I last checked in at Open Gate in August, when the autumn beer schedule was being drawn up. I promised you doppelbock. They promised me doppelbock. But alas it was not to be: although the beers are almost entirely confined to the taproom, they're subject to the usual stringent Guinness quality controls, and that batch didn't pass. So what else did the turn of the seasons bring?Summer was not quite cold in its grave when the brewery summoned winter with a Sichuan Stout. This is built on the…

1995 Inscape Platform: PC Psychasm was a very intriguing action game in development at Inscape around 1995, the studio responsible for a number of CD-ROM titles including The Dark Eye, Drowned God and Bad Day on the Midway. Very little seems to have ever been documented about this project, and it would ultimately disappear without a trace. The game was highlighted to Games That Weren’t thanks to JomSpoons, who has been researching Inscape and managed to uncover several rare references to the…

I started blogging around 2005, on Blogger. I had always remembered it as earlier, but the Wayback Machine set me straight: its oldest capture of my old blog is from 2006, and the archive in that page goes back to 2005. Looking back, it's funny how much of the web I take for granted now was being invented in those little sidebars and comment boxes. The early days The blog was called Blog do Mário, and it was written in Portuguese. Most of what I wrote back then was about what we would now call…

What if every European capital sent out a car at exactly the same moment, with the aim of reaching every town and village in Europe before its rivals? Which capital would claim the most territory, and how far would its influence extend beyond its own national borders?If Every European Capital Sent Out a Car at the Same Moment is an intriguing interactive map from Copilot Travel that attempts to answer these questions. It imagines 38 cars setting off simultaneously from 38 European capitals,…

Every time we head out to Dad’s, I start humming ‘Back on the farm‘. A necessary, restful few days. R’s heaps more confident there – the year between visits was light-years different. Watching her amble into the hen house to bring back breakfast felt kinda magical (especially as I’d been lain up with lurgy the previous mornings and not seen her shown around it).

I’ve been slowly working my way through the Tales of franchise these past couple years. I randomly played Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicom a while back, and while I didn’t enjoy playing it per say, I found the tech behind it really inspiring. So, I followed two paths after Phantasia—I played the Star Ocean remake for PSP, and I played Tales of Destiny on the PSX. Well, that’s a bit misleading of me. I beat and reviewed Star Ocean, but I dropped Tales of Destiny unceremoniously and…

Showmen: For a Few Dollars More and The Valley of DecisionFOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965/1967) --- Nearly a year and a half elapsed between Italian release of For a Few Dollars More and its American open. Did this bespeak a lack of confidence? Turns out United Artists, as US distributor and financier on the second and third “Dollars” westerns, wanted to release all three over four-month intervals beginning in January 1967, like episodes of a TV program offered close enough together so patrons…

November 2, 2026 If you’re in the US, and you haven’t yet voted, I’m assuming that I KNOW what you’re doing tomorrow. I’m not telling you how to vote, I’m just telling you to be part of the process… Let’s admire the clever and elegant way that Ms. Klien has arranged these letters and these color blocks into something much greater and more lovely than the sum of the parts. That’s what art is – taking what we’re given, and helping it grow and beautify the world: Our heroine is dashing back and…

Per E-Mail antworten

the cold shower slams a bolt, then a tingling calm my lungs full of thanks

[NOTE: this entry involves the last two panels of Fantastic Four #18, the 2026 series, which came out just last week as I write this.] So when we last left our intrepid team, they were about to be face-to-merged-faces with this alien warlord fella, an amalgam of two powerful and warring alien brothers who somehow combined as a result of one of Reed’s devices. And most of the first half of #298 was dedicated to that confrontation, as the being reaches Earth and immediately falls into conflict…

I encounter totem poles no more than once or twice a month, but there was a time when those artfully-carved items could be found in Disneyland, in the old Indian Village.This first picture is from July, 1964; a woman poses next to an impressive totem pole, perhaps 20+ feet tall (or over 6 meters). The strong and distinctive stylization on these amazing artworks is so appealing, and unlike anything else in the world. I believe that the totems were moved to Walt Disney World, eventually.Next we…

The Ghost Breakers (1940)

After finishing “The Possessed” I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to read next. I picked up and put down a number of books, read a few pages of several, and hit the doldrums for a day! Fortunately, I was saved by the unexpected arrival of a book I’d pre-ordered a while ago from a favourite indie, Confingo Press – and it turned out to be exactly the right book at exactly the right time, and just what I wanted to read! “Manchester & Ginsberg” by Roger Bygott, is a neat little volume that…

November has arrived, and round these parts that means only one thing – German Literature Month! As announced in a previous post, Caroline and I will be hosting the sixteenth(!) edition of this annual event, and all you need to do to take part is read something in November that was originally written in German, and then shout about it from the rooftops. Or use social media (with the #GermanLitMonth tag) – your call While doing my best to follow the schedule suggested in the announcement post,…

Since its release in Go 1.16 (2021), //go:embed has quickly proven to be one of the most loved features of the Go language. Russ Cox and Brad Fitzpatrick originally designed the feature in 2020 to embed files and directories into Go binaries using a go directive (more on what that is later). It allows engineers to quickly embed anything they want instead of using awkwardly formatted constant string literals or reaching for flaky third-party tooling to bake data directly next to their program.

