Say "good day" to Samuel Onion if you will. He's an onion. A fine enough onion. He's also destined to be included in tonight's stir fry. I'm pretty sure that it's good place to be if your career involves you in being any sort of onion or some other random vegetable type. You will eventually end up being part of a recipe or another related arrangement. Call it fate or the achievement of a proper purpose. Being useful. That's something many folks miss out on. Bye for now (?) Sam Onion. What is it…

I’ve been publishing a post every day for two weeks now. I don’t have enough time to spend hours mulling over what to write about (I write these notes at night when my baby is asleep), so I try to write about whatever comes to mind while feeding my baby at home, talking with friends at a coffee shop, or pushing a stroller through a nearby park. I don’t carry around a notebook to record all my observations, but I try to put on my writer’s glasses and remember whatever leaves an impression on me.…

I like the film experience very much. I like the limitations of the medium (e.g. fixed ISO), the limitations of the process (e.g. no feedback until you process), I like the fact that you have to plan (e.g. you have the films you have, no infinite shooting), and I like the limitations of the render (e.g. you’re stuck with the film stock you chose). All those limitations make the process more of a slow, intent-driven, more personal experience. But it’s so expensive! Taadaa! So I thought to…

In a direct rebuke to the ethical grocery movement, food startup Unfair Trade Provisions launched its flagship coffee line today, promising customers that its beans are harvested through ruthless, completely unchecked environmental aggression.While specialty roasters compete over shade-grown certifications, carbon offsets, and bird-friendly biosphere seals, founder Forrest Recht argues that ecological caution has been dragging down roast quality for decades.“People brag about leaving zero…

WHAT’S IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE NDAM: Assemblywoman Heather Simmons Advocates for T1D James Talarico Elected to U.S. Senate — A Voice Living With T1D twiist Insulin Pump Receives FDA Clearance for T2 Diabetes Supporting T1D at Mealtimes — Webinar, 18 November 2026 Stronger Cholesterol Treatment Shrinks Plaque in Heart Arteries Abbott Libre Duo: A Closer Look at the User Manual Lower-Cost Component for Experimental Injectable Glucose Sensor Dexcom & Potential Expansion of Medicare CGM Coverage FDA’s…

We all have expectations when we travel to places we’ve never been, or don’t know well. Prior to the APT conference two weeks ago, I’d been to Indianapolis once, for a day, and had no chance to look around. When I got to explore a bit two weeks ago, I had a small surprise: there was less limestone and more terra cotta than I had expected in the facades of older buildings. “Indiana limestone” is the most common limestone used in construction in the US, and that name is used for a type of stone…

Francis Gene-Rowe Editors’ note: A version of this essay appeared in the “Compost Futures” zine from the London Science Fiction Research Community, physical copies of which were buried and allowed to partially decompose by the Waal river in the Netherlands. “Compost Futures” was also featured by Vector alongside their 2026 special issues on “Zoefuturism”. The author was kind enough to offer this essay to ARB, as well, where it will be subject only to digital decay. The essay has been lightly…

Oh dear. These have a bland, mushy, claggy pastry. The filling borders on flavourless but there's plenty of it at least, and it has a nice chewy texture. Not great, especially in comparison to the Irresistible ones. 2 out of 5. (Palm oil) #MincePieFest2026 #MincePieADay

Shang Zhitao leaves Harbin for Beijing, lands her first job at a hip advertising agency, and promptly collides with Luan Nian, the genius director who made his name young and guards it behind a wall of aloofness and a very sharp tongue. They should be oil and water, but they end up in a secret relationship nobody can know about, because he’s her boss and she’s terrified of looking like she slept her way to the top. What follows is a slow-motion trainwreck of two people who plainly love each…

In general, I don’t like the notion of “I’m an XYZ developer”. I write code in C#, Python, TypeScript, C, Zig, Rust, and anything else that I feel like. Most of the production code I write is in C#, but I don’t like the tag of “I’m a C# dev”. It is… a very limiting term. Having said that, I started writing C# code over 25 years ago. I got started during the .NET alpha days, around 2001, I think. Given that, I have a lot of experience with C# & .NET, all the way to contributing code to .NET. I…

Happy Diwali from our family to yours. Diwali is the celebration of light’s win over darkness. It’s also a moment to cleanse yourself of the past and then look forward to a new year and a year of prosperity. It’s hopeful and it feels timely. Here’s to a delightful new year of adventures.

I’m participating in Knowember 2026, a blogging event initiated by Robert Birming. A photo I recently got into drawing and this is one of my favorites. A drawing is not technically a photo, but it’s officially allowed by the rules. 😅 And this one is based on a real photograph of myself. Name or nickname I’m Robert and most people just call me that. On the Fediverse (and pretty much everywhere else on the internet) I’m known as IrgndSonDepp. I’ve been using this nickname since I was 14 or 15.…

I sat through the Avengers trailer at the cinema on Saturday night. Does anyone know why Robert Downey Jr is doing Werner Herzog’s voice? If you’re just joining me: this is my digital notebook, which gets added to one or twice a day, usually just once, sometimes not at all. TODAY: Serpent Mound is a Native American earthwork – I did a bunch of research on these a few years ago for a graphic novella that comes out in 2027 – and I came across this wonderful bit in a new article on it: “Those who…

Sometimes you get to a cross road with no road leading you straight. But you can always look up.

