Sir Patrick Stewart has died. I don’t really know what to say — words really are failing me right now. So I’ll start here: I grew up on Star Trek. When I call up fond memories from my childhood, the happiest all involved watching the original series with my dad. Every week we’d huddle up around the television — either the one in our family room in the basement, or the small one perched in my parents’ bedroom — and settle in for an hour of space fantasy. It was the first time I remember being…

Over on Prismatic Wasteland, the summons has gone out for another Blogwagon. This time about How to Be a Good Player. I have chosen to respond with a series of questions to help you get playing the games you want to, because I think you're going to be a Better Player if you're in the game you want to be. Why am I playing? Are you playing a game because of the game, or are you playing it because it's a way to hang out with your friends? This has strong implications. For example, if you are…

I’ve taken part in several TV quiz shows over the years, but the one that inevitably prompts admiring (I think) oohs and aahs is Mastermind, on which I appeared twice, once with hair and once not. Maybe not my very proudest achievement, but something that might get mentioned at my funeral.But on Monday my former sort-of boss Jerry Thackray aka Everett True became not a Mastermind contestant but a Mastermind question. I think I’ll just slink back into my cave.That said, I do think I should…

These clouds helped make a nice sunset a few evenings ago.

In 1998, Terrance Odean wrote a paper about how many of us hold our losing investments for too long, and sell winning investments too soon. Selling a losing investment is tough because in order to let go of it, we need to realize and accept that it’s a loss. We need to admit that there’s a better way to invest the money, and it’s not this one. It involves closing up the possibility of hope in the losing investment, and moving that conviction into one with a better chance of winning. It takes…

As part of my ongoing site updating, I’m happy to report that bythom.com is now operating from my new software—which I’ve called NewBox—and that has produced a wide variety of changes, even though things might look pretty much the same. I was able to complete this work faster than I originally planned by just concentrating on it rather than a couple of other projects. This just leaves zsystemuser.com to get over to new software and I’m ready for another few years of typing frenzy. I’m still…

Following up on my previous post about content that loads through JavaScript, this post looks at another agent-readability problem: styling that carries meaning. When gray text marks a module as excluded from a product tier, or a check-mark icon means included, that meaning disappears once an agent fetches the page and converts it to Markdown. I walk through how to compare the human view of a page against the agent view, and why complex tables and elaborate HTML layouts matter less when agents…

RE: Polish Your Postings, Please Hehe... once upon a time I let this entitlement dictate how I write. Why can't people just live and let live? Write and let write? It's a tiring game. Instead of a rant, people should write helpful guides for those who want to learn. Not a guilt inducing lecture. It stops a lot of people from writing. #reply #writing #blogging #rantThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

OK. So I don't know if it was a TV movie but it feels like it was. I was like five, and it was a commercial for it on NY TV. I don'rt remember anything outside of this one scene which was in a moonlit room in an apartment with a woman pleading, please don't put that pin (or needle) in my neck. I know it's real and not Streisand effect cause it creeped me out and lived rent free in my head ever since. So I'm guessing late 70's?

I’m back home, after a whirlwind tour to SPIEL that felt like five minutes but was in actually six days for me. I’ve done SPIEL so many times by now and yet it still feels surreal: a day before my travel to Essen, things seemed to so far away that SPIEL might begin the next day or the next year. And now I’m back from it, it seems like a dream and the only evidence it really happened is a noticeable lack of sleep, a suitcase full of cloths that need washing … and of course lots of new games that…

The habit was daily journaling or 'morning pages' see https://loveisverbing.bearblog.dev/journal-exit/. I managed to stop for a massive fifteen days! The next post - which is a copy of my journal entry the day after I resumed (Tuesday) - will demonstrate its value to me and might even benefit you in the reading... Meanwhile, these are my journal notes about the stopping adventure: First, it was a useful break. I saw how addicted the pen, hand and head were to scribbling. Less navel-gazing…

A room full of string appears in Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026). ▲ Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026) ▲ Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026) ▲ Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026) ▲ Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026) ▲ Little Caesars’ “Mix N Maxspiracy” ad (2026) From contributor Barry Hudek.

