Ron Charles tells us that British singer and songwriter Dua Lipa has created a collection of banned books — called The Manifesto Library. It’s in Portugal. The new library is housed in the basement of Livraria Lello, in Porto. In a statement printed on the wall, Lipa writes, “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed.” Apparently people are queuing up…
I've mostly tuned out of reading the news. But, once in a while, a headline will be shared on social media and I'll momentarily stare into the abyss. There has recently been a change in UK Prime Minister. I neither know nor care whether that's a good thing. What I do know is that Senior Political Correspondents collectively shat their pants with excitement at being able to breathlessly report any half-baked gossip which would drive clicks. I saw "Rumours suggest so-and-so will be appointed…",…
When you see the same ol' "happy birthday" butchered day after day, you learn to cherish the cakes that break the mold and say something truly unique. Whoah, thought that said something a little off-color for a sec!(Who else saw "Jerk?") Anyway, I've been collecting some of the better examples for ages now, and as I started scrolling through them today I realized they told a kind of story.It helps if you imagine them as a conversation between two people.And also if you're a little drunk.BEGIN!…
I stopped by a Filipino/Hawaiian (mostly filipino) restaurant/bar that was recommended to me a few months ago by someone I met at an AANHPI event. One of my friends that was eating with us had gone many times before and said they enjoyed the menu. We looked up the menu before heading over. As a Filipino-American I always get curious about Filipino restaurants because a lot of our dishes are family-style/comfort food, so it’s always interesting to see what foods will be on the menu. To our…
The Juilliard School announced a multimillion-dollar acoustic renovation to its legendary Morse Recital Hall this week. Known for its intimate setting, the upgrades will enhance the reverberation and tonal warmth for both soloists and small ensembles. The space has long been celebrated as the premier venue for musicians demanding absolute acoustic fidelity.“The new paneling will allow performers to fully explore the dynamic range of the room,” said Juilliard’s director of contemporary…
In 2003, Nintendo solved their own problem it had spent more than a decade creating.The original Game Boy Advance was technically brilliant, but it inherited one frustrating flaw from every Game Boy before it: unless you happened to be standing beneath perfect lighting, its screen could be pretty difficult to see. The Game Boy Advance SP changed everything. Folding neatly into a pocket, introducing a rechargeable battery, and eventually receiving one of the most beloved backlit displays…
Charlie Kurth, currently Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, will be moving to the University of Georgia. Professor Kurth is known for his work in ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties & Virtues of Anxiety (MIT, 2018) and Emotion (Routledge, 2022) as well as many other works. For more information on his publications, see here. He will be taking up his new position at UGA as Professor of…
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve’s request, for fear its collapse would take the rest of Wall Street down with it. The fund’s principals included two Nobel laureates in economics and a team that had, by any ordinary measure, done the math correctly. Their models of bond spreads were not naive. They had been checked, refined, and…
Annexing the Bronx made perfect sense from the perspective of nineteenth-century New Yorkers. The city of New York was growing northward up Manhattan island and, while it had not yet filled all of the space, the end of that form of expansion was in sight. The semi-rival city of Brooklyn had far more space to expand and, prior to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, discussion of New York and Brooklyn being something other than rivals was rare. The area we call the Bronx, on the other…
You could read today’s Cory Doctorow column or you could watch this Nathan MacIntosh bit. 😉
I’m in an Air BnB in Wilmington, Delaware right now and somewhere between airport layovers, North Carolina micro-breweries, high school golf tournaments, and road trips through the Piedmont of NC and Virginia, I lost track of what day of the week it was. For some reason, it has really bothered me that I got my days messed up and double posted on Monday and posted on Tuesday thinking it was Wednesday. Here’s the fix: Music Monday:…
🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 I've been recently thinking about how Open Source maintenance seems to be becoming a little more a slog recently - largely with the increased amount of contributions possible with AI agents - and how it impacts being a maintainer. I'm very fortunate that my literal job is to be an Open Source project maintainer (among other things) and that it's a privilege not many others have. That being said, it still doesn't mean that undoes the amount of work…
Hey, Bear. The deployment was somewhat chill and short, 17 days. We setup the new position and worked without being hit. The way back also was easy and fast. This post is not about it. I am actually home right now. Just washed off the donbass dirt from myself and lying on my huge and clean bed. I am renting this place for about 10 years. I wasn't here since I got enslaved by this system. Almost everything at the place where I left it.. I know where is my stuff and I have everything I need here.…
TL;DR If you’re migrating between hosting services that both use Cloudflare then don’t be surprised when you see the old site after cutting over DNS to the new provider. Your request is going into the new IP, but being served from the old cache. The old provider needs to be de-provisioned so that Cloudflare can pick up the new content. Background My Atsign colleagues have spent the last few months working on a new atsign.com website, and yesterday was go live day. I was drafted in to take care…
