Okay, you know how good it feels when you peel your socks off at the end of the day? You know how your crinkly leg hairs all get a chance to relax, stretch out, and breathe a sigh of relief? Well, taking out your ponytail is like that times a million. All your hair unbends and finally points the other direction. Shivers shake down your spine as you bend your neck and shake your hair out. Yes, all the pressure just melts away and it feels like an instant scalp massage. Plus, if you tied your…

When you were little, did you enjoy playing with magnets? Now you get to play with magnets under the guise of a strategic boardgame. Upside Town is designed by Singaporean designer Quentin Quek and published by PlayByDesign. Quentin comes from a product design background, and it shows in how well put together Upside Town is. This is not a game with a gimmick. The

Ariana Grande is currently in the spotlight for her extreme thinness and I think it needs to stop. Fans are “concerned” and wish the healthy Ariana back. When her music video for her title track petals dropped, her health was all that was discussed in the YouTube comment section, not her music. “Discussed” is giving a lot more credit to the “discourse” than it deserves because all anyone voices is either their “concern” for her health or an edited picture that exaggerates her emaciation. Both…

Being able to ignore things that annoy you is a skill. Some people are born with an innate talent in this area, but the rest of us learn, over time, that it is important to not let people's worst habits or peculiarities grind your gears or otherwise drive you crazy. I used to struggle with this, but eventually I got better at it. The key is understanding that most of the things you dislike about other people are things you dislike in yourself. From there you end up in one of two places, and…

A company of soldiers on a difficult mission. A priestess held hostage by her position. A man trying to save an empire by eliminating the emperor. The writing is fine, albeit somewhat overly flowery at times (for my taste), and I didn’t appreciate the fantasy language passages. If they are translated immediately, why not skip that step please? I’m being peevish, I know, but it was annoying every time. The characters are plentiful, and range from interesting to vapidly dull. Sadly, the author…

Today’s Soundtrack…

Consider a large company that wants to make the best use of AI, while maintaining control over it, so that it can run itself profitably, compete effectively, and avoid disastrous legal or technical mistakes. Regardless of whether AI keeps getting better or plateaus, or whether the AI bubble pops sooner or later, every single large […]

This 1:144 model represents one of the modified variants with the cutaway engine cowling to increase engine cooling, a necessary change as the initial production suffered seriously from engine overheating, a problem caused by the synthetic oil that replaced the scarce castor oil by 1918.The Siemens-Schuckert D-III was very fast, very manoeuvrable, and climbed like a rocket. It went into service in April-May 1918, but the aforementioned engine issues kept it from being the game-changer it might…

It's time to pick a peck of perennials for the landscape project. Every flower and variety that's been selected for the front yard landscape project. Earlier this year I unrolled the most expensive piece of paper I've ever owned: The landscape plans. I have a general landscape plan and a plant list, but no planting...Read More

There's only one way to go from here. I went offline. It wasn't so much a choice at first. I spent much of the summer on the road, which meant that getting online was nearly always a struggle, and so when I didn't have to, I stayed off. And when I did get on—I was working my remote job doing book research—doing work was the focus. I didn't fall prey to the usual distractions of endless scrolling on Instagram and Bluesky, because when weighed against the effort to get and stay online, it didn't…

Liked Higurashi: When They Cry mahjong game from 2009 is getting a remaster for PC and consoles. Life-or-death matches where even cheating is allowed by Carlos "Zoto" Zotomayor (automaton-media.com) Fans of Higurashi: When They Cry and mahjong will be interested to know that Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Jong, a 2009 riichi mahjong game for the arcade and PlayStation Portable (PSP), is being remastered for PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, with a planned release in 2027. I have played…

What a beautiful show. Just go watch it, it speaks for itself. You’re welcome. Storytelling – A – I’m still crying an hour later Voice – A – Fuck yes Characters – A – Beautiful Attention Grab – A – Was surprised when it finished Production – A – Gorgeous. Overall – A Recommendations – Utena

statusbar v0.3.0 got a nicer help (and other goodies)

I came across an interesting passage in THEM Anime’s review of a 2023 anime series titled The Dreaming Boy is a Realist. The line and the review were authored by Allen Moody, who I quoted once previously in a New Leaf Journal article on review systems. I emboldened the key point of the quote: Kei sits behind Wataru in class, is apparently much more social (Aika seems fairly reserved), routinely talks to Wataru despite Aika’s supposed annoyance with him, and in general seems a much more FUN…

Big Brother's best winner and Twitch streamer Dan Gheesling is not handling criticism well for his participation in a live-streamed U.S. Army reality competition, e.g. propaganda.

