'It's ok I'm not ok. OK?' This past week that little covid minx has been inhabiting my body. Beautiful friends have been offering help and support - how wonder-full. And they've prompted a realising... All seem to see my predicament as 'poor Lizzie, not OK' as they wish me better soon. Indeed, my mum and a very dear friend keep checking in on my progress as if they're hanging hope of my recovery SOON because I must be 'NOT WELL'. Well... I love them all, love their offers to help, and don't…

Evelyn de Morgan: “The Soul’s Prison House” 1888 When the phrase “the writer writes from prison” popped into my head, I knew I would do something with it. The phrase has a certain velocity, which created the rhythm of the story’s opening, which for a while was all I had. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to short stories; this story’s turns basically came to me one at a time as I wrote…. As I came to the end, I was worried about writing a story that seemed to lack consequence despite the…

A brief break from teaching to spend time with the family and finish up a writing project.

WIt Cult TV Blog, John's season of posts about the villainous Doctor Who Autons continues with "Spearhead from Space," the inauguaral eposide from the great Jon Pertwee's run as the good Doctor.There were a lot of celebrity deaths announced this week, and by the time you read this, there might even have been more, but we'll begin at Comfort TV, where David remembers Michael Gray, whom people of our age remember from Shazam!At A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence looks back at the career of Walter…

After implementing the small-change pattern, Imprint Engineering’s next focus in improving our development loop has been implementing a verification loop for our software development. This is an increasingly common pattern, particularly popularized by poteto’s pstack, but you’ll find similar ideas emerging in other places as well, e.g. Niko Matsakis’ post on the correctness ratchet, among others. This captures some of the confusion I’ve seen in our initial rollout, and the particulars of how we…

I’ve heard it a hundred times before, and I bet you have too: “the way AI systems are trained means that they can only provide the average answer to any question.” And yet, anyone who’s recently used an LLM would tell you that this obviously isn’t true. Over the last few years I’ve shared many reasons why that assumption is incorrect. I’ve tried to explain how post-training works, why agents are more than just LLMs, and how these systems develop emergent capabilities, but I found a far better…

*Harald Sohlberg, "Evening Glow," 1893. Nasjonalmuseet.*Saijō Yaso, "The Crow's Letter." Via stopping off place.*Solid gold pumpkin charm, via Erie Basin.*1927 photograph of mummers. SOTK2011/ Alamy Stock Photo.*Dr. John Dee's obsidian mirror, with a wooden case covered in tooled leather labeled in the handwriting of Horace Walpole: "The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits."The inscription also includes this quotation from Samuel Butler's "Hudibras" about Dee's assistant,…

"yecʼhed mat!". "What does that mean?". Tell me you're not from Nantes without telling me you're not from Nantes. 😅 #nantes

This morning I opened Snapkin on my phone after a new build and the top of the screen looked wrong. Behind the clock there was a white strip, where the app’s light grey background used to be.

Keith JarrettRoma Keith Jarrett pianoRecorded live July 12, 2016at Sala Santa Cecilia,Auditorium Parco della Musica, RomaProducer: Keith JarrettEngineer: Martin PearsonDesign: Sascha KleisExecutive producer: Manfred EicherRelease date: November 6, 2026 Keith Jarrett’s Roma fills the last space in ECM’s portrait of his final European solo tour. Recorded at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Hall on July 12, 2016, it joins the Budapest, Bordeaux, Vienna, and Munich concerts in documenting five evenings across…

Daily Drawing 1034

A research administrator at the University of Kentucky objected on religious grounds to the pressure the university was putting on him and other employees to rely on AI in their work. With the help of the American Humanist Association (AHA), he was able to secure a Title VII exemption from using the technology. David Durman “felt he was being asked to offload his thinking to tools like Microsoft Teams Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT bots in his day-to-day work. That felt like a violation of his…

Crows roosting on Pitt’s campus on the night of the supermoon, 1 Dec 2017 (photo by Kate St. John) 30 October 2026 Monday’s Hunter’s Moon was spectacular as seen in photos around the world. I didn’t take a picture this week but I did capture the supermoon(*) on 1 December 2017 with crows roosting near Heinz Chapel, lit by the full Cold Moon. A video of them flying across the moon would have been even better. Brett Banditelli wanted to capture that video and achieved his goal last June. Here it…

I took some time recently to reflect on the three things I find most annoying about myself at the moment. It’s a useful exercise to revisit periodically. My current list is: (1) Letting people finish their thought instead of letting excitement or impatience get the better of me. This is a long-term project. It’s the dark side of a strength: a bias for action. The balance is tricky, but I’ve made some recent progress in my own self-awareness around it, and that gives me hope. (2) Removing “like”…

Everyone here at Strange Company HQ wishes you a happy Halloween!In which an 18th century priest meets a troll.Gunnhild, Mother of Kings.The strange case of the Crow Hill Bones.So now we know what is the oldest pub in England.The Abominable Snowman visits Massachusetts.I thought you'd like to know that someone is cataloging public restrooms. (And, yeah, I don't want to know what this person's other hobbies might be.)All right, I know you're itching to read about coffin torpedoes.A haunted…

