IF YOU THINK I DIDN’T BOOKMARK THIS FOR LATER REFERENCE, I’VE GOT A BRIDGE TO SELL YOU: The Top 24 Gen Alpha Slang Terms of 2026. What can I say — I’m old. Kids these days, get off my lawn, and all that.

Academia, Travel I have spent the last two years living and studying in Siena. While this was a valuable experience with many personal highlights, I cannot in good faith recommend the experience to others. Before I start, let me say that I by no-means think the university of Siena (nor the city itself) is terrible. In fact, for many people, in many places, Siena might be a massive improvement over what is otherwise available. My perspective is one where Siena is compared against the other…

GDoC is a yearly virtual conference I love to watch and I highly recommend buying a ticket to watch the talks happening and support the conference. I’ll let the website describe GDoC since it does a better job than I could “Game Devs of Color (GDoC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to amplifying and empowering developers of color in the gaming industry. Since our founding, we’ve focused on elevating talented creators and their innovative work, providing platforms and opportunities that…

This week in US Pop History class, we are talking about early jazz, and that means talking about Louis Armstrong. If you are not deep into 1920s music, your relationship with him almost certainly begins and ends with this: Bob Thiele and George David Weiss wrote the tune specifically with Armstrong in mind. He recorded it in 1967, four years before his death, and many decades after his period of peak cultural relevance. It wasn’t a big hit in the US, though it did top the UK singles chart. The…

CUBE Type | Free Isometric Typography Generator CUBE Type is a tiny playground for isometric typography. Type a few words, pick a composition and a palette, and your text comes out as stacked blocks. [ 📌richardsison ] fatcousin — 5200 free local-first browser tools Local-first, browser-only tools. No accounts, no uploads, no waiting. Your files stay on your device. [ 📌tdjones and michaelfox ] playgrnd tiny tools for making weird, beautiful things [ 📌sachaa ] slashfriends — a directory of…

Snippets reflect the transitory experiences we have when passing through scenes, places, and times with people that are fragmentary and atomistic pieces of a great whole. Snippets of Warsaw was created over several days in July 2026, during a European heatwave. It was my first time vacationing alone in more than 20 years, and I was moving through a city whose language I could neither speak nor understand. That separation shaped how I photographed: I often held back, placing people within the…

Ash Adams The Art of Leaping Out of Planes to Fight Wildfires Heidi: How did this assignment first come about, and what did you know about smokejumping before you began? Ash: New Yorker photo editor Gabrielle Farina reached out, and I’m so glad she did. I was familiar with smokejumping in advance (from in and outside of Alaska), and I was delighted to work on this. Was there a particular image or idea you wanted to pursue from the outset? I was most interested in documenting days-in-the-life on…

Today’s TDC says: Make a waving Gif Flag for DS106 or something else. This started as a response to #tdc5337 . Use one of the DS106 graphics or upload your own and edit the text. I made this

In the world of fountain pen inks, is there any better collaboration than Kobe and Vanness Pen Shop? These two recently worked together to produce Vanness Hummingbird, a wonderful Emerald Green ink, exclusively for Vanness. I have one bottle to give away this week, so read the rules below and enter away! Kobe Ink Vanness Hummingbird Green Ink Giveaway

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses to pressurize all or part of a house with filtered air. It would be great if this were possible, but with all the ways for an improvised system to fail I'm pretty skeptical. I…

I think this is what our grandparents call "a senior moment." The best part?THEY WROTE IT IN ALL CAPS. [sad face here] "Sprinkles All Over Momther" is the name of my Cake cover band. Ahhh, NOW you're speaking my language.(The language... OF WRECKS. [eyebrow waggle]) In a word?NO. Thanks to Lani T., Donna C., Patrick L., Anony M., & Rebecca P. for keeping those lines of communication nice and squiggly-like.

The alarm in the potato room began at 2:13 in the morning, and Lena Voss reached the leaking valve before the first tray lost pressure. She shut the feed, fitted a new gasket, wiped the nutrient solution from the floor, and recorded the repair in a ledger whose last eighty pages contained only her handwriting. By three she had washed the tools and returned them to their outlines on the wall. The potatoes would be fine. The same could not be said for her sleep, so she put on a coat and climbed…

This was the month the world took notice that AI might kill everyone. Jacob Coxon’s resignation set off a preference cascade. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that we must pace the frontier. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis agreed. We were filled with hope. Perhaps we could agree to some basic safety measures, starting with embedded evaluators, pass some basic regulations and guardrails and otherwise start to act sensibly. Politicians on both sides took notice and were saying sensible…

Is a story a nothingburger if mystery meat is involved?Based on a story about the corporate sponsorships behind the MAHA Summit in Washington next week, we're about to find out.Politico reports (HT: Jasmine Nisar):Walmart, America's biggest retailer and a leading purveyor of the ultraprocessed [sic] foods MAHA decries, is among the sponsors. So are two artificial intelligence giants, OpenAI and Anthropic, whose chief executives recently asked Washington to regulate them in order to prevent…

Uniqlo, you know my email conversion rate, and I’m literally inside your linen shirt right now. And The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., I will always be grateful for that AWP award that one time. So know that I am coming from a place of love when I say, “‘ANDY WARHOL TRANSFORMATION Discover the collection that traces the sources of Warhol’s inspiration by exploring the everyday images that inspired his iconic works.’ WTF?” And the image is a workup of the screen from Modern…

The best-selling Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto on degrowth from Kohoei Saito was published in 2020 (in Japan… 2024 in English)– – as was Jason Hickel’s best-seller on Degrowth. What? Two best-sellers on degrowth? Yes, it’s almost, but not quite, safe to talk about degrowth now … and we will definitely be talking more about […] The post Review: Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto first appeared on Hinesight....for Foresight.

