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!
With a bit of public operation in the offing, it was time to catch up on some loco maintenance with the live steam fleet. First, replace the battery box in the cab roof of the Lady Anne. The original had distorted over time, and would drop the batteries out, not ideal in the middle of a run!I've had a replacement box for nearly a year. The old one is bolted into the roof, using holes in the plastic that are also in the new box. I thought this would be a doddle, but it's a fiddly job since the…
As I have discussed in previous posts, “AIs” can make mistakes. In fact, they do make mistakes, and their mistake-making patterns are such that where and how they will make mistakes is both uncertain and constantly changing. Thus, in any scenario where you want to attempt to make “productive” use of “AI”, you must have a system in place for checking every result. Not checking some results; checking every result. If each result might have a consequence for you (and if it didn’t have a…
The Oculus Go was Oculus’ (now Meta) first attempt at a standalone virtual reality headset. Indeed, it was one of the first commercial attempts at a standalone VR headset entirely. By contemporary standards, it is extremely obsolete, though not completely useless. It can still run a range of software designed for it and is a reasonably open platform. It was first announced in October 2017 and released in May the subsequent year. It released in two models – one with 32GB of storage and another…
This past weekend, myself, Richard Rothaus, and his son Isaac took a trip to Delphi with stops at Osiris Loukas, Distomo, and Eleutherai, and I took some photos.
Haircuts are stressful. Come on, there are at least 3 Major Worries when you go get your lid trimmed: 1. Disappearing Choppers. Have you ever gone to your regular place and found your go-to person suddenly missing? Brother, that’s a bombshell. Plus, the gang left over can be pretty tight-lipped on details, too. No forwarding address, no new business cards, nothing. They just vanished and left only a few combs floating in the Barbicide for clues. Yes, now it’s time to step into the chair with…
The endgame sees Zamora restored and the sequel set up. Yendorian Tales: Book I United States SmithWare (developer and publisher) Released 1994 for DOS Date Started: 6 May 2026Date Ended: 19 June 2026 Total Hours: 37Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) Summary: Yendorian Tales is a superior shareware game by a talented family of programmers. On the continent of Yendor, where society is divided into spellcasters and the miners who…
Trip: 58 Nights: 191-193 Last weekend was the annual Aliner Ascape rally, which has settled at Laurel Hill State Park near Somerset, PA. We missed last year when my career blew up 3 weeks before the camp out, so it was great to get back this year to see old friends and a make new ones. The park is kind of in the middle of nowhere. We had to drive 40 minutes to find a brewery. The town of Somerset is about 20 minutes, and that is really the closet store or gas station. However, it is very worth…
Laurel Hill State Park Trip: 58 Nights: 191-193 Last weekend was the annual Aliner Ascape rally, which has settled at Laurel Hill State Park near Somerset, PA. We missed last year when my career blew up 3 weeks before the camp out, so it was great to get back this year to see old friends and a make new ones. The park is kind of in the middle of nowhere. We had to drive 40 minutes to find a brewery. The town of Somerset is about 20 minutes, and that is really the closet store or gas station.…
Hello, loves! Not even that devious: this seems like a decent idea for the simplified Content. The AppearingCOntent object gave me some trouble using the new CombinedContent experimental object, though I was able to make it work. We’ll look at the offending code in a moment but as I see it the issues include: Setting up the objects is a bit gnarly. I suspect that the idea of using nonlocal to get access to objects that we need to recall is contributing. We may go back to providing an info…
The "deadliest poison known to AI" is very easy to set up. You should.
