“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…

I went into the bathroom because of coffee. I peeked out the window because it should have been starting to get light outside. I was not disappointed at all to see the deep red horizon. I quickly threw on my shoes to go outside and look and grab a picture. I stood there looking at it for a few moments. The calm and crisp cool air made it feel great too! The red glow as only near the horizon but it was bright with a few dimmer clouds up higher in the sky. I used the zoom on my phone to capture…

I saw an ad for a movie based off this book and it looked interesting so I borrowed the book from the library, and it didn't disappoint. The book follows Harold Fry who gets a letter from an old work colleague saying she's dying of cancer. Harold owes Queenie a lot and has never said it so he writes a short letter and when he walks to the post office he just keeps going. This was at times joyous and profoundly sad as Harold and his wife Maureen work through 20 years of marriage where they had a…

A question of semantics? With increasing frequency, I come across the notion that large language models (LLMs) constitute a new level of abstraction in programming. A recent post on LinkedIn puts it well: "AI will be the next layer of abstraction in IT. "First we thought in machine instructions, then in procedures and functions, then in objects and patterns that are now built into the languages. With AI, we can use ordinary words to describe what we want, and then the AI writes the code."…

community is when you care about everyoneand most of them care backthat is true of any communitysince the dawn of manthe effort you put inis not always mirrored backand sometimesyou justend upless than you startedhow thendo you cut back your caringeven when its unreciprocatedhow do you matchyours to theirsone way or anotheryou cant force someone to careso the only things you can doare to stop caringor feel in the darkand when you do feel around in the darkyou usually finda loose stringwhere a…

I see everyone hyping up on November because of the old NaNoWriMo events (which I also did), but I am afraid to commit to anything involving routines, my brain simply lacks the mental space for it. November in the Netherlands, as a parent, means the start of two of the busiest months, specially if one of your kid was born around Christmas. Because of this, I will try, not commit, to 100 words a day instead on this microblog. One hundred words for one hundred days. I will not revise them nor…

Man Made Monster (1941) Lon Chaney Jr. stars as Dan McCormick, a carnival performer whose act involves working with electricity. His continued exposure to electric shocks has made him partially immune to the effects of electrocution. When he survives a bus accident that kills the rest of his fellow passengers, he captures the attention of Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). Dr. Rigas views McCormick as the perfect test subject for his experiment, to create a perfect human being that doesn’t require…

Hope you had blessed Sunday! ✝️🙏 Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 249 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 249 appeared first on The Simple Catholic.

The issue Institutions fail less often on the warnings they suppress than on the issues that belong to no one’s portfolio, which are therefore raised by no one, decided by no one, and revisited by no one. Why it persists Accountability assigned function by function leaves the issues between functions without an owner, and success removes the losses that would otherwise force them into view. What follows One question separates disciplined neglect from orphaning: who set this issue aside, and…

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all. YouTube is the gift that keeps on giving. Three favorite recent live performances: ▰ On October 9, 2026, KMRU doing a dense solo drone noise set as part of the Skaņu Mežs festival in Riga, Latvia: ▰ On October 25, 2026, the great Brad Mehldau performing variations on Bach’s Goldberg…

Share your favorite song that never says the title in the lyrics. It’s 2001. Britpop is dead, and Damon Albarn is noodling with an Omnichord. He selects the Rock 1 preset and a track is born. I’ve been a fan ever since, saw them live a couple of years ago, and each album continues to bring an eclectic mix of influences, styles and grooves. And it all started with a song that isn’t about Clint Eastwood. “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio…

Crappy weather, flash-flooded roads, and weekend plans changed yet again. What to do? Make another wicked lo-fi gear video, of course! This one's a companion piece to the stoves article. Read More ... Continue reading The Quiver: Our Backpacking Stoves in 2026 | Canister, Alcohol, White Gas & No-Cook (video) at PMags.com.

