Recently, John Gruber linked to a prior rant about how much he dislikes Apple Notes using a single-story lowercase a, despite liking Futura (which I also like). It doesn’t bother me, and though I’d like to try switching from San Francisco to New York, I may even like it. But a font detail I have developed an aversion to, is a lowercase g with an conspicuous “ear.” While it’s moslty a serif problem, as a typical sans-serif g looks like: There are exceptions. A serif g with an inconspicuous ear…

The latest book from Chris Harte's Sports History Publishing is an anthology of over 100 stories from the pages of Men Only, the magazine for men launched by C. Arthur Pearson in 1935. Within a year, the magazine was selling 800,000 copies a month and soon added colour plates to the regular black & white photos and cartoons. Men Only survived the war thanks to its popularity

How Valve's VTF spray format works, and what it took to build a spray maker for Source and GoldSrc games that runs in the browser.

The old blog, which link I won’t post, will be deleted from the internet. This is its last screenshot. This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/quickies/last-screenshot-of-the-old-blog/

Miscellaneous bits of news and fun stuff from around the Internet... ...Hot on the heels of the new Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray release of TV's MAVERICK (1957-62) comes the news that 77 SUNSET STRIP (1958-64) will be available for home viewing at long last. It will be released on DVD only, not Blu-ray; my understanding from Tim Millard is the reason for this may be the high music rights costs incurred. Millard says all of the music rights were cleared, "at great expense." The DVDs will be…

If this is Dhelt's response to returning an amulet, I want to be the hero who rescues his kidnapped daughter. Somers and Quill, Forgotten Realms denizens, arrived in this weird little dimension after killing a burglar who stole the holy symbol belonging to Lord Dhelt. Since then, our only mission has been to recover the holy symbol and get home; in this, we are principally opposed by the enigmatic, vampiric lord of the place: Count Strahd von Zarovich. We have been joined by NPCs native to this…

WordPress’ writing prompt is asking the deep questions today. Okay, I’ll bite. If I had to sum up my philosophy on life in one sentence, it would be this: Don’t take life too seriously, laugh at the ridiculousness whenever possible, and always have snacks. I realize that’s not particularly profound. Nobody’s going to embroider it on a decorative pillow or invite me to give a TED Talk. But hear me out. Life is messy. People are weird. Things rarely go according to plan, and just when you think…

Hello again, old friend. Cringetober I’m excited to be done with my Cringetober drawing challenge, which I participated in for all 31 days. Upon finishing it, I’ve decided that I’m not going to do this again next year. I probably wouldn’t have aimed for completion if I hadn’t set a goal way back in January to do so. While I’m glad I pushed through and accomplished my goal, it taught me that this isn’t for me. day 29: ARG. screenshot from the marathon cryo archive launch trailer, which was…

I don't know what to make of Tumi fragrances. Atlas is very fresh, quite a bit woody and green, and reminiscent of a '90s masculine, with actual oakmoss in the formula. Yet I rarely feel like reaching for it. Continuum keeps turning up at a steep discount at rack stores, and it gets good reviews, with people like Derek (Varanis Ridari) saying it's excellent and complex, so for $30 (down from

Subscribe and Listen: https://youtu.be/krEljdw3Gm4🎙️ $3 Trillion CAPEX ReckoningThe bill for AI infrastructure arrived and public markets provided a reality check. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have $3 trillion committed to AI spending. It should not be shocking that building out multi-gigawatt footprints will show up in the balance sheet but somehow it is.$3T+ in AI spending commitmentsAlphabet Q3 negative free cash flowThe modern data center footprint is transforming modern…

Last Wednesday marked the beginning of the inaugural HEROIX: Legendepic in the World of Rem campaign. We were delayed by a week due to a vexing migraine on my part last Wednesday and I will admit to having reservations about a few things as a result of that combined with other factors. This game has two players and they are very enthusiastic about the game itself. They have skimmed an earlier version of the rules which is appropriate but I wish at least one of them would give it a thorough read…

This is an excrept from the FSCI xmpp chat room discussing the philosophy behind ideology, pragmatism, and how free software deals with AI 2026-10-30 16:39:38 spaciouskarter78_: Debian went all in on AI thanks to one person. Somebody integrated LLM reviews to the NEW package queue. It’s opt out and the LLM sends you a review of your package when you upload it to the NEW queue. 2026-10-30 16:51:20 Pirate Pulawen: it is the dfsg team, each team makes their own decisions as GR did not forbid AI…

Here's hoping everyone had a great Halloween! Our boys enjoyed the holiday and were pleased to acquire an assortment of candy. I also want to remind everyone who lives in a region that observes Daylight Saving Time to, "Fall back," an hour so they aren't anywhere early by accident tomorrow!

For November, we return to the Lands of Zork. Sort of. As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies. Enchanter is a fan favorite for good reason. The mechanics of scrolls and spells is evocative and supports a terrific puzzle experience. (My own Hadean Lands was directly inspired by thoughts on how Enchanter intertwines its puzzles.) The NPC Adventurer is of…

Ready for another G.I. Joe: Classified Series review? Today I'm checking out Airtight, the last of the vintage single-carded 1985 G.I. Joe figures to be released in the Classified Series. Airtight was released during the height of the line's vintage popularity and so he appeared in the animated series and on lots of merchandise. Character-wise, though, he's not one of the most well known and well developed characters from that era. He does have a pretty useful function as a Chemical,…

I have not been posting much lately. The proximate reason is that I spent most of October finalizing with Borners the text of the London construction costs report; there’s still another round of edits but they’re quite small. I don’t want to preview the argument in the report yet, but I do want to talk about one thing that jumped to me while looking at the cost history of London. In New York, we broke down the cost premium into three components, each stacking on the others: labor (primarily…

Fremantle2026 November 1 (Sunday), 12:00PM· bridges · Swan River · Some photos from the opening of the bridge this morning: ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au to leave a comment.

