Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share the good stuff I encounter on the web. ❧ myNoise – Almost too good of a service/tool: I keep thinking “where is the catch?” but there doesn’t seem to be any. Like dinosaur eggs in the sand: the pterosaur museum built to thrive in the Gobi desert – Fascinating building, in and out. The Film Experience – In case you have time to spare, this looks way more interesting than the average YouTube video. (via Kottke) Apple…

Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people sometimes produce inelegant solutions because they’re capable of rapidly brute-forcing problems. If I had to remember a hundred names, I would spend time coming up with clever mnemonics. John von Neumann would probably just remember them. There’s a famous von Neumann story where he was asked how far a fly must travel if it kept flying between two cyclists who were approaching each other at some fixed…

Burnout 3: Takedown I turned on widescreen and in the menus this feels stretched but in races it seems...fine? I'm not sure, but it does seem easier to read wider. The rubberbanding in this game feels pretty unfair sometimes, very one sided. The CPU is always right on your ass but then you'll be an insane amount of seconds behind...and growing. It's especially tough on the eliminator races where there just aren't other opponents to hit to get the boost to get back into it. The tension is good,…

A real theme I've been noting since I started reflecting on games more regularly is just the question of ambition and scope. How do you decide what to change, what are your sacred cows of the series and what can you play with? What is too much at once? This is overdue and as such my memory has degraded a little bit, but I wanted to consolidate some thoughts about the DS Castlevanias I played earlier this year through this lens. I found Dawn of Sorrow pretty forgettable. It runs back a winning…

The most successful CEO ever is Jensen Huang. The founder and CEO of NVIDIA. That is, of course, if your definition of 'success' is how much value his company has created. And, that is: if you define 'value' by stockprice etc. Or maybe even the impact on the world. We can discuss about these definitions and classifications. And we can have different opinions about them. Because: what is success? What is value? The fact that is true -- at least in my opinion -- is that Jensen Huang is a…

So a long time ago, in my college days, not too terribly long after Star Trek: The Next Generation came on the air, I shared a Shakespeare class at UC Santa Barbara with a couple of good fellows. One, named Ray, actually worked just down the street from the comic shop where I was employed, at a stationery store if I recall correctly. The other person was a friend of Ray’s, named Jebediah. Now, Jebediah was a very handsome gentleman, appearing at first glance to be straight-laced and…

Here's a pair of very nice views that I am pretty sure date to 1968; I think you will like them!First up is this shot taken from the Peoplemover, looking down on the Motor Boat Cruise, which is experiencing a traffic jam. It's those ducks again! Why don't they get jobs? I like this unusual view, with the boats passing beneath the Autopia freeway.Next is this great shot of guests who appear to be returning from Tom Sawyer Island - this is the "Injun Joe" raft. There was also a "Becky Thatcher",…

Blade: Trinity (2004)

The first game in the series immediately impressed me thanks to the serious, earnest approach it took to its classical music theme—and also daunted me with the myriad interlocking systems required to play them well. My musical skills were split between three genres (this was on top of experience in each song), I was expected to chase after temporarily visible fairies for new sheets of music, worry about the accessories I wore to each performance, and pick out emotive keywords after viewing…

The argument for better gear is seductive because simple: get more sensitive sensors, better autofocus, faster lenses and motors, and you’ll produce better photographs. The problem is that “better” assumes the goal is optical accuracy. Accuracy, in fact, is exactly wrong. Visual accuracy is not the point Memory research, starting with Bartleson’s 1960 study on memory colours of familiar objects and extended since to shapes, scenes, and spatial boundaries, establishes something inconvenient for…

On Wednesday the Ian Visits website celebrated its 20th birthday, an exceptional milestone. I say that having got there myself, but whereas I generally write one post a day Ian writes half a dozen, an exceptional output. His posts are generally "a mixture of transport, architecture, history, exhibitions and things to do around London", so he says, and his What's On list is a famously good digest of things actually worth visiting rather than overhyped brand opportunities. If you're reading this…

A Twisted Halloween Tale in Four-Part Disharmony Image by Author, created in AI. Plexi Glass was in a bit of a pickle. And as she often did when encountering situations she couldn’t resolve by waving about her titanium checkbook, she called her best friend. “Tupper, you have got to get over here immediately.” Tupper Ware, already in a bit of a mood after having to relinquish one of her martinis in order to answer the phone, was not impressed with this entreaty. “Why?” Plexi sighed. “Look,…

https://zoey-on-github.github.io/blog/macgcc.html#fnref1

I like to write using fineliners because you don't have to press them hard against the paper. My hand coordination for rounder things is terrible, so my writing always ends up being terrible, and I always feel a bit of pain after a while because I have to tense every muscle to write legibly. With fineliners, it's easier, as they let the ink flow at the slightest touch on the paper, and it flows really nice. But most fineliners don't like being used at an angle, and I don't enjoy writing with…

Shawn Gude has recently had a book published: American Socialist: the Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs. I recently read the book: it's a clearly and exhilarating book about Debs, a person who is often cited as a working-person's hero by people like Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders; he was lauded by contemporaries like W. E. B. Du Bois and was one of the reasons for why socialist unions and laws for worker rights increased substantially at the start of the 1900s. To me, Debs is a clear example…

Hello friends. How foolish I was to think that I would have time to write this newsletter while I was back home in Australia! Apologies for the radio silence. My family and I visited friends and family, before I made a quick stop off at Melbourne International Games Week to do some scouting around. It was a good, but draining time being back in my homeland. But now I am back in Japan, staring at the wall of grey cloud and rain that is pelting Lake Biwa, thinking about plans for 2027. Daunting…

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20261029-00/?p=112808/ Then again, that is what they asked for.