Powerful AI is unpredictable. Your robotic butler may suddenly decide to kill you1 for no comprehensible reason, in the same way that Bing’s helpful chat AI would sometimes try to blackmail or seduce its users. “Solving alignment” means understanding even superintelligent AI minds well enough to be confident they’ll never do that. As I see it, solving alignment for LLMs isn’t just impossible, it’s incoherent: we can’t even articulate what it would look like to succeed. LLMs are not blind…

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II: “I did not want to love so. That was not my design. I did not want to pity so. That was not my design. My pen is lighter Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden Is too much for it to bear. How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin?” Few Americans have earned the right to speak so intimately and with such authority of war and its impact on writers and others. Most of us…

Perfume PosseAll Saints, Pumpkins, Big Moons I’m not religious, but I do mark Halloween – and the equinoxes/solstices (stolsti?). Finishing this up on Halloween afternoon (my favourite holiday of the year … sigh). Went to the farm shop’s pumpkin fest. Boy, were there a lot of… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseAll Saints, Pumpkins, Big Moons

STUFF I'VE WRITTENWhen your values disagree with each other. The decision you keep circling is two of your own values, pulling opposite ways.From the Archive: The Hidden Cost of Keeping Your Options Open. Patience without a plan is just waiting with better branding.STUFF I'M READINGThe tool is fine. The brief was bad. Sana Khalid on why the managers who get the most out of AI are the ones who could already brief a person. A vague ask gets a vague answer either way.Are great teams less…

John Wyver writes: Ninety years ago today, the BBC’s high definition television service officially went on air from Alexandra Palace. There are celebrations there this afternoon and evening, and a number of articles and posts are marking the occasion, including the BBC Canvas presentation TV90 – From Trial to Transmission by Jamie Medhurst I am delighted to make my own contribution below in the form of a lightly edited reprint of the relevant section of Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of…

Technically the third of two promised new Scottish units. If sci-fi writers can have four part trilogies, I can have three of two.If you think that is slightly confusing, the rest of this post continues in the same vein...Donald Oig Farquharson of Monaltrie was called ‘the pride of Braemar'; he spent six months at court and clearly made an impression, as Charles would always call him "my man". Whilst visiting Edinburgh King Charles was informed of Donald being threatened in a fray by some…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! The lazy encounter benchmark for 5e helps GMs quickly benchmark whether an encounter might be deadly in 5e games like D&D 2014 and D&D 2024. Here's how it works: Choose the type and number of monsters based on the situation in the story and the pacing of the game. Determine if an encounter might be deadly by comparing it to your lazy encounter benchmark. An encounter might be deadly if the sum of all monster challenge ratings is greater than the sum of…

We are not going to have a run down of all the elections today. We are saving that for tomorrow. Don't miss it. Then at 6 pm EST (7 pm EDT if you prefer Daylight Saving Time all year) tomorrow we will switch to Nov. 4 and start live blogging the election all night until it's over or we run out of coffee. We will frequently update the main page, but you will have to force a reload of the page regularly to see the new page. See how here. And a reminder that we are running a survey, so that…

More helpful rats, a worm, and a boat. So apparently all the stuff after Fort Joy was actually act 2 or something like that. Oh well. I'll go back and change the wrong ones. Tonight I was decided to get off the island, so finished my preparations and told Gareth I was ready to go. I didn't even notice until a dialogue option showed up that the Tyrant helm we picked up also allows us to absorb source. So we went up to what I originally had thought was a Magister camp but actually is a bunch of…

I knew of Tushita Meditation Center through social media. The pictures I thought were interesting, but I wasn’t sure I would end up there. Come late September, I found myself in India with a few weeks to kill and not much to do. And somehow I felt that I should look into their courses. They had a 10 day Introduction to Buddhism course available from 30 September 2026 to 9 October 2026 which was available. So I signed up and soon found myself in the picturesque town of Dharamsala. One shared…

In the summer of 1895, a young British actress arrived in New York City—and immediately became a media sensation for reasons that had nothing to do with her theatrical skills. “A Real New Woman” blared the headline of a wire report across America. “Miss Dorothy Chestie, the English actress recently arrived in this country, has altogether discarded skirts for daily wear.” Discarded her skirt? Well, it wasn’t as if she walked around her West 22nd Street neighborhood with entirely bare lower body.…

Four Months in Poland by Keenan “Almost every single day I am reminded how much of my life I’ve lived in service of making myself small. To stay out of the way. To not become someone else’s problem by merely being present.” Wish this weren’t relatable. I’ve gotten a lot better about it but still catch myself thinking this way sometimes. Especially when I do seem to get in the way accidentally all the time 🤦‍♀️ + on letting myself be an inconvenience (midnight) “what i didn’t realize is that…