As the calendar flips from Spooky Season to Noirvember, it looks like Netflix is making an unusually hard push to get their awards contenders in theaters this year, even seeming to play nice with AMC! John Turturro plays The Only Living Pickpocket in New York in a lean-looking crime caper that also features Steve Buscemi, Tatiana Maslany, and Giancarlo Esposito. It's at the Somerville, the

Introduction A hundred years ago, the world was just as much of a mess as it is today. Yet, people still (like today) found the time to sing, dance – and live the fullest of lives. That included, of course, posing for photographs. In this snapshot of time (a follow-up to last year's The People of 1925), let’s take a look at the faces, fashions, and fragments of ordinary lives from 1926. ImageWe’ll begin with one man and his dog, as it were – and set the tone for the post. This is CD (Charles…

Today’s review is for the joint winner of the last readers’ poll, the other winner being Slay the Murderer (1946) by Hugh Holman, which was reviewed earlier this month. I must admit this book has sat on my TBR pile for a number of years, having originally been purchased due to its similarities with Raymond Postgate’s later novel, Verdict of Twelve (1940). It is hard to say if Postgate was aware of Bullett’s story, but I was curious to see what his precursor was like, and which one I preferred…

I love this Red Maple in our yard.

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In 2019, I saw a talk called Building and Growing an Agile Team by Tom Hoyland, which has probably been one of the most impactful talks I've attended in my career. In the talk, Tom talks about how he worked with a team to build them into a high-performing team, which, among other things, involved measuring things like "cycle time", improving the way the team's deployment process worked by doing it for every story, and by discovering the sources of…

I had a conversation with a buddy in work about the performance differences between WASM and JS that started like something like this: THEM: Hey, team X has had some really good wins with WASM, they’re saying it’s a lot faster than their JS implementation. Should we be thinking about developers using WASM as their preferred runtime? ME: huh. I’m not sure. What’s the data? THEM: Outside of team X, it’s not clear either way because I’ve never seen a clear comparison. ME: Err… I wasn’t planning to…

Miss Priss

The morning begins with titles floating like single leaves or bits of branches down a stream; some parts of the riverine flow are rapids, some are quiet near banks. For the former, I try and catch them but they often move swiftly out of reach, and soon disappear. For the latter, I take them in hand and bend in consideration for thoughtful moments. "Friday's fear of falling?" Hmm... no, not quite. "A fillip of Friday flakiness?" Eh, meh. I choose the one, eventually, and often enough it stays;…

What does it mean to be a 2026 human in tech? A friend recently pointed out how I've always introduced myself as a "long time human in tech" on my socials. It got me thinking: what does it actually mean to be a human in tech (towards the end of 2026)? The Golden Age I remember a time in the early 2010s when it was so exciting to do everything online. Create a profile, share, check-in... Remember Foursquare? I was the mayor of both my living room and my office. It was so cool to check-in at…

Tim Smiley, an Fellow of my Cambridge college (Clare), died about two weeks ago. He had a long and distinguished career, holding major College offices such as Senior Tutor, while garnering academic accolades, such as becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. Although his specialism was logic, chiefly philosophical logic, we seldom spoke about technical matters, which I now regret. I’m not sure he was ever aware of the sort of work I was doing. Even today, most people find computational logic…

Last weekend I attended a workshop hosted by the Canadian Unitarian Council's UU Ecosystem Project called "Shared Leadership through Sociocracy". To be honest, I didn't really know what I was going to learn, but sociocracy sounded vaguely familiar, and the workshop description promised I would learn about collaborative government models that support distributed leadership and better, more resilient decision-making. To be perhaps too honest, I expected it would probably be fairly dry and boring,…

I honestly think everyone should be creating something. Whether it’s music, art, blogs, videos, literally anything. I don’t think it matters what you create, I just think everyone should have some sort of creative outlet. Not even for the money or fame. You deserve to have a voice. I was thinking about this today in the gym. I don’t really care how many views my blogs get. Of course it’s nice when people read them, but that’s never been the reason I started writing. I don’t get hundreds of DMs…

I worked on a new album this past year as a follow-up to last year’s Covers. I finished it early September, submitted it for distribution, and then… nothing. It sat quietly in “approval” hell. But Gone Dark came out Monday which just so happened to be a very big day for a very different reason. I felt weird saying anything because it had that suspect look of capitalizing on the bigger buzz. I really want to share it though because, if I’m honest, I’m a little proud of it. I was proud of Covers,…

A conversation with Maia Adar of Cosimo Research: Inferring Causality: Mechanistic vs. Statistical Approach Nathan Fielder sings “Born to Die” Ofermōd — “the dysfunction of Harvard University, and adult developmental psychology, and the Great Stagnation.” hey man we’re going on a trip Aella’s new The Fetish Map — “Nearly 600 sexual interests from the Big Kink Survey, plotted by how common they are.” Neoncube: “Potatoes for dinner, eggs before lunch” Not long after finishing my potatoes and corn…

Wouter Groeneveld aptly writes of the same frustration I have had in obtaining human support from Xfinity. My prediction is that soon we will be charged premium prices for human interactions, which will be on top of the processing fees we pay for nearly all electronic transactions. Imagine Xfinity providing a yearly subscription service, which they might even call Xfinity Prime, that provides a 1-800 number to call and to which I provide my member number for the privilege of waiting on hold for…

