Announced today, in post 1st December, Christophe Fanichet (bio on Wikipedia) will replace Gwendoline Cazenave as CEO of Eurostar Group (bio on Wayback Machine - she has already been removed from Eurostar's website). News confirming it from Le Figaro here.Eurostar then is replacing someone who had worked 20 years for SNCF (Cazenave) with someone who worked 18 years for SNCF (Fanichet). No surprise I suppose, as Eurostar Group is - post merger with Thalys - SNCF Voyageurs (55.75%), CDPQ…

Some shiny links from about the internet! For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request. Attronarch's Athenaeum launches RPG Blog Carnival: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures ToucantSam hosts mini map jam Rise Up Comus posts The retinue came arrayed in their finery and their armor [In the House of the High King] The Tao of D&D gives us Subterranean…

As you might have noticed, I’ve been doing some remodelling around this home. Added new painting, and things are still a bit out of place here and there, but I take joy in the process. Though slow, it releases from me a force of creativity I often miss. As if slowly, as the season darkens, my desire to bring about a new sort of light rises and pursues my dreams, and won’t let go, tugging, tugging, until I give in. Often, this means letting go of other impulses and pet projects. Often, this mean…

WordSmith Progress Chart Introduction I don’t normally try to write much about these writing events when I am in the middle of them. However, this year I thought I would try to write something every few days just to record some of the things that have happened, and any thoughts or ideas moving forward. 2026-11-01: Day One So, today is the first day of FediWriMo2026. I hadn’t planned to start at midnight, but I got really excited about a couple of things, so I stayed up for the start. What…

i'm sitting outside, smoking a cigarette and feeling the phantom blood pooling in my gums, feeling the pulse of it in my fingertips. i listen to the crickets and the occasional truck passing by on the main road. i'm overcome with that familiar 1am urge to make something of my life, which i know i wont right now. but i care that i feel it. i've been told many times that my big feelings are a blessing, even when they bring me pain. that without the depths of my capacity to be upset, i'd not be…

The link. The (short) paragraph: “You can almost call (pumpking beer) the original pastry beer,” says Phil Markowski, brewmaster at Two Roads Brewing in Stratford, Conn.

There are places which I have never been or seen in real life. However, there are places, like Memphis, or places even the idea of a rainy night in Baltimore that somehow reconnect me to songs from my young adult life.Music . . .God, where would I be without you? I remember the feelings that used to come over me when I heard a song called Sweet Thing from Van Morrison.I suppose I felt the same way when I heard van Morrison sing Into The Mystic.This was another good one.I remember the way I felt…

Sun rising through an increasingly threadbare forest canopy of mellow reds and yellows, all converging on brown: oaks in November. A hunter walks out of the woods in camouflage gray.

In 1971, economist Thomas Schelling asked whether mild individual preferences for similar neighbours could produce large-scale residential segregation. The answer is yes: even when each agent requires only 30% of occupied neighbours to share its type, the population self-organises into sharply segregated clusters. The Schelling model is an example of an agent-based model: Place two types of agents on a grid, leaving some cells empty. At each step, identify dissatisfied agents and move each to a…

Sound the Six O'Clock Whistle - it's time for the story of Chigley!

I have already followed my advice -- to vote for Democrats or independents when possible and abstain otherwise -- in early voting. I agree with Peter Schwartz, who made that case clearly and economically recently on his Substack, where he concluded:Republicans are now in thrall to Trump. They make possible his dismissal of legal constraints. The only way to neutralize Trump, then, is through a Congress controlled by Democrats. Yes, even if they are "democratic socialists." A president aided in…

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #46 (1986)Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky•The previous issue of Larry Hama's G.I. Joe series was a pretty intense, action-packed one, and the title isn't going to let up at all until the landmark issue #50, as several new prominent characters will be introduced (some of whom change the very make-up of Cobra), Joes fight their way into Cobra's base, a Cobra agent fights his way out of The Pit and then we get the biggest battle of the series so far, featuring…

A Whitman-branded issue of Batman I had when I was a kid. I thought that I was pretty much out of ideas for Reference posts, but when someone asked me a question on Bluesky I realized that I had at least one more. As I’ve noted many times, when I was a kid, you could find comics in all kinds of different places. For me, it was mostly grocery stores and gas stations. That covered both new comics and the damaged and unsold comics that I got in mystery packs. However, there were a lot of other…

The HomeView’s OS — which doesn’t really seem to have a name — was explored over the weekend by several folks. It looks like an interesting mashup of iOS and watchOS, complete with a bunch of fun wallpapers. I’m partial to this one.

