This post was written entirely by a flesh-and-blood human and therefore represents the pinnacle of artistic expression and human achievement. Too many slop grenades these days. LLMs are cool and all, but does every Slack message need to be a bulleted list where the first sentence of each item is bold? I recently read one too many blog posts with the phrase, "it's not X, it's Y" as a one-line paragraph and finally snapped. It is now my life's mission to purge selfish LLM usage from the internet.…
A poem by David White. Your great mistake is to act the dramaas if you were alone. As if lifewere a progressive and cunning crimewith no witness to the tiny hiddentransgressions. To feel abandoned is to denythe intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,even you, at times, have felt the grand array;the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowdingout your solo voice. You must notethe way the soap dish enables you,or the window latch grants you freedom.Alertness is the hidden discipline of…
I noticed the first drops of rain from this event riding back over Wanstead Flats from the Holly Tree around 10pm, thoughts of Messi’s majesty in Argentina’s win against Austria fast being replaced by watching clouds bubbling overhead. Reaching home the drops didn’t come to much and I wondered if the action would miss us, like so many damp squibs in the past. Nevertheless, I closed the roof windows and sure enough the first heavy rain arrived at 0130. And rumbled on and off for another four…
We have three rescue cats. People ask me what that’s like, and I never know how to answer. It’s like running a small, chaotic republic where the government is feline, the laws change daily, Jane handles Interior Affairs (litter logistics, vet diplomacy, treaty negotiations), and I am merely the Minister of Food Distribution. They arrived in our lives the way most good things do: by accident. The rescue centre in Trento had a habit of calling us whenever they had a cat that was too weird, too…
May was a great month for casual gamers, with pretty much every week having a release for every taste and mood. Thrifty Business was released during this cozy-indie wave on the 18th of May and just like the name gives away, this is a management game where you run your own thrift store. The game was developed and published by Spellgarden Games, the same studio that made Sticky Business, another game I really enjoyed and recommend whenever someone asks for a laid-back game recommendation. I’ve…
Last full day in the UK, where they do doorbells well.
Recently, I came across two different elements in Capcom games that seemed to be related — one in the original Street Fighter and the other in Final Fight. The popular explanation online says that both are homages to the same real-life Capcom employee, but because they manifest differently in their respective games, I wasn’t sold. If there’s one takeaway I’d want from my Mario 101 project, however, it’s that confusing, overlapping and sometimes even contradicting origin stories can exist…
Spectacular footage likely to be seen everywhere soon. Prime fodder for Ozzyman. Text article. Many more videos, etc.
Whenever one of my lectures covers the topic of Greco-Roman agriculture, I always include the ‘Aristophanes the Astrologer’ passage from Agathias Scholasticus – it may be 6th century CE, but it expresses a timeless reality that speaks to the countless generations of Norfolk tenant farmers in my paternal line as well as to the facts of life in the classical Mediterranean. Will my harvest be successful this year? the client asks. If you carry out all the necessary tasks at the appropriate time,…
We left Bedford last week in the midst of war but, like many towns in the country, thinking ahead. Planning for a better Britain to emerge from the destruction and sacrifice of war was a motif of the time and in this Bedford’s civic leaders were typical. In the event, the grander aspirations of the era were rarely fulfilled but they left a significant mark in the town as did a broader post-war revolution in housing provision In December 1942, the more energetic ambitions of Alderman SB Morling,…
Last month I visited Uruguay for the second time since I moved out. The first time I visited I took my German boyfriend, who also wanted to trade a winter month for a summer one, and spent most of the time introducing him to everyone and showing him around in what I sometimes call a nostalgia tour. I am proficient at nostalgia touring. Doing it with someone else is always a bit disappointing, because, although they can, if you're good at talking about it, understand what you feel about things,…
Bruno posted today about the impact and utility of different approaches to choice in narrative games. It's a very good post! You should read it! Bruno approached this topic, in my opinion, with an enormous amount of restraint. He's responding to a Narrascope talk which annoyed me so much I was unable to finish it. So I'll say something more emphatic than Bruno: if you read Bruno's post and the stuff he's saying about choices feels very natural to you... or if reading it opens up a landscape of…
I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm. I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time. If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me…
When Intel designed the 80386, they gave it a trick for hiding memory latency: Early Start. Instead of waiting for an instruction to reach its memory micro-op, the 386 begins the next instruction's address work — effective address, segment relocation, the bus cycle — in the last cycle of the current instruction. Intel put it at about 9% of overall performance. It is also the source of the POPAD bug.