Solid interview of Ed Zitron by Jon Stewart. Not a lot new here for those of us who already have an unhealthy fixation on the AI bubble (you know who you are), but an excellent overview for the well-informed but not obsessed. From the Internet of Bugs, Carl Brown explains why the "worst cybersecurity incident in history" is less scary than you think. Watched this movie a couple of nights ago on Kanopy (arguably the best streaming service, even without taking into account the fact that it's…

A girl named Hoshino finds herself back at Another Danchi, a community that’s past its prime. Her grandmother used to run a summer festival for the community, but it’s fallen away, especially with her coming down with dementia. However, the grandmother finds a spark of something familiar in old promotional material that Hoshino finds, and that gives her an idea: maybe she can make her grandmother better by reviving the summer festival. In taking steps, she revives the spirit of the festival…

Before the baby was born, I always wished I had more time. I couldn't publish more because I didn't have enough time. I couldn't read all the books I bought because I had no time. I felt like I was hopping from one task to another, hoping to find some peace and finally settle into a focused state of mind. Now that we have a baby, I can really say it's difficult to find a chunk of time to focus on writing or any other creative project. I wake up at 5:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays for yoga and…

The spookiest of holidays is upon us this weekend so let us stop and see what new metal has been released to soundtrack this. Hails! Cryptorium - death - SwedenEreboros - death - BrazilTrituration - death - ParaguayTormentous - death - USADead Twilight - death - ItalyInfernal Genocide - death - USAEldfödd - death - SwedenMastic Scum - death/grind - AustriaHope Collapse - death/crust - USADesecrated Extinction - death/slam - UKTraumatomy - death/slam - Japan/RussiaNegativus - death/groove -…

Okay, it’s been almost 3 months since I last showed a sign of life on my blog and I think it’s about time to break the silence. Is anything special going on? Eh… kinda. Let me just shorten it to: financial stress. I’ve been thinking about sharing negative thoughts on my blog, but I decided not to, because I just don’t feel that my cute and cozy personal blog is the right place for those things. Also because I build my blog mainly for myself, as a happy place to go to, and I don’t wanna be…

This is an excerpt from the Verges/Orchards sequence of French poems, written in the last four to five years of his life. from poem 42 Tonight there was something in the air that makes us bow our heads; we want to pray for prisoners for whom life stops. And we think of life stopped…. Of life no longer moving towards death and of where the future’s absent; where one must be uselessly strong and sad, endlessly. …………………………………………………………………. translated from the French, by A Poulin, JR The Complete…

Whereby I discuss the value of old ideas...

WordArt is back, baby. This is fun. Put in a postcode or area and Local Wikipedia shows you articles local to you. Postmark make games that are printable and just need common game components like cards or dice to play. Neat. Wonders of Web Weaving, a podcast I was a guest on back in August, has just published it's 25th and final episode. James has some behind the scenes info here about the show. Shep, a prolific maker of web things, posted about Instant Fail which is a soundboard of fail sounds…

About 20 years ago, some construction-fence art went up on a large site at Park Place and Church Street, for the project that eventually became 30 Church Street. It showed the “walking man” symbol from traffic signals all over the world, and was amusing but I didn’t think all that much about where it came from. It turns out this was a real installation and has been used in multiple places: Maya Barkai’s Walking Men Public Art Installations. Most of the symbols are low-resolution men walking,…

It's only fair for me to illustrate this blog post with a couple of bad photographs. (click to enlarge)As much as I have tried in the past, over and over again, every once in a while I accidentally make a good photograph. I apologize for that. I don’t mean to but one invariably slips in now and then. I wish it didn’t. Seriously, I know you expect mundane photos from me and I don't want to let you down. Let me be upfront about something. I specialize in making mediocre photographs. It's not a…

There are certain things about video games that we tend to take for granted, particularly when it comes to the ones we've been playing for most of our lives. In a traditional side-scrolling platformer, for instance, you generally start on the left and work your way towards the right. It's such a familiar convention that most of us probably never give it much thought. But what if you took one of the most recognizable run-and-gun games of the NES era and reversed the entire experience? Not just…

Enterprise over Earth flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Honestly, we’re not sure what you can do with this one, but Ambient Earth is seven hours (plus) of footage from the International Space Station, looking at our beautiful planet. We hope it inspires you to write, or make art, or do something. Last night we had the sad news that Patrick Stewart had died, so here’s my nod to him. I took a screen shot of the video and…

So, we’ve moved back. Back to the UK. I had planned on writing this before we moved. In fact, I started the draft in July... but alas. Here we are, two months into living in the UK. Since I last posted, Mel has gotten into Cambridge University for her PhD. She has finished up her work for the New York City Food Policy Center and is beginning her PhD in Criminology continuing her research on food in prisons this fall. As her program will take a few years, and I did not handle doing long distance…

– My bro and I in matching outfits stoked for christmas. About a month ago my brother created a website with the help of AI. His main goal was promoting his upcoming solo-made comic (not AI-generated btw), but it has also been a huge creative outlet for him. He’s been a prolific blogger, writes deeply thought out articles, cares for his site as his personal garden on the internet, has cool art, promotes local techno-adjacent artists, he has been active in several indie web communities, making…