Early fall is pretty. I’ll savour it now before the trees get all nekkid. A couple of larger mushrooms by the trail, surrounded by fall colours. Just west of the Cariboo Dam. Golden trees in golden light at Still Creek.

They Are The Law! Thrash Metal Band Anthrax join forces with Rebellion Publishing for a headline takeover of issue #500 of Judge Dredd Megazine!This January the monthly Judge Dredd Megazine celebrates issue 500 with a packed lineup of new stories from the hottest creative talent in the comics industry today, and it’s headlined by a major collaboration with the legendary metal band Anthrax!

Lick and load, people. Yeah, yeah, sure, we ain’t mailing letters much these days but we both know there’s the odd time you’re forced to fold-n-crease a piece of paper and snug it tightly into a envelope for some smoooooooth mailing. Now, if you don’t nail it properly you get a fat wedge sticking out the top of the envelope and are left with two horrible choices: 1. The Creasy Jungle. This is where you unfold and refold your crinkly masterpiece. It’s not ideal because there’s no hiding your…

Speech is a useful medium for communicating with AI, both as an input/output channel and as back-and-forth. Over 2026 I’ve been increasing the amount of speech I/O and have collected a fair number of use cases. Input Voice is, of course, great for rambling at coding agents. Oftentimes the transactional “just talking with the agent” convo stuff is easier to ramble out than it is to type. I also occasionally have wrist sensitivity issues that make it difficult to type – now with STT and…

My partner is out of town and I'm trying to lay in the middle of the bed in the hopes that I will be able to sleep in the middle of the bed, and maybe even starfish a bit, but it just won't take. When you sleep in the same bed as someone for years and years, things just get stuck in a certain way, and the way they're stuck over here is that half of the middle is her side and encroaching on that sovereign territory is tantamount to an act of war. Or something. Also, the Blue Wave was fun to…

The Drift SeriesWhat this is: A low-key baseball tournament set in the same universe as my Odradek's Drift Classic Traveller campaign, on the industrial planet El Zocalo. Run on the Gay Beholder OSR Discord. The pitch (no pun intended): Players take on the role of managers for one of the planetary baseball teams in Odradek's Drift sector. Players will generate and name a roster of players using rules I'll provide, and then I'll organize the teams into tournament brackets. Every Tuesday night…

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

In October, we took a trip to Halifax and around Cape Breton. The trip was specifically for the fall colours, and the trees did not disappoint. The colours were pretty similar to what we see in Vancouver right now, but there was something like a digital detox in seeing a sea of multicoloured trees stretching into the distance. Coincidentally, the Celtic Colours festival was taking place, and we were lucky enough to catch a couple of shows in Chéticamp, an area where Acadian French is commonly…

How about that blue wave, y’all?! 🌊 👷‍♀ What I’ve been working on Peachtober 2026: participated in my first month long, daily art challenge Sewed and quilted a Frankenstein’s monster pillow case. Technically I finished it on Nov 1, just in time for Halloween 2027. Went to a friend’s house for craft night. I painted one of the mugs she threw on her wheel, and hand-built a paint brush rest from clay. 🧙🏻‍♀️ Side quests An unusual amount of travel this October! First, I met up with my immediate…

Once a year at my church, I usually give one sermon. I was asked to tie the theme to a young adult retreat we had taken to the Sunshine Coast. My first experience giving a sermon was many years ago at my old home church in El Monte, California. It was a Vietnamese-American church, but kind of oddly located in retrospect, as everybody commuted to the church from pretty far away, and at the time there really weren’t too many Vietnamese people in El Monte. The church service used to be primarily…

I really enjoy the hobby aspect of a VPS but with seeing some recent security things I decided I wanted to take a break from that for a bit. AI is finding vulnerabilities quickly these days. The recent ones would not have affected me directly. Maybe the VPS host but not me directly. At least they wouldn’t have affected me in a way I could handle except maybe losing my static files which are published anyway. I stumbled onto NearlyFreeSpeech.NET very recently. I have seen the name before and I…

My father had a secret. It wasn't a particularly interesting secret, but he guarded it like it was the location of buried treasure. He knew how to turn off the outdoor water tap for winter. For some reason, he never shared this information with any of the women in the house. I don't know if...Read More

My son (19) voted in his first general election today. He didn't register to vote in time to receive a mail-in ballot, (Utah is still a vote-by-mail state, at least until 2029 as the current laws stand,) so he voted in-person after work this evening. He waited in line for 90 minutes and registered to vote right there at the polling place. He arrived home in good spirits. “I figured I don't have much right to complain about the state of things if I don't exercise my right to vote,” he said.…

Construction Workers, JPMorganChase Tower – New York, New York I found some construction workers at the base of a new skyscraper. Do you recognize it? The triangular fan-shaped support is a dead giveaway. About two weeks ago, I had a three-part mini-series showing you the new JPMorganChase Tower on Park Avenue. This is from the construction site during the daytime. Beyond being a street photograph, it gives a good perspective on the scale of the tower’s structural supports. In that mini-series…

