Chip YoungA: There's A Great Day Coming B: Just As You Areboth wr. Joe South, Joe South Music (BMI) Esco 200 CYSept. 1959It seems that the Billboard reviewer sensed insufficient promotion from Esco for this Chip Young record ("could step out with plugs" and "could create interest with exposure"). And he was not wrong, at least regarding a national promotion. The Esco label (and its Escophonic sound proudly printed on all the labels) was the offshoot of Esco Artists, a local booking agency…

I am participating in Prismatic Wasteland's "Blogwagon" on Player Advice. I had some ideas after reading the other responses so far (and you should read them too; linked below), but I scrapped that post in favor of this one based on this last weekend's game. The discussion came up about computers. It went a little like this (paraphrasing to get to the point). Andy (character): "I send Larina the file."Me (GM): "Ok. How?"Andy (laughing): "Oh shit, how did you do it in the 80s?"Me: "On disk.…

The top downloads in the Education category of the United States Mac App Store are Chatbot: Ask Chat AI Assistant, AI Chatbot - Ask AI Anything. and AI Chatbot・Ask AI Anything. Each has expensive weekly, monthly, and yearly subscriptions, as well as a “lifetime” purchase of $100 or $200. Incredible, right? Chatbot: Ask Chat AI Assistant, the #1 download in the Education category, is the #9 download overall in the United States Mac App Store. It’s the #6 download overall in the Ireland Mac App…

We think a lot about games here in the neon pixel halls of Set Side B. You probably already know that three of my personal faves are Rampart, Party House, Balatro and Kirby Air Ride City Trial so I’ll set them aside for this. What else? For me this isn’t a complete list by any means, but there are some games that come to mind, that stick out in my memory. All screenshots from MobyGames. Nethack, of course, because it’s Nethack, and Rogue for similar self-referential reasons. A lot of classic…

49 Carrots

I’ll be discussing the results and what they might mean tomorrow at 4:15 p.m. ET at AEI with Heather Harding of the NEA Foundation, AEI’s own Rick Hess, and Ginny Gentles of the Defense of Freedom Institute, moderated by AEI’s Nat Malkus. You can attend in person or watch the livestream. Register here. Rick Hess and I did an election pre-mortem last week at Harvard. Video will be here. This month I’ll be at UVA and 50Can, let’s connect. It’s election day. How to watch the election? Initially…

Just clicking in on double digit month numbers in this eighteenth year of doing daily photos posted to flickr, and October got to its trick/treatish end without falling behind too much. Self high fives, two of them make ten, all the way around! Without much more ado for this month, on the last day of October, I pegged 304 out of 304 this year (taken, not always posted the same day) (see the rule about no rules). The October haul of daily taken photos posted to the 2026/365 album No GenAI needed…

Pulling this snapshot to the top of the stack while I get notes in order to fill out a ballot. Dunno who’s behind these posters wheatpasted around the city, but they were busy — these are everywhere. A message I’ve seen percolating is that midterm elections don’t involve electoral votes, so every vote is pivotal. Makes one think that’s how it should always be. Today’s soundtrack (SoundCloud / Youtube) encapsulates my spirit going into the voting booth — more about the band and song in this…

Corrie Driebusch and Kate Clark, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Anthropic has officially started the clock on what could be the biggest initial public offering ever. The maker of Claude unveiled its IPO paperwork Monday morning, putting it on track to go public as soon as the week before Thanksgiving. The 400-page prospectus offered a mix of promise and peril. Artificial intelligence, it said, could usher in a new era of progress, transforming how people code, conduct research, build…

It's US election day today, eight days early for the US — and, based on various expressions of outrage, maybe only two days early. It's worth pondering what victory means, or even looks like.† The US is not — or, at least, not yet, not uniformly — a totalitarian regime in which voting against entrenched incumbents and/or "community leaders" ordinarily results in a late-night/

Here is the full article... https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/11/02/1147846/the-agentic-web-is-here/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=mittechreview/magazine/MIT+Technology+Review In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that…

Everybody wants to socialise. Everybody wants to own the room they walk into. Everybody enjoys being the centre of attention. But most people are too absorbed in themselves, to the point of paralysis. They want others to be equally fascinated by them without giving anyone a reason to be. Some people call themselves antisocial. In truth, they have nothing substantial to say in a larger group, where the risk of being exposed as a fool is real. Fake it till you make it is a sound strategy until…

A few years ago I wrote about a curious result: a/b is usually greater than c/d when a + d is greater than b + c. And “usually” means with probability 11/12. As stated in the post, you can make this statement rigorous by choosing integers up to size N at random and taking the limit as N goes to infinity. We can also choose a, b, c, and d uniformly from [0, 1]. This is similar to choosing four integers up to N and dividing all the integers by N, which doesn’t change the probabilities. Now a/b >…