I understand what it means to feel lost or elsewhere and what t means to be or believe as if to be out of this hemisphere and more, I get how it is to seem like a stranger while alive and well and living here in familiar territory. My best memory of times when I was supposedly well or fine enough to be welcomed is when I was alone or by myself. I chose to break free like a lion or a tiger who escaped and broke free from his cage. I chose the separation between myself and the crowd and so, I…

Oh, neat. The Vitalant blood donation people ask a lot of questions about your health history. E.g., they ask about some medications; I guess depending on what's swirling around in your veins, they may or may not want to give your blood to someone else. New to me: They translated their questions into Spanish. That makes sense; there are probably plenty of people who'd like to donate but whose knowledge of English doesn't include words like "lungs" or "transfusion".

So, over the weekend, you may’ve seen something like this: Disney+ has altered its user agreement to clarify that ads will be allowed on all subscription tiers. https://bit.ly/4hhOjBo— IGN (@ign.com) 2026-09-21T00:01:01.999089314Z On Bluesky alone, nearly 2,000 people have quoted this, cursing the skies at Disney+ and the streaming movement for once again fucking over us, the loyal customer. So… …guess what? It’s not that at all. IGN has since updated their headline, now reading “Disney+…

A few months after her mother’s death, the author Naomi Alderman tries to keep her grieving father occupied by setting up a camera to take photos of the foxes that visit his garden at night. Examining the photos the next morning, they discover that they’ve captured not only an image of the fox, but also another animal they’re unable to identify. Soon it emerges that other people all over the UK have also seen this new creature – a furry mammal, similar in appearance to a badger but with a flat…

I liked Rubin’s book “The Creative Act,” and generally agreed with it’s thrust, so this series of quotes from him about AI & creativity comes as not much of a surprise to me. But it still seems like this viewpoint is shocking and avant garde for most people, so including it here! From Business Insider (archived): However, the finished work, or even the process of making something, is only a small part of what creativity is, Rubin said. “The things that we make are the reminders that we’re…

Thanks to contributor Andy for sending us this: * Strike back by reading New Escapologist Issue 19 and/or by anonymously mocking your useless workplace to our Workplace Woes desk.

The New Enemy (Liam Scott #3)Author: Andy McNabGenre: Military FictionReleased: 2015Rating: ★★☆☆☆It's a deadly game of hide and seek. Liam Scott has joined Recce Platoon. And it looks like he will be heading for Somalia. His mission is to gather intelligence from behind enemy lines, carrying out top-secret surveillance and dead letter drops. But he's new to the game and there's a lot to learn. Soon Liam is monitoring a den of Al-Shabaab militants and hunting a key terrorist target. Can Recce…

I wanted to post this yesterday but didn’t get to it. This is a good list, I think I should make myself one like this: good things I’m looking forward to this week — feel-good rituals included. Highlights of my week francescrossley.comLittle things I love every week What the Fran https://francescrossley.com/highlights-of-my-week/

After I had finished categorising all the posts on Mappery (see this post) it occurred to me that a similar strategy might be used for geocoding ungeocoded posts. If you have been following my vibe coding posts you will know that Arnaud and I built a geocoding and mapping plugin for our WordPress site that we are about to publish. When we built the plugin, I salvaged the geocodes from the old plugin that we had disabled but that left nearly 1,000 posts ungeocoded (either posts from before the…

One of my favourite bird groups are the hornbills (or bucerotiforms), a spectacular, tropical group related to hoopoes, sadly in trouble due to the loss and deterioration of their habitats. Caption: two different branches of the hornbill family tree. The skeleton at left represents Bucorvus, a great aboreal frugivore (specifically, this is a Great hornbill B. bicornis). At right is a ground hornbill, specifically the rarely seen Northern ground hornbill Bucorvus abyssinicus. Images: Darren…

I have a small project where I needed to label commits as either “maintenance” or “new development”. The obvious way to do it is with a cheap but relatively capable LLM, like GPT 5.6 Luna. I tested it on a small set of commits and manually verified its labelling, and it emitted the same label as I would have for the entire test set. That was good enough for me to roll out on a wider scale. If we have Simon Willison’s llm CLI tool installed (and you should – it’s great!), we can call it in a…

Started reading: The Art of Gathering How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker 📚

Well, I know a bit about folk art ,but I know absolutely nothing about Hex signs. In fact, the first article I found about them said “yes, Hex signs are still used and professional Hex sign artists still paint them. Well,there is no such thing as a “professional” folk artist. By definition, folk artists are amateurs so I smell a barn rat. I think we have to label them craft. Or “tourist art” might be more appropriate. As for their significance and function (other than decoration) I have no…

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