The Lancaster Witch by Carol H. Behrman, 1993. Thirteen-year-old Maddie Stoner is startled when her parents suddenly tell her that she has an English cousin named Clive who is going to be arriving for a two-week visit on Saturday. Maddie has never even heard of Clive before and wants to know who he is and what’s behind his sudden visit. Her parents explain that Clive is more like a second or third cousin, the son of her mother’s cousin, who moved to England years ago and married a British man.…

What can I say about the amazing place I've called my Internet-home for the past four and a half years? The Fediverse is an amazing place. It consistently amazes me that there are just so many cool, kind, and amazing people on there. It's what social media should have always been. When I say, "Fediverse, my Beloved," I guess I'm really saying "Humanity, my Beloved." Because somehow, even in the Year of Our Confusion Two Thousand and Twenty Six, I'm still such a huge believer in humanity, even…

A fun lil convention from the financial app YNAB’s release notes page – there is always a headlining feature with a hero shot and a long description, but the smaller improvements are still listed as “pocket change”: #release notes

Well, I got back to the Handworks event in Amana, IA on Sept. 4th and 5th. And it was awesome again. Two days full of hand tool immersion. The event is put on by the proprietors of "Benchcrafted", the company who sells crubber, the leg vise "criss-cross" thing, workbenches and other stuff. And other than getting there and staying somewhere, the event was free to attend - though I did add to the donation jar.One of the outdoor tentsThis open-air timber-framed structure housed Pete Galbert, Jason…

As part of the Bournville Heritage Weekend, Andy Christie had organised a live steam railway in the St Francis of Assisi church, and asked me if I'd help out. It seemed like a nice chance to take a train ride, and have some fun. As a bonus, when I arrived, the Carillon was playing, something I'd not heard before. Although it's a peal of bells, the sound is quite different to that produced by bell ringers. The "layout" was a couple of circuits of 45mm gauge track, with connecting crossovers and…

From grammar suggestions by Microsoft Word to poetry by Gen AI… and other links for your reading tonight. The Curious Power of Punctuation, by Louis Menand, New Yorker Carlo Rovelli on The Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework, by Carlo Rovelli, Literary Hub Pivot from Video, by Violet Conroy, Vittles Tomato Cure, by Seth Kaplan, Orion Magazine

I caught two amazing games this week, the diamondbacks beat the Yankees with the two run homer in the bottom of the ninth, and the Phoenix Mercury, who aren’t making it to the playoffs. Just beat the Dallas team that is making it to the playoffs. Not sure second the last game this evening. This post (Games of the season dbacks and Mercury Wnba) was last edited 4 minutes ago.

A year ago I briefly tried Omarchy and then returned to the comfort of my MacOS. This felt like the exact opposite of my impressions in OSX adventures, which I wrote a long time ago when I was switching from Linux to Mac. I tried it on an older generation of Thinkpad and it didn’t click, not just because I couldn’t switch to worse hardware and the feeling of plastic under my fingers, but also because its tiling window manager didn’t work for me. See, the thing that didn’t click is the fact that…

If your bad back, busted ankle, or bum knee is keeping you off the courts, then get ready to lean back in your desk chair and reminisce about the game you loved… Just crumple that hot inky sheet yanked from the photocopier’s paper-jammed bowels, swivel your desk chair sideways, and shoot a majestic three-pointer into the metal garbage bin. And don’t worry — if you’re inside the line, just go with a hook shot, buzzer beater, or big swooping alley-oop over to the glass fire extinguisher case…

Teh Tarik Game by Ray Tan was the winner of the 2025 Malaysia Design & Play game design competition, of which I was one of the judges. The winner's prize was either a publishing deal, or a cash prize. Ray decided to take the cash prize and publish the game himself. He did all the planning and the art. The game was released this year. I got myself a copy. I was part of this game's journey,

500 things I love about London [because it's exactly twenty-five years since I properly moved here] Life, nightlife, the sense of history, the Underground, the Overground, canalside strolls, the view from Greenwich Park, the fact there's always somewhere to discover, cutting-edge architecture, classical architecture, curvaceous Regent Street, the chimes of Big Ben, the 2012 Olympics, the Olympic Park, layers of history, nightbuses, world cinema, world cuisine, the world in a city, a Muslim…

Talarico leads PaxtonTexas Democrats have long struggled with the Republican-dominated Texas for decades. To give you an idea of how reliable it is, Ted Cruz has been sent to Congress by Texas voters since 2013. What makes the current US Senate race in Texas interesting is the confluence of factors involved: John Cornyn is an establishment Republican: This seat is currently held by John Cornyn, who has held the position since before I graduated from high school. He’s not a mover or shaker…

Cool site; recommend going in here and poking around

But first, this. And, also, because someone on Threads made me think about Dave Pirner, I'm going to force ask you to listen to Soul Asylum's outstanding cover of Victoria Williams' "Summer of Drugs". Soul Asylum was one of many bands that contributed Sweet Relief, a tribute record that was an integral part of teenaged Dave's world. Pearl Jam's cover of "Crazy Mary" and Evan Dando's cover of "Frying Pan" are also standouts. 🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch work on feeling okay about only 🌳 grass writing a…

As we reach the first official day of fall, 2026, Apple and Google have made their latest product announcements focused on their visions for how artificial intelligence integrates with smartphones and laptop computers. Meanwhile, we wait for Microsoft’s product announcements in October. Google’s hardware efforts exist for the purposes of solidifying and extending its software ecosystem. The first Android phones provided a safe place for Google Search on mobile should Apple decide or be forced…

