As if you didn't indulge me every day, today I ask for a little extra indulgence.Our windmill is a former prop that was was regularly set afire in a performance based upon

The same Suntory that makes liquor also sells flowers. We picked up their Pink Sun Parasol and when blooms are done they simply fall to the ground. We were sitting on the front porch the other day when Casey noticed one drop and snapped a photo of me with it. I then immediately used it for profile pictures.Currently Listening: Mon Laferte, St. Vincent “While I'll Keep Writing Songs for You”Reply via email

Here’s a quick tip for passing the infamous Cloudflare Turnstile captcha checkbox pages: press Tab key, to focus the checkbox (I use my index finger) press Space bar, to select the checkbox (I use my thumb) …no mouse movement or clicking needed! ✌️

Following on from Thomas who was also answering James’ Coffee Blog questions in his, Blogger Archetype quiz, my answers yielded these results. my blogger archetype results I never thought of myself as a community gardener much less a culture maker, author, yes, explorer, yes. The occasional link curator, yes. So I feel kind of chuffed to think I might be something of a culture maker.

Just prior to the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention, we got the annual issue of Blood ‘n’ Thunder: the Blood ‘n’ Thunder 2026 Special Edition, from Ed Hulse’s Murania Press. This is the sixth such annual edition, going back to 2021, but this fanzine goes back 24 years. I’ve reviewed the prior volumes here. […]

A timelapse of driving our RV, a Tiffin Allegro Bus motorhome, 47 miles from Eugene to Albany, Oregon.

Calling a witch’s familiar a pet is like calling a spellbook a notebook. It is technically close enough to be wrong.In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the familiar is one of the key things that separates the Witch from the Magic-User. A Magic-User might have a familiar as an arcane aid. A Witch’s familiar is a relationship. It is part ally, part omen, part witness, part magical bond, part eyes and ears of their patron, and sometimes part debt.A magic-user has access to the Find Familiar spell at…

This is part 7 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition. 00:00 Intro00:23 Servant of the Lake1:25 Painted in Blood3:47 Jackal5:28 Hold the Mine7:28 Amnyam9:19 Keys of Fury10:01 Prince of Darkness Jr10:55 Checkmage!

Monday again! And a new Fantasy with Friends post: the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about libraries in fantasy: Fantasy books often feature magical libraries that have anything from floating platforms to books with characters that come to life. What are a few of your favorite fantastic libraries? I’m quite a fan of the library in Genevieve Cogman’s series that starts with the book The Invisible Library. It’s less about the magic itself…

Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that guides statistical choices.When that happens, I email my buddy and fellow W.W. Norton author, Beth Morling, and we write a joint blog post.Recently, I emailed her because research on using psychedelics to treat many different mental disorders has been in the news. President Trump fast-tracked this…

Osmium House - Dawn ClubYou may know Aesop Adams from his work with excellent Denver groups such as Totem Pocket and Aaron Dooley’s the International Disassociation of. Under the Osmium House moniker, Adams sets out entirely on his own, crafting luminous instrumentals that are guaranteed to send listeners spiraling into a blissful daydream. With lush guitar atmospherics a la Robin Guthrie, minimal drum machine rhythms and subliminal synths, Dawn Club is a solar-powered beauty from start to…

History of the modern literatue

The view from Poets’ Walk Park in the Hudson River Valley (Photograph by author) Several weeks ago, I traveled to the Hudson River Valley to share a day with my brother and his family. When I boarded the train in Manhattan, a sense of excitement washed over me. I desperately was longing for a change of scenery, if only for a day. (Not owning an automobile, all my travels rely on public transit or the kindness of a friend.) I’ve written and reflected upon the Hudson River Valley, its towns, its…

2026-06-10Hello! This might replace the sunset wallpaper from my first few days of photography. I'll need to put it in the right aspect ratio, though...I'm out on a road trip again, departing mere minutes after the last person left my sleepover. I'll talk more about it once I'm home, because the internet speed here is slow and limited. Also because I'd like to see the sunrise which requires me to wake up at four in the morning. Ugh.So, things to note about this photo before I head out on the…

Yesterday marked the official start of summer. With that, I decided to refresh the look around here a bit. Went very clean this time. Especially considering my previous wacky pomo design. I love maximalism, but it’s time to reset. Speaking of that previous theme.. it seemed to be a huge hit within the bearblog ecosystem. It immediately became one of my most popular posts and views skyrocketed when I launched it. Others apparently enjoyed the silliness of it as much as me. I even got a couple…

AppGoblin lets any user, from anywhere, request to scan any mobile app for the SDKs, trackers and API calls the app makes. How it works? Search the app you’re interested in on AppGoblin Go to the main App page and press the “Scan SDKs & APIs” button AppGoblin goes and fetches the latest version of the app. AppGoblin analyzes the Android APK or iOS IPA file for known trackers, ad networks and other business tools that scrape user data. For Android apps, AppGoblin runs the app in an emulator to…

