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…

The photo above is from a house inspection the other day. I got pretty spooked when I spotted it in the corner of a cold, dark, and tight crawl space. When I got back out, the homeowner and I had a good laugh about it. He told me that the previous owners had left it there as a prank. Since the new owners knew I was going to check that area, they thought it was a great opportunity to pay it forward. Well played! You never know what you’ll come across when crawling around under people’s houses.…

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TIL about @tart.run, a virtualization toolset to build, run, and manage virtual machines on Apple Silicon Macs. It supports macOS and Linux VMs, and it uses Apple's Native Virtualization Framework for what appears to be blazing fast performance in my first few tests.

Light Troops in the Seven Years War | From Reason to Revolution 1721-1815 | Helion & Company

Thank you to whoever left the Enormous Tip in Stream! ❤️ This means a lot to me! Thank you! 🙏🏼

Jumping back to 1983, this is Morrissey Mullen with a very pop-inflected sound. It reminds me a lot of George Benson's In Your Eyes, with very 80s pop instrumentation and vocals fused with the fusion jazz/funk elements. (This is a playlist with the full album, so let it play through!)

I've seen a few people talking about SocialSpec which claims that "the future of social media is websites". Something I strongly agree with. However, I don't see the point of this fledgling spec on top of all the other IndieWeb complexity that's flying around. From what I can gather, it's 3 files that you upload to /.well-known which provide a bio, a means of contact, and what blogs you follow. Step one is to have an RSS feed, actually, but everyone should have an RSS feed anyway. But aside…

Not a Halloween one-shot mind you. While there's plenty of excellent micro-spooky adventures out there, horror games perfect for that 1-3 session tension or capsule games that prioritize atmosphere and dread, I'm here to say you should run a Halloween episode. A session or two explicitly dedicated to horror themes and atmosphere in an existing campaign otherwise focused on adventure or whatever your system prioritizes. Why? Differences in kind is fun, and allowing your players to explore your…

Bank robbers have always made for exciting characters, and author Chris Gerrib got inspired by a real life robbery while working at a bank. Hop in your getaway car for a drive through the Big Idea for The Third Person in the Room. CHRIS GERRIB: “They were alive when I left them.” That’s the first line of my new book The Third Person in the Room, and figuring out what happened after the speaker left is the through-line of this book. Like many authors, and unlike Our Host, I have a day job. For…

I spent my youth and twenties hiking the Canadian Rockies as much as I could, always with topo maps in hand. So a book like Mapping the Mountains by Andrew Davies (Uitgeverij Moving Mountains, 2026) holds considerable… More

It is really annoying you know not having contact with you anymore. I guess this is just more of a rant because I am just so angry at you. Why did you have to be such a piece of shit, such a disgusting "man"? Why couldn't you have been just a nice guy? And why do I still want to be near you? Comfort is no excuse for disrespect in a relationship, and yet I want to tell you all about my day and the physio appointment I had and the fact that the practitioner said that I did not have enough ass…

The sheer effrontery of this cat! I was planning to sit there! Does the cat not understand his place in a hierarchy! I suppose one might say that we have differing opinions about who is at the top. I will need to have a serious discussion with Saja about this. One of us buys the Churu around here. If he wants any more he’s going to have to change his seating arrangements. That’s right, I’m not above bribery. — JS

Rock formations at Colorado’s Garden of the Gods. The post Orange Spires appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

"Perspective" is what we develop when, with the benefit of time, we're able to frame something more aptly than is possible from within the thick of it. As his support collapses and oversight looms, why wait years? It's never too early to seek perspective. Here's mine: He’s a 4. Maybe a 4-1/2. If we ever had a 3 (Putin, Erdogan, Orban, roughly), we’d feel as warmly nostalgic for Trump as dems now feel toward GWB. (Remember how just after 9/11 he visited a mosque to support our Muslim neighbors?…

Learn what the abi3t and the limited C API are and what that means for Python users. This article explains what the limited C API and the abi3t are to Python developers who don't have experience with C extensions. 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of Python 3.15, over the next 15 business days I'll be writing about a new 3.15 feature every day. Explained clearly and with examples so you don't have to sift through the changelog. Subscribe to receive this free email series: Enroll…

Going with Siouxsie & The Banshees on Hallowe’en is obviously some kind of low hanging fruit but I have absolutely no problem with that. Especially when it means I get to post this entire 1981 concert from Köln, West Germany, filmed for the Rockpalast television series which has been a fantastic post-punk archive. The show […] The post Siouxsie & The Banshees, Live on Rockpalast – July 1981 appeared first on Space Echo.