So, looking at Sycamore - It looks lower. Back in September is was at 24 when I crossed, it looks like its around 284 now, but steadily going down. If it gets below 100 before noon, I'll go, otherwise, nah. This post (So wanting to camp but Sedona still recovering from floods) was last edited 8 minutes ago.

screenshot of Palestine_1961-Omar-El-Akkad-4K.jpg and caption via princeton.edu I am bummed to miss Omar El Akkad’s Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton today. I was amazed to see the artwork used to promote the lecture, which is credited as Khalil Rabah’s Palestine, 1961, courtesy of the artist. Rabah has pounded nails into an open dictionary, leaving only one definition visible and legible: philistine \ˈfil-ə-ˌstēn; fə-ˈlis-tən\ n. often cap [Philistine, inhabitant of ancient…

Called out yesterday. Going in today. I didn't sleep great. I just want to stay comfy under the blankets. Hopefully today goes by fast.

The last two parts of the "Ask the Developer" interview series went up today and these are my favorite tidbits. Aonuma: That makes exploration much more exciting, but since there were places where we preferred players not to jump, the auto-jump system was, in some ways, convenient from a development standpoint. If you remove that restriction and make it possible to jump anywhere, you need to anticipate all kinds of player behavior and make corresponding adjustments to the environment. So, at…

Sometimes you just want to watch a tidy little biopic, and for those times might

[It was still delicious.] Last year, I wrote about Reese’s not-as-spooktacular-as-advertised candy. As a reminder, here is the wrapper in question, which shows a carved pumpkin: And the actual lumpkin found inside the wrapper: Though the company did defeat a fairly ridiculous lawsuit, I noted that they should still knock off their nonsense. They had two reasonable options available to them. Either make the candy look like the picture on the wrapper, or make the wrapper look like the candy. It…

Today is Election Day. Tonight, votes will be counted one by one to decide who wins and who loses. But sixteen years after Citizens United, there’s another American way to count: dollars. Elon Musk has put roughly $446 million into this year’s midterms, according to FEC filings. No individual donor in U.S. history has given more. Nearly $190 million went to one Senate race in Texas. I'll shrink the numbers to illustrate the problem clearly. Musk is worth about $840 billion, so he’s spent about…

The months have passed smoothly since the builders began their work on my studio workshop. It is more than just a place to do woodworking and furniture making, a simple enough shed would have done for that. We are creating a legacy of training, a place to film and edit video content, a space for my artwork and writing and then an office for us all to work from. The other side of that black line is roughly the size of a UK single-car garage, so 3.5 metres by 5.5 metres. It started out looking…

Let me try to do a brief summary of the latest Apple earning report: The company made boatloads of money, especially for iPhones, Macs, and Services Margins are dropping, and will continue to fall Device prices may still go up, but, of course, Apple will not talk about future products, whether it is about touch screens or RAM prices My humble opinion: Apple need to figure out doing more with less. Less margin. Less RAM. Less storage. Time to innovate the heck out of this economy. ~ Links: Apple…

Laid two excellent letters into The Visitor’s News issue one template last night. My goal for issue one was at least five letters to fill up the 8 page booklet format and I think that’ll happen.

I was reminded of this hilarious SNL sketch from 2012 which imagines some “lesser-known” Bond girls: Diane Keaton, Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Ellen Degeneres, Lea Michele, and Molly Ringwald.A bonus are the ridiculous but almost-beliveable Bond movie titles: Never Die Twice Tomorrow, The Man Who Was a Gun, etc.Daniel Craig was hosting, so he appears, along with Taran Killam doing a not-terrible Connery impression.Here it is on YouTube.

Two months ago, we turned compfuck back into an interpreter and wrote a specializer that, given a Brainfuck program, folded the interpreter away and left…

"If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow.When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become."– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Christopher Cruz / Rolling Stone: In two years, DC’s Absolute Universe has dominated the sales charts — on top of racking up multiple nominations and wins at the industry’s Eisner and Hugo Awards — with a cultural footprint that seems outsized for this era. We expect superhero movies to rake in billions at the box office, but people flooding brick-and-mortar stores for paperbound products almost feels unreal. “Week after week, people are lined up outside the door waiting for us to turn that key…

📷 290/365 - Enjoying autumn

You were great to me this year. Can't wait to see you again next time. In response to my mood shift with the Halloween season passing, I decided to give this place a little renovation. Thanksgiving and fall are in full effect, and I think that I've created a cozy little nook to house my thoughts for the season. Aside from that, I've changed the now page into a snapshot page. Always loved the idea of a moblog from back in the early days of the internet, but was too young to be able to afford the…