A bunch of things I’ve found on my digital strolls in the past month (which I added to my Tumblr although for a few weeks it was terminated so not everything appeared there) for your eyes / ears / brain to spend time on (as no longer active on Twitter or on LinkedIn much). READ “The day all billionaires died…” by u/thisecommercelife in thisecommercelife “Happy birthday, Lara! This month marks 30 years since Ms Croft first swan-dived into our lives with her unique blend of athletic prowess,…

My wife and I had a watercolor date night sometime in January of last year. I tried my hand at copying a picture from one of my favorite reads from that season, The Wind in the Willows, the edition with the Ernest Shepard illustrations. My Photos app reminded me of this today. Like Rat, I would love to sit by the fireplace, writing poetry, songs, or reading a good book, and eventually being lulled to sleep by the crackling of logs. This is what a good fall or winter evening would look like to…

watch on YouTubeI want to talk about one detail from John Carpenter's “Halloween” (1978) which is genuinely hilarious but also doesn’t matter at all. Michael Myers might be innocent of a crime that everyone thinks he committed.In the middle of the movie, Laurie and Annie pull up to the hardware store to chat with Annie’s dad, Sheriff Brackett? He’s shouting over the hardware store’s burglar alarm where someone stole a Halloween mask, rope and a couple of knives.We are meant to think that…

🏃‍♂️ First time running intervals again in a very long time, and feeling great afterwards. I’ve not had that in weeks.

Its been a minute since I have made a blogpost due in part to being laid off, burnt out, etc. You know the things. I've come back to it after spending time doing something else I love....baking. Growing up, I knew how to do little to nothing in the kitchen. My mom was and still isn't much of a cook. Bless her heart. As the eldest daughter of 6 girls in a household living on welfare, I learned how to make hamburger helper, instant mashed potatoes, and other premade dishes. It wasn't until I…

Firefox 157.0 made its tabs round along with a bunch of other UI elements. I thought it was ugly as hell, so I spent time figuring out how to change the tabs back. Here’s how to bring back corners in Firefox tabs and other areas. Removing Rounded Tabs This has been tested on Firefox v159. Type about:config in your browser and press enter. If you see a “Proceed with Caution” screen, click on “Accept the Risk and Continue”. Type toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets into the search…

I’m one of those people who keep an unhealthy amount of tabs open at all times, so switching browsers is a bit of a hassle. What if one of those tabs contains something that might turn out to be really important in some imaginary future?For the longest time now I’ve been using Vivaldi as my browser of choice on my computer and I’ve been fairly happy with it. As far as browsers go Vivaldi is a bit much, but it’s easy enough to disable any of the myriad of features (and there are a lot) that you…

📺️ Slow Horses, Season 6 did not disappoint. We will keep watching them as long as Apple keeps making ’em.

Dear Constant Reader, I hope you are having a wonderful Halloween! Photo by La Photographie Boudoir I was too busy this year to record a Halloween story for the general public, but you can enjoy previous years’ stories like The Cats of Ulthar, The Winding Sheet, and Lily and the Great Vampire Hunt. However, I have a fresh new story (well, an old, public-domain story) for my Patrons. If you join my Patreon at any level, you’ll have access to the entire trove of stories! And to further entice…

The village of Uley was closed off again this evening to host the Lantern Festival parade. It’s an impressive event with hundreds gathering in Green Close with lanterns of all shapes and sizes. At the front is a very loud steel band who lead the procession. Just after 6pm, when dark has fallen properly, the parade kicked off, weaved all through the village, turned into South Street and headed for the Millenium Green. There were some really fantastic lanterns this year, and it’s quite…

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Marx valued private property in the hands of truly private individuals, e.g. peasants or artisans. Capitalism inevitably wants to do away with this. I met Steven Colatrella some months ago when he commented on one of my posts here to mention that he had read Politics and War. He recognized our similarities. He is thirteen years my junior and has had a similarly checkered academic career. Born in the New York area to a working class family, he was trained as a sociologist but now seems to see…

Last month I wrote about an app I created called Concierge. The app allows me to tap into functionality on my local Mac via a modular web dashboard from anywhere on my local network (or via Tailscale). From the end of last month, this has led me on an interesting journey where I have gone wide and deep on developing a number of new tools.

For better or worse this is an art blog. I include in that technological advances in the transfer of art like silly putty (press it on the page and it picks up any image) and these KOPEEFUN transfer sheets designed to copy any image by rubbing on the the magic paper on top of any image. Now I don't think the kind folks at Woolworth's intended our little KOPEEFUN consumer to use this paper to copy hot, pre-code comic babes! Maybe the older brother got into the pack? I think this is what the…

Most see sacred quests as optional, to be considered only after one has sufficient security and comfort. But in fact, our civilization will plausibly fall, to be replaced by other quite different ones, if we cannot manage to sufficiently organize around a shared civ-level sacred goal. Making that quest pretty essential. Let me explain.Cultural drift threatens to topple our civilization, to be replaced by others with quite different values. I’ve talked often of three main solutions. But actually…

Review for Silent Hill: Homecoming, published by Konami in 2008.

