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
Source The American badger digs rattlesnakes out of their dens, absorbs their bites, and eats them. In South Dakota, it is considered the rattlesnake’s most important predator. A rattlesnake in its den is supposed to be safe. The burrow is narrow, dark, defensible, and the snake can coil and strike at anything that enters. Against a badger, the den is a trap. The badger does not enter the hole. It excavates around it. The same claws that can dig through blacktop and rip open a ground squirrel…
Some time ago, I had an idea that I would find and mark a bunch of "no pedestrian crossing" signs on a Google Maps bookmark set and publish it. I very quickly gave up. It turns out that finding these is pretty hard - they obviously only ever face the sidewalk, so noticing them while I'm on my bike isn't always a sure thing. They also tend to appear in high traffic areas, or in the middle of long blocks, so they're often in places where it is genuinely unpleasant and difficult to bike. And to…
So, we come to the last of the PW show plunder posts, twenty posts I've got out of it, this year, and some fine loot was scurried back to Small Scale World's command centre here in North Hampshire, to be shared with the rest of you, and we're finishing with the khaki-clad chaps and their contemporaries. OK, so Google hasn't just changed the graphic on the upload page, they've tripled
I have a use case where I need to copy files from Nextcloud to S3 storage using my phone, and I think I finally found the perfect apps for this. While I use rclone on my PC, I wasn’t aware of any app for this on Android. But there actually is some: RSAF (available on GitHub or F-Droid). It uses rclone and provides an integration into the native Android storage framework. Using the native file manager (which can be accessed more easily using a shortcut app like this), you can view, copy, move,…
Probably jinxing myself by posting this, but: here’s a chunk from Twisted Presents. Three nights ago had been the Longest Dark, the strongest night of the year. A night for the clan to come together and declare the year’s struggles, to mark the end of feuds and wars. Even living clanless and bereft, Mha had caught a whisper that her youngest daughter was in danger and had charged into battle. The magnificent fight had given Mha fresh cuts. She had defeated an elven wizard. Other orcs had…
The Tennessee Primaries are Today Tennessee is holding its primaries today. The 1796 state Constitution says primaries must be the first Thursday in August. Historians say there was no rationale for that. Maybe they decided it had to be on a day that started with "T," as in Tennessee, and they flipped a coin and Thursday won. Hawaii also shuns Tuesdays. It's primary is this Saturday. Click here for full story
If you’re craving a quick, comforting dessert that tastes like it came straight from a farmhouse kitchen, this Aunt Berry's Fruit Cobbler is just the thing. Made with simple pantry staples and a can of fruit pie filling, it bakes into a golden, buttery crust with sweet, jammy fruit bubbling through every bite. This cobbler is perfect for weeknights, last‑minute company, or anytime you want a homemade treat without fuss — and it’s endlessly adaptable to whatever fruit you have on hand. Warm,…
There seems to have been a bumper crop of classic crime reprints in July, so let’s get cracking and take a look at them…
Some London borough boundaries are easy to cross. The boundary between Croydon and Bromley, for example, is 10 miles long and can be crossed in over 40 different places. But other London boundaries are much harder to cross, or in a few cases impossible except by boat. So let's investigate... The London borough boundaries with fewest crossings It's best to do this in two parts. a) Boundaries along the River Thames Starting out east... Havering → Bexley: 0 (big estuary, no crossing points)…
It’s another edition of monthly links! Here are some interesting things for you to check out in August: Tracy Durnell has some interesting takes – and interesting ways of presenting existing ideas. In this tortured reflection on why Tracy won’t buy the lamp that she wants, she highlights how “home decor” is another way of putting you onto the consumerist treadmill. How will I be useless to Capitalism today? And commenter Chris Glass links to his List of Things I Do Not Need – a brilliant idea.…
An agent harness is the software wrapped around a language model that turns it into an agent: the loop that calls the model repeatedly, the tools it can execute, the context management that decides what the model sees, and the guardrails that decide what it’s allowed to do. The model predicts text. The harness is everything that makes those predictions add up to work getting done. Anthropic’s Claude Code documentation puts it in one line: “Claude Code is the harness; Claude is the model inside…
Python A-Z is a blog series about Python. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of Python development that match with the letter of the day. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month. The code that a program runs is provided by the developer of the program. The inputs and interactions are initiated by the user of the program. The environment variables are data provided by the system that runs it.…
Veuve Cliequeot rhymes with Voove Cleekay. And a guitar lesson. Fuck ya Happy anniversary to my beautiful soul mate. Celebrating together after n 2 youngster lesson. This post **(August 5th, 32 years Later)** was last edited **1 minute ago**.
Getting out of my head started with the exhale. Take that, I have the final word.
“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.” Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned Tonight” in the November 1947 issue of House and Garden magazine (!). He posits a fire that destroys his…
Learning and dealing with occult magic is all about reach.It reaches across the veil, into dreams, through mirrors, down bloodlines, into old books, forgotten places, and the spaces between worlds. It is not always about power. Sometimes it is about contact.That is what makes it dangerous.The Witch Queen Larina of West Haven knows this better than most. The white streak in her otherwise red hair is not just cosmetic. It is a reminder. A mark. Proof that sometimes her reach goes farther than her…
Was the first doge really the first? Did he even exist? There are some serious doubt about doge Paulicius (697·717) to be examined.
Perfume PosseA Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux Hi Posse crew, This week I was looking through the Indie boxes to find something fun to wear. Completely out of place I found my current and backup bottles of A Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux. Very annoying because… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseA Quiet Morning by Miller et Bertaux
Thursday 6th August 2026 Okehampton’s doing well for rail service restoration. Not only did the town (population: 9,500) gain the return of a daily hourly train service to and from Exeter along the ‘reopened’ Dartmoor Line in 2021 (building on the successful Devon County Council funded Summer Sunday service that ran for a number of years) but last Saturday it gained a brand new station on its eastern edge with the opening of Okehampton Interchange. Photo courtesy Devon & Cornwall Rail…
I have some really good news if you’re an artist trying to get noticed: You do not even have to be good these days. I think there are enough people out there so bored on their phone, on their computer, on their whatever, just looking for anything halfway interesting. And I bet if you’re an artist, you can be at least halfway interesting. The only thing you have to do is be consistent. I am not a lot of things, but I can be really consistent in my efforts. Walking or riding my bike every day—and…
Back from holidays, and the railway room is cool enough for some more TINGS preparation. I fitted together the three N-club modules that will form one end of the layout, and carried out a few minor repairs. Two new on-off switches for the fiddle-loops. Some rail repairs to the joker-tunnel. And a new length of track fitted to replace the one damaged packing up after the Erith show. Next job, build a box for the bridge. Then the ESNG meeting, at the new earlier start time at 2pm. We accumulated…
This short novel is weird in ways in which only M. John Harrison can be. A futuristic literary dystopia, the story is set on the southeastern English coast and centers on Phillip and his aunt Marnie. Sometime in the past, some sort of inscrutable alien race called the iGhetti appeared out of nowhere, and everything changed. Decades later, Phillip picks up flotsam on the sea coast, including artefacts which are some shifting form of alien life. His aunt is an artist who barely navigates in this…
Forgot to post yesterday but nothing special happened. I got off work and me and my boyfriend hung out and played board games. Managed not to spend any money and had fun in the mean time. We finally had the brain cells to understand how to play Sky Team and it was fun! We’re only on scenario 2, and we had a tough time cracking it lol. Maybe tomorrow. Today we technically bought food but it was from a sinking fund we set up for fun money. I’m still entertaining all kinds of things I want to buy…
