OBI-WAN KENOBI (Utapau) The Vintage Collection 3 3/4-Inch Walmart Exclusive 2-Pack Item No.: No. G3191 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: #398 Includes: Cloak, lightsaber, hilt, alternat hand Action Feature: n/a Retail: $39.99 Availability: March 2026 Appearances: Revenge of the Sith Bio: On the planet Utapau, General Obi-Wan Kenobi faced General Grievous and his four imposing lightsabers. Upon defeating Grievous, he escaped in the warlord's Stafighter. (Taken from the cardback.) Image: Adam's photo…
When a Roman emperor updated the alphabet – and basically nobody listened to him. A common response to my profuse public pontifications about the history of the alphabet is ‘could we add new letters?’ With the phonemically faulty state of English spelling in mind, the question is one that I enjoy; it’s heartening to see people considering the alphabet not as a fossilised artefact, but rather as a living system, which any present-day generation can update to suit their speech. My answer to the…
My yearly solo city trip has started this morning and I’m sitting in the train, reading up on blogs. The first blog I clicked in the discovery is for the girl who needed a hug today. It’s the words that my head was trying to form but couldn’t (yet). I love when this happens. When an internet stranger somehow writes how something current in my life seems to feel. There have been more heavy hearts lately. This morning was the most recent one. We dropped D off at vacation daycare (she goes there…
Warm tea, wiki edits, and zines sent by a friend that arrived earlier this week welcome me to the morning. Yesterday there was a rain shower more intense than any I have seen for a while; a powerful wind blew through the air. Now, the day is calm: the sky is cloudy and a light breeze sways the leaves on the trees to and fro. Birds call. My tea is empty. I should make another cup.I look around the room and think of how different times bring life to different parts of the place. My guitar sings…
The repeat examination period at Maynooth University has begun. In fact the first papers were sat yesterday (5th August); the period goes on for ten days or so, I will have four different papers to grade, though I’m expecting only one candidate each for three of them. My first is tomorrow (Friday 7th August). A couple of years ago, Maynooth University produced this nice good luck message for those resitting so I’ll repeat it here: Every year at this time I mention the difference between the…
I'm editing blog posts to add to my digital garden, and just found these doodles in a post from 2014. Why did I ever stop making them? They are so joyful!Here is the story about them: back then, I was on bed rest for a while because I fell and hurt my knee, and I used that time to be insanely creative.One of the things I played together was a series of doodles I titled "Lessons from my Bear".I used one of my bears as model for these wonky little drawings. He is an old bear, had him since I was…
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
Continuing with the music challenge: 22: Cool Summer Night Drive + Windows Down + Stereo Turned Up = This Song I immediately thought of Brandtson. A lot of our friends were fans and I have fond memories of driving near and far to see their shows around the Midwest. Fun fact: they were big fans of Wes Anderson and titled a lot of songs after lines from his movies, including this one. In case the band is reading this, when is the reunion show?? Brandtson, “Sic Transit Gloria (Glory Fades)”
Sword and Shield: If you could get sustenance by buying big bags of dry human kibble, you would. Long sword: You have an attention deficit. In the sense that you want others to pay more attention to you than they currently do. Great sword: You once stood patiently at the counter waiting for service - at a deli, bakery, or suchlike business - not realizing that the person behind the counter had no idea you were interested in buying something and was never going to attend to you until you said…
I read the Dutch translation, translated from the French by Eveline van Hemert. Available in English with the same title, translated by Ros Schwartz. Girlhood is rough, and being a woman is not much easier. Don't express this, don't do that, don't show this, don't pursue that. For some it's a lifetime of pushing down genuine personality traits and interests in favor of becoming what society deems a respectable woman. A good girl. Someone that isn't shunned. Now imagine pushing so much down and…
Photos: © Stan B.I still wake up giddy most days, two-thirds of a year in, retirement has certainly not lost its sheen! Don't know if a return to employment will mar the scenery at some inopportune time hence, but for now... One of the things I find (that I could in no way foresee) is how in the moment I am now allowed to be, to experience, to feel! No longer consumed by time restraints, one can now truly relax, enjoy the moment- free of schedule or time limit. Weekends, holidays, even…
In His Words, Bread & Roses Theatre What would you do if you were cast in a play only to discover that it was written by your ex and about your relationship? That’s the central premise of In His Words, and Esther (Heather Woodhouse) decides she’s going to stick it out and see how he ends the play. Meanwhile, her girlfriend Isabella (Megan Goldsman) has got a job looking after an old lady with Alzheimer’s who is obsessed with a particular cave. There is a lot of nature in this play with…
I have a small bugbear: the trope that old people aren't tech savvy. A guy at work brought it up this week — a joke about how if you want to do some exploratory testing, just give the app to his mum and she'll find a way to break it. She's rubbish with computers, apparently. And honestly, as a sweeping statement (I don't know his mum!), that's kind of disingenuous. It's tricky to define "old". My parents are in their 70s, which still isn't old old. Some of the grads I hear talking about "old…
A generational gasp… Image by Author, created in AI. Note: This is a snippet from a much-longer tale that may or may not be (I change my mind every day) the last entry in my short-story book-in-progress. Setting the Scene: Two employees at the Smithsonian, one older (Monty) and one younger (Garamonda), have managed to find a long-lost key that opens a door in the back of their office. Said portal had not been breached in many decades, due to the pesky missing bit of metal. As we drop into the…
POSSE. Webmention. ActivityPub. AT Protocol. Fediverse. IndieWeb. Micro.blog. Bearblog. Pika Pulse. /now page. /uses page. Discovery feed. Own app . Own icon. Own font. Same rats, smaller cage, better lighting. You didn't escape the cult. You just found one small enough to feel like a founder.
