I placed 29th in the AMP Challenge with an Aggregation Score of 16.45 out of 100.

For use with Dolmenwood. Keep vigil at a saint's shrine from dusk until dawn. Swear to keep its Observance. Receive its Blessing at dawn. Break the Observance and any Blessing from that saint is lost. The saint will never bless you again. Only one Blessing may be held. Reciting its Prayer spends it. A new Blessing replaces the old. Any number of saints may be served. Their Observances remain binding. Abjuration of St SignisAll sound within a few paces of the blessed ceases while they hold a…

Economists are frequently accused of being advocates for unfettered and unregulated laissez-faire markets, but anyone who has ever taken a basic introductory economics class knows that this caricature is untrue. The basic intro econ class does spend time on explaining what markets do well. It also spends considerable time on the category of “market failures” where markets often do not do so well, including externalities like pollution, investment in public goods, poverty and inequality,…

Soda Machine, Farmersville TX. I've had insomnia for two weeks. I go to bed at a normal time, wake up two hours later, and can't get back to sleep for another four hours. In the last week I've nearly dozed off at red lights more than once. It's pissing me off, and it's scaring me. I tried half a dose of Tylenol PM. The sleep ingredient is diphenhydramine, one of the few over-the-counter options that doesn't spike my blood pressure. It did nothing for me at 2 a.m. and just made me dopier the…

I missed the early voting window so stopped by before work to vote! reply via email: hello@fiddery.com

Colorado hailstones, June 2025. (9News photo)I was in Pueblo talking with my new insurance agent yesterday -- new in that her Colorado Springs-based agency (with satellite offices) has bought up my old small-town agency, which earlier had bought a smaller-town agency). Consolidation everywhere — like hailstones,We talked about trying to get fire etc coverage for our rental cabin, It came up for renewal right during the big Aspen Acres Fire, and that was a hard no. (The coverage came from a…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***A wise man called Cliff once said, "Carrie doesn't live here anymore."Then he added, "Carrie used to room on the second floor."I don't know if either of those claims has since proven to be correct but I do know that in November 1976, Carrie was living in your local cinema.That's because it was the month that saw the release of the film of the same name.And it wasn't alone, for that…

I've refactored this blog and some other web apps in Rust that I maintain from Jinja templates to a type-safe Rust macro. To illustrate the difference, let's start with a concrete Jinja template example: <style> .comment { border-left: thin var(--secondary-bg) solid; padding-left: 10px; } </style> <div class="comment"> <p> <strong>{{ name }}</strong> {% if site %} (<a href="https://{{ site }}" target="_blank">{{ site }}</a>) {% endif %} </p> {{ html_content | safe }} </div> This Jinja template…

Last night I went to the Pick of Voila! at the Cockpit Theatre, NW8 – a showcase of five 10-minute excerpts from some of the panlingual shows participating in this year's Voila! theatre festival at these eight small theatre venues across London.We were treated to We Are All Fish @yata.collective (fascinating), Windows of Displacement @toussainttomove (wow!), Binary Lives - where fate takes us @Disequilibre (engaging), The View @chloboblob (engaging) and Fiasko! @angelapoulima (colourful). It…

These apples are large, classically shaped, and slightly ribbed. The partial orange blush, streaky in spots, is over green-yellow, accented with light lenticels. ¶ They are fragrant, and some have a little russet in their stem wells.

Welcome to The Film Noir Files, the noir series here at Shadows and Satin and over at Speakeasy, the blog authored by my pal Kristina, where each month we recommend a film noir feature for you to watch on TCM. We never know what the other has selected until we post, and part of the fun is trying to never pick the same movie! As I did with my Pre-Code Crazy post a few days ago, I’m serving up a post from the Shadows and Satin archives for this month’s Film Noir Files – my recommendation is one…

I buy myself a blue second-hand coat,change my mind: it’ll fit you better.tangerines, grapes, pomegranates, mangoes in season,I stock up on mabuyus, kashatas, chevda, simsims,permanent ink for date of birth and government nameswe discarded a long time ago,so that they’ll be able to identify our bodies,inform families that discarded us a long time ago.I shower and shower so that the police dogs,if/when they finally come, will not mistake usfor anyone else, for a harem,even when duplicity was our…

Our local RPG Club had their yearly Halloween Event recently (I wrote a - German - blog post about it!) and I wanted to try something new and Halloween appropriate: “13 Omens” was the perfect choice. The game is currently live on Kickstarter and offers a story-focused horror experience. Game Designer: Jason Bulmahn Publisher: Paizo Page Count (Preview): 63 (preview rules + adventure), 32 (second adventure) Publication Year: 2026 (Preview), 2027 (planned release) The MechanicsBasic roll…

There's no game name, but the screen gets the important part. Mazes and Monsters United StatesMicro Video Corp (developer and publisher)Released 1982 for Interact Home ComputerDate Started: 12 August 2026 A short and simple game is fine. A long and complex game is also fine. A short and complex game is a bit weird, and rare, but I wouldn't exactly call it a problem. The problem is when a game decides to be long and simple, when it reveals all its tricks within 20 squares of exploration and you…

What we learned caching a busy Django API in Redis: cache shared data once, invalidate exactly what changed, and plan for Redis going down.

