BB debuted his “Ghost Skeleton Demon” costume today, hopefully the wings and horns make it through a day of kindergarten. I flipped off a motorbike with two riders in blacked out helmets screaming down the bike lane while we were crossing. They shouldn’t have been doing that, and I shouldn’t have done that. Two wrongs don’t make a right, etc etc.

9729/21648I went up to the attic and found the boxfile containing my scripts (and some other bits and bobs) from Ra Ra Rasputin. What would it be like? Would it hold up? Could there be a comeback?It certainly needs some work and a few of the then topical references are lost on me now, but there's lots of heart and madness and fun in it. I think it could have a bit more heft, though it does explore the way that this story is already a myth, with my Rasputin adding more mist and mystery and lies…

Batching the Billing Ledger: Small Trade-Offs with High Impact is a great article about “systems assembly”, and microbilling is part and parcel of nearly any web app today, certainly when your users call into LLM models. Gotta keep’em tokens counted! Since the start of the agentic era, I’ve been curious about “how much software” we need for workloads like this. After all, my doctrine is less stuff and this looked like a use case too perfect to pass on. Thank you, Vicente, for the pitch-perfect…

Bullshit: a prose-like substance which, on the first sight, looks like it has substance - but it's lacking it. Characterised by being order-of-magnitude harder to dismiss than to produce. It abuses norms of good-faith intellectual engagement. Truth: what actually is, not what someone believes or wishes to be. At odds with motivated reasoning. Reputation: a tool for saving effort on verifying claims from people who are repeatedly full of shit and/or bad actors (the distinction isn't important in…

Emily Hall Under Review:Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young. Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward. Columbia University Press, October 27, 2026. Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young’s sobering monograph, Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward, argues that since the early twentieth century, white philanthropists have compelled African American writers to temper their anger about systemic oppression. As these authors note,…

Just for fun. Publish a doorstopper1 fantasy 1b. Publish it with Orbit Have someone describe my worldbuilding or prose as "lush" Publish something with a cover by Chris McGrath Have someone say I'm their favorite writer Publish something Dark Academia Have someone make beautiful fan art of my characters or world Publish an ongoing Urban Fantasy series Have one of my books blurbed by Brandon Sanderson or Jeff VanderMeer or Seanan McGuire Publish something with magic portals Publish a novella…

I joined Nathan Puls on his Jobs Podcast: A conversation about making stuff, making a living, and making a little room for weirdness on the web. What if you had to be Chris? Nathan opens with a strange assignment: Chris disappears into his camper van for a week, and Nathan must impersonate him at work. The survival guide? Make jokes in Slack, ask pointed questions, rub your chin, and maybe ship a little design polish.

I've been reading forum posts by sailors concerned by the increase in unmanned monitoring vessels. This concerns a collision on Lake Erie. The NTSB has recommendations for improving the safety of such operations. What bothers me is that they assigned no responsibility to the powerboat that ran down what could have been a kayaker. It was daylight, and the drone was transmitting AIS, which the powerboat was not monitoring (not required, but it was a 45' boat moving at 25 mph, which in my mind,…

#coffeeneuring2026 No. 5; ~7.0km round-trip This was an extremely extravagant outing, worth it in terms of the time spent with a friend who leaves on Sunday, not at all in terms of €26 for three cappucini and a cornetto. Nevertheless, some people do actually frequent Caffé Doria. It's the kind of place that a certain kind of local and a certain kind of tourist love. The locals have cash to burn and are living their best life. This and a few similar places are not a privilege but a right.…

R.B. RussellTartarus PressGathering together lost souls on the Sussex Downs, houses demolished and rediscovered, and half-remembered dreams, The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories collects uncanny fiction written by R.B. Russell over two decades. Many stories are rooted in moments of real life, but are transformed into something disquieting, from the enigmatic commune of ‘The Sanctuary’ to the ex libris of a lost artist, these stories drift between memory, history and imagination.Inspired by…

The concept of optionals has been a core part of Swift since the very beginning, and it’s incredibly rare to come across a Swift code base that doesn’t use optional values one way or another.However, despite both being so commonly used, and conceptually simple (an optional either contains a value, or it doesn’t), optionals have quite a few interesting features that go quite far beyond simple unwrapping using statements like if let or guard let. So let’s explore some of those features, shall…

📷 286/365 - An experiment with a passing train and Halide that came out rather special.

Week #819 This week we spent some time working on the Australian Concreter’s web app. It connects with their Xero accounting system, but most of this work was around job scheduling. We put a layer on top of the Tracking Categories (jobs) in Xero to track more information than is available in the system; like duration, start and end dates, execution steps, etc. We’ve always visualized this as a Gantt chart, but now we’re tweaking it a bit more as colored cards for each day’s tasks. For PETALS,…

Let’s celebrate the pinnacle of spooky season with some historical costume movies and TV shows.

After my API key was compromised, getting help from Anthropic showed me how hard it is to automate customer support well.