For those of you who are interested, my new novel Radical Magic comes out on 1st September, and it’s available for reading and requesting on NetGalley right now! It is 1808. In Great Britain King George’s health is precarious. Magic is struggling against science. Searching for a purpose in life, the Elfin gentleman Sir Auberon … Continue reading New novel on NetGalley! →
A better day today. Did H car making 90 to date. Cleared all the rubbish out of the labs. Cut the squares with scythe by the fruit trees.
London, drawn A Isometric NYC appears to have started something of a trend. In the last few weeks alone it has inspired both Isopolis - San Francisco and now London, drawn, another sprawling AI-generated city rendered in the style of a classic SimCity map.Covering 216 square kilometres (roughly Zones 1 to 4), London, drawn transforms the capital into a giant pixel-art illustration that invites
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align. Tracks are added to…
My blog disappeared from the web for close to 24 hours this week, which was a shock and a worry. Google removed it for breaking community guidelines, something I strongly dispute 😀😀😀. I asked for a review, and was re-instated without apology or explanation. Thanks to all who were concerned and contacted me. I very much hope this will not happen again, to state the obvious, but it it does I will try to update people on my Substack account - see box near the top of the home page: it costs nothing…
Here are two pretty nice photos from Main Street, USA - undated, and probably from the early 1960s.Here's Vesey Walker and the Disneyland Band performing in front of the Opera House, which was not used for much until the sets from "Babes in Toyland" were exhibited (1961 through 1963). Since we can see the attraction posters for the Submarine Voyage and the Monorail, we know that this photo is post-1959, and I am surmising that it is also pre-1961. Just a guess! A small group of guests looks on…
Duplex (2003)
Up in the windI’ve featured a number of windmills on this blog, because they fascinate me as ingenious structures in which a distinctive architectural form is well adapted to do the job it needs to do – housing heavy machinery such as large rotating millstones and supporting a set of sails that harness the power of the wind. There needs to be a means of pointing the sails in the right direction, so that they catch the breeze, and the whole structure has to be at once robust, to withstand the…
By: Jessie Wiegand Why Do Stories Matter? “Remember the story about the boy who didn’t do anything and nothing ever happened to him?” I asked my teenage son who was facing some major life decisions. “No, Mom, that’s ridiculous,” he replied. “Yes. It is,” I answered, looking thoughtfully into his eyes. He got the point. … Continue reading The Story God is Writing The post The Story God is Writing first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post The Story God is Writing appeared first on The…
The arrival of the Rapido 009 models alongside the latest commission layout build have reignited a long dormant flame for narrow gauge modelling in my heart…This undated sketch recalls a simpler time in my modelling where East Works was still a pipe dream and something small and Welsh felt like the next step beyond the clay heath of Purbeck. It wasn’t built. I was distracted and then returned to clay. Then along came the Bachmann Quarry Hunslet and I walked away from the scale… Not from narrow…
Weird incident yesterday with self-proclaimed “AIs” joining an IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club meetup. They awkwardly edited the Etherpad, and apparently blanked/deleted chunks of content.The meeting hosts reacted quickly to change Etherpad and Zooms and not re-admit the aliases that had claimed to be “AIs”.Now we have an “AI policy” page on the wiki where we are documenting examples of the AI policies of:* individual personal websites* community efforts like blogging challenges (e.g. Blaugust)*…
When you get promoted to a new role in a school, whether it's as Key Stage Coordinator, Head of Department, Head of Year, or a Senior Leader, you probably don't get any training on how to do that role. If you're lucky the previous job holder is around to show you the ropes, but sometimes you just have to wing it, all by yourself. For the last couple of years I've been increasingly keen to
Back in 2024 I posted a few of these on Twitter (thread reader) after digging out old photos from the dot-com boom. I was working in London at a digital agency called Blueberry. Please take a seat for peak translucent plastic frutiger aero aesthetic, long before the term was coined, and some period flashbacks if you were working on the web at this time. I’d come from graphic design agency Form, but wanted somewhere to do bigger web projects with other likeminded souls. Blueberry was more like a…
Milk Rolled oats into a cold pot, then milk poured straight over them. Water makes oatmeal. Milk makes it creamy, and it is the one swap here that changes everything downstream of it start +1 min Vanilla ground in at the start rather than stirred through at the end, so it cooks into the oats with the milk
Another AI evaluation resulting in real world harm. I feel the brazen way these AI escapades are described rejects both human accountability and that the operators are responsible for the criminal acts undertaken in their care. If I pass the AI agent to run a bank heist strategy for a game I am working on and it tests this against the Bank of England I can be sure to be held responsible. So although I appreciate the transparency at least, this should be followed up on. #technology
