We each have a magic genie that will do whatever we ask of it. So do we still need anything from other people? By the same logic, if everyone else has a magic genie that does whatever they want, why would anyone need something we make? Another way of saying that is: if the magic genie makes creation abundant, what will become scarce and valuable? Of course the magic genie is AI. The question of the hour is: if AI serves as a magical personal assistant, or a general partner, for any chore we…

So you’re part of a gaming group, and you want to exchange presents. But what do you get? I took the top ten gift categories overall and extrapolated them for your gaming friends (or, for you?). I know it’s early, but some of these things have to be order from far and sent to far, so that’s my excuse. I, er, also gamified it. A little, anyway. First, a d10 table of categories: d10Most Popular Gifts Category1Electronics2Clothing and Fashion3Food and Drinks4Books and Reading5Beauty and Personal…

Unidentified male singerMama Could it be one of these acetates made in a coin-operated recording booth so popular in the 50s ?Nothing is greater than a mother's love

Between Monday 2 and Sunday 8 November I shared a pile of browser-based games, a Deus Ex deep dive and some Daft Punk, all of which landed over on social.omgmog.net. Here’s the roundup.

I made it back home late in the evening after attending Texas Linux Fest in Austin. I was in Austin two nights for the event, which all went well. Most of the keynotes seemed focused around chat bots this time though, which granted, seems to be the direction of the tech world these days. It's not my cup of tea, but some of it was interesting. Last years event was all about containers. I mostly went to meet with people and to knock out a goal on my jobs "performance goals" sheet in "learning and…

so many ideas, so little time story of my life

I've always enjoyed the idea of the IndieWeb Carnival, which is sort of a community prompt for blogging. Each month a host decides the topic and people write their thoughts and perspectives on it. But I keep postponing it. Always wanting but never doing it. So to sort of break the spell, I decided to go for an easier community prompt: Robert Birming's Knowember. The prompt is just four simple questions you answer to let people know a bit more about yourself. Even though I've written enough…

Batwoman flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Austin Kleon loves drawing Batman. He says: Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me! You don’t even have to draw Batman from a movie or from scratch: If you have a black pen and a magazine or a newspaper in front of you, you can turn anybody into Batman. Take inspiration from Kleon and turn somebody into Batman I took today’s page from my daily calendar and attacked…

An evil necromancer decides to conquer but has no army. Solution? Simple! Raise the soldiers who have already fallen it battle from the dead and turn them into a mindless but overwhelming force of destruction. However, two of the resurrected soldiers are not terribly keen on this situation – they are quite happy to rest. And they are determined to rest, trying to make themselves dead again through any means possible – and the means get increasingly desperate the more that they try… This hugely…

I’m not sure whether I’m in the calm before the late-semester storm or whether the worst has passed, but I’m enjoying a bit more time to listen to music lately. This coincides with a spate of releases that have intrigued and delighted me. I’ve really enjoyed the steady stream of Strata-East releases that shed light on lesser known artists. I really like sax player Cecil Payne’s Zodiac (recorded in 1968 and released in 1973) which features Kenny Durham on trumpet! Oddly, Strata-East has not…

I arrived early in the morning, 26th of October. I walked around Shinjuku in the pouring rain while waiting for my capsule hotel to let me check in, have a shower and get something to eat. The journey from Oslo to Tokyo was fine at first, with a short flight to Copenhagen. At Kastrup, there was barely time to do anything other than get through passport control and make it to the gate. From there, it was 12 hours and 35 minutes on the plane. Back breaking plane ride The last time I went to Asia,…

When I planted the magnolia tree in July, I decided I’d bury most of Grace’s ashes beneath it on the Day of the Dead. Well, that was just a week ago, and when the day arrived I found it harder to actually do than I had anticipated. First I put it off for an hour or so despite the weather being clear; then I moved the container to the table and procrastinated a little more, until I realized the trouble was that even though it was Grace’s soul that I loved rather than her mortal form, deep down I…

Mebel is astounded when her husband announces he is leaving her for their 24-year-old chef. Their son has told her she is a CHIP – a Chinese-Indonesian princesss – and she is proud of that, and knows she has fulfilled her part of the marriage, catering to her husband’s every need for nearly 40 years:Mebel has never understood why being a trophy wife is somehow looked down upon. She loves being a trophy wife. She makes such a fantastic trophy. She’s even shaped like one, all slender curves and…

Welcome to the Monday Pressing Concerns! We have new albums from four artists who’ve shown up in these pages before: Smug Brothers, Hill View #73, Saoirse Dream, and Axis: Sova. I think you’ll enjoy these! If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here. Smug Brothers – Pinhole to Vortex Release date: September 18thRecord label:…

I forgot to load film in my Nikon F2A before going to my last car show of the season, in September. I can’t believe I made a mistake like that! I blasted through 38 frames before I realized it, too. Disappointed but undaunted, I whipped out my iPhone 17e and made some shots. This new iPhone of mine is proving to be a far better in-a-pinch camera than the iPhone it replaced. Here you go. Enter your email below to get Down the Road in your inbox six days a week! Subscribe

Pretty much all my singing events are open to anyone, regardless of experience. This means that I always work with groups of mixed ability: from professional singers to those who’ve only ever sung in the shower. So how do I pitch the teaching level? it’s tempting to think that, when working with a group of singers with a wide range of abilities, you need to aim your teaching at the least experienced.After all, you don’t want to put them off singing for good if this is their first experience.…

