You know the rules, when visiting a show, at least one item must be purchased. Even when your time wandering around is very limited. So, I had no choice. First up, a very sensible buy, considering the event is run by the man who publishes the Hornby Collectors Club magazine. A lovely, and not at all accurate plastic kit of Hornby's own factory. It fits with the series I've been writing, building these vintage models, so in theory, this will be fodder for a future article. The only worry is, I…

conservatives and corporate lobbyists won’t be quitting after election day if you want the politician you voted for to be successful in politics, force them to keep their promises if you want more fascists, let corporate lobbyists write their policies AIPAC will smear your guy as antisemitic unless they commit genocide. the national security state and military industrial complex will always advise war. publicists will caution your guy to keep investing in AI, lest the economy crash on their…

Detail from Vilhelm Hammershøi's Moonlight, Strandgade 30 (1900)1But enough about robots and dying governments. Time to stop talking about the thing and start doing the thing. Like increasing my capacity for beauty and wonder, which can be a challenging muscle to exercise when the world feels like it’s sliding into a sinister dimension.Ever since I’ve known C, she’s kept a grid of aspirational images taped to the wall to guide whatever she’s working on at the moment. Dozens of photographs,…

There are people who died after seeing social media on the web in the internet, and television was not even invented when they were born. When I was born, there wasn’t DVDs and World-Wide-Web. I wonder what I will see when I die.

A few hours prior to attending an event several weeks ago, I met up with an online acquaintance and his wife who had come into town. We knew beforehand that a local animal shelter was invited to the event and would bring a couple of their dogs with the hope that they would be adopted by attendees. I can admit it was a sweet initiative. I didn't know this couple very well, but I met them in person once a few years ago. It was nice to kill some time by chatting with them about the evening ahead,…

In November I often play catch-up and try to review groups of figures from the same lines in a row. I'm starting off with the G.I. Joe: Classified Series because it's both my favorite ongoing action figure line and I've got a ton of them sitting on my desk waiting to be reviewed. It's entirely possible I might be reviewing G.I. Joe figures all November, so maybe I should just go ahead and call this Joe-vember, huh? Yesterday I reviewed Airtight from this same series of figures that released…

You weren’t sure if you were gonna score that cheese-drippy sandwich or crispy hashbrown soaking through the paper sleeve. But you ran in the door and then barely scored a hot and steamy breakfast before the menus flipped, the lights started flashing, and hot burgers started rolling off the line. Now you can kill your early morning munchies a few different ways. Yes, grab that greasy breakfast before the buzzer, snag a fresh lunch after the flip, or go half-and-half with an Egg McMuffin with…

Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary (Delta), Tlahutum Regional Park (Coquitlam), Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)Weather: Sunny, 11–14°C A spooky Halloween day of birding! Except it wasn’t spooky, it was sunny and pleasant. Reifel Bird Sanctuary Ducks in a pond. We started at Reifel, where the entrance pond had some Mallards and two small groups of Northern Shovellers doing that weird spiral thing they do, following each other in a tight circle to stir up the muck and enjoy the mucky spoils. The…

I've never had a real reason to go deep into the San Fernando Valley, despite all the time I've lived in LA. I've been to events on the rim of the valley, let's say - in the mountains to the north of the valley, and in the foothills on the north side of the Santa Monica mountains. But I haven't had a reason to just go that far into the valley. This is probably pretty stereotypical of me! I am a young person, I live in an apartment, and I commute by bike and train, mostly. I'm not eyeing the…

The front yard is finished. You've seen the before and after photos, you've witnessed the loss of nine years of gardening, and now you find out every single thing I planted and how much I paid to destroy everything. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's actually much more expensive. First, the plants. The...Read More

CW: parental neglect & trauma, ableist slurs I'm an adult child with a narcissistic father. No, I'm not using that terminology lightly; he fits the exact type of individual afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. To be clear, I don't think having NPD or any other personality disorder automatically condemns somebody to be a bad person; it will complicate the process of navigating interpersonal relationships, like many other mental disorders, but it doesn't make the navigation…

Local law says that when you’re in Los Angeles, you’re required to take a picture of the Hollywood sign.

IntroductionI started running 1000 Statues on August 27th of 2025, a little over a year ago now. The game concluded on October 8th of 2026, about a month ago now. I wanted to write up a retrospective about my experiences running the module, the mindset I took towards conducting the game, and how it went. The Nitty GrittyThe game was played using Delving Deeper with the following house rules: Use Delving Deeper Saves and Thief Skills instead of Target 20; we should only use Target20 to resolve…

5th Avenue Shoppers – New York, New York 5th Avenue is a major shopping destination in Manhattan, particularly from 40th Street to 59th Street. It caters to tourists and also features high-end stores, particularly as you get into the upper 50s. I took this picture around 51st Street. North of 59th Street, 5th Avenue turns primarily residential. South of 40th Street, the stores cater more to locals with a mix of retail. As you get toward Greenwich Village, below 10th Street, the street turns…

You might know that I love stickers. I even have a whole Sticker Trading site. Oddly, I never thought of writing about my own laptop(s), until I saw Joel's post about laptop stickers, and the Brain Baking article he "responds" to.