Content note: suicidal ideation, suicide planning and other extremely dark themes. Please do not read if this is likely to distress you. Check out some of the past Halloween erotica instead – in the past I’ve done a vampire, a werewolf, a succubus, a siren, a reanimated corpse and even the monster that lives under […]

Very far Far Pixelly close-up

30 Cookie | INDEX Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

[Once again, a lot of mistakes were made.] Game 6 of the WNBA Finals took place yesterday, but it would have been extremely easy for you to miss, because the Golden State Valkyries and Atlanta Dream tipped off in Georgia at a ridiculous 12:30 PM Eastern. For Valkyries fans back in California, that was 9:30 in the goddamned morning Pacific. That’s a travesty, and it didn’t have to be that way. Thankfully for those who wanted to watch, Flavor Flav declared it a paid holiday, and Hillary Clinton…

This week, Ofcom published the first of doubtless many reports on the impact of the Online Safety Act, which came into force in 2025. In the report, Ofcom acknowledges that there has been little change in the amount of “harmful material” children encounter online. The one bit of success appears to be that children are less able to access mainstream pornography sites because of age verification – but children still see pornography via social media, messaging, and gaming services. Ofcom wants to…

Windy and warm for late October. Cumulous clouds accumulate. Tulip-tree samaras comes spinning into the yard like a drone swarm, but one that seeds life rather than death. The kak-kak-kak of a Cooper’s hawk.

People sitting at desks using typewriters in Norway. 1940s Introduction I’ve been a bit of a debate regarding the content of web posts. Dave Melor advocates for highly polished pieces of writing in Polish Your Postings, Please1. Joel Chrono, on the other hand, advocates for unpolished writing in Unpolished human websites2. Candy3falls squarely on Joel’s side, and has a few comments that fall in line with my thinking as well. I’ll address those comments in a little bit. (And I’m now annoyed to…

Gregory Peck in The Omen (1976) Vitals Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn, American ambassador to the United Kingdom England and Rome, Fall 1975 Film: The Omen Release Date: June 6, 1976 Director: Richard Donner Wardrobe Supervisor: Tiny Nicholls Tailor: H. Huntsman & Sons, London WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background With Halloween just around the corner, there’s no better time to revisit Richard Donner’s 1976 supernatural horror classic The Omen, which marked its 50th anniversary earlier this year on…

I like Star Trek. Always have.I like almost every iteration of it: the “classic” series with Captain Kirk, The Next Generation, Voyager, even Enterprise.Except Deep Space Nine. It always seemed to me like the adventures of a shopping mall in space.But I have to admit that a good many episodes of the original series make me cringe. I recently rewatched one called “Miri,” and this time I was beyond cringing. I was appalled.“Miri” aired on NBC on October 27, 1966, early in the show’s first season.…

In the Newsletter this weekAnalysis: A rant about the Urda rail disasterGood week: Siemens wins the contract for 30(+10) high speed trains for SpainAlso a good week: Renfe starts to clear up its train categoriesBad week: GoVolta catches fireElsewhere this week: First #CrossBorderRail explainer video on YouTubePhoto of the week: TGV-M power cars in OUIGO livery at BelfortNewsletter 037, Friday 30th October 2026.Subscriber-only newsletter, sent every Friday at 14:00 CET/CEST, today a bit…

I am going to continue being vague about my place of employment, but I think I can talk about it more generically without it being immediately obvious where I'm talking about. So suffice to say it's a sports retail store. I've never done retail before so I'm eager to get some more hands on experience, but I originally wasn't scheduled to work at all this week or next week so I'm trying to pick up shifts from other people. I also, of course, would like some additional employment income in…

And now…An entire post of Halloween puns!That's right, my friends. Brace yourself... for the pain.***What do you call trendy ghost detectives? "In" specters. Why did the coven mess up the words to their potion? They couldn't tell which witch was spelling which. What do you call pink ghosts? Fa-BOO-lous! Why did the skeleton go to a BBQ restaurant? For the spare ribs.What do you get when you cross a werewolf with an eagle? A real birdbrain who's all bark and no flight. And now, your moment of…

In 2017, after getting laid off from a startup, I spent a while looking into AI risk: Many people I respect have started to think that AI risk is the most valuable place to focus EA efforts. For example, 80000 Hours ranks it first on their "list of global issues", taking into account "scale, neglectedness, and solvability". On the other hand, I have a lot of friends working in machine learning, and none of them think AI risk is worth working on now. This level of disagreement is very strange,…

2026-10-30Hello!A photo I took of a railway line above some trees and grass had incredible colors that made the landscape look alien. I wanted to explore more with that here, but it turned into a dive through color theory, deeper than I thought it would go.First, that alien color palette. Skies aren't supposed to be red! But infrared photography can filter out certain wavelengths of light at the sensor level. An editing trick here tries to emulate that output, but there's nothing like putting a…

Yes, I intended to continue the Messier Project this month…but… Hurricane Isaias came through and I wound up not being able to get into the backyard until my prime targets for the month, the crowd of globulars in Ophiuchus, were in the trees… Talk about synchronicity, muchachos. Last month in the AstroBlog article about my new (ahem) Tasco, I mentioned A Key to Worlds Beyond, the little book/booklet Tasco once included with their telescopes. A copy had come with the 11TE reflector I bought in…