i think about intimacy, sharing my past and history
After deciding that my original pick for this week was so terribly bad that reviewing it would be a simple unkindness to myself as much as the author, my plea for some more sapphic or queer suggestions turned up a much better replacement, Kiss of Seduction, as well as a few other books I can add to my review backlog. This one’s a contemporary paranormal romance, a succubus and a half angel, set in the author’s version of the kinky decadent court of BDSM obsessed supernaturals trope. Demons,…
It has been a weekend of cheer, pigeons and gardening. On Friday afternoon I was in town and spotted not one, not two but three pigeons all with string foot. One of them had a very swollen and white foot which was clearly causing him a lot of pain but I had stupidly left my net at home. When I returned about an hour later with the net he was nowhere to be seen but I managed to catch a different bird that needed help so it wasn’t a wasted journey. Here’s the before photo. It doesn’t look so bad…
There was movement in the water, on the opposite bank of the River Teme.A fish? No, we could now see it swimming on the surface. A snake—it was long and thin. And coming towards us.No: Jane pointed out the furry tail. A rat, then? A very small beaver? (I kept that thought to myself) A squirrel? Do squirrels swim?Yes, they do. Across the water Almost with us
A tremendous week here in sunny athens! Perfect temperatures (~30ºC), blue skies, a breeze and sunshine every day is good for the soul. Also good for the soul but less good for the body has been a reversion to going out a lot. Outdoor cinema Monday evening, after my greek class, was a trip to Nea Filadelfeia for a taverna meal at Αυλή and my first outdoor cinema of the year, to see the new Spielberg alien film – Disclosure Day (review + pics, ⭐️⭐️). Film was fine but forgettable. Cine Alsos was…
More music at Fête de la Musique. All the locations were pretty close by. But the kids did not fancy the high temperatures, so we didn't last long.
I was hoping that people sending postcards of restaurants would have mentioned the food they ate in those places. That rarely happened. What was far more likely was that they would say when they were returning from their trips. What had put the idea about mentions of food into my mind was the message on the back of one of the linen postcards from my last post. That was the card from Burdick’s Drive-In Restaurant that pictured French-fried shrimp on a plate seemingly floating in the sky over the…
You might find this post especially useful if you have a project with many #[sqlx::test] tests. One of the upstream Rust projects that I worked on during the past few years was the rewrite of bors, the merge queue bot we use to merge all rust-lang/rust PRs. If you are interested in learning more about this bot, check out my talk from RustWeek 2026. I’m quite proud of the integration test suite of bors, which I spent a lot of effort on, and thanks to which the bot has been working pretty much…
Before I can think about fitting the garboard planks, I need to bevel the keel so the planks fit at just the right angle. To prepare for this, I watched an Off Center Harbor video ($) from Geoff Kerr’s Caledonia Yawl series. The Caledonia Yawl is a larger boat, but the the construction process (glued lapstrake; plywood) is pretty similar. A few minutes into the video, Kerr says “if you haven’t bought a hand power planer yet, you’re going to run to the store.
Reading this week: Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa by Roland Oliver The second full day of our river cruise on the mighty Danube I woke up while the ship was still moving, mist-shrouded Austrian-looking buildings sliding past in the quiet morning. Very neat! Right before we entered Vienna we went through another lock. Since it wasn’t our first it was much less exciting, and we experienced it as we ate breakfast, i.e. we watched a concrete wall slowly lower (from our perspective)…
A collection of seasonal excerpts from the commonplaceEssays, blogs, and other prose: No as a Noticeboard, Sara Ahmed A no to an institution can be expressed through the withdrawal of labour from it. When you leave because of a complaint, you don’t just leave the problem behind. You leave a record of confronting that problem, which can be another kind of legacy although one that often has to be unburied by those who come after. Leaving also meant I was freer to express myself. And that I had…
Looking Out Browsing Talking Crossing Peering and Walking
Findings(may not work)
There is a lake here, but it isn’t viewable from our campsite. However, the price is right with the 50% Senior Pass discount. We are close to Drs Moines and in a holding pattern to get to Cedar Rapids for an available campsite. On our first day here, we ventured to a nearby brewery not worth mentioning. It’s never a good sign when the oatmeal stout is translucent. Cedar Rapids is where my mom lives, so we will be there for several days this coming week. We did get in our first campfire of the…
Good morning from a partly cloudy Road America. After two days of brilliant sunshine each morning, it is currently partly cloudy with a forecast of complete overcast later in the day. The forecast also calls for cooler temperatures, with a high of 65° and breezy. I dressed accordingly and wore a sweatshirt. I am re-thinking […]
I’ve seen this advice for creative pursuits multiple times that you should practice finishing your projects. I think it is great advice so I thought I’d share some reflections on what has worked for me. In retrospect, it is somehow both in the spirit of this advice, and a complete inversion of it at the same time.