To fool a crow, Goody, I must fashion a crittur that will first deceive a man. — Dickon, in Percy MacKaye's The Scarecrow (1908)A Sentence in a Schoolgirl's DiaryOn Wednesday, June 5, 1940, my mother was fourteen years old and living in Alexandria, Ontario. She wrote in her diary, in French, as she nearly always would for the rest of her life. That morning a Mr. Smith helped her with her agriculture lessons before school. Then she and a school friend went to look at the school garden.And then,…

October is my favorite month of the year, and has my favorite holiday, Halloween. Of course it wasn’t all great… When is it ever? But work has been a little rough transitioning to my new boss’ work style. And then right before Halloween losing both Walter Konig and Patrick Stewart just felt so heartbreaking. Captain Picard was so pivotal for me. I was exactly the right age for TNG to have the impact it did on me, and Patrick Sterwart’s brilliant acting and the embodiment of the character meant…

Jen and I are often asked what it's like to be "professional" bloggers. How do we spend our days? Do we have a swimming pool filled with gold coins? Are there fantastic parties and gourmet ketchups? The answer to all these questions is yes. Jen even has a green dress. (But not a real green dress. That's cruel.)That doesn't mean it's all fun and games, though. Sometimes we take naps.In fact, I think I'll keep a diary for a day, just so you can see firsthand the "glorious life" of the…

I threw stones You threw a lifeline I was blinded like a deer up in the headlights Heart was cold Filled with hate I clenched a fist and fought against life in Your light When I was still Your foe You met me there on Damascus road Saul wasn't looking for Jesus. He was "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord" (Acts 9:1) when the light knocked him into the dirt. That's the whole gospel in one roadside: "while we were enemies we were reconciled to God" (Romans 5:10).…

2026-11-02Hello! As I write this, a squirrel is running across the slanted shingles of a nearby roof.I captured a massive steel tower that is part of the even more massive Benjamin Franklin Bridge that connects Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Camden, New Jersey.I'll avoid repeating the trivia surrounding this bridge — that's what the Wikipedia article is for — but I want to just highlight that fifteen people died in the construction of this bridge. Spare me the gory details, but how did they die?…

Thailand is the only country in the world that has active civil and scientific space programs, and is also party to the US-led Artemis Accords as well as China-led ILRS frameworks for cooperative lunar exploration. Which is why the Moon Village Association’s 10th global lunar symposium piqued my interest since Thailand’s leading space organization, called Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA), co-hosted the event in Bangkok last week on October 26 & 27. The fact that…

The vibeOverall, pretty okay and chill. I had some bad neck pain toward the end of the week, which put a bit of a damper on things. Otherwise, I was having fun and feeling curious about where a few new ideas might go.Highlights📱 I have been having fun with the iPhone Duo. After the preorder mess in last week’s notes, it has been nice to actually enjoy the phone. Trying apps, seeing what developers are doing with the extra space, and finding the little things that still need adjusting have all…

On Friday, Australian economist Rafe Meager posted “Ugly Milkshake Duck”, a blog post about “Elon, X and twitter, fascism and myself” that they’d “been trying to write … for 3 full years”. Some of its points I needed time to think through, but there were so many good ones that deserved to be read and shared widely that I promptly posted it to Metafilter, then pulled out some quotes to start a conversation: The problem is not hatred. I do not mind if people hate me. I don’t like it, but it…

Played in a Swiss Team game today, which is the first time I’ve played IMPs (instead of matchpoints) in roughly a year. In the first round we are randomly paired against an OK intermediate team, so we are just brutalizing them when I pick up the final board of the match. S: x H: AKQxxx D: AK9x C: xx This is an easy 1 Heart opening. I think I might just Jump Shift and force to game if partner makes a response. Partner bids 2 NT the “Jacoby 2NT” showing … a strong, game forcing heart raise…

Erasmus, Adagia II viii 67, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 34: Adages II vii 1 to III iii 100, translated and annotated by R.A.B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 77, with notes on p. 342: Viri senis astaphis calvaria An old man's skull is as dry as raisins Ἀνδρὸς γέροντος ἀσταφὶς τὸ κρανίον , An old man's skull is like raisins. The lesson of this adage is that an old man physically is weak and flabby; the juice is drained out of him and his flesh is gone to nothing.…

It was Halloween week! Naturally we did not pick up any chocolate for trick-or-treaters until Halloween itself; we had to go to 3 different stores to find some. It used to be you could count on cheap chocolate the next day, but retail stores seem to take everything off the shelves as soon as possible to push Christmas décor now. We had a slight panic-inducing moment to start the week: we discovered a tick on our dog's ear. Luckily, from everything we researched, it appears it hadn't been…

I thought it was possible for a city clerk to be a gentleman. George Grossmith (1847-1912)

[Also, this company might need to expand.] After the city of Tacoma installed cameras, they captured a ridiculous number of speeders in the first month of usage: New speed cameras at Norpoint Way and Marine View Drive in Northeast Tacoma photographed almost 400,000 drivers exceeding the corridor’s 40 mph speed limit between Sept. 14 and Oct. 11, according to city data…In total, approximately 515,000 vehicles drove through the corridor in the same period, meaning that roughly 77% were speeding.…

Academia neglects interdisciplinary work that combines insights from multiple areas. Each field has expert versions which experts use among themselves, and public versions seen by outsiders, and people in field B won’t accept your using the expert version of A if that differs from the non-expert version of A that B folks have in mind. Also, if you hold an academic event on the topic of A intersect B, you’ll usually invite the most prestigious people you can get in A, and in B, but you won’t…