Took the last dose of my antibiotic (again...) tonight. Feeling fine maybe, I really don't even know anymore. It's hard to trust my body when I keep 'getting better' just to go back to suffering a week later. Not looking forward to tomorrow. Work + probably getting called by the urgent care + having to deal with job onboarding that I couldn't do this weekend cause it was glitched out. Can it just stay sunday forever. I just want to keep laying here with my partner and the cozy couch and not…

I've got a really good friend I've known for a really long time, who for as long as I've known her, posts a "PMA" in our group chats basically every single night. 3 items, what good happened today. I don't think she's missed a day in the entire time I've known her. I bring this up because on Tuesday we went out for dinner. It was super nice! Was the first time in a while we'd properly yapped and it was a rlly good reframing for me on a lot of things. One of the things to come out of it was that…

this diary is now a scratch pad so I can potentially plagiarize myself years down the roadI’d just informed my best friend that I will be dressing up for Halloween, and I will be costumed as a fly. She looked apprehensive. “I know you have some sort of sympathy for them,” she began, horrified. Maybe that’s true. Maybe I not-so-secretly love a pest. But she was referring to September, when the whole family had been chasing after a little fly in the kitchen. “Oh,” I’d said unhappily, walking in…

WHEW — this is a long one! When I started putting together this issue of ROM, I was seeing a lot of headlines and social media posts about stuff that, frankly, bummed me out. Surely exaggerated claims that it's joever for the Switch 2 ("Nintendo's worst nightmare!") because you can emulate it now (AI). A dozen new recomps a day (AI). A launcher for said recomps (AI). Play this or that in your browser (AI). Instead of trying to pick apart the kinda-yuck from the very-yuck, I decided to do…

Last year, I switched from Notion to Obsidian as my primary notetaking tool. This post is a writeup of what that process looked like, how it has evolved, and how I use Obsidian in a philosophical sense. What Was I Doing Before ObsidianI am a very forgetful person. I have noticed this about myself, I feel a certain sort of shame about it but honestly at this point I just accept it. If something is important to me it'll be easy to remember, but I have to work at it. I have to like, make a real…

Red Notice is a two player game of cat and mouse. The criminal and the international police agent race around the globe. The criminal wins by cashing in a total of 1,000,000 in cheques. The agent wins by catching the criminal a third time. The world map is divided into six regions. The location of the agent is public information. However, that of the criminal is

Happy November!The year is moving right along, and it's time for a look at the November lineup on Turner Classic Movies.Burt Lancaster will be the November Star of the Month, with 31 of his films screening spread across Tuesday evenings. I'll be highlighting some of the titles below. The November Noir Alley films will be BREAKDOWN (1952) on November 7th and 8th, SLANDER (1957) November 14th-15th, NORA PRENTISS (1947) on the 21st and 22nd, and THE GREAT FLAMARION (1945) on November 28th and…

There are, "We Rock the Spectrum," franchised gyms all over the World, with different owners putting unique spins on their locations. Our family loves visiting the one located in Fenton quite often, and we heard that a spot had just opened in Saint Charles. Clarkson was up early today (his body thought it was 8-ish even if with falling back for DST it was 7-ish) and wanted to stay home and nap in the afternoon, but Gibson had slept in and wanted to get some energy out. Hence, we visited the new…

The iPhone Duo has unlocked some new design choices from the App Store’s best developers. These apps have never been more beautiful.The iPhone Duo has been in my hands for just under one week. And it’s been a week — I am so far away from developing a firm opinion on this device, I doubt I’ll be able to put coherent thoughts together by Christmas.In a sense, I think this may be a microcosm of what we saw out of pre-release reviews. Some reviews suggested “the future is foldable!” boldly, while…

Tilapia is a kind of small fish native to lakes and rivers in Africa and the Middle East. You’re probably familiar with it as a cheap farmed fish that’s thin and easy to cook. They’re convenient to farm because they’re omnivores and thus easy to feed – unlike, say, carnivorous salmon. In fact, humans have been farming tilapia since Ancient Egypt. From the outside (or a packaged fillet), tilapia looks like a pretty typical fish. But don’t let that fool you: tilapia are actually horror movie…

Quoted Sumo: Back in top division, evergreen Tamawashi still evolving at 41 by Mainichi (The Mainichi) Former sekiwake Tamawashi will become the oldest wrestler in the modern era to return to the elite makuuchi division at next month's Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament ... He will enter the record books at 41 years and 11 months after spending the past two tournaments in the second-tier juryo division. Tamwashi began the year as the oldest sumo wrestler in the top makuuchi division at 41.…

I used to read and listen to a lot of pop psychology figures back in the day, until I heard about “effective altruism”. The underlying premise of this never sat well with me, and ultimately lead me to question a lot of the “wisdom” I’d absorbed during that time. Recently, an article in The Guardian about a dystopian new game show reminded me of another example from that time. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ Imagine you’re a game show contestant, and you have $50,000 on the board. The host offers you a difficult…

I was on a day job call the other day, and we were talking about doing deals. A guy I’m doing work for told me that I needed to get this deal closed so I could get all that money in my retirement account. This was clearly a potshot at my age. So okay, fine. I’ll get that deal closed , but I’m not about to retire. Never in my life, at 55, would I have thought that I could legitimately do music as a career. As a third career, if I wanted to. But I could. And that is so freeing. It allows you to…

Watchin’ (Filums) Disclosure Day: Spielberg’s…fifth???…outing re: aliums and, as always, is very in-conversation with our times and what’s going on in our world right now; I enjoyed the hell out of it, but don’t have anything to say about it that others haven’t already said better. Go watch it, it rules! The End of Oak Street: An absolute, unmitigated blast that finally wrests dinosaurs from John Hammond’s cold, dead hands and gives them to people who want to have fun with them again; side…