No matter what you call them, Beholders are vile servants of the coastal wizards. But worry not. They have monstrous cousins that can be used to populate (monsterate?) your dungeons. Less common and less popular, perhaps, but not less worthy.MumblersAlso called: Omniphagists, Gabblegob, Chew-OrbsArt by Felipe FariaThis spherical monster levitates through gaseous sacs in its body. Its central cavity is a gnawing mouth of yellow teeth which leads into an extradimensional space (similar to a bag…

People often confuse freedom with disorder, and predictability with trust. Autonomy threatens something psychological that obedience doesn't. Human ability to predict the other person. People generally build a mental model of someone: "He's this kind of person. She believes these things. He always reacts like this. She's the funny one. He's conservative. She's difficult. He's against this." Once that model exists, interaction becomes cheap. You don't have to encounter the person anymore. You…

Bobcat kittens in North Texas (photo from WIkimedia) 21 September 2026 Another rainy day in Pittsburgh with yesterday’s Flood Watch lasting until noon today(*). So to take our minds off the rain … Let’s watch wild bobcat kittens at play in Connecticut in late July 2025. By autumn they will be able to hunt alone. Though they can stay with their mother for up to a year, they’ll probably leave earlier. Ready for new adventures. video embedded from Jay Cromak on YouTube (*) Flood Watches have…

When you are naming a pen model after after the eight-legged horse Norse god Odin rode in on, you better get it right. Luckily for us, Hinze Pen Co. always gets it right, and the Sleipnir model is just the latest example of their craftsmanship.When you are dealing with a magical creature as inspiration, how do you bring that forward into a pen design? For starters, how about an eight-sided barrel, matching the number of the mythical beasts legs. If eight sides weren’t enough on its own, they…

It’s the economy, stupid.

I don't believe anything coming out of frontier model CEOs mouths. Their stakes are extremely high, and they have incentives measured in $ trillions to lie, blow out of proportion, or hide information. We are in the middle of a misinformation war. Assume everyone is lying.

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but…

Hi, baby. I'm 18 weeks pregnant today. 16 weeks ago, you were a single cell with two nuclei, about to mix it together and make a new human. Look at you now: a tiny baby curled up in a foetal position. Sometimes it feels unreal. I can't grasp how lucky I am to have you in my belly. I think it will be easier when I'll really feel you move. For now, I'm always afraid that you might disappear, even though I feel my uterus stretching to give you room to grow. How does it feel? Are you comfortable?…

John Ottman is one of those filmmakers whose résumé is almost ridiculously varied. As a composer, he’s probably best known for movies like The Usual Suspects, X2: X-Men United, Superman Returns, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Nice Guys, and Valkyrie. Horror fans will also recognize his work from Apt Pupil, Lake Placid, Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, Hide and Seek, and Orphan. He even directed Urban Legends: Final Cut. In 2019, Ottman won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on…

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything…

What have you recently finished reading? I finished two books last night, which I was very pleased with — two very different books, as is my wont, ahaha. One was Brandt & Stein’s Worst Man, which is a fun and ridiculous graphic novel in which one character is trying to make his best friend’s wedding amazing, and the other one is trying to ruin it (only, of course, he changes his mind). I love the art, the faces are so expressive and there’s a lot of comedy that arises from expression and…

My library in progress #3So happy with this! After playing with the flat version, I decided to apply the logic to individually cloned shelves, about 5 hours later this is the result! #blog #pixels #website #redesignThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

As someone who has written a lot about the independent web in the past, then something like the newly-launched Pixel Area is like catnip to me. From the site’s About page1, Oleh Providnyk explains: “Pixel Area is a 100×100 coordinate grid with room for 10,000 websites. Each pixel belongs to a real person and links to whatever they have online: a blog, a project, or just a small site they made. You pick an empty spot, choose a color, add a short description, and visitors find you by wandering…

Ian Holloway has posted about the Ghost Signals book at his Wyrd Britain site: “This, the latest collection of writings from Stephen Prince, the man behind the always excellent ‘A Year in the Country’ blog, takes us on a tour of various obscure televisual gems from ’68 to ’95… he’s a digger extraordinaire so alongside old favourites there are… tantalising treats of programmes I had no idea existed – ‘A Pattern of Roses’, ‘Shades’, ‘The Plant’ – and his analysis are ever cogent, and insightful,…

White people, and especially Americans, tend to hold some pretty weird beliefs. But top of the list may be the belief that we have a basic right to permanent emotional comfort. This is a confusion of basic human rights with elitist privileges. A particularly bizarre dramatization of this belief is that paying audiences for the arts have a right never to experience any emotional discomfort. Another is that our lawmakers and other celebrities seem to have an extra-special right to be buffered…

What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently? Recently? Ever since I first heard this I can’t listen to it once. Love the flow, the beats, the attitude, the lyrics, just love her voice in this too. Plus it’s only 2:39 long so easily repeatable. Seriously, how catchy is this track? Been 2 years and I still hit that repeat button whenever it comes on. “DENIAL IS A RIVER” by Doechii Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist…