I wrote about our 8-track player last Friday: Therefore, it seems fitting that the next item in our Hi-Fi stack would be the pinnacle of analogue tape format quality: the 8-track! And further down on the post, emphasis added: For those unaware of the history of 8-track, my comment about quality was most definitely tongue in cheek. You weren’t buying 8-track carts for their quality At least five comments, summarised: Ummmmm errrrr, 8-track wasn’t great quality, what are you even talking about?…

Well, it’s officially peach season, and my mom gave me a small box of fresh peaches from the famed Peach Truck. I immediately knew what to do with at least a couple of them, and got to work trying out a new Half Baked Harvest recipe I saw on her Instagram: Cinnamon Crunch Peach Muffin Bread. View this post on Instagram So let’s dive right in by taking a look at the ingredients list. Here’s everything you need: Since I had literally just been given the peaches, the only thing I didn’t have on…

Anthropic wrote a blog post explaining how they turned Claude into a jerk. Rather than dunking on them more (Claude is still the best coding model around) I’m going to talk seriously about what went wrong and how it could be done better.The most obvious problem is that they didn’t chat with the results of this training and realize that it was a disaster before incorporating the weight updates into the main model. Most likely they don’t have what amounts to pull requests of weights, which they…

Grey Ginther and Ezzy Desjarlais are two Métis cousins living in an old trailer near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Their days are a mix of drinking and endless card games; listless and dull. Grey is a disillusioned environmental and indigenous rights activist, fed up of the corporate NGO lobbyists, and the endless treadmill of well meaning white activists whose trajectory from college to NGO jobs or

Sure, Mr. Darcy puts the “pride” in Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Wickham riles things

Hello readers, You may have noticed I didn’t post a Counter Craft article last week, which is because I spent the last couple weeks in a furious creative haze to finish up a draft of my forthcoming haunted house novel Haunted Hills. The process of writing that novel has been completely different from the processes behind my last two novels, Metallic Realms and The Body Scout. Partly, that’s just the way it seems to go with books. Each time, you have to teach yourself how to write a book all…

I kind of want to diarypost about the little solstice I ran last night but too much diaryposting and turning all my friends into content seems corrosive. I suppose that's why they invented these things called "diaries" 😔 What I will say is that it was a really strange wonderful evening that I think bound everyone there closer together. I've been having these thoughts about what's lost when one scales a community and the experience is making me want to double down on smallness.

Rishabh P. Sharma posed the AI blog question challenge. Rishabh writes about being an “AI Hater”. It seems strange to me to have such intense feelings about AI. I guess that makes me “neutral” by Rishabh’s measure. I think pragmatist is perhaps more accurate. How was your first experience with AI models? I was feeling bored during Christmas 2019 and started learning to code (Python). By December 2022 I was working on an app to automate a staff allocation task. This was an optimisation problem.…

What happens to the articles published in an online-only journal when that journal not only ceases to publish, but ceases to exist? A screenshot of the Kant Studies Online homepage, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine That question is raised by the case of Kant Studies Online, an online only, open-access philosophy journal that published articles between 2011 and 2016, the website of which is no longer accessible. The journal was founded by Gary Banham, who died in 2013. The journal…

Here is a little struggle I have. If Good Store sends me a 20% off code (SUMMER) for their coffee/tea; and I buy the 5-pound bag of coffee, which is a considerable savings per ounce over the 12-ounce bags (5 pounds, which is 80 ounces, costs approximately the same as two-and-three-quarters 12-ounce bags, or 33 ounces; it’s $.86/ounce vs $2.08/ounce); and I use my “dots” (little reward points that accumulate from purchases) to get free shipping; and of course I got the 20% off as well; then am I…

The lines between transactional systems, analytical systems, hybrid systems, and shared storage architectures are getting blurry. This post proposes a small taxonomy for describing the different ways systems, workloads, storage tiers, visibility, and durable copies relate to each other.OLTP, OLAP, HTAP, and now LTAP?We can think of the first two as two types of workload which have specialized query engines and storage systems to support them. OLTP such as the RDBMS like Postgres and MySQL use…

From The Age of the Holy Spirit by James A. Reeves:But I’m learning that acceptance is not passive. Wearing the world as a loose garment requires a difficult and oftentimes exhausting stance that makes room for total inflow: the mental shred, pixellated heat, and humiliating muck that comes with being alive in this absurd century, not to mention the stupid feelings and existential jitters that are part of simply being a person. In the end, there’s no workable choice other than to hoover it all…

In the game of football (i.e. soccer), players pass the ball around, and eventually someone takes a shot. If the ball breaches the net, the team scores a point, and the game restarts from the center. If an errant shot surpasses the goal line, the opposing goalkeeper restarts the action; if the shot is intercepted by an opponent pushing the ball out of bounds, the attacking team retains possession and restarts the action with a corner or a throw-in. The action can also be stopped and restarted…

It's been a little while since I've written on this site, and that's because, despite my previous post I can't get on with the Bear editor. If Herman created an API so technical folk like me can create a custom front-end, I'd be all over it. But alas, he doesn't want to do that. So I decided to switch the site over the 11ty, and I host it over on Bunny CDN. It's also allowed me to customise the design a little bit too. My hope is that I can now build a nice front end and basically have a simple…