The night watches and morning hours went easily with the boat sailing itself. The only thing the on-watch had to do was an occasional look around. Just before noon I tried taking a sun sight, and got the celestial running fix to just 7NM from the boat position. In general, our dead reckoning system has performed really well on this passage, despite the paddle wheel having been stuck the first day (polars were used instead). In the afternoon we entered the forecasted windier stretch of the trip,…

Every now and then, I trick my friends into busting out some old indie game, precisely because I think it has cool features that are lost to time. As a design community, we’re sometimes pretty bad about learning from our past, which I think is both counter-productive and a crying shame. Most recent case in point: Best Friends from 2006. Have you heard of it? I’m guessing you haven’t. Canonically it’s a game about girlfriends who on the surface are (ahem) best friends but are actually boiling…

Dead magisters and lost minions. Started late tonight so didn't do much. Quite a lot of inventory management. We walked back into Fort Joy and demolished the Magisters, some Paladin guy said thanks for saving him and then fucked off, made no effort to help us, I guess he could tell our group is vastly stronger than him at this point. Inside the Fort is a Magister Judge guy who demonstrates the soul-sucking ability on an Elf to make a Silent Monk and then we killed all of them as well. Also had…

Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 10-25-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 10/30/2026 @12:37 Mr. Yuk - Penny ArcadeGabe: I mean it makes me want to eat their throat, like a jackal.The last panel is just chef's kiss. 10/26/2026 @12:58 Why My Dad Didn’t Have a Cell Phone - Jim Nielsen’s BlogSo many of the messenger apps on my phone are other people laying claim to my time and attention.It reminds me of an interaction I had with my Dad years ago.[...]One night at family dinner I asked,…

The extraordinary life of Sergiu Celibidache. From his childhood in Romania, to his exile in pursuit of a career in music, his struggle for survival in wartime Germany and his rise, fall and rise again, in an unimaginable life journey. Strong biopic regarding one of the great conductor of all times, directed by the protagonist’s son. While not having a very famous cast (except the great John Malkovich as Sergiu Celibidache and some appearances by Sean Bean as his father), the acting is top…

I'm starting a new series wherein I review games I've beaten in the last month. Let's see how long this lasts, hahaha. I've become quite a fan of the emulation community and have joined a few different community events with RetroAchievents. I find playing older games to be a delightful trove of game design research. Adventure System: Atari 2600 Released: March 1980 Developer: Atari (Warren Robinett) Publisher: Atari, Sears My Playtime: ~15 Minutes Box art by Susan Jaekel. Your quest as a single…

I have reviewed many visual novels written in Ren’Py (I also published a visual novel that I wrote in Ren’Py). I want to reassure everyone that it had totally occurred to be before I published my October 24, 2026 review of Oniguisama, which was my 28th Ren’Py visual novel review (or 27th if we exclude my article about my own piece) that I could capture screenshots by pressing “s” during gameplay. I was just challenging myself by using my desktop’s window capture utility. Having proven my…

Hello and welcome to my weekly Meals of the Week post. Every Sunday I like to share with you, my lovely readers, all of the deliciousness that I have enjoyed as my main meals over the past seven days. That's a whole lot of tasty going on!This is only my main meals and does not include my breakfasts or lunches. Most of the time I will eat my main meal at noon, unless I am going out to eat or eating at a friends, or having company. That is just works for me. I don't like to go to bed on a full…

An LLM serving simulator drained all four GPU replicas at its first autoscaler tick, before any request arrived. 0 of 200 requests completed. The repro, the root cause, the fix, and how real autoscalers set a floor.

Three months on from August: 19 pieces: 1 novella, 5 short CNF, 13 short stories 196 total submissions 126 rejections 3 published 2 accepted, forthcoming Has turned into: 22 pieces: 1 novella, 7 short CNF, 14 short stories 269 total submissions 168 rejections 7 published 2 accepted, forthcoming (novella & a micro CNF) The new pieces since last time: “Triptych” (CNF) went up at Wordgathering, Vol. 20, Issue 1. This one is kind of hard to define. Prose-poem-esque-tismy-thing? “Inheritance”…

I was out walking the other day and I happened across a large bush of spring flowers (sadly, I do not know their name). The scent was very strong and immediately evoked a memory of walking down a particular narrow street in Kyoto many years ago and smelling a floral incense wafting from a cafe. Now I had utterly forgotten this memory. And in all likelihood, if I had not smelled those flowers, the memory would never have arisen. No flowers, no memory. So my question is this. Was my memory of…

On a spring evening, in a quiet side room of a busy tavern in a mountain town, the hero of “Delend, or the Phantom of Fantasy,” notices a strange shift in two stars in the still light sky and senses an inexplicable change in the atmosphere: Delend suddenly gave a start — and timidly, almost … Continue reading "Dreams, phantoms, and beautiful horror: Visions & Apparitions by Ladisav Klíma"

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