What is good code? Functional, correct, fast. If you’re a Mac user, you’d expect delightful to be in the mix. But there’s more. Boring and predictable, for example. If boring code works, it’s often the best kind of code. Easy to extend, easy to fix, easy to understand. LLMs can be great at this. Tests ensure the code is correct, and being trained on a large corpus of data gives at least predictability and, probably because it’s averaged out across many implementations, plain boring code. And…

Around a year ago now, I decided to wade into the vast ocean of Korean webnovels, mostly in pursuit of villainess stories. Many of them were not translated into English, but in skirting around smut and dodging dodgy authors, I came up with a pretty good list of stuff to read. The stuff that was translated naturally rose to the top (and some non-villainess novels made their way onto the list) and I began writing reviews on this very blog for the few works that left me with plenty to say. One of…

Nightmare (c. 1940) by Rockwell Kent. Happy Halloween. May all your horrors be cosmic ones. • “At that time, I was into a lot of esoteric philosophical stuff, and he was very hungry to learn about that. I gave him a list of obscure books, which he sent his girlfriend out to buy from Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street.” Bill Nelson talking about working with David Sylvian in the 1980s. This minor detail makes the Kabbalistic/alchemical appearance of Russell Mills cover art for Gone To Earth seem…

A pal asked me how to prepare for a meeting they were facilitating. Here’s my response.No. 0001. Know the purpose, rational aim & experiential aim of the meetingThe purpose and rational aim are good to share during the conversation. Keep the experimental aim to yourself. This gives everyone a chance to understand what purpose they’re working towards. A decent rational aim answers questions like ‘what will we make or decide?’ or ‘what’s different after this time together?’ and serves as evidence…

I was delighted to see one of my archived RSS feeds light up with a new post: Creating a new personal website in 2026 is certainly a choice. The commercial web is a disaster of privacy invasion, pop up annoyances, and ads that drown out content. Most social media is a dumpster fire best left in the rearview. Bots outnumber people while siphoning up every thought you or I publish. Minor algorithm tweaks by a major tech company can wipe out small businesses at the drop of a hat. Corporate…

I was disappointed after the fall board meeting of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association to head to the door of the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, only to note that they have discontinued Saturday hours. A shame, as much of the research that made up the history I assembled in Ten Thousand Voices was gathered in Saturday afternoon sessions in that library. I shall have to arrange to fly in earlier on Fridays in the future. All is not lost,…

New, from Radiance, and direct to my door today, owing to the fact that I contributed a text essay to the booklet — FANTASTIQUE! I first told you about this one when it was announced. A box set comprising six feature films: DANS LA NUIT, directed by crumbly character actor Charles Vanel. Marcel L’Herbier’s LA […]

Halloween is here! I currently have cupcakes in the oven that I'll be dropping off at the library later as a treat for the librarians. They'll have Halloween sprinkles, and I'll be wearing my "actual ghost" hat, which will be the extent of my Halloween costume today. Aside from that, we're having a low-key Halloween at home, maybe with some popcorn and horror movies. Last night, we went to see the original Halloween in the theater as part of Regal's "Screams on Screen" event. Danny had never…

A few weeks ago, I had an email on my work account from Paul Lee. He's a writer and researcher interested in various topics, who I don't really know as such but with whom I'd previously had a very small amount of contact online regarding archive television matters. TV history being one of his areas of interest.One of his other areas of interest is the topic of ghosts, and he had emailed to send me a press release about a discovery he'd made. Not about ghosts, as such, but about a report into…

In anticipation of All Saints’ Day, last week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes an article about Unusual Polish Cemeteries by Anna Cymer. Here are some excerpts. We normally visit cemeteries to bury our nearest and dearest, but many notable graveyards in Poland also possess exceptional atmosphere, history and architecture. Powązkowski Cemetery, Warsaw The oldest cemetery in the capital opened in 1790, covering an area of two hectares, which has since grown to 44. Two years later, Dominik Merlini…

Another entry in the great and terrible dungeon duel with Loch of Nothic's Eye. Shout out also to beloved Bamzo who once mentioned that she liked an old post of mine that didn't get so much play in the run of things. ROPE 23Imperial cities do not have names - the army and the pragmatists give them working names when they need to, but otherwise, officially, they are all 'Iron City' or 'Drug City' or 'Training City', etc. Most people use a vernacular of numerical designations to distinguish…

Halloween was always a thrill when I was a kid. My family moved around a lot, which meant there were always new neighborhoods to explore, new houses to visit, and different little Halloween attractions to discover. I loved figuring out what I was going to dress up as each year and was constantly trying to top whatever costume I had worn the year before. Then seventh grade arrived, and suddenly Halloween seemed childish. I was heavily into horror movies by that point, and walking door to door…

Another month gone and we are properly into autumn now. Temperature has finally dropped, though we are still in double digits for the most part. Good Old British WeatherWe had a couple of impressive storms pass through, back-to-back, last weekend. Heavy winds that did surprisingly little damage but whooshed eerily around the house as we slept. I was nervous about the massive plane tree that sits behind us in the graveyard, especially as a branch came off about 10 feet away just as the first…