I had to put my main development work on the back burner for a few weeks and so I'm just getting back into things the past couple of days. Before I stepped back I had updated my dev workflows to use tags, betas and release candidates, and boy am I glad I did that, because of course when I picked back up the various plates I had spinning, of course several things had stopped working, none of which were anything to do with my code, and all of which had to do with things shifting underneath me.…

Finished reading: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 📚 Quick and funny, this was a nice leisurely listen. I appreciated the British narrator, who perfectly punctuated the deadpan, sarcastic, and self-deprecating British humor.

1. Once one of the world’s largest and most beautiful department stores, today hiding inside a Parisian office building Founded in 1856 as the Palais de la Nouveauté, Dufayel became one of the world’s largest department stores, famous for selling furniture and household goods on credit. At its height, the business employed approximately 15,000 people. The store closed in 1930. The premises subsequently became offices, notably for BNP, before their latest transformation. General view of the…

I'm putting money where my mouth is and trying to make the Pluritine faith feel more like a lived religion. Warren's excellent breakdown of medieval law and how to use it for Dolmenwood also got me thinking about historical customs and how to use them in the game. Though, to be fair, I reverse googled quite a few of mine after writing them. Turns out whatever weird shit you come up with, someone in history has probably done something like it. So here are some customs that faithful folk in…

With Halloween comes Trick or Treating - clearly one of the best night of the year for young kids. Dressing up. Tick. Wandering the street with their friends after bedtime. Tick. Getting given sweets and chocolate. Tick. Ours had a great time, and for the first time we teamed up with another family which was a nice change of pace. There are little ‘kid-isms’ - phrases or words that kids haven’t quite mastered that lead to delightful misunderstandings. As a kid, for the longest time, I’m led to…

Snippets from last night’s many dreams: A tiger lurked on top of a cliff, looking down. The tiger was desperate, trying to reach its prey, but it could not reach it, it was far below. She woke up in the bathtub from her old house in the barrio. A shallow bath with a curtain to double as shower. The room was light in sepia hues, coloured, but not quite. She woke from the dream inside the dream. Two little African figurines next to her, the spirits escaped the dream she dreamt. Then, two smaller…

9733/21652In an alternate Universe my TV show and book "Everything Happens For No Reason" about an average woman finding out how she is faring in a universe of infinite possibilities, would be a runaway success and I would be a rightful billionaire. [Paid Substack subscribers can read my first chapter here (and the various script versions are also available if you search for them and I think also the taster tape of the sitcom - you should really become a paid subscriber. You get so many cool…

A pumpjack extracts petroleum from the ground at North Texas’ Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge. The post Pulling Out appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Nota bene: Here are the previous 11 installments — parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 — in my multi-part series on Adam Smith’s day-to-day duties as a commissioner of the Board of Customs of Scotland. Endnotes are below the fold. Order #130 is dated either 15 November 1784 or 25 November 1784 (alas, the first digit of the day is cut off from my copy of the document) and is signed by three commissioners of the Board of Customs: Basil Cochrane (top signature), Adam Smith (middle), and…

Modified Wandering Monster Check ProcedureNormally, a wandering monster check has a 1-in-6 chance every 2 turns. Then, the referee has to roll again on the dungeon's encounter table. Instead, roll both at the same time by rolling 2d6. On doubles, the listed encounter on the dungeon's random encounter table occurs. It's the same chance.Retainer VignettesNormally, a wandering monster check has a 1-in-6 chance every 2 turns. * On a roll of 1, a random encounter occurs. The referee rolls again on…

When I ask artist and lecturer Linn Phyllis Seeger about how microblogging might benefit art created today, she tells me “it’s really a question of how to carve out alternative aesthetics and posting practices through formats and platforms that have not been commodified yet”. — Is microblogging the next big art movement? | Plastered

That was a fun finding. You can load up any page and destroy it completely by playing with a stick figure character and a bunch of different weapons. Fun. Destructive Fun. It didn't work on my personal site though. Not sure why yet. Obs: There is also a multiplayer if you want to waste a good 5 minutes shooting other people online. Why not?

Translated from Russian into English by Julia Meitov Hersey. This is the second book in the Vita Nostra trilogy, it will make zero sense if you haven't read the first book in the series. For me it's a reread, preparing for my upcoming first read of the third book. Not much can be said about this novel without giving away any spoilers for the previous book. If you were wondering about the ending in Vita Nostra, no worries, it will get explained in this follow-up (eventually, slowly). The way…

An open letter to J K Rowling (November 2026) Dear Ms Rowling I see you have published an update on your June 2020 essay on transgender issues. As you probably recall, I responded to that at the time.1 And here I am again, with a couple of brief(ish) remarks about your update. The difficulty with this debate has always been, and still is, that most of the time both sides are running on rage. On both sides there is something laudable about that rage. For on both sides it’s rage against…

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the CHAT | Hope conference in Innsbruck, Austria. CHAT is the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology and Theory group and we hold an annual conference, usually in Europe. This year’s conference was hosted by the the University of Innsbruck and papers focused on the theme of hope. These conferences attract a wide range of papers from those focused chronologically on the Medieval and Early Modern period to more conventional historical and contemporary…

This was the result of a question I saw on Lobste.rs, on whether it was possible to run a copy of Tangled that could only be accessed through a Tailscale private network and not exposed to the public internet. I responded that yeah, theoretically, you'd just need to set up all of the components with a custom PDS and PLC, for your own private identities that don't leak out. This is actually similar to what people tend to set up to do atproto development, and the setup I use when working on…