I got through Alias, Season 2. Like a lot of shows that last about five seasons, the second season is where it got really popular.My notes —It’s darker. Sydney is less of an innocent this time around, and some very bad things happen to people.Sydney’s mother plays very large in this season. She’s played by Swedish actress Lena Olin, which is a stroke of genius because she and Jennifer Garner absolutely look like mother and daughter. Her loyalties are very much up in the air. The big arc of the…

One of those days where nothing seem to go right. Had to take a $30 cab ride to the office because I turned off my alarm and went back to bed. Then I went to pick up my medication from my doctor. Missed a med. Paid for courier $22 to pick up. We have a visitor from HQ the next two days which means no WFH for Fridays (which is the norm). My reading has slowed. There is a restlessness under my skin. I suspect it is PMS. What I have read is interesting though. No More Tears, a non-fiction about…

The night gave us yet another challenge: two hours of sustained 40kn winds. We took the main down and kept the staysail. In the pitch black darkness we surfed down the waves with wind howling in our ears. Wearing full set of foulies was not an exaggerated approach to the situation. After that, the winds subseded and we were left with mere 30 knots, what at that point felt calm and easy. As the morning rose, we pulled up the main in second reef and opted for good sleep for the off watch instead…

This is a giant version of Counting Cats, the latest game from local Malaysian publisher Meja Belakang. Haireey is now using this copy to run game demos. It's a great idea. This is a game of literally counting cats. It is a children's game and casual game designed with his young son in mind. You want to be first to count correctly the number of cats of a specific type. So this

The cover of the third issue of Fantastic is a wraparound which depicts a scantily-clad woman about to be murdered by goblins, which I think we have to admit is pretty crazy. We've read two stories that debuted in this issue of Howard Browne's magazine, "Final Exam" by Chad Oliver and "To Fit the Crime" by Richard Matheson. Today we'll read a story in the issue printed under Mickey Spillane's byline (though isfdb tells us Browne deserves a co-writing credit on this thing) and one by Cornell…

I don’t know when my intrigue started with the French foreign legion? Maybe all little boys had a fascination with it? I’m not sure. Unlike The Alamo, Zulu and other war movies that inspired me as a kid and as a manchild I never recall seeing any FFL movies. However, from as young as I can remember I always wanted FFL soldiers and a desert fort for them. When I came to Australia, 40 years ago this past October, my grandma gave me a bread loaf bag full of 1/72 scaled soldiers. It was a mixed lot…

This site TOTALLY takes me back: Spelunkr.tv is a set of 34 themed channels playing shows from the 80’s and 90’s: cartoons, Star Trek reruns, wrestling shows, Bob Ross, Friday Night Videos… and you can’t change the channel. What’s on is on, and you watch what you get. All I need now are a stack of Oreos, a glass of milk, and a spot on the couch next to the dog.

I set up a new shop on Big Cartel for my zines. I’ll be closing my Etsy shop in December, since they updated their Terms of Use to allow sellers’ content to be used to train AI. I wrote a post about it on my zines site.

October, more like Oct-over, amirite? I finally managed to shift my sleep time by 1 hour (from 22h to 5h), which allowed me to spend more time working out in the morning, while still able to do laundry before work. I decided to separate the rewrite of pensiv (static site generator that builds this website) to a new, separate repo. The rewrite is intended to be something much more modular and the base is more of a framework than the monolithic generator as it is currently. However, this November…

…please let me wake up tomorrow to good news.

Michael and Abby L's exit interviews from The Traitors: New Blood contain some wild revelations.

A fun capture by my sister at Arches National Park. Lots of photos, laughs, and stories to tell. Definitely want to get back here to Moab sooner than later.

Lately I've been concerned with my media diet. But taking this very large. Including even notifications, text messages, books, everything. All input. Sick leave has allowed me to risk basically turning off notifications. Let me tell you: It is not the way but it is a start. And diet is the right word. We're presented with so many choices to read/watch/play/whatever. And it's hard to separate the noise from the worthwhile. I'm hoping that by slowly pruning, I will get to something healthy

[1979]The return of the power pop party that never stopsCould this song be any more 1979.It was a perfect pop year. New-wave power-pop was the thing. And this was one of the best UK tunes in the game. White Heat killed it with this exhilarating burst of power-pop energy. A real jumpy around buzz*. Young, fresh and making a nervous breakdown sound like a whole lotta fun.*Some dude in the comments said that and it was perfect so thanks Potato People!

The chart A good week, and with it, a graph that is bending in the right direction again. Much better than last week. This week's rolling 90 day average spending The spending And this is the lowest weekly total since I started this exercise. Wow! AccountTotal Bars and alcohol64.44 Groceries51.53 Vet50.00 Hobbies41.90 Dining33.94 Online Services31.63 Clothes25.90 Gifts19.99 Miscellaneous14.49 Butcher12.25 Auto5.07 Taxes0.18 Total351.32 Where it all went Leading with bars and alcohol, good grief.…

As some of you know, my thwarted ambition is to have been a decoder at Bletchley Park during WWII. Alas, I was born both too late and in the wrong country but, more to the point, I lack the puzzle-solving acumen needed for such undertakings. Although I love words, I am not even very good at Scrabble. However, this does not affect my appreciation of such puzzles so I was intrigued by the description of The Enigma Challenge and greatly enjoyed reading it.Read more »