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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Affordability is not the answer One of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign. The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in…

The Street Photographer – New York, New York Happy Halloween! I’m making an assumption calling this guy a street photographer, but it’s an educated guess. I actually saw him ahead of me on 5th Avenue, and I quickened my pace to overtake him so that I could make this picture. From my other photos of him, I can tell he was carrying a Nikon DSLR and some kind of Leica M camera. These are not typical tourist cameras, and Leica Ms are classic street photography gear. I pursued this photo more…

One of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign. The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE…

This is one of my favorite plays I worked on this summer, and in honor of the holdiay, You can get a sneak peek of this little play about gardening and some murder. Find it HERE:https://heyzine.com/flip-book/5ec967c56c.html

Let’s celebrate the end of Daylight Savings Time, my favorite moment of the year because it brings the night closer. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. Changing the clocks should be the year’s biggest celebration with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Reset the internet to 2009. Have a functional government.

Cool technology used for horrible things, cargo cults, and being generally tired - a rant.

After 20 years of WordPress, Squarespace, Wix and Shopify, I moved my sites to static site generators and handed AI the publishing work that slowed me down.

Aidan Lynch dropped out of medical school, addicted to entirely too many substances and thrills to cut as a doctor. Instead, he became an enforcer for the Hell Raisers biker gang, doing the occasional side gig in security work. Hired in the latter capacity at an art gallery event, he found himself drawn into an intense relationship with Yoon “Sunny” Sun-Hee, the gallery’s manager, the two bonding over their shared interest in hard drugs and extreme sexual practices. One night, during an intense…

For anyone still running the WordPress Flickr Justified Gallery plugin in 2026, I have some news. I patched my copy and put it on GitHub in case it's useful to others Tested on WordPress 6.9.x and 7.x with PHP 8.2, it's GPLv3, same as the original, with all credit to Miro Mannino. Also, I should point out that if it hadn't been for Adam Bowie all those years ago, I wouldn't even know this plugin existed. So thank you, Adam.

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also…

The 1970s saw the last decade of life of Rupert Croft-Cooke, aka mystery writer Leo Bruce. 66 years old when the decade began, he made it to June 10, 1979, just ten days shy of his seventy-sixth birthday and five weeks after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of England, having suffered a significantly debilitating stroke in 1974. Before that stroke, between 1970 and 1974, he published four additional Leo Brice detective novels, the final quartet of the Carolus Deene series: Death on…

Happy Halloween 🎃 Selfie a day for a year, day 60: Oct 31, 2026 edition.

This is a long one, because 1) there was a lot that we discussed at Akademy, and 2) since many people are not aware of Activities, I wanted to provide some more context, so people can understand better. Overwhelming interest¶ That I think Activities are cool should come as no surprise. What was surprising though was just how much interest in Activities turns out there is the community: at the Activity BoF, we were about 30 people and it was a very constructive meeting the video recording…

A few nights ago, instead of biking home after getting back from the train station, I stopped at a record store I always pass and always think about stopping in (its always been closed by the time I'm coming back from work). This time though, it was open. I looped around to the sidewalk, found a place to lock my bike up, grabbed my bag off the frame of my bike, and went in to browse. At first, I wasn't super impressed, but it had only been 10 minutes or so. I dug around, just enjoying getting…

Édouard Manet, Marine, 1869, oil on canvas, 15 1/8 x 18 1/2 in., selling at Christie’s This seems like such an unusual Manet, so spare, kind of like it was painted in 1969, not 1869. But here it is. I never really considered him one, Manet turns out to be a painter of many boats. But the only one close to this is the next one in the catalogue raisonné, a painting of boats at sea with a horizon, twice as wide, which was also his only sunset. Édouard Manet, Bateaux en Mer, Soleil couchant, 1869,…

This is a little circuitous, as real life often is. My house has two fiber connections to The Internet. The ISP in question has failed to bill for them since July of 2026. We got a large lump sum bill for the connection that wasn’t paid for via ACH. We canceled it, because I’m retired now and no longer need a dedicated work connection.

The past few days, I have been a little busy. Two days ago, Archive of Our Own, the largest fanfiction website on the net, announced unexpected maintenance, which then turned out to be a security breach resulting in the site being down for the next two to four weeks. As some of you may be aware, I run my own transformative works archive, fanfiction.lol, using the open-source OTWArchive codebase. I've written about this before on my blog. By chance, I audited and upgraded the software on the…

The movie trailer as a form of media has undergone its own stages of evolution alongside movies. Early Hollywood promos tended to rely overly on large title cards, then came the narrator/voiceover trend which lasted many decades well into the 2000’s (“In a world, where…”), after which trailers began relying solely on footage and dialogue from the movie itself, well into present day.In the last decade or so, movie trailers have become more optimized for YouTube and for attention-grabbing, and…

20 kids, which is a pretty good year.

StarringHugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, and Noah JupeDirectorMichael SarnoskiOverviewHe was no hero.Grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder, Robin Hood finds himself gravely injured after a battle he thought would be his last. In the hands of a mysterious woman, he is offered a chance at salvation.Review The Death of Robin Hood Dark. But also, I take umbrage at the “character growth” here. It was just a sad old man full of regret who decided to die…

Of course we all obeyed and wisely decided to stay home. Just kidding. The post French Protest Act III, the Dreaded Halloween Edition first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.

Long-time readers may know that I have a long series of articles covering hair color in Japanese anime, manga, and games. While the main series specifically focuses on Japanese media, I will branch out in this article to examine hair color in an original English-language visual novel (OELVN), Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve. While Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve is not Japanese, it draws obvious inspiration from Japanese visual novels (see e.g., describing itself as an “otome” visual novel). For those…

To celebrate Halloween, I present a review of a 2016 freeware otome visual novel titled Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve. This visual novel was written and developed by Ran and fittingly released on Halloween day in 2016, exactly ten years prior to the publication date of this review. The title screen for Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve featuring the view-point protagonist, Cara Lee. In Once Upon a Hallow’s Eve, the player takes the perspective of Cara Lee (first name can be changed), a 20-year old woman who…

Spoilers ahead! finished: coming to america illuminate the heart (umamusume event story) gay Gay happy for these lesbians. i liked all the depictions of the relationships here (perfect rivals vodsca, the two vps (to rudolph's president) in groove and brian, empress and emperor groove and rudolph, and laurel and brian which i have no idea how to classify). laurel and brian was especially interesting bc i haven't really gotten that kind of angle to their relationship yet in star blossom and i…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a documentation strategy I'm pursuing: mining chat logs from AI app builders to find doc problems and fix them in a continuous loop. In this post, I'll go deeper into the obstacles I faced when I looked at the logs, and describe a workaround that turned out to be more useful than the logs themselves.

The subwalls were cut from a left-over piece of strathmore board and as you can see I haven't clad the subs with embossed card yet. Actually, the build has gone further than the image indicates. I will make an updated post as soon as I can about my progress and the structures dimensions.

Here we are at the end of it all. Prime Evil (1988)Prime Evil is directed by Roberta Findlay and concerns an ancient sect of Satan-worshipping monks who have survived into modern-day New York through a bargain involving human sacrifice. There is an undercover nun, an upcoming sacrifice, a lot of talk about Satan, and enough low-budget occult weirdness to make sure nobody mistakes this for subtle horror.The plot details don't hold my interest as much as the movie’s place in the decade. It is as…