Keller, Murray, Ivory & Cabreros for The NYT: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s. A beautifully-illustrated case for America’s king-sized vehicles being the main culprit for increased pedestrian deaths. The careful reader will remember that this “Big SUV hypothesis” was also highlighted by Brian Potter a while back, though it didn’t explain all of the increase. And of course my conspiracy theory may also be true, although if there are people who said a while back “hey, these big…

Pokémon is something of an autonomous force these days. It's the largest IP in the world, and essentially everything it does will be met with the loud cheers of fans the world over. This is especially true in the case of its mainline games, which have changed enormously over the years but consistently sold millions (often tens of millions!) of copies. Increasingly, the series has leaned into narrative and online play with features such as raids and even coop while changing its level design foci…

Status: Pre-heatwave day today, so it’s hot but it’s going to get hotter. Feeling quite tired anyway after yesterday’s excursion and have had continuous tinnitus all day which hasn’t happened for a while — usually it comes and goes, serving as a warning light for me to take a break. I’ve decided to lean into the football a bit, looking for more teams to follow over the World Cup alongside the obvious England. Argentina were a little underwhelming this afternoon and I’m going to give France a go…

A Lakelands setting post Most of the Unbound crave human worship, attention, or service, but not all of them do. Some of them lack any interest in humanity. While the Howling Rustic decided to make its own version of a terrestrial hominid, the Sulphur Herald remembered its former subjects. Long ago it held sway over the peoples of two planets: on Yir and its moon Sdikga it governed the drakemantids and amazons, while on Nkamvond it commanded the psanzomv, often called spacegnomes in the…

You know, I’m beginning to think that SwiftUI’s Commands API is not very good.

I have an injured foot after a fall during last week’s hiking, so still not lifting with my legs. It’s very fun to watch the World Cup games on the TV in the gym and listen to Slayyter while lifting. Unknown location (probably inside)

Tem um ditado que eu sempre gostei bastante, após ouvi-lo pela primeira vez há muitos anos, atribuído de forma apócrifa a Confúcio, quando na real é apenas um fruto da cultura popular. A sabedoria vem de escutar; de falar vem o arrependimento. Eu nunca vivi por essa filosofia, apesar de achá-la prudente. Sim, eu acho que eu sou um bom ouvinte (minha esposa e meus sócios podem ter outra opinião a respeito), e eu gosto de pensar que eu sempre soube escolher a hora de falar menos e escutar mais.…

Enough has been said about Tolkien's works that I won't much discuss the work here. Safe to say I now understand why the Hobbit holds the place it does in the canon of fantasy literature. Despite consuming much Tolkien-inspired media, I'd never read any of the Lord of the Rings series nor seen the Peter Jackson film series. I went into the book with the hope of being as untainted by outside interpretations and criticisms as possible.

Finished reading: The Permanent Problem by Brink Lindsey 📚Food for thought though I am not entirely sure of the solutions proposed.

Reviving an old blog feature. My coffee this week is Brazil Mogiana from Happy Goat, for pour over.

Featured Projects Three live Azure workloads I own end-to-end — CI/CD static delivery, AI-backed search on real content, and full-stack Blazor with actual users. 🔧 Episode Atlas Track TV progress at scale with per-user state and cloud-backed data. What it does: Per-user episode lists, “last watched” markers, and curated metadata links — so long-running franchises stay manageable. Tech used: .NET Blazor, Azure Static Web Apps, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, GitHub auth. Why it’s impressive:…

I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TVs in the place shut down, and it's suddenly quiet. Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada, or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power (talk about dead silence—it was weird!), but still, it's eerie.

Meta — the same company that declared in 2021 that by now you’d be living in the “metaverse” — sold a few million camera glasses for pervs and, all of a sudden, the next future envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg’s unhinged mind is one where we all walk around wearing camera glasses powered by “artificial intelligence.” Yes, Silicon Valley CEOs believe the best way to curb screen addiction at 20 cm from your face is to strap screens 20 mm from your eyes. Silicon Valley operates like an insular small…

As a long time gamer who has never gotten into PC games, this is super interesting to me! 👾🎮

A post from the north-west corner of London, taking in canal-side pubs, Fullers 'London Pride', a prestigious private school, and more Wetherspoon's that anyone really need to be subjected to.I've sat on the Oxford Tube countless times as it pulls off the A40 at Hillingdon to pick up and set down a handful of passengers.Why do they get off there? I figured I'd hop off and see what I could see.Discovery one: Hillingdon covers a big area and its current GBG listed pub is a heck of a long way from…

While Bunny was otherwise occupied with a nurse I took the opportinity to look around outside. While there, I found this odd staircase off the side of a path: I'm not sure what the purpose of such a structure could be, perhaps a place to sit down? But there were benches along the path. Perhaps stairs to Narnia? Perhaps?