I have been a Readwise customer for several years and its Highlights and Reader apps/functions are critical to how I read and track what I read. This week Readwise launched their eBook platform, which is a combination of a book store and app for Android and iOS. In a blog post Readwise explains why they are getting in to eBooks and what is their strategy. While I agree with the idea that more competition is needed in eBooks, I am not entirely sure that being the “Strava for reading” is what…

My son is taking an art appreciation class in college and one of his latest assignments was to make a collage. We used to make collages all the time in school. All we had to do was grab some old magazines or newspapers and cut out pictures and bust out the glue sticks. Yall. I didn't have any old magazines. I have magazines but they are expensive/vintage/collector publications that nobody is looking through much less cutting up. We managed to find some old Time and Wired magazines from the…

I might have injured myself slightly. I had a bit of a shoulder and lat muscle sprain. So I took this week slow. I did one simple P.T. and otherwise walked around. Over the week, the pain has not reduced. I am a bit worried, especially because it’s on the left side. I hope it gets better with rest. The work has been hectic. That could also be the reason for the shoulder pain. I need to pay attention to posture and the breaks. At Palmgrove inside Ballal Residency to discuss TheGreatNERide2027…

My wife is on the mend, slowly. They still aren’t sure what happened, the scans and tests all point at nothing in particular. A couple of conversations and some self-diagnosis and we are happy enough that she is no longer in so much pain. Might even be back at work at some point next week. It has thrown my routine out of whack though, which is not a complaint just an observation, but as the weekend arrives so my focus can shift to calmer things. Suffice to say that work is as manic as ever so…

A reminder to send in your subscription request and (if you want) your letter for The Visitor’s News in the next week if you want to be part of the first issue. Subscribe now and you can be part of a group that may some day require two hands to count!

Gubble 2, the PC puzzle game from 1997, has a page on Steam. It’s not out yet but you can wishlist it. I’m assuming it’s a pretty basic rerelease and not an HD version, but that’s ok. Maybe one day we’ll get a rerelease of Gubble Buggy Racer.

This was fine. The book goes into what a good apology consists of, and the how and why of the terrible apologies most people give. It gives tips for giving, accepting, and refusing apologies. Honestly great information for anyone to read up on, and in that regard it was useful for me. I liked that the author also dedicated a section to describing how forgiveness isn't necessary for healing and moving on. What I thought this book lacked was more insight into worse situations, for lack of a…

Remote FT8 from the couch with POTACAT and ECHOCAT On Wednesday evening, October 28, 2026, I logged a two-way FT8 contact with Bulgaria while watching the World Series upstairs with my wife. My radio was in the basement the whole time. The station was LZ2XA, Val, in grid KN33, about 7,400 kilometers (4,600 miles) away on 40 meters. I made the contact from my phone. Why remote? I like experimenting with technology. There’s another reason too: when I go to the basement to do radio, I feel…

Cryptic: From Voynich to the Angel Diaries, the Story of the World's Mysterious Manuscriptsby Garry J. ShawGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 331 Rating: Synopsis: Books can change the world. They can influence, entertain, transport, and enlighten. But across the centuries, authors have disguised their work with codes and ciphers, secret scripts and magical signs. What made these authors decide to keep their writings secret? What were they trying to hide? Garry J. Shaw tells the stories of…

B.A.T. G.I. JOE: A REAL AMERICAN HERO (HASBRO) Hey there, it’s Friday. Well, that sure is nice, I suppose. Made it to the end of the week and all. Aren’t we all so proud? I am. Okay, so let’s do that whole Flashback thing I like to do at the end of the week, once more jumping back into the world of G.I. Joe, with a return look at the original Cobra B.A.T.! After being a fairly straightforward military-based line of toys, and then a mostly down to earth adventure series for the first 20 years of…