I looked through my posts from last year, and I was so deep in revisions on The Second Time We Fell in Love, and knew if I stopped for a month, I would never get back to it. So a broke a streak of writing a new story every fall. And revision still took another gazillion years. Much like knitting, after you've written a book or three, you are sure you have a rhythm and a process and you can just slip and slide your way through the next story. Now I confess, I never actually used a slip and…

We’re back at Hackney council where council officers are insisting that an 8 year old disabled boy and his family leave their council home of 20 years and move to temporary housing in a fortnight. The boy can’t cope with change, but it looks like tough luck for him, etc. Council officers will not budge. That’s the charming world we’re in. My latest podcast on this is here: The council insists the family moves in that short time, whether the boy can adjust quickly or not. (Spoiler – he can’t.…

A bowl sits on the floor.The bowl is white with divots like craters on the moon.I approach the bowl and look inside.It's filled with gentle water.I feel compelled to reach inside,I pull out a small toy.I notice I am a child. A child at play with infinite possibility.

So many fine poets were born in the 1920s – Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn – and most of them, Gunn (b.1929) excepted, are now past their centenary. Three years past his now is the New York poet James Schuyler, who was born on this day in 1923. Here is one of his best, a poem imbued with the 'wonderful freshness' and Nova Scotian light that it describes, but with a very dark edge, and a stark closing image... Air from CanadaA wonderful freshness, airthat…

The Silver Island Mountains rise along the western edge of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. The post Otherworld appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I use Alcotest and dune-release for almost every OCaml package I release: the first runs the tests, and the second publishes the result on opam. Both had collected issues and pull requests over the years (the oldest issue I closed this week dates from 2017), so I spent the past week going through them. Alcotest 1.10.0 and dune-release 2.3.0 are the result. For me, the most useful changes are that Alcotest can now write JUnit reports without any change to your tests, and that tests can carry…

Creativity isn’t only coming up with fresh, brand-new ideas. Mark Manson wrote in 5 boring ways to become more creative: One of the most common criticisms of my books is that I didn’t “come up” with most of the advice I give. Well… of course I didn’t! You really think I’m going to compete with Aristotle and The Buddha? This advice has been around for thousands of years. I simply repackaged it in interesting and novel ways, changed the emphasis on a few points, and added a couple of my own ideas…

It’s been an age since my last batch of language links. Please enjoy this random-ish selection of linguistic items that caught my eye since then. I omitted a few that required registration or subscription, but let me know if you run into any difficulty with the remaining ones. Sheesh. Footwear etymologies. ‘Crosswordese’, counted. On the hyphen in Moby-Dick. When will Modern English end? Comparing translations of Borges. The first monolingual Irish dictionary. Anatomical names can be an…

Well, Govardhan is Govardhan. Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a mathematician and domestic terrorist. The Twilight Zone was a science fiction television series that was popular during my youth. How could you possibly put them together? Just watch me! Govardhan On my twice-weekly walk around Govardhan, just past Jatipura, on the path hugging the hill, a row of shanty-like brick houses sits on my left, facing the hill. I usually pass them at the hour when a pipe running along the…

There is something different about a city when you travel through it at 5am in the morning. Empty, with seemingly clean streets. The buildings are also quiet, offering themselves as silhouettes of their future self. No traffic.

Some people see me as a talented quilter, but I realize all of my shortcomings: I'm not precise in terms of cutting or stitching. I've figured out projects that work for me. I want to stitch so that I have something to do during times of TV watching, so sewing on the machine won't work. I don't like hand quilting as much on big projects, but modern batting doesn't need extensive quilting to keep it in place, so I quilt less. Some people pay for long arm quilters to finish their projects, but so…

The Phantom Chips: The 1740s Corporate Smuggling Ring Inside Deptford DockyardWhen we look back at mid-eighteenth-century Deptford, we usually think of a bustling, proud hub of imperial craftsmanship. But behind the towering brick walls of the Royal Dockyard lay a shadow economy of immense proportions.In the 1740s, a series of explosive Admiralty investigations and Old Bailey trials blew the lid off a sophisticated, highly organized smuggling and embezzlement ring.It did not involve rogue…

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 crawler bot (inset image) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter (background). An arrow points to the tiny lander on the image’s right. Images: JAXA / TOMY / SONY / ISRO / Chandra TungathurthiThis story pieces together insights from experts at JAXA, NASA, and ISRO.On January 19, 2024, Japan’s solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on Earth’s cosmic companion. Most (social)…

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about graphic novel adaptations: An increasing number of books seem to be newly adapted as graphic novels. How do you feel about this trend? Are you excited to see new adaptations? Do you think new audiences could discover the story? Are there some books that you think might be difficult to adapt in this way? I’m sort of ambivalent on this topic. On the one hand,…

When I look back on the biggest breakthroughs I’ve personally made, I can track back every single one of them to a book that I’ve read.People learn in different ways. I learn primarily through reading and then doing the things I realized whilst reading.You see? It all starts with reading. Over the years, I’ve often shared my favorite books. I realized that I hadn’t published a list in YEARS.“Why is that?” I thought to myself.Well, after reading a lot of non-fiction books, you don’t really come…