Outside The Met – New York, New York My wife and I stayed to the very end, right up to closing time. Given how large the museum is, we must have seen only a fraction of the exhibits. We definitely need to visit again. We were part of the scramble to exit the museum, resulting in a crowd of people leaving at the same time. Sensing a street photography moment, I pulled out the Leica M246. Admittedly, a picture like this is pretty easy with a modern autofocus camera. Using my D-Lux 8 would have…

Tags: #places #dispatches #sketches #natureNot that far south of Hollister, make a left at a little complex of buildings or a large farm, depending on how you look at it, that’s the start of it. This is CR J1, the Panoche Road, and it is only marginally maintained. As it winds its way up the Tres Pinos gulch the grand landscape views are presented in miniature. The views are close, the walls rise steeply but not to a particularly great height, and yet all the necessary components are present.…

Wow! It's been over a year (not since April of 2025) since I reviewed anything from Valaverse. I don't think they've released too much since then that got my attention but over the summer they did drop some new figures from both Action Force and their new modern pirates line, The Black. I'm going to be looking a couple figures from both lines in the coming weeks but I'll start with Jester as he's a pretty interesting figure. Using Action Force figures and a Mattel WWE Mr. T, I've worked on a…

It's a piece of plastic that has a ribbon of black protruding out of the slit in the bottom, akin to a sound wave. It allows for anything but the sound it mimics, should one put it into the player and press that clunky play button. Instead, a pencil is rammed into one of the twin holes, winding, winding, until everything is right and tight again. This is technology. This is the mix tape. It's a silvery thing with a murky midriff, alcohol-swabbed clean. It's a bootlegger's best friend, the…

It is now 9:30pm. I worked all day, got home around 3pm and started working on my annotated bibliography for my current class in pursuit of my master's degree. Five grueling hours of identifying potential sources for my thesis, formatting those sources correctly, and then having to come up with master's level annotations for each source that define the source's thesis and then how it supports my thesis. I got 3 out of 16 of those done. My brain is goo, and I honestly cannot believe I am sitting…

Saturday was a blast at House of TARG. We missed DJ Shanker, but Gerard Van Herk, and The Reverb Syndicate were a good time. The Gruesomes were superb. Neither of us knew anything about them going in, aside from a quick listen on Apple Music before buying the tickets. They sounded like a band that would be great live, and they didn’t disappoint. There was even a harmonica. I love a harmonica. I also love an interesting crowd, and this one didn’t disappoint. A real variety of characters and…

Claude and I did a session in WT Builder focused on the generated audio for Weekly Thing issues. This was one of the goals i had with the new authoring app. Audio pauses will now fall in natural breaks in the flow. Each functional block of text is generated on its own. Better section announcements and handoffs. Blockquotes “quote” and “end quote” again. Lists are spoken better. I’m now embedding images from the issue into the metadata. If your podcast player supports that you will see them as…

Feast of the HuntFollowing the death of Ser Wess of Caragon, a great hunt ensued to slay the griffon which took his precious life. The hunters returned with the griffon's head and young in tow, and a feast was held in celebration. During the feast, a visiting warrior poet, Jan [Pronounced Yan] the Joyful sang and made merry, so merry that when he awoke from his drinking and singing, he found himself in the back of a cart, pulled by the donkey of two treasure hunters. Ill-fated Thieves"We'll use…

Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s I saw this Robert Gober Plywood at Boesky in 1998, and it blew my Gober sink- and crib- and leg-addled mind. Now it’s for sale. Gober was already fluent in sinks and beds by 1987 and was seeking to try to make, he said, an abstract sculpture. “What I ended up making is an extremely realistic sculpture of a more or less abstract object.” The faces are indeed realistic, the kind of rough veneer used to manufacture plywood.…

You've probably already noticed the new book cover with a familiar title just a few inches to the right of what you’re reading now. What’s the story? Glad you asked.When Television Brought Us Together was first published in 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic. Some writers have reported that their book sales increased during a time when people were forced to stay inside and away from others. I was not one of those writers. Sales were slow, and with the passage of time I can see the blame…

I remade the Future Horizon Design logo so the shell now has an inhabitant - a hermit crab.

...to mark the day of infamy ...to finish what has been in suspended animation ...to gather the strands of loosening threads ...to comprehend the rate of ML development ...to wakefully finish what was begun in dream

I believe that art only becomes art when it’s exposed to oxygen, by which I mean, when other people interact with it, enjoy it, comment on it, purchase it, or feature it. So it was an honour to be featured in the most recent Art of Travel book, France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists. Chuffed!

We’ve given in to using LLMs for writing at work. From emails and Slack comments to full-on documentation, everything is AI-generated. However, I’ve realized it only ever saves me time when I’m being lazy. That is, it’s great at converting meetings into transcripts, summarizing those transcripts into action items, and keeping information accessible. But it’s pretty bad because the result is ridden with invisible errors. But what counts as an error if you trust the LLM and never meticulously…

hiii vibe: nathan and i are sitting at the hotel front patio blogging!! we ate an early 4 pm dinner and nick is walking to a bar to get a beer while we blog/read umm i forgot what happened this week!!! work was awful but my shift won another challenge so we got food. last month we got bbq, this month we got pastas. very yummy!! i love free food!! nick and i went out to eat and got a flat tire which is a very nick and mariah situation we have gotten ourselves into many times. like maybe within a…