If you're working in indie games, you're competing for a small slice of a small slice of the games industry pie. The obvious reason for this is that you can't compete for attention with hundred-million-dollar titles. But the other reason is that you are, on PC where most indies live, competing with every game that has ever existed. Everyone who's likely to buy your game probably has dozens, if not hundreds, of games ready to play on Steam. If they're the kind of real enthusiast who takes risks…

https://melaniekat.com/blog/public-on-pds/ the personal homepage of melanie kat

Reading Time: 37 minutes I confess that while I personally have no beef with crypto per se – other than my occasional angry recollection of how much I would be worth had I bought Bitcoin when I first wrote about it 15 years ago and it was worth thruppence – I can’t help but find it very, very funny that a bunch of people who’ve been hodling like motherfcukers can all be undone by some iffy infosec at a meaty level. ALL THAT ONCHAIN ENCRYPTION CAN’T DO SH1T IN THE FACE OF HUMAN INCOMPETENCE, MY…

Source A deer killed by vines. Video on Meta There is an invasive plant called dog strangling vine. I thought the name was for drama but maybe it is literal. I have posted several times on weird and odd disasters for deer. Prior posts on deer. I am guessing 6 or so relate to Deer Deaths or mishaps.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine loaned me a book called “Attached". A bit dated, the book’s goal was to explain the different types of attachment systems that people generally fall into: secure, anxious, or avoidant. I devoured this book within a few days, as I had just come out of a very long term relationship of eight years and was scrambling to make sense of what had just happened, looking for solace and understanding wherever I could find it, which in my case, is fairly often deep within…

My blog lately is just watches and Emily St. John Mandel novels but what can I say - every time I finish one of her books I am immediately drawn to her other titles, and watches... watches are a different beast altogether. Lets just say the algorithm on my only social media app (YT) is now completely revamped and I'm only being recommended more watch videos. Guilty as charged but I enjoy it. I recently finished Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Exit Party, and wow, this one is eerily…

Defenses upI've always been an enthusiastic person. I like to jump from one project to the next (literally running, when possible) with my knobs turned to 11. I tend to do well on relatively short action cycles; getting started on (and being ready to move on from) tasks sooner than my more methodical peers. I like to jump in with both feet. And I like to say yes! when people ask me to do things, or collaborate on projects. This is partly because I genuinely like doing things, partly because I…

So, speaking of Lua, I wanted to round some fractional coordinates to the nearest whole pixel before drawing, to reduce skrungliness. (That's a technical term.) Lua doesn't have a rounding function in its standard library, which surprised me, but it's a pretty petite stdlib, so ok. And then I was like wait... how DO you round a float? Like, legitimately? The standard thing you see goes something like math.floor(n + 0.5). For negative numbers, floor increases the absolute value instead of…

This is David, your ever so ambitious web guide, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love it when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!».Last week, I asked you to tell me why you like reading the newsletter. I got so many heartwarming answers, thank you! One of you told me they like how the newsletter «puts ideas in my head for the weekend», which helps keep work-related thoughts away until Monday. I had never thought of it that way…

With apologies to Wallace & Gromit….. Allan reports….. O what a lovely day. Had a day out with young Mr. Apps. We went out on a reconnaissance ( hope I spelled it right) run. To find a cafe when we go to Ashford or Folkestone way. Found a nice cafe of the M20 at junction 10A on the A20. This is now logged in for trips that way. Here’s the evidence! Note that Mr Apps’ breakfast is half the size of Mr Dawes’!!!!!! Then went to the Ashford International Model Railway Education Centre in…

City Chicken. The delicious chicken dish that really isn't chicken. This fabulously tasty recipe is a Polish American recipe for making something very tasty which was developed during the Depression to help create a delicious supper dish that tasted like chicken, but was made with meats that were not quite as pricey to buy. It is a recipe which was first shared with me by my sister many years ago and I have to say it is incredibly delicious! Everything my sister does is done with great skill…

Programming Notes: We regret how late this is, even by the recent Friday standards. We have been working all day long, planning out not only today's post, but the next four after that. And we have been testing our Election Day setup. It takes time. On that note, we have so much news-related material, that we are going to do a news-focused post tomorrow, as if it is a weekday. Then, on Sunday, we'll have questions and letters. That is the only way to squeeze everything in. DesperationWatch 2026,…

I drove around Portland today looking for the last of the Fall color and wasn't disappointed. Here are a few shots from the Portland Japanese Garden.Then it was a quick jaunt after lunch over to Multnomah FallsThe old Columbia River Gorge road between Multnomah Falls and Troutdale was incredible looking, I wish I took some photos of it because the color along the route was unforgettable.