Outside The Met – New York, New York Remember yesterday when I said all that stuff about preserving the purity of street photography by using a manual-focus Leica camera? I truly believe that, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t still use a backup camera for some autofocus insurance. I wanted to make sure I successfully captured the scene outside The Met after closing. When I’m shooting with the Leica M 246, especially during fast-changing scenes like this, I don’t have time to check focus and…

Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? michaelharley.netBy Michael HarleyRead original post → I came across this blog post by Michael Harley. I started following him after I came across some of his blog posts on bubbles.town (I want to call it button.town every time I type it, and I don't know why 😀). But he does have a point, and I am guilty of making bad titles too. In fact, if it were up to me, I probably wouldn't have any titles. But I think most things in writing do deserve…

Daily Drawing 997

After 300+ posts in a row I almost forgot today. The most surprising thing is that I made it this far. Entries have may been not my best the past few weeks but what are you going to do. It did scare the shite out of me as I was almost in bed. Still no idea why I do this. More tomorrow…

Not everyone can debug code Counterfactual reasoning is a technique where you assume alternative scenarios that could have happened, but did not in fact happen. You assume something is true when it is, in fact, false. A question involving a counterfactual is "What if dinosaurs had not gone extinct?" Reasoning with counterfactuals is considered an advanced cognitive skill, and it comes in quite handy when you are debugging code. To debug effectively, you have to entertain insulting falsehoods.…

One of the most useful ways to understand the mess we are in today is to ask a deceptively simple question – what comes first – the individual or the network? #Mainstreaming economics startes with the individual, were sociology, anthropology and related traditions start somewhere else – with relationships, institutions, communities and the social structures into which individuals are born. This difference matters enormously, when we start thinking about technology, politics, economics and the…

Came across this review of Shock and Awe online and was reading it, nodding along and thinking 'this is rather perceptive' and then realised it was AI generated!Still more acute than most of the actual reviews by living-breathing consciousnesses.It's from a site called RetroForge about which I will be saying more at the other place in due course.Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First CenturyGlam's artificiality is not an escape from meaning; it is the…

"Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours" - Maria Callas

I’m currently doing a trial of a site that lets you access a bunch of different AI tools in one place. Having all those services easily accessible through one subscription instead of multiple different ones has its ups and downs in terms of feature parity, and some other issues. But it does let you work relatively rapidly in a single shared UI to generate multiple different assets pretty quickly in parallel. From that experience, I just wanted to capture a really simple workflow to use for…

Brioche month continues, and this time Dorie’s buttery dough takes a savory spin with Cheese-Swirl Babka Buns. Think cinnamon roll, but with a spiral of cheese! Actually cheeses (plural)- a smoosh up of ricotta, cream cheese, Parmesan and cheddar. Minced shallot and scallion greens break the creaminess a bit. More cheddar appears in the streusel topping, which tastes like Cheez-Its. As usual, this brioche is a two-day affair, the first day dedicated to making and chilling the dough, and the…

My head is a fog from cold pills, and I left the house a minute later than I should have, but the traffic lights aligned and I did not miss my bus. Is there a Patron Saint of Public Transportation? If so, they turn a blind eye on OC Transpo most days, but they smiled on me today, so there’s that. Maybe they feel bad because I’ve been taking the wrong cold pills for the past month and I just figured that out. It turns out the “Plus” in “Cold & Sinus Plus” is very important in cold and sinus…

We've had our parklet for 15 years, and now SFMTA says they're going to fine us $500/day if we don't demolish it in two weeks. We have spent nearly two years trying to negotiate with them to figure out some rational way to satisfy them, and they have been 100% unwilling discuss any alternatives. In their view, they can demand whatever they want and we just have to suck it up. Over the last few months, we have reached out to Mayor Lurie, and to District 6 Supervisor Dorsey (through various…

Perfume PosseCheap and Cheerful: Acqua di Selva I actually got reminded of this one from a FacePlace post that a friend commented upon. I’ve never owned this but I know I had smelled and liked it and this past week (first week of August) has been fairly… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseCheap and Cheerful: Acqua di Selva

by Eurocheese Heading into my screening of Elsinore on the last day of the festival, I had heard a number of mixed things on the ground. Some said the film pulls too readily at heartstrings without much plot. I’d heard rumblings that it was likely to win an audience prize, and it ended up taking the International People’s Choice Award before I saw it (yes, it’s eligible since it’s a UK production and La Bola Negra became automatically disqualified for the honor when it won TIFF’s general…

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Ellen Nehr ADAM HALL – Knight Sinister. Pyramid, US, paperback, 1971. Harper, US, paperback, 1990. First published in the UK in 1951, written by Elleston Trevor under the pseudonym Simon Rattray. Before he became famous as Adam Hall with the publication of The Quiller Memorandum, Elleston Trevor produced five chess-oriented mystery/suspense novels; these were published in England under the pseudonym Simon Rattray, and reprinted here under the Hall name after the…