Redwings Haiku flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Write a haiku about autumn. Bonus points for illustrating it. We’ve been waiting for the redwings to arrive at the end of our garden and this weekend they appeared. They are really hard to see in the rowan trees as they blend into the red-brown leaves and red berries, but I got a photo of one yesterday that I’m quite pleased with. Here’s a haiku I wrote as I watched them…

Thoughts on reading: Solnit, R. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. Penguin. As part of training for [my writing routine](Konfetti Explorations), I am starting to read an essay a day (or night), inspired by An Evening with Ray Bradbury 2001. I had this book tucked in my shelf for a few months. When I took it, I did so because I enjoyed the title, and the print was readable. I was dipping my toes into essays and finding examples to learn from. But that was some time ago. Since then, I look…

In the Spring 2026 edition of the Metaculus Cup one question concerned the number of runs in the knockout stage of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) in 2026. The community predicted a mean of just under 70 runs, with a spread of 60–80. My prediction was 60 runs, with a spread of 42–80. The actual number ended up being 59 runs – nearly exactly what I predicted. Let’s see how that was done. First, there’s a sloppy way of making a quick guess. It’s not very interesting, but it’s a good baseline.…

STORE-BOUGHT IS FINE RECIPE REVIEW Charlie Bird’s Autumn Salad · Simply Ina, page 75 ★★★★★ 5/5 Flavor | 5/5 Effort | Easy Ingredient availability | Easy to find Make again? | Absolutely Make Ahead | Partially Best for | Thanksgiving Season | Fall Dietary fit | Vegetarian Charlie Bird’s Farro Salad from Cook Like a Pro is one of my all-time favorite Ina recipes and easily one of my most made! Apparently Ina loves it just as much as I do, because she’s given it a fall twist with roasted butternut…

Over the years, I’ve considered self-hosting a Git service multiple times. At the moment, virtually all of my code lives on GitHub, both private and public repositories. However, I never ended up doing it, and always because of some half-arsed excuse. But maybe I’m closer to doing it now. I’ve been running a few services on Nata.café for some time now, and a Git service would probably be one of the most obvious things to run there. Yet, I haven’t done it. For quite some time, I even had a…

I wrote this draft over a year ago. I’ve been editing and re-editing it in the hope that I don’t offend or say the wrong thing as this is a topic I’m passionate about and which, rightly, gets picked over in intricate detail. I re-read it again last week and read an article1 today that made me realise I need to publish and be damned. TLDR; FUCK THE PATRIARCHY. I’ve seen it before and, like me, you can probably tell from the body language; whether it’s the pushy ‘just give me your number’ guy, or…

If you’ve interacted with me online in any way, you may have noticed that I use Emojis. A LOT of Emojis! I get that some people may find that annoying, but to me it feels necessary to relay the tone I’m writing in, especially if you can’t see my facial expression. I’m an eternal joker. One of my main goals in life is to make people around me feel safe, welcome and at home. And I try my best by joking around. In real life, you’ll see and hear that I’m laughing at my own jokes. I don’t care if…

The world is large and the writer is small. We become large when we write the truth. The world is large and the photographer is small.We become large when we photograph the truth. Often, I don’t know what I’m sayin’.Yet, often I know what I’m feelin’. Our African youth will be large one day. Asé Peace, Blessings & Governance,"Guided by the Ancestors" Reply by email

This post will show how a graphic programmer’s hack could lead to a rigorous definition of the projective plane. As mentioned in the previous post, we start by adding some “points at infinity” to Euclidean plane to take care of exceptional situations. For example, instead of saying most pairs of lines intersect at a single point but some don’t intersect at all, you could say all pairs of lines intersect at a point, but for some pairs of lines, namely parallel lines, that intersection point is…

It’s interesting that #mainstreaming tech makes it easy to use you, while alternative tech makes it hard to use freedom. One is built for control – and works very well at it. The other is built for freedom – but often works badly at delivering it. That’s the real #techshit problem we face, we need to make freedom easier to use than control. The latest #fashionista panic about AI scraping is exposing a real problem with how we understand and defend the #openweb. Faced with aggressive commercial…

Milestone: this week I called a freeze on new Hanami work. From here we’re focused on cutting down our outstanding items and then switching to release prep. I cut down a few items myself: three little pigs things to finish our Hanami CLI changes for compatibility with Dry CLI. This CLI is just right. After some great feedback from Michael, I made a few adjustments to Dry Logger’s expanded log filtering (like making Regexp filters case insensitive by default, for consistency with string…

The internet can swamp the best of intentions. When you want to know how to do something, there’s nothing like 274 million Google hits to make you think that you’re never going to find the time. And now AI has ‘entered the chat’. This technology is the most powerful frontend to the library of everything there is to know about anything that we’ve ever seen. The only snag is the librarian can’t entirely be trusted, and they never seem to stop talking… However you try to drink from it, this fire…

Be More Ambitious I am one of the laziest people I know. I don’t really want much in life. I would be so much happier just rotting on the couch and watching TV all day. Okay, I am joking about that (I think). I am lazy, and I don’t really wake up wanting anything, but looking back I have almost always been up to some shenanigans. Again, not because I want anything in particular or because I want to execute and achieve my grand vision, but because doing something is better than doing nothing. A…

I'm not gonna go into why Spotify is bad. I assume if you're reading this you are vaguely aware that Spotify is bad and feel a bit guilty for using it anyway. It's convenient. It's what you're used to. It's nice to have whatever music you wanna listen to just there, across all your devices. (ok ok, let's have a sidebar on why they're bad. They bad because you pay them money or listen to ads, and then they take that money and they pay it to their founder (who is evil), or to the other…