by Cláudio Alves From 1950 to 1955, only one performer won the Best Actress Oscar from an original screenplay rather than a stage-to-screen adaptation. She was Audrey Hepburn, who took the prize for 1953's ROMAN HOLIDAY, at the 26th Academy Awards. While most of the world was rebuilding from the brink of ruin, the USA, whose territories the war barely touched, transitioned from WWII into a period of booming prosperity. As discussed in my last alternative Oscar history post, this led to a rise…

This is the last of my 1:144 scale WWII Japanese aircraft models, this time one that I built myself in Blender, the Aich D3 "Val" dive-bomber.I think it unlikely that I'll be doing any more Japanese aeroplanes, as I have no plans for building a Japanese wargames army any time in the foreseeable future.

MarginalRevolution, the long-running blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, recently published their archive so that AI agents can more easily access their content. As an example of an AI analysis, Alex published a post on how they Changed Their Views on AI and Where They Disagree, but it’s very brief.As is my habit when economics professors from George Mason university publish non-comprehensive AI analyses, I decided to do a more in-depth analysis. I asked ChatGPT for Work to investigate…

The Traitors: New Blood, season 5 episode 8, was bizarre, from the repeat roundtable to the game play. And I'm pretty bored with this season.

Quoted Romania Forms New Government as AUR Gains Popularity by Péter Fazekas (The Jamestown Foundation) The Niculescu cabinet marks the latest twist in a major political crisis that left Romania without government for nearly six months. On May 5, the PSD—which was part of a pro-EU coalition with the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL), the liberal Save Romania Union (USR), and the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR)—joined forces with the main opposition party, the…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] If you’ve done Fourier series approximations of functions, you had three reactions to today’s XKCD comic: First, of course, was a smile of recognition. Then came a “wait a minute” as you realized that the Gibbs phenomenon doesn’t get smaller as you add more terms to the Fourier expansion; it just concentrates itself at the corners: That ringing never goes…

Madison scoreboard in MadTracker v1.1.0. Track cycling — racing bicycles on a velodrome — is pretty niche. Even more-so is software to score such events. For a few years now my friend Glenn OConner has been volunteering at Mad Track Arena in Detroit using custom Excel sheets to handling the race scoring and scoreboard display. Out for a ride one evening he and I got to talking about the complexities and complications of the scoring work and, looking for another project, I realized I might be…

Now this looks like a dark and eerie scene from a dark and eerie picture... or are we just throwing you off the trail? If you want some more difficult screenshots to identify, check out our post from 7 years ago (!!) of the Halloween edition of The Impossibly Difficult Name that Movie Game which still has four of the five screenshots unidentified.As always, if you are not familiar with the rules to the Impossibly Difficult Name that Movie game or the prize, click here!

In Firefox on Mac, if you double tap to zoom (smart zoom) on something (for example, a column of text), by default, and unlike Safari, the scrolling is very “loose,” making it very difficult to scroll in a straight line. But if you change `apz.axis_lock.mode` to `1` in the advanced settings (`about:config`), it makes the scrolling very stable, linear, at least as much as Safari, maybe more. But the option should really be in the regular settings. (The default is `2`; change it to `3`, and,…

Worldbuilding gets a lot of flak sometimes. And fucking rightly so. Not going to play a novel. Not interested in exposition dumps. But leaving worldbuilding on the floor often just means falling back on default or baseline assumptions about how the world works. It's not a question of how much worldbuilding you do. It's more important to think about what you get out of it during play. What does it inform, and what can players do with it? Creating a pantheon of gods for your dungeon dragon world…

A lot of the things Herman posts on his blog resonate with me (I now also love the 574's), and I always appreciate the posts he thoughtfully puts up. His recent post (The upvote dilemma) had a line in it that really hit close to home and I wanted to just simply share it here and encourage all of you to read his post. ✉️ Reply by Email

I have published a number of articles about pumpkins and gourds seen on and around Brooklyn stoops going back to the early days of The New Leaf Journal in October 2020. While much of my pumpkin posting has been on the subject of autumnal pumpkins being left out well-past their prime, I will note that there are some aesthetic stoop displays. For example, see the following display in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights on October 26, 2026. Prior to reading an October 26, 2026 report by Brendan…

Injuries, I find, come in all packages. I once fell off a bridge in a park in Saitama while doing a handstand on the railing and hit my face on the stone of the bridge on my way into the water. I scraped my face thoroughly, cracked an orbital, and eventually broke two teeth. I once fell off the same trick move, jumping between slide and swingset, on my elementary school’s playground frequently enough that I broke my nose. I once broke my pinkie while playing soccer, catching it on someone’s…

If you have a place to put everything by default then everything winds up in the default place. This takes some spontaneity out of blogging.