My first book for this year’s Novellas in November is by an author I tried for the first time last year, when I read and enjoyed The Stepdaughter. I’d heard that Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize, is considered her best book, so I was looking forward to reading it. Great Granny Webster draws on Blackwood’s own memories and experiences and feels very like a memoir; in fact, the poet Philip Larkin, one of the Booker Prize judges, apparently voted against her,…

William Glackens, a social realist painter and founding member of the Ashcan School, didn’t have to go far for the subjects and setting of his 1907-1908 painting, The Shoppers. The woman in the center is his wife, Edith. She’s interacting with three friends in a department store, perhaps Wanamaker’s, which opened on Broadway and Astor Place in the early 1900s, near the Glackens’ West Ninth Street home in Greenwich Village. Wanamaker’s, like A.T. Stewart’s Iron Palace, Arnold Constable, and Lord…

From Fact: The Hindenburg and The Big LiftTHE HINDENBURG (1975) --- Ultra-classy for Universal at a time they seemed poised for industry leadership after years an also-ran, The Sting a recent winner for Best Picture, American Graffiti an all-time profit getter, plus Jaws making history a same summer The Hindenburg was being completed. I was there for June-July 1975 as pupil with USC’s Filmmaker program, or whatever they called the course. We were turned loose on the lot three days per week and…

Just another day in Casa Quirk. 🤣 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Sebenarnya saya pun tidak ada kemampuan lanjutan dalam memahami kode, saya membuat halaman micro ini pun menggunakan bantuan Google Gemini. Tapi gapapa yang penting halaman ini bisa berjalan sebagaimana mestinya, dan saya sedikit paham kenapa tampilannya bisa begini dan begitu (tampilan halaman micro) yang saya contek dari rishikeshs[dot]com/micro

Today is my 43rd birthday! And I really can’t complain. I’m surrounded by people I love, I enjoy the city I live in, I have a job I’m happy with, and hobbies that keep me entertained and engaged.Life is good. I hope I’ll be able to say the same thing a year from now. And if I can keep this up for the rest of my life, it will have been a good one.

In the footsteps on Thomas Burke’s Outer Circle – Rambles in Remote London (1921) It was good to finally complete the walk I’d set out on in February which I had to abandon just past Wood Green due to the heavy rain. I picked up the route from the War memorial at Bowes Park and headed for Broomfield Park – the original destination following a comment on YouTube that Broomfield House was being demolished. Parts of the house dated from the 1550s but it’d been extensively rebuilt over the…

Stephen George WallisEden Book SocietyAlthough unpublished by Eden outside of the famed anthology Best Short Stories: 1952, the work of Barbara Livesey forms a part of The Eden Book Society's story. The first yellow envelope to show Livesey's return address in Norwich is postmarked December 1949; a cover letter accompanying the manuscript within is signed "M.G.W." Further correspondence in the record is signed with the same initials and continues through the autumn of 1955, concluding in the…

Day Two in Fukuoka. Hitoshi is kyujo with a broken eye socket and bleeding in his eye, injuries suffered in his Day One bout against Tanji. He will likely join Shirokuma in Makushita in January. Brutal sport. It will be a while before we have a yusho race to follow in Juryo but Tobizaru and … Continue reading Kyushu 2026: Day Two

For months now I had been trying to understand why the American Osteopathic College of Radiology (AOCR) had been visitors to pages on my website that no longer existed. These were pages I had scrapped or permanently moved over ten years ago. In the grand scheme of things, the traffic coming from here, until recently, had been minimal – over the last year it was 0.17% to be exact – but it was not nothing. Moreover, it was increasing rapidly. Out of 74 visits in the last year, 59 were in the last…

29 years ago today I added a news page to my website. Four years ago I wrote that I wasn’t too proud of this blog anymore. This year feels different: I’ve already published more than in either of the last two years, and almost four times as many longer pieces. Here’s to year 30. 🍻

It's pretty hilarious, or shall I say ridiculous, that the iOS 27 update is modest enough to demand nothing less than 20GB of disk space if you wanted to download it to your phone. May I bring to mind, dear Tim Apple and friends, that you once had iPhones in your product line that had a total of whopping 64GB in disk space (and users who still own phones such as these? Exactly right: yours, truly). According to ongoing calculations, 20GB is a little less than a third of that. To say the least,…

As a child, I watched the sky through leaves. My gaze intently on the glimmer surrounding these leaves, the sky a backdrop to the words I could not hear. I know now, after reading about it often, that my experience is not a unique one —perhaps now it is as children spend less time in nature. There was life in those leaves, I was witness to their existence. I went on a walk in nature with my family, us and the quietness of trees. I noticed how much I yearned for the smell of the rotting leaves,…

Cobra Records was founded in August 1956 by Elias P. Toscano (1924-1967) and Howard Bedno (1919-2006) was an independent record label that operated in Chicago from 1956 to 1959 and launched the careers of Chicago blues artists Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Buddy Guy, a new generation who pioneered the West Side Sound.The most comprehensive Cobra/Artistic reissue package to date (it does not include alternate takes, but it throws in both sides of 8 Abcos for good measure) appeared in Japan in 2008:…