It’s that time of the year again when more Bonk Wave falls from the frozen sky. Well, it doesn’t just fall from the sky, really. There’s quite some work to be done by several people to compile all that great music into albums, master it, make album covers, post it to a bunch of sites, create release party videos, etc. But hey, it’s all worth it! If you appreciate some free music from independent artists, here’s the first of four (!) albums for the Four Seasons of Bonk Wave Winter compilation…

Some time ago, I praised the URL design of Flickr, and the URL design of Unsung tries to follow a lot of the same principles. I’ll write about it some day. But those principles do not just apply to URLs, and I was just reminded of it when using Gmail. Since its beginnings, Gmail has had a concept called labels (reigniting the age-old debate between folder users and label users). True to Google’s origins, it’s also had a prominent and powerful search box. You can navigate to a label by clicking…

Liz Fong-Jones’s proposal to add maps.Grow was accepted on October 29. It gives you a way to make room in a map that already exists, much like make(M, n) does for a new one. A Go map grows on its own as you add entries. Each time it runs out of room, the runtime allocates bigger storage, rehashes the entries into it, and leaves the old storage for the garbage collector. One grow is cheap, but a loop that adds thousands of entries can trigger many of them, and each one burns CPU and creates more…

Can we really have a variable and a function with the same name? That sounds ridiculous. But we are talking about Bash here...

The Model Spec is potentially OpenAI’s most important document. It outlines what they aspire for the model to do, and how it should think. I’ve already covered a previous version in depth, so my strategy this time is to look at the diff. I had a Google Doc created for this purpose, and will be working from there. A bunch of things get moved around or reworded, often piecemeal. There are a lot of line edits, most of which are improvements. I’m focusing on what looks new and important. My main…

It is time for a special Election Day edition of the Pook-Emu Bee links. However, I do not have many election-themed links in my backlog after yesterday. I do have to vote, but we’ll deal with that later (I hope without ode to skunk). But what is later can be done later. Now is the time for links. Cause and Effect? 1 | Mamdani bans NYPD from responding to 311 calls on homeless encampments (Larry Celona, Craig McCarthy, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon for the New York Post. Sep. 23, 2026.) Beautiful…

I was struck by this ad on the bottom corner of the front page of The Globe on Feb. 13, 1913. The newspaper was founded in 1844, and later absorbed The Mail and Empire to form The Globe and Mail in 1936, according to Wikipedia. A friend of a friend found it in an old cabinet. The ad points out that much of the money Canadians spend on American goods is influenced by U.S. advertising. Over a hundred years later, that still holds true. Ask yourself why you buy certain brands. Are they really any…

Patrick Welsh retired in 2013 after teaching 43 years at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria (VA). Few high school teachers write op-ed columns and of the few that do, Welsh is one I have read many times. He is a clear, crisp, and coherent writer whose work as a teacher and writer I have admired. This article appeared in the Washington Post “Outlook” section on September 27, 2013. Erika Dietz was overwhelmed when she started teaching English at T.C. Williams High School two years ago. Not…

The Endless Museum “3D Wikipedia Game” Every article is a room, every hyperlink a doorway. Wander Wikipedia as an endless museum - or race friends through it. [ 📌arnicas ] Cherry (github) An open source self-hostable bookmark service [ 📌dbuscher ] Welcome to Wildebeest (github) “the Fediverse on Cloudflare” ...an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now…

This is an irregular column that rewinds the clock back some years to see what was on the taps at certain pubs. Too many of these will no doubt be from my local, The Great Northern Railway Tavern (GNRT), in North London that has been a tremendous pub over the years for its beer selection.…

The Green Man's Heirby Juliet E. McKennaGenres: Fantasy, Mystery Pages: 368 Series: Green Man #1 Rating: Synopsis: A hundred years ago, a man with a secret could travel a few hundred miles and give himself a new name and life story. No one would be any the wiser, as long as he didn’t give anyone a reason to start asking questions. These days, that’s not so easy, with everyone on social media, and CCTV on every street corner. So Daniel Mackmain keeps his head down and keeps himself to himself.…

Danmei Web Novel Review: Game Loading by Long QiDo you like stories where it’s only the main couple, with no love triangles or rectangles popping up? Stories where it's just that couple and they’re solid from beginning to end. It’s the two of them against the world, that ride or die kind of relationship. What about the opposite end of the spectrum? Do you prefer harems? Those stories where one character, usually the main one, is the center of everybody’s attention and the object of everyone's…

Another spooky halloween novel. This sci-fi classic written in 1897 was a treat – a horror but v funny in places. The protagonist is a learned but irritable psychopath who uses science to become invisible, a condition that turns out to be in fact an enormous hindrance. Not least because england’s terrible weather and cold proves deleterious to his nefarious schemes as he has to do them all naked to avoid detection. What fun! Download free from Standard eBooks

This is coffeeneuring 1 of 8. I’m sorry to say I did not bike to the coffee place, I walked. I did respect the 3.2km roundtrip minimum, but I had cycled to do errands all morning and really wanted to enjoy the sun for a longer time. My walk brought me to a nice coffee shop that I’ve seen many times but had not visited yet: Gwendoline, in the city center. There’s nothing like a sunny terrasse in November. Lots of sun and nice vintage furniture with a green and pink color scheme. This café has…

Reminds self I live seven miles and work two miles from nuclear ground zero if in fact the first direct side-effect of the heavily anticipated Trump electoral humiliation is Trump angrily dropping nuclear weapons on Iran and the descent into nuclear world war that follows and my concurrent incineration in the literal fallout. Vital Reminder One:Life in the Rootcanalocene. I confess, until a month ago I thought there'd be a major false flag operation in the week before the midterms, someone…