of the Guildhall Art Gallery consider what is essentially the home of the City of London council’s art collection to be underfunded: …the Corporation’s apparent lack of interest in the Gallery, which is chronically underfunded and thus understaffed, despite its evident local and worldwide excellent reputation. The promised new culture strategy has been postponed at least twice. The committee will continue…
For a good part of the 20th Century, homosexual performers and actors in the United States went to great pains to hide their true sexuality. Homosexuality was frowned upon in American society, to the point that it was included in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a sociopathic personality disturbance, and sex between two people of the same sex was banned under the sodomy laws of the time. It should then come as no surprise that famed pianist,…
Probitas is a blended rum collaboration between Barbados’ Foursquare distillery and Hampden Estate from Jamaica, known as Veritas outside the United States. The expression launched a few years ago as a 47% “white” rum with bolder flavors than your typical light rum. The blend of Coffey still rum from Barbados and a bit of Hampden’s heavy pot still rum means it has a ton of flavor in a daiquiri or other cocktails where you want the rum to be clear or nearly so. The collaboration now has a second…
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Star City is really really good.
I recently read an article by Adriane Quinlan for Grub Street titled Dark, Dense, and Disappearing How pumpernickel bagels became an endangered species. The headline concerned me. I am a fan of the pumpernickel bagel. While I like most non-everything bagels (everything tend to be too salty for my taste), pumpernickel is probably my favorite bagel (we can place cinnamon raisin to a different category). I previously wrote about how my regular breakfast in my senior year of high school was an…
The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance. My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor, but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars.Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over wheelie bins (that should have been indoors), got into some smelly fertilizer, and committed other…
In a recent article about John Haugeland's rejection of micro-worlds I claimed: as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general Nobody has objected to this remark, but I would like to expand on it. The claim may or may not be true — it is an empirical question. But as a theory it has been widely entertained since the very earliest days of digital computers. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, the first person to seriously investigate machine translation, came to this…
Microsoft saw the Netflix model of "sell a subscription for a tremendous amount of content at a loss to drive the old industry out of business" and thought that was just the sort of evil they loved to do. Then they started game pass without stopping to realize that they were the old industry they were going to drive out of business.
What can I say, I was feeling a little ambitious. And yes, I did the guitar solos, but before you get too impressed, please know a) they’re not recreations of the David Gilmour solos, because my ambitions have real and practical limits, and b) I cheated. And by “cheated” I mean I initially tried to do the solos on one of my guitars, but it turns out I am slow, have clumsy fingers made of hot dogs and despair, and only questionably know how to find the key of B Minor on my fretboard. So, I took…
Another pride parade! This time in Northern Kentucky. T'was warm out! I took a bunch of photos.Currently Listening: Various Artists “SoundCloud's New Pride Anthems 2026”Reply via email
I thought yesterday's SeeStar shot of the moon was good.But my other half also took a SeeStar video of it. Why would you take a video of a static scene? To enhance the view. He spent today fiddling around with AutoStakkert!, software to stack multiple frames to get a better image. The result is great, much crisper:Why not just use the SeeStar to integrate over a longer time, like with other images? Well, it doesn't do that for solar system objects, so we just have to try harder.He also played…
I recently wrote about building a website in minutes, and now it's even faster. As in, literally 4 minutes and 22 seconds. Cloudflare released the ability for agents to deploy with temporary accounts. Using my example from the other post, that means you can pop open Claude Code and just type: Claude initially didn't know that the --temporary tag existed, so I gave it a little encouragement to try it anyway. And then it did: Since I was already logged in, I clicked the Claim Account link, and…
While IndyCar qualifying featured some interesting twists and storylines, in the end it was Alex Palou on the pole for tomorrow’s XPEL Grand Prix at Road America. If that sounds familiar, this was Palou’s fifth straight pole, and the sixth out of ten poles. In case you’re wondering, Palou still has a way to go […]
SumatraPDF is a Windows GUI application for viewing PDF, ePub and comic books written in C++. Lately I do a lot of my SumatraPDF coding with AI agents: Claude Code, Grok Build, OpenAI Codex. They’re good at writing code. They’re less good at knowing if the code works, especially for GUI apps. The problem: agents don’t drive UI well Say I ask an agent to fix a bug in PDF text search, or in the new feature that translates selected text via an LLM. How does the agent verify the fix? Surprisingly,…
i think wikipedia is the best learning resource any high school student can have if they know how to use it. wikipedia is not a source, ive never had a teacher tell me that only that i should never use it because 'its not trustworthy' 'anyone can edit it'. im not going to get into that debate of moderation on wikipedia. but what i will say is yes, wikipedia is not a source, but it is a resource. So what is a wikipedia article really? well... its an information report, with references, it uses…
If anything looks wrong, read on the site! I still can’t believe I was able to see Iron Maiden play Infinite Dreams, Powerslave and Rime of the Ancient Mariner live. Child me would only ever dream of seeing them live at all. Teenage me realized that dream, in 2011, after traveling 600km to be barely able to see my idols as small dots on the stage. I’d seen them two more times after that, in 2013 and 2019. Each time was amazing, a dream come true, and each had a handful of songs that I was…
Was ist besser als Tsatsiki? Tsatsiki mit Feta & Gurke! Dazu etwas Brot - Hellas, ist das gut und das findet nicht nur Dimitri Stoupakis, Austauschbandit aus Griechenland. Wir schweifen ab, vom Schuh des Manitu wieder flott zurück ins Greenwaycastle. Wenn Du von diesem Tsatsiki eine Schüssel voll zu einem Grillabend mitbringst, ist sie garantiert geleert, bevor das Fleisch einmal
Agents streaming UI is starting to happen by Peter Van Dijck Christine Vallaure wrote about a new protocol from Google in UXdesign. Basically, if the interface is generated fresh for each request and then thrown away, the unit of design stops being the screen and becomes the system that decides what screen to make — which is context design, not screen design. When I think about on-demand UI generation, I reach back to how working with computers are supposed to work in Star Trek (The Next…
Fragments on Eccentricity The concept of fomo has always alluded me. Part of the reason is a persistent need for eccentricity, for growing against the grain. That is not to say that I am persistently rebellious, but that there is a natural aversion to doing things “the way everyone else does it”. The word eccentricity has for me always evoked a relation to its meaning within astrodynamics1 — the amount by which a given orbit deviates from a “perfect” circle to an ellipse. For a spacecraft…
Great architecture. I love how this old harbour building got a new purpose and is now a museum. It's an interesting area at the waterfront in Rotterdam.
A while ago I migrated burningboard.net to a multi-jail FreeBSD setup: nginx, Puma, Sidekiq, and the database each in their own jail, with the host doing all the PF and routing. That post ended on the architecture. What it did not cover is the question that matters the morning after you put real users on a thing: is it actually healthy right now, and if it is not, will I find out before they do? This is the observability half of that story. I run a completely separate machine whose only job is…