I was about to write “what a weird time” and then scrambled trying to recall a time when it was not. An altogether fruitless exercise and certainly not the Stoic thing to do. Earlier this year Data Storey and I decided that waiting for the world to return to "normal" as a means to reduce the risk of making change is pointless. So, later this year we're moving south, back into the part of the world that doesn't live under the oppression of the polar jet stream. I've now spent twenty six years of…
Growing up, it wasn’t officially summer until we had Pie-Iron Pizza cooked over a campfire on a camping trip. It’s simplicity at its best: marinara, mozzarella, and pepperoni sandwiched between two slices of buttered white bread, secured in a pie iron, and cooked over the fire until golden brown with melty cheese inside. For years, living in New York with no campfires in sight, I could only dream of making them. Sure, I could have used a panini press or a skillet, but it’s not the same! Then I…
I ran into the classic “range over a channel” leak while working on a custom cron scheduler. I’ve debugged it on prod many times before, but writing one myself in a small piece of code reminded me how easy it is to write bugs like this even when you know about it. Here: on each tick, the scheduler dispatches the jobs that are due each job reports its outcome on a channel one collector ranges over that channel to record the run func tick(due []Job) []outcome { results := make(chan outcome) var…
Definitely been a hell of a year, and I am happy to say I can finally walk and sit again. The main recovery from this part of the saga has been due to being able to stay with H and his family and all the help they have been giving me. Through physical therapy and all the rest of the shit you can find in the previous posts, I can now finally be somewhat human. Anyways, take care of your health and get some Peace, Love and Wifi, and enjoy the 5-bracket HDR above.On a random note stumbled on…
Every single person I've ever met is dumbfounded by the enormous irrationality of other people....even as they themselves are obviously irrational much of the time. It stems from each of us feeling robustly capable from our experience operating in some narrow realm with clarity and competence. We feel comfortable forgiving our failings outside that realm. An otherwise competent person is naturally prone to err "a bit", so it's forgivable!. It only feels like "a bit", of course, because the 98%…
This is the 5th video in our virtual memory series. In the previous video, we learned about the page table and how the hardware performs a page table walk to do address translation. But merely finding the physical frame address in the page table is not sufficient for the hardware to do a memory access. It also needs to do certain additional checks to make sure that the access is valid. For example, it has to ensure that the page table mapping itself is valid (e.g., the page might have been…
This week's bookshelf is pretty straightforward, like last week's, and for the same reason. To the left, you have the rest of my Showcase Presents volumes. To the right, most of my Essential volumes. I loved both series for the same reasons and, now that they have been discontinued, I wish I would have bought more of them when they were still available (Of DC's Showcase Presents, I kind of wish I had bought almost all of them; with Marvel's Essentials, I wish I would have at least stuck with…
I’ve heard this claim now really often: at conferences, in keynotes, even in casual conversations: “With AI, we’ll soon only need to work two or three days a week.” The narrative is seductive, I admit: technology will finally liberate us from the grind, freeing up time for creativity, family, leisure, hobbies – who would not […]
Actually, that's not true. This is what I actually learned:Find a topic, 'a niche', you'll probably have to experiment a lot to find the one that works. Then - only post about that topic. Experiment a lot to find the style/tone/approach that works. Then - only use that approach.Do it a lot. Multiple times a day. Keep it exactly the same but keep experimenting with ways to change it.Be incredibly lucky.That is incredibly hard work. And most of the people who work really hard at it don't get…
"On the pitch, much was amateurish: penalty spots were painted in the wrong place, some games finished ahead of time, and the identity of some of the goalscorers remains unknown. Argentina’s captain, Manuel Ferreira, left halfway through to sit his law exams, and the US midfielder Andy Auld was temporarily blinded when a physio spilled a bottle of chloroform while treating his split lip. Some teams played in an assortment of colours, and Juan Evaristo, Argentina’s right-half, in a beret. The…
I don't know how to start this or why tf I am writing this, but I am really, fucking really tired of my fucking life. When I was a baby, I was in my mother’s vagina. That’s what the books and porn taught me, and I remember seeing a light blue light. It was pretty peaceful, but then as I grew up, I started seeing fights between mother and father and both families. My father was a gambler, not the one who bets online on cricket etc., but the one who goes to junk areas. He was also a tobacco or…
Hallo, hello, moin!
Having recently taken the California Zephyr, Amtrak's Chicago-Bay Area service, for approximately half its length on a trip to the Rockies (as well as a lengthy set of experiences previously in my life, of course), I have some thoughts on train travel in the US that I wanted to share. 1. Timeliness is a Huge IssueAmtrak has significant issues with not owning its track and with not getting priority over freight because of that (which it's supposed to). These are structural problems that…
I love my vacuum cleaner robot. Originally from China (yes, it's a Roborock), and altough he has a female voice, we've been affectionately calling him "Robo" and referring to "him" ever since we've got him. I've tried out some of the available voices (back then when I was still serious about learning Spanish 🥲). But in the end, I've always returned to its German, female voice. It's nothing special. As a matter of fact, Robo's personality is very down to earth, very serious, very robot-like…