Not-so-fat Bike Winter was a total bust. We barely had any snow down in town. So little that I questioned whether I should bother with a fat bike any more, if winters were going to be like this. But we also have plenty of sand here. I love riding the shoreline of Washoe Lake in the winter so a bike that can traverse sand does have some value. There are some large sandy areas nearby that I've barely explored and a good sand bike could open up new riding options. Since most of my bikepacking is…

I felt many emotions seeing Keir Starmer announce his resignation outside Downing Street on Monday morning. Not one of them was sympathy. For those who've spent the day celebrating the Prime Minister, demanding we respect the human frailties of a hard-done-to public servant, of Starmer's cracking voice as he struggled through the last few lines of his speech, there's a straightforward reply. Where was his respect and sympathy for the protestors ruthlessly designated as terrorists, for the…

Most of the music I write about ranges from well known to iconic. I am not one of these people who takes pleasure in knowing about obscurities that other people don’t. However, I do have one intense fandom for a couple of guys who you are likely not to have heard of, Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine. I took the family to see them recently in a converted church in Kingston, NY, and the music sounded like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My…

I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important. In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’. Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic…

Last week, I shared my frustration with not getting a solution to work out for the new project I was working on–a design/build for the True Woman ‘27 Conference that Revive Our Hearts will put on at the end of September 2027. Over the weekend, I had a new idea on how to tackle the problem and was successful in pulling it off. The evolution of a solution As I mentioned last week, one of the logo variations had a “punched out” shape element. I wanted to punch out that shape from a div within the…

Ready for a confession? I didn’t love Balatro, the roguelike poker deck-building game from a couple years back. Don’t get me wrong, the number-go-up part of my brain adored Balatro. But the rest, the foam of consciousness so certain it’s in control of the mammalian beast, the me suspicious of anything hypnotic, found the whole process incredibly off-putting. Which, of course, is why I played it for (oh no) 76.9 hours, about which I cannot tell you a single anecdote. Which, incidentally, is also…

How the most disrespected role in software quietly became everyone's actual jobFor about a decade we ran a quiet campaign to abolish the manual QA. Nobody announced it from the stage at the all-hands, but the intent was unmistakable. Shift left. Automate everything. Build the test pyramid. If a living human had to open the app and click a button to confirm it worked, that was treated as a defect in the process - a smell, evidence that someone upstream had failed to write enough Selenium tests.…

Actually, the best of Ludlow was two posts back, but as I haven't included the brewery tap or Black Country Ales pub, I figured I could squeeze in one more Shropshire blog post.If only as an excuse for a little bit more timber-framed glory...And one of the more unusual places to find Union Berlin stickering...Normally we would have made a beeline for the brewery not long after arriving in town. But Mrs PropUptheBar diligently checked opening times before letting me make a wasted journey after…

Time to curl into a ball and hug my Steam Deck (I initially wrote Machine in a Freudian daze). So, the time has finally come, Valve has now announced the price of the Steam Machine, and as feared, it is expensive. Even at the low end with the 512GB version without a controller it is £879!! Then at the other end, for the 2TB version with a controller it goes up to £1,208!! Oh, but it does come with two additional face plates. Now, is this extreme price point Valve's fault? Technically no. It is…

You can already point an AI agent at your Filament admin panel and have it click around like a human. Take a screenshot, find the button, fill the form, submit, screenshot again to check it worked. With computer-use or a browser MCP, that works today. It’s also slow, brittle, and spends a small fortune in tokens describing pixels to figure out where the “Save” button is.

The latest State of Unreal happened at Unreal Fest and, as I had a feeling would happen, the other shoe of Epic’s grand plan has finally dropped. Unreal Engine is about to change. Significantly. Before I harp about Epic’s changes, I should probably set my stall out. In my opinion, Unreal Engine is the best game engine that I’ve ever used. By far. No question. It’s not without its problems, but in terms of workflow, speed of development, shipping, scalability and stability, it is years ahead of…

Leisure LINC went online as a Tymnet/Telenet-hosted service in September 1986, offering game matchmaking, news, member chat and mail. It was especially known for its chess focus, including an official partnership with the U.S. Chess Federation, but it also supported other classic games such as checkers and backgammon. What helped set it apart from similar services was the dedicated client software, LINCware, which was intended to give users a more graphical experience. It apparently had a lot…

Sam Taylor Wood, Still Life (2001) It’s amazing how long a nation can live with a bad idea. And how that idea ages, sours, rots and attracts all sorts of rodents. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. I was ten years younger when I watched the Newcastle results from a hotel room in Anstruther, where I was taking part in a workshop organised by Mozilla with people from all over the world. I would later spend almost £1.5K to get naturalised in January 2018. I learnt how to deal with…