An Account at Oriskany |The Battle of Oriskany (/ɔːrˈɪskəniː/ or /əˈrɪskəniː/) was a major engagement of the Saratoga campaign during the American Revolutionary War. On August 6, 1777, an American column of Tryon County militia and Oneidas marching to relieve the siege of Fort Stanwix was ambushed by a contingent of Britain's Indigenous allies and Loyalists. It was one of the few battles of the war in which most non-Indigenous participants were settlers born in the Thirteen Colonies. The…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Emily McBride’s novel Queen Mab is a brilliant debut that marries folklore to postpartum depression. The New Yorker wrote of the book: “The body horror of birth gives way to the fairy-tale…
On a recent weekend we found ourselves back in Kuramae to check out another of its many coffee stores - Coffee Counter Nishiya. This one came at the recommendation of a barista from another coffee store we had visited, so we were sure it wouldn’t disappoint (and it didn’t!) Coffee Counter Nishiya has a bit of a unique setup in that you take your order at one long and narrow counter. There are no seats, so this is probably not the place to linger for too long. The store is owned by Kyohei…
1) And how would it be? A new world? A new life? A new time, made for a new form of living and a new way which is mad or madder than the madman who lives to die or dies to live.What is this? What is desire if nothing else than a spot or a place in my heart to which I swear to live and remain unfearful to die, or if at all or if anything else, who am I now or who will I be now? Who will I become now that the older versions of me have been dismissed? And so, if I am free to exist, then how can I…
As Wielder of Arms flapped her vast, strong wings she climbed away from the ground. She crested the village and saw beyond it hundreds of people running. They were armed for war and Wielder realized the others had been stalling. She cried to her friends, “We have been betrayed! More foes come to join the fight!” The people below begged Delver to wait, “Yes, we had sent word for aid.” "We’ll tell them to stop. We wish not to fight. If you wait, the peace will hold.” But Wielder of Arms heard…
Just a quick announcement from Rockstar this morning — the video is basically just a moving JPG, so don’t worry yourself too hard about hitting play — but what’s fascinating is that the reveal will be on Netflix in addition to YouTube. I wonder who is paying who on that one?
A good two-state toggle can actually express all three data model states. Until recently, if you looked at most websites with a theme toggle[1], you’d find three options: Light, Dark, and System. Examples of tri-state dark mode toggles. In (LTR) reading direction: Ant Design, Red Hat Design System, Web Awesome, Excalidraw, Taiga, Astro, Hero UI. Thankfully, these days the trend has shifted towards a simpler two-state toggle, but tri-state ones are still incredibly common. Examples of two-state…
Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders. Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world. We link out a lot, love comments,…
Henry Bolingbroke and his cousin, Richard, were childhood friends, but when they were older Henry became one of the Lords Appellant in 1387 who took it upon themselves to curtail what they saw as excesses and corruption in the administration of Richard when he became king.Not only had they been friends, but Henry's father and Richard's uncle, the powerful (and sometimes feared) John of Gaunt, was a steadfast supporter of Richard personally and of royal authority generally.After all that…
The beauty of blogging with Pika is how low the barrier to entry is. Think of a thought, write it down, click “publish post,” and you’re good to go. No bloated “update your plugin” horror show that ruins your layout yet again (hello, WordPress); no friction (though friction can be a good thing in itself). Can’t everything in life be this simple, please? I’ve noticed, however, that a quiet, organic division has crept into my daily publishing routine. And that’s one that I don’t like: short,…
Much in the same way that the SECNAV in 1975 created 15 new “cruisers” from thin air by reclassifying DLGs to CGs to gain a two-cruiser lead over the Russkis, the Navy has just dubbed 19 planned Blocks V and VI Virginia class SSNs as SSGNs to fill the gap left by the four retiring TLAM-commando boats. The first of four Ohio-class SSGN conversions, USS Georgia is pending decommissioning after 42 years of service, with her sisters Ohio, Michigan and Florida soon to follow. Each was given a $1…
Florida-based KelTec continues its established trope of delivering strange yet intriguing new guns to the market, introducing the SUB-SDP last week. The pistol, dubbed the “Nub Sub” in the company’s own marketing materials, is based on the KelTec SUB2000 folding carbine, made into a pistol format and sporting a stabilizing brace instead of a stock on a shorter extension tube and a 6-inch barrel. Set up to take Glock-pattern 9mm double stacks (i.e., G17, G19, G45), the base model ships with a…
Sixth Fleet images, some 40 years ago this month. How about this surreal photo of a 44,000-ton Soviet Kiev class (Project 1143 Krechyet) “heavy aviation cruiser” (CVHG) seen from across the deck of a Sovremenny class destroyer, Mediterranean, August 1986. USN Photo DN-ST-86-11164, via NARA And this full-length version, sans Sovremenny: USN Photo DN-ST-86-11165, via NARA How the Kiev and the Sovremenny stack up to the rest of the fleet: DD-ST-86-06685 The above CVGH is believed to be the Minsk,…
When AI-generated code breaks something, the real problem is often how we reviewed, understood, and trusted it.