Psst! Let’s say you’re, a kid who is, setting up a pretend office. Shhh! You’ll want a computer. And you’ll want that computer to be able to send messages to your adults. And get messages from them? Here’s what to tell your adult! SSH into a computer that you both can access. This could even be your computer! If you're on a mac, click the Apple in the upper left > Sys Settings > Sharing > Remote Login (checked). $ ssh meh@coputar.local Paste this bash loop that appends a new message to the chat…

30:28 foundation for your statements give me a short list of some of the ailments that 30:35 have been alleviated by music I’ll start with Wellness so music boosts the immune system particularly immunoglobuline a 30:42 IGA is responsible for fighting off infections of the mucosal system which is covid or colds music also boosts the 30:50 production of natural killer cells andk cells and tea cells which travel to the site of an to fight an infection the Some interesting comments I never knew…

After the dense uphill undergrowth forrest, the clearing with the sunlight seemed restfull at first, but the lack of reactive stimuli in the open space is starting to feel uncomfortable.

Not another Manning Wardle I hear you say, but perhaps I’ll be let off, as this one feels quite special with this ‘as built’ Manning Wardle livery, representing ‘Newcastle’ that currently resides at Beamish… Work started with the plain maroon Rapido model that was fitted with RT Models buffers and one of my etched roof conversions. The easy (!) work stopped there! With the motion masked she was primed ‘intact’ before a coat of Humbrol 131 gave a basic Manning Wardle green to work up from.To…

My Domoticz installation used to polled the SolarEdge cloud API to get the solar production stats of my SolarEdge SE4000 inverter. This stopped working sometime last week. Because, there now is a new -- limited -- free API. You can do up to 2000 calls a month. Which is not a lot. There are other plans available but then you have to pay up. A lot. The cheapest plan starts at 100 USD / month. I got the free API working but it's limited, and it didn't sit right with me. This is my inverter, right?…

Final Fantasy Resonance Max power Mechabo! So I did the Rain and Lasswell duel which was, off the top of my head, the best scene in the entire game. Although it was a little weird. They have this Goku/Vegeta thing going on where they each want to push each other to the edge, but they're somewhat afraid of the consequences of what would happen if Lasswell wins? It has this exchange that was really funny. Rain: You're going easy on me Lasswell! Why would you do this? Lasswell: I'm afraid of what…

So graphics-wise, with my ThinkCenter S50 running SuSE Linux 7.2, I was where I wanted to be, but there was another problem, the ThinkCenter’s network adapter appeared a bit too new for the 2.4.4 kernel: deepblue:~ # modprobe e1000 /lib/modules/2.4.4-64GB-SMP/kernel/drivers/net/e1000.o: init_module: No such device It’s not that I expect to do a lot with networking on a device that won’t be able to do modern https or imaps. But if I don’t want to tranfer files using floppies of at most 1.44 MB,…

For while in the 00s, I shared the rental of a house in Marino, D3. I was only up in Dublin for 2 nights a week and I could have endured 5 hours a day on the bus commuting from home. But two younger workers at the coal-face of science made me an offer I couldn't refuse on the bed-nights. I also enrolled in drumming workshops in the evening after work. Tuesday "Djembe, dance and body-percussion" with Sinead "sensei" O'Brien; Wednesday "MaSamba" with Simeon Smith. When I got 'home' at 21°°hrs, I…

“If KSR could just write pamphlets!” Noted SF scholar Gerry Canavan joins to discuss The Voice of the Dolphins, a collection of science fiction stories with extremely pointed politics from physicist Leo Szilard. Credits: Guest: Gerry Canavan Title: The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard Host: Jake Casella Brookins Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia Artwork by Rob Patterson Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough References: The podcast(s) Grad School Vonnegut/Grad School Achebe…

DS exclusive Bangai-O Spirits opens not with a missile-filled bang but a 17 part tutorial, every explanatory intro followed by a playable example of the newly-introduced concept. When combined with the already perfectly adequate information spread across several pages of the manual it… it all feels like a bit much, really. Certainly not openly hostile in the way Advance Guardian Heroes‘ first moments are, but it still leaves me a bit fidgety, wondering when the lessons will stop and the…

Not long ago, I decided to build my genealogy tree. I had started it once when I was a teen, but I didn’t put that much effort into it. It probably stopped around my great-grandparents’ generation and that was it. But this time I decided to dig deeper! A Baptism From 1907, Santana da Serra As many of you know, I’m Portuguese and I’ve been living in the Netherlands for over 6 years. And, as far as I know, my family’s history doesn’t cover anything interesting: everyone is Portuguese, comes from…

When my youngest lad was a child, he loved for me to buy him the frozen toaster Strudels you could buy at the grocery store. He was a very finicky eater, and there was not a lot that he liked to eat really. He would go on binges and one week all he would eat was hotdogs . . . the next it might be pizza . . . or mashed potatoes. There were times I really worried he would be too skinny or never eat normally . . . and so when he wanted something like the toaster strudels, I would get them for him…

Humanity spreads everywhere, but there are also some abandoned places in the world. Former villages, and towns, and even cities, now left behind and given over to nature. It’s in those places that we roam. A mistake was made, somehow; a mistake of genetics. There are only a few of us, and we are as human as anyone else, but we’re also different. It’s in these forgotten habitats of humanity that we’re mostly safe from the rest of you. A person can exist for a long time in a place that society…

31 unblogged things I did in October Thu 1: There comes a day when you look at an old pair of trainers, perhaps several, and think "I've loved you but you're worn beyond repair so you've got to go, now hop into this black binliner", something I did today alongside half a broken office chair. Fri 2: The last time I saw my balconysquirrel this season. Sat 3: Ooh I got a Beatrix Potter 50p in my change. Oh I've already got a Benjamin Bunny, they're nothing special. (I still haven't seen any of the…