The night sky has dimmed out on planet arganee.world. From the surface, Earth has dipped below the horizon for the last time. As part of my domain sweeping started in April this year I had turned off the Hover auto-renew for a domain I set up in 2016 as a home for the Networked Narratives course. Last call from domain registrar. Nobody answered. I have hopefully managed to archive as much of this WordPress multisite that include 10 different subdomain sites, the task was not simple and took an…

An unbuilt monument, testing twins, and a contentful book. This week’s collection of things I enjoyed reading. Albrecht Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants (1525) The German Peasants’ War is not something I knew much about. Now I know a little more, mostly notably that though they were screwed before, they were royally screwed after. What to make, though, of Albrecht Durer’s monument to the peasants, never intended to be built but drawn “to illustrate the proportions of monuments”?…

Margaret Rutherford, the intrepid actress best known for portraying the medium Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit and Jane Marple in the Murder She Said series had, in 1967, earned an Academy Award for her performance in The V.I.P.s and was awarded the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire that same year. Prior to this crowning achievement she had an even more exciting experience.... she was thrust among the living and the dead in a one-hour television special The Stately Ghosts…

I haven’t written any weeknotes in yonks. Mainly because there hasn’t been anything interesting to say or much progress to report. But it’s starting to feel like there is a way through, and we’re gathering support from partner teams, leadership and colleagues in assurance. Over much of the last few weeks, I’ve been navigating the governance and assurance processes as we try to get permission to test a hypothesis. A lot of the time I’ve been frustrated with the slow speed, and the conversations…

World of Warcraft's hot new servers are going live next week with the promise of a familiar-yet-altogether-different experience from both retail and Classic. It's hard to say how Forever will work out, but it's clear from their beta's overwhelming popularity that it's going to have a lot of momentum coming in. Players of both versions of WoW have been eyeing it up and its broken through to the public conscience in a way that few MMO releases ever do. Friends of mine who haven't played WoW since…

I am aware that,I am fully alive and, Here in this moment.

The poster for the American release of Black Sabbath shows a headless man barreling through the countryside carrying the decapitated head of one of his victims, while four young women bare their ample cleavage in horror. You can’t quite call it false advertising, but it definitely takes liberties with the kind of thrills that are contained in this movie. The movie contains three horror comic-style stories: “The Telephone” is about a woman receiving threatening phone calls from a man who wants…

For Halloween, I like to talk about spooky scenarios. And these days, the most trendy one is an AI apocalypse. You can run into a wild range of ideas for how AI could go wrong, of varying plausibility. They go from hacks shutting down key infrastructure or engineered viruses, to taking over nuclear arsenals and sending out armies of killer robots, all the way to nanotech that devours the world and flawlessly manipulative plans that end up filling space with computers simulating hell at the…

Storm Boelo rampaged through here last Saturday, stripping the leaves from the trees, flailing the hedges and making me thankful I'd strapped all my spare broods and supers down securely.Had I not done so, it would have looked like a bad Jenga defeat, and I'd have still been clearing up when another low pressure system rumbled through on Tuesday.It's been a windy few days.On Sunday, once the wind had dropped to a zephyr-like ~30 mph, I embarked on a quick tour of my apiaries to check everything…

We now have a genuine world model in Google’s Genie4. Real time generation, volumetric, 3D navigation, language prompts. Awesome! Genie 4: A new generation of world simulation

It is a singularity in the nature of the English that they are strangely addicted to all kinds of pleasure, above all other nations. The city of London alone hath four or five companies of players with their particular theaters capable of [holding] many thousands [of spectators], wherein they all play every day of the week but Sunday… — Elizabethan traveler Fynes Moryson The contrast between the plays of William Shakespeare as they were seen during his own time and as they are seen today is…

I spent a lot of October with my head stuck in the sand, keeping to myself more than usual and processing some real life stuff as the days slowly started getting shorter and colder. I dabbled in a few MMOs in the past month and I’m thinking that a good chunk of my winter gaming might be spent back in the genre. Been continuing leveling up all of Teddy’s jobs in FFXIV by running daily roulettes, which are probably still my favorite part of the game. Since last month I’ve capped out Machinist,…

A few months ago I wrote a piece called the moats of Europe which was about how border guards and frontex officials would use rivers as a way to deter migrants. They would often strip them of their possessions and force them to swim across the river out of the country. This is known as a pushback which is illegal but it also lead to many deaths of migrants. I was going to follow this up with a post about detention facilities that are used to disappear migrants or torture them as a way to force…

By David Tuller, DrPH In one of past year’s more amazing developments in our domain of interest, Alem Matthees has been actively communicating again. On December 10, 2025, I received my first e-mail from him in almost ten years. He has also been expressing himself publicly with multiple posts on Blue Sky. Quick background: Alem […]

Editor's note #1: After this post the RotW posts are going to take a break. I'm not sick of writing them and they'll be back, but they do take up listening slots that I want to spend on other things. One is that Listmas is of course coming up soon and I want to start slowly preparing for that while revising what 2026 has given us. The other thing is that there's a personal music-related project I've been quietly working on for a while but which I actually want to focus on for a bit. Sadly I'm…