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a another true one.) I’m the kind of a strange person who presses ⌥[ and ⇧⌥[ and ⌥] to get to the smart quotes directly from the keyboard. Yeah, I’m doing it right now. Yeah, it’s awkward. Yeah, I know that these days a lot of software automatically introduces curly quotes for you – I even wrote some of that software myself at Medium – but I started doing this in the early 2000s, and you know how…

I can not believe that I haven't made post yet. The induction engine is compete for now. I might go back and add more details later on. I am considering adding a copper wire from both ends leading to the underside of the platform to somewhere. The Distillation Tank has seen multiple additions and revisions. Some of the additions are listed below. Steps up to the tank platform A wooden ladder up to the top of the tank Two feeder pipes from the top of the tank and down to the slop drain Door for…

Source Sir Patrick Stewart (13 July 1940 – 28 October 2026) I always liked his role as Picard. He pulled Star Trek out of the camp from the original series but what I remember most is the line below. Time is the fire in which we burn.” Delmore Schwartz When I first heard it, it was like a slap to the senses. The stunned look on his face mirrored mine. I didn’t know at the time it was in a Schwartz poem. He will be missed. Prior mention of it.

The invention of the Pop-UP ad. Seriously…how annoying for patrons. I’ve noticed both drudge and google news have both started to make one click through TWO pop-up ads just to read one of the articles they stoled and put on their site. I think I’ll ask google chat AI if they ever heard of the phrase “Killing the Golden Goose” because two Clicks is too much. Piper’s opera house in Virginia City, Nevada was built in 1880 and is still there. Real Photo Postcard of Piper’s Opera House in Virginia…

Pokémon™fans have been asking for Pokémon minifigures for some time and finally their dreams have come true, well, as long as you also love LEGO® Technic. LEGO® Pokémon™ 72154 Iconic Trainer Moments Poké Ball was released on 1 October 2026 with the hefty price tag of US$299.99/ £229.99/ 259.99€/ AU$429.99. Let's see if the new elements within the set help justify this price tag with iconic moments inside.Continue reading »

Snapshot of handmade articulated folk art toys, Location appears to be the maker’s living room. No date either. I am going to guess around 1945 or so...returning vets brought a wave of jigsaw afficanados home and they subscribed to wood working magazines Collection Jim Linderman Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Last night's movie was Spookies from 1986, and crimony, what an absolute mess. Normally I write these up as I am watching them and then a little time at the end to cover some more. But I needed time to read up on this mess, so I am posting it tonight, early. I might need another movie to work this one out of my system.Spookies (1986)A group of people wander into an old mansion and start getting picked off by an astonishing collection of monsters. Normally I would describe the characters a…

Nota bene: Here are the previous installments — parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 — in my multi-part series on Adam Smith’s day-to-day duties as a commissioner of the Board of Customs of Scotland. End notes are below the fold. The next document in my Adam Smith sample is Order #126, which is dated 15 November 1784 [1] and is signed by the same commissioners in the same sequence who signed the previous order in my sample (#125): David Reid (top signature), Adam Smith (middle), and James Edgar…

I’ve always liked the idea of a little traverser for the Ivar Tramway. Just long enough for its tiny engine. But electricity, you siren…

When working with a large language model (LLM) AI, there is typically an exchange of information. I provide some criteria and information via a prompt to have the AI do something on my behalf. This could be to research something, make something, or provide a counterpoint to challenge my thinking. The AI then, hopefully, responds appropriately. As the conversation grows, more context is provided and so on, but what happens when we get to a new conversation? How can gathered knowledge be shared…

Dearest DC Comics, Please watch this video. Kudos to NatrixNate for putting it together.

# Things have been a bit quiet round here for one reason or another, but I couldn't let today pass without the annual reminder to "choose the web you want" rather than just falling into big tech defaults. Whatever you do on the internet, do it on your own terms. Own your data and identity.

Today’s a big haul of recordings, and they’re all from a Film Four Star Trek season. So apologies in advance as these are going to be bits I like rather than longer synopses. The first recording starts with the very end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Still the best. Before the next installment, there’s an introduction from Leonard Nimoy. Then it’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It’s an odd-numbered one so according to the rules it’s a bad one. But there’s plenty in it I like. And one…

The Kickstarter for Blood of the Baptist describes St. John the Baptist as an “extreme radical” and “one of the world’s greatest original rebels.” Can you speak to these characteristics and why this specific story was one you wanted to tell? John the Baptist was something of a rock star in his day. He attracted … Continue reading Reimagining John the Baptist Through Art and Music The post Reimagining John the Baptist Through Art and Music first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post…

Crucial Track for October 29, 2026: “Save Me” by Saint Motel These lyrics feel like they could be about the main characters in The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Tell me how we first met Tell me, will we meet again? And I know I don’t say anything But I feel everything, I know you understand ∞ via Crucial Tracks

This is the face of the dead man in Clerkenwell. He does not look perturbed by the change in the weather. Once winters wore him out, but now he rests beneath the streets of the modern city he will never see, oblivious both to the weather and the wonders of our age, entirely oblivious to everything in fact. Let me admit, although some might consider it poor company, I consider death to be my friend – because without mortality our time upon this earth would be worthless. So I do not fear death,…