One obscure, but very useful Bash trick is CTRL+X CTRL+E, which will open $EDITOR to edit the current line. This means I can switch to a Vim session with whatever I was typing on intact. This is handy for those times where I need a search-and-replace operation or fix things in a long command or build a long complex command from scratch. I’m aware of Bash’s vi-mode, but I prefer using the default Emacs keybindings because I also work in other’s remote servers. Also, it’s a Vi emulation. I’ve…
Come write HTML with me this Saturday. HTML Day is an annual celebration of getting together and writing HTML, created by Elliott Cost and Laurel Schwulst. Saturday, August 8, 2026, is this year's date, and I'm running two online sessions again, same as last year. Sessions Two one-hour sessions, so folks across time zones can join in. Oceania Time — 6-7pm AEST European Time — 6-7pm CET The European session also works out to 9-10am PT, 11am-12pm CT, and 12-1pm ET, if you're in North America. No…
We often forget how inexpensive it is (often free, in fact) it is to completely make someone’s day/week/year or, even, give them a memory they will cherish for life.
Performing circus can teach kids about hard work, dedication, teamwork, performance, etc. Most importantly, it teaches kids how to fail in front of a crowd, get back up, and try it again. “Smile and Style” as they say. The crowd, for their part, will cheer even louder when you get it the next time.
I kinda like this framing of doing work vs. going to the gym: At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.
[🎶 Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man ad! 🎶] Surprise! You don’t really own your BMW.Link: https://www.techspot.com/news/113327-bmw-putting-spider-man-ads-dashboard-after-promising.html
Celebrating 25 years of blogging with gratitude, reflection, and a sweet slice of success surrounded by creativity and joy. August 6, 2001, 25 years ago. I started blogging. I had a website made by Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GTE (now Verizon) in the homepages they offered back in those days for residential customers. In fact, your ISP provided everything for you. You had so much website space and an ISP-provided email, which you lost if you changed providers. That's foreign today. But I…
This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.
Low resolution, high compression, wonky colours and press-the-button-and-hope photos! Yes, it's the shitty camera challenge!
We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life. When you’re working your way up a steep climb, you have to take it one step at a time. There’s little point looking back at how far you’ve come or ahead at how far is left — both just pull you out of the only step that matters, the next one. Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that…
General anesthesia using gases for surgery is one of America's great nineteenth century medical achievements. In early 1845 dentist Horace Wells used nitrous oxide to painlessly extract a tooth. In October 1846 dentist William T.G. Morton successfully demonstrated ether anesthesia in Boston during an operation by John Collins Warren. The Morton/Warren event soon made it's way around the world. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology outside Chicago maintains an extensive timeline that covers…
As part of building a service for automatically publishing blog posts from RSS feeds into atproto's standard.site lexicon, I implemented atproto OAuth for logging in and getting access tokens to publish for the user. This means that any user with an atproto account, whether they created it on Bluesky, Eurosky, or Blacksky, or any of the other Personal Data Servers available, can log in to your service. Atproto OAuth does not require pre-registering clients with a service, one implementation…
Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project. The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past. But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business…
I’d mentioned earlier in the spring that Kim picks up two new hanging ferns every year so the birds can nest in them. This one has had two separate momma birdies choose it to birth and care for their young this year. And yes, that’s a lot of poop! 🤣
tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, Wi-Fi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is…
Wavyleaf basketgrass (photo from Wikimedia) 6 August 2026 Have you seen this plant? Its wavy leaves are nothing like the plants I’m used to in Pennsylvania so I was surprised when I saw it at Bear Run Nature Reserve in late May. Was it a new wildflower? No! This is wavyleaf basketgrass, an extremely invasive plant that is just starting to take hold in Pennsylvania. This month the Pennsylvania iMapInvasives Program is holding a statewide blitz to find it so we can beat it back before it covers…