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'Notebook' 1842 It’s autumn again. Where did the summer go? Summer was a scorcher of a season here in Las Vegas. We braved the heat, but we were ready for it to end. We’re all stoked for autumn. I’m not fond of the shorter days, bare trees, and all the pumpkin mania that has hit the markets… pumpkin spice this, pumpkin-flavored that. And then there’s all the Halloween stuff right…

First, a little background… There’s a guy who lives a short bike ride from our place who has an ongoing garage sale. It’s not on every day; just on weekends, and sometimes, the occasional weekday:His wares are set up on folding tables and shelves that seem to be set up all the time. There’s no indication that he takes them down or puts them away when he isn’t having a sale. It appears that he does cover the goods with tarps, shower curtains, and large trash bags when it rains. The stuff is a…

(1965) Directed by Mario Bava; Written by Ib Melchior, Alberto Bevilacqua, Callisto Cosulich, Mario Bava, Antonio Roman, Rafael J. Salvia, and Louis M. Heyward (English version); Screen Story by Ib Melchior Based on the short story “One Night of 21 Hours”: by Renato Pestriniero; Starring: Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Ángel Aranda, Evi Marandi, Franco Andrei and Federico Boiso; Available on Blu-ray and DVD Rating: ***½ “Do you know what that mysterious planet in Terrore nello Spazio was made…

I recently had family in town, and one of the things they came to see, besides me, was a ukelele festival in Torrance. At that festival, I saw the guy in this video play this arrangement of Billy Jean - the same preposterous one-ukelele version he plays in the video - live. It was extremely nuts. Feng E can actually make the ukelele make these sounds with his hands??? I don't even know too much about ukelele limitations, but I've absorbed enough from friends in college and from my…

thinking cap onStarted to think about this last night at my desk. Chopping the 8 slots for the table clips wasn't that appealing. Thought of gluing a bearer at each corner and then screwing up through it into the top holding it down. Should work, shouldn't it?This is all I got done in the AM session. I had my final chemo cocktail party today and I am now in the monitoring phase. Every 3 months I'll get a CT of the lungs and have it reviewed by the oncologist. Fingers crossed that is a long time…

Stairs on the Galveston, Texas, Seawall lead to the frothing surf of the Gulf of Mexico. The post Froth at the Foot of the Stairs appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) Unit 1: The Stories I Tell Myself The Assignment Technology & Pop Culture vs. the Ancient Archetype — Where has tech and pop culture reshaped or commodified or flattened an ancient archetype? Think about the algorithm, influencer culture, AI, our current branding of “authenticity,” etc. Is anything gained in all this reshaping? Who cares that the Tech Bros have decided that they are the embodied merge of the archetypes Master and Mystic? Who cares that on…

It saddens to see parents (dads and moms alike) lead their online bios with the quantity of their offspring – much like academics lead with their list of earned titles and degrees. It turns me off and signals to me that This individual wears their quantity of offspring as a badge of honor deserving of praise and awe. You have 6 children? Or 2? Or 12? Great – but don’t wear one of the most ordinary and basic pieces of what humankind has always done as a badge. At least don’t lead with it.

The first Interesting Assemble is a week today. Tickets are still available and still free.And, excitingly, we can now announce a very special guest for Interesting Assemble II - the return of Dave 'Funkypancake' Simpson.Old school interneters will remember Dave's work with enormous affection. He pioneered a genre of noticing the world with a camera which would go on to be a staple on social and algorithmic media. Dave spotted and shared the unregarded and the odd, the quotidian things that…

🔖 Read Seasonal Living Isn’t Just A Wellness Trend — It’s How We Were Designed To Live by Dr. Jaclyn Tolentino (The Good Trade). 🍂 It’s fall according to the light and the temperature is obliging, too. Time for cardigans, sweet potatoes, and days that feel like the golden hour all afternoon.

A big screen carries with it different UI expectations, and how that manifests itself in Apple TV’s Settings app, is that there’s always room for an additional hint about the thing you’ve just selected. So yes, I have been exploring Apple TV’s Settings after the recent update like any normal person would, and I have noticed how well-written those are. They help navigate difficult technical things, and they’re not afraid to get conversational, or offer advice, or even commentary… but they always…

Intent ⬇ Preparation ⬇ Execution ⬇ Post-processing ⬇ Result The smartphone killed the idea of intentional devices. It is every device that you need and more. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod, an internet device. A phone, an iPod… you get the point. Having everything at the tip of your fingertips has removed the intent of certain devices and objects around us. Remember when going online was an intentional act? You needed to have a computer, go to it, wait for it to turn on,…

For Apple, it's time to move on beyond AR demos with iPads, as Joe Rossignol reports for MacRumors: Following renovations, the Apple Park Visitor Center in Cupertino, California no longer features a 3D augmented reality model of the Apple Park campus. ~ Links: Apple Park Visitor Center Just Lost an Attraction Offered Since 2017, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors Apple Park AR Experience, by AppleInsider, YouTube (2017)

I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and what to look out for. It also helps if I have a few birds I’ve looked up to be able to say “oh cool, that’s a gray kingbird!” I went on my first outing today dedicated to bird photography and after a few shots I realized it was the same feeling as encountering wild Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. I’d never been excited about pigeons…