02-08-26 And a fantasic trip to Saltoun Big Wood. Things are beginning to kick off there but still a little less than full gas as the devil's bit scabious is only starting to bud. That is the purple flowering stems that line the back trail on either side and lure all the insects in the place out, to put on an exhibition of butterflies that I rarely see elsewhere in Scotland.red admiralI like to put festival in the title of a blog around now to remind readers that the 17 Edinburgh Festivals are…
For the first time since 1946, the total debt of the United States ($39.5 trillion) is greater than our GDP ($32-ish trillion). The interest on this debt is currently about $1 trillion per year, which is more than we spend on defense. This level of debt won’t create an explosion, but more of a slow burn. To service this debt, yields on bonds will go up, which means borrowing goes up, which means inflation stays high, which means your cost of living stays high. Basically: the United States is in…
What skillOverrides controls, its four visibility states, and why it touches your own skills but not plugin skills
Happy Birthdaversary to all whom celebrate (it's us, we are celebrating) 21 years ago today, my now-partner Della was celebrating her 21st birthday with only her camera and film, a pair of jeans, a shirt, a pair of chucks, her passport and a $10 white dress with black polka dots that she bought at target (we'll get to that in a few) because everything else she owned was in a suitcase causing security upsets at Heathrow due to it having arrived from across the Atlantic without a passenger. 27…
screenshot from video from afarTV on YouTube 31 July 2026 This week a massive iceberg floated into webcam view at Ilulissat on the west coast of Greenland. It was so massive that it filled the camera screen (screenshot above). Greenland map from Wikimedia In less than three hours — from 5:03am to 7:47am — it collapsed, flipped and largely disintegrated. Then its remnants floated away. The video below from afarTV on YouTube condenses 2 hours and 44 minutes into just over 10 minutes by speeding…
Lately, I'm just over it. The madmen, the tyrants, and the greedy have taken over the wheel, and I feel like darker times are ahead. I got to thinking about what hobbies I do that aren't reliant on a computer. Photography can be decoupled easily enough - go back to film and chemicals. Music making depends on digital tools, but could also be taken offline via instruments and recording. Writing can always be offline, and certainly was for many years. Painting and drawing don’t depend at all on…
Almost a year ago, I decided to give blogging a try. I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing my posts (I put a lot of effort into them), but seeing how little traction my writings got was usually disappointing. My best-appreciated blog post was very short; I suspect that was part of its appeal. What I consider to be my best post was very niche, so I understand why it didn't get many upvotes. After that one, though, I tried to write about things that I expected to be appealing to a larger…
I’ve been thinking about AI for a while now, since I am increasingly being surrounded by AI tools at work, with Microsoft adding a Copilot button everywhere I look. But that’s a topic for another time. What inspired me to write here was the recent controversy within the Blaugust community about the use of AI-generated images and text. And I knew about this controversy after reading Andreas’ post: Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop? And then the contribution to the topic by Joel: Not…
TLDR: I migrated my blog. Please email me if you notice anything's amiss! What should you do when you’re busy and have been spending too much time on your blog lately? Why, dive head first into a completely unnecessary SSG migration, of course! I had Hugo on the brain last night for somewhat valid, somewhat flimsy reasons: I used Hugo in the past and liked it. 11ty’s fast, but Hugo’s wicked fast. I’ve been writing more Golang code lately. While I’m fine with JavaScript and enjoy TypeScript,…
Mt Haku (白山, haku-san) or quite literally "White Mountain" is a 2702m elevation mountain located on the borders of Ishikawa and Gifu prefectures. We hiked Mt Haku as a day hike in mid-July, which turned out to be the perfect time to enjoy the alpine flower fields that line the trails. As well as being one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains (along with Mt Fuji and Mt Tate), Mt Haku is also one of Japan's Hundred Famous Mountains. This list is based on a book written by author Kyuya Fukada - and as…
I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and…
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed. Today we face a different crisis,…
NASA has released a new 3D model of the Earth’s gravitational field. “The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth’s… More
Last edited 0 minutes ago. This is my 37th month of August on this earth as a human being. The past year of my life has been... eventful. Unfortunately. One might even say it's been a series of unfortunate events, but I've heard this is copyrighted or whatever. I've been financially struck due to my own mental issues, lost a couple of big jobs and with it a lot of my professional confidence. It's been a very slow path of trying to get out of this mess I've created, and there's been plenty of…
Post DinoCon, Matt is staying at my house, and we are trying hard to push out some science. This morning as he tried to innocently drink his coffee, I bombarded him with a passage from Taylor et al. (2025:87–88), read out loud. Instead of telling me to shut up and go away, he suggested I post it verbatim here. So here we go. The mounted skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, based on its paralectotype specimen MB.R.2181 (then “Brachiosaurus” brancai HMN S II) was unveiled in August 1937. With…
Last year I spoke at MK Geek Night about my personal reflections on how, after years of chasing IndieWeb perfection, I just accepted my imperfect website. I finally sat down to transcribe it and post it here. The base of this post was a transcript of my presentation but some editing is now present for added clarity, blog context instead of presentation and correction of grammatical mistakes. This a ramble about what a safe personal online space focused on creativity, community, and…