It's all going on! KEIR STARMER RESIGNS This is the sixth time a Prime Minister has resigned in the last ten years. 24 Jun 2016: David Cameron 24 Jul 2019: Theresa May 07 Jul 2022: Boris Johnson 20 Oct 2022: Liz Truss 05 Jul 2024: Rishi Sunak 22 Jun 2026: Keir Starmer Note that only Rishi Sunak resigned as Prime Minister on these dates, the others resigned as leader of their party forcing a leadership election. Only Rishi lost a General Election, the others were all personal decisions. Note…
Pagalache the clown walks into a patisserie. Behind the marble stands the owner, a man with cold hands and a folded white life, who looks up from his wiping and says we’re closed; and Pagalache, who has never in his life heard a closed thing, says: she had a smell. You have to start at the smell, he says, or none of the rest of it lands. She smelled like the inside of a tuba; the spit valve specifically, not the bell, any idiot loves the bell. He loved the valve: the warm brass and the held…
There’s nothing quite as comforting as a bowl of homemade White Chicken Chili as a quick supper on a busy weeknight. This creamy, hearty dish is a delicious twist on traditional chili, made without tomatoes and instead built on tender chicken, mild jalapeños, soft white beans, and a warming blend of herbs and spices. A swirl of sour cream and a splash of cream at the end give it that velvety finish that keeps everyone coming back for seconds.It’s simple to make, wonderfully satisfying, and…
The Trump Administration Just Keeps Losing in Court... It's not exactly a secret that lawsuits brought by the Trump administration don't generally go well in court, outside of the Supreme Court. But even with that caveat, the White House has been on a very bad run lately, with judges across the land saying: "Yeah, I don't think so." Click here for full story
When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did. Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon…
Three quick opening week trips on The Wye. Water conditions and weather against - but you've got to give it a whirl! Ten chub to about 3lb & two eels to 2lb - but no barbel yet (either spotted or caught). Think I'll stick with the perch & carp until conditions improve...
I was originally going to try my first baby run post-surgery today, but then the forecast came out with a high of 31°C (it got to 32) and I noped right out of that. Instead, I walked to Burnaby Lake and back. In fact, I walked all the way to Piper Spit, which is about a 12 km round trip. I got my weekly 150 Intensity Minutes and even tried actual running for a minute or two, to see if I’d keel over or something. I did not keel over. The part that felt the worst was my legs, actually. I didn’t…
Koriander CMS on PyPI Open in new tab (full image size 81 KiB) Try installing Koriander CMS from PyPI. All you need to run is the following, provided that you've installed pipx: pipx install koriander You can use Koriander CMS in your terminal with the koriander command. For example, to access Koriander CMS in your browser and create or edit new pages, use the following command: koriander serve You don't have to worry about which directory you start Koriander CMS from as it stores your site in…
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I’ve put “Femme Prédatrice” up for sale on itch.io. I’ll doubtless put it up elsewhere, too, but I mainly wanted to get it in an upcoming book bundle and maybe get some more eyes on Animal Noir. I also enjoyed making a noir movie style title card using GIMP and a photo (originally in color) by Morica Pham.
Prime Day is Restaurant Week
While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to joke about, sort of. I’ll see a photo of someone’s bookshelves – old university press editions, multi-volume sets, no paperbacks – and I’ll experience a rush of another of the Deadly Sins, Lust, followed immediately by the more temperate, longer lasting, easier to ignore sin, Envy. I can say I covet the books and give the craving a silent ha-ha, thus…
Last Saturday was the 11th Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library. This is always an annual treat for me. It must be for a few others as well, as this year saw a record number of attendees.
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 It’s Tuesday so that means yet another blog about a further outbreak of competition between bus companies which began at the beginning of this month. Early June has not only seen Arriva move to outwit First Bus in Southend-on-Sea, Stagecoach tread on Arriva’s toes in Stevenage and Stagecoach hit back at Preston Bus in Preston but the town of Aylesbury has seen renewed competitive action between Red Rose Travel and Arriva on the bus route to Buckingham. Blog reader John…
I am doing a major drawdown of gear in my home office. I'm getting realistic with myself about what I use and what I have time to learn. Professionally, things have never been busier. DJ'ing is great. I have enough bass gigs just with Buckdancer's Choice, the Dead cover band, and synth live is totally covered with Daphne Falls. (And that rig is the MPC Key 37 and the SP-404MKII.) I bought the MPC used, cheap, for 500 bucks. I've had it probably about a year, and I'm going deep with the MPC…
Went up to Asakusa on a shopping mission, but the shop was closed. Yoshikami turned out to be a worthwhile consolation prize, because hayashi rice was available! I asked the guy behind the counter if I could stick my senjafuda to the wall, and he took out rag to wipe down a spot for me. Given the shadows of stickers from days past, I assume mine will one day get removed too, but I guess it’ll stick around for now!