While at the On the Paper Trail LIVE event I saw the Chanomegumi collection from Pilot including pens and wraps themed around tea. I saw the Light Green and it was like a siren song from across the ballroom for me. It’s lighter and more citrusy than the original Metro Pop in Green. Must. Have. The. Green! image from Pilot This collection is called Chanomegumi which means “the blessing of tea and features 3 color ways with a fountain pen, ballpoint and coordinating pen sleeves. The coordinating…

Been having some fun with my 404 page. I love discovering little Easter eggs like this on other people's sites. Just visit a random page, like https://kevquirk.com/mjkk Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

Episode 800 of the Retronauts podcasts released recently, celebrating twenty years of floating around in the podcast-o-sphere. Twenty years of making podcasts and eight hundred episodes, not counting the ones Jeremy and co. did for 1UP! That’s a remarkable achievement considering most other podcasts I listen(ed) to only record one, perhaps two to three seasons and that’s it. I don’t think I need to advertise Retronauts or the work of Jeremy Parish and his merry band of co-hosts. So why this…

Last week in the current feedback group for my Landscape Sketching Fundamentals course, we looked value in detail, and explored the benefits of value studies especially at the beginning of your sketching process. Today I want to give you a few practical tips if you want to explore value studies on your own. These tips are based ... Read more Source

RE: Polish Your Postings, Please Hehe... once upon a time I let this entitlement dictate how I write. Why can't people just live and let live? Write and let write? It's a tiring game. Instead of a rant, people should write helpful guides for those who want to learn. Not a guilt inducing lecture. It stops a lot of people from writing. #reply #writing #blogging #rantThank you for following my feed! ♥ Leave a reply here.

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have exceptionally large brains for our body size, comprising, on average, about two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't…

Fall is setting into the Pacific Northwest, and I’m (mostly) fine with that. Grey, rain, not particularly warm. “Stay-inside” weather. I prefer summer, but the changing seasons are nice. This, and adjacency to multiple biomes, is why we moved to Oregon! On our last visit to California (outside the Disneyland bubble), I noticed more of the in-between places. Oregon’s in-betweens, at least along the western part of the state, are way more interesting than California’s between San Jose and…

Technology has stripped every small friction from our lives. You can reach a friend instantly, wherever they are in the world. You can order anything you want. Food comes in endless variety. There is always somewhere to go, at any hour. You can build anything you can imagine. You can teach yourself any skill. Technology has made everything possible, and in doing so, it has made everything impossible. We no longer sit alone with ourselves, waiting for a letter to arrive. We no longer step…

📷 285/365 - Another great morning. The sun was shining, a bit of fog.

Back in August, I shared a thought about our vulnerability. A week from Friday I'm going to have coffee with the director of emergency management here in our county. The Pentagon is ordering U.S. military bases to begin infrastructure improvements to support up to 90 days without grid power. This stuff is in the ether these days. And it should be. With the advances in AI capabilities, the growing instability in international relations, the rate at which we're enraging our enemies and alienating…

In a recent privacy chat we kept coming back to the same practical question: on a phone, does it make sense to run a custom DNS and a VPN at the same time? Our May post "Privacy Tool Spotlight: DNS" showed why changing from your carrier’s DNS is usually a good idea. Better options can block malware, ads, and trackers while reducing what your provider sees. A Citizen Lab report called "Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware"…

DS Waldman, Electric Lit: I wonder, is it safe to generalize that touch, or exposure to touch, necessarily devalues a piece of art? Does the very idea that a painting or sculpture has come into direct contact with the public, the viewer’s flesh, make the painting or sculpture worth less money? If this is true, then how powerful a thing touch is. I imagine a scenario in which, across the world, in all the biggest, fanciest museums—all the MoMAs, The Met, The Louvre, the Guggenheims—a group of…

Pixies - T.T. the Bear’s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 31, 1986It’s Halloween 1986 and you’re in Cambridge, MA. Why not head over to T.T. the Bear’s to catch this new up-and-coming-band you’ve started to hear about — Pixies?! If you’d followed that sage advice, you’d have eternal bragging rights, I think. The rest of us will have to make do with the shaky camcorder footage that remains 40 years later. Don’t worry, it’s pretty good stuff, capturing the Pixies only a few months into their…

One of the often overlooked contributors to the overall production of Oxygen that we are so dependent on is the lowly moss that grows everywhere in the world. We might think that moss is just a nuisance that we have to deal with but way back in history it was a major factor in generating Oxygen that allowed human life to eventually evolve. Even now, according to studies a square meter of moss produces more oxygen than a fully grown tree. Which is something I wasn’t aware of and is in fact quite…

It’s been a number of years since I’ve updated what I carry when I travel to support my tech habits (partly because I’ve done little traveling), and I realized that since the last time I wrote about this, literally everything has changed. So here is a look at what I carry when I am out and on the road. When I travel these days, it’s typically with a suitcase, my camera bag (of which an update will happen in a few weeks — stay tuned) and a tech bag, which holds my iPad (5th Gen) and Laptop (an…

Where did the M25 come from? Chris5156 Thu, 29/10/2026 - 14:28 London’s notorious orbital motorway turns 40 years old today. Where did it come from - and why the number “25”? https://roadsorguk.substack.com/p/where-did-the-m25-come-from?r=63d189&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This two-issue series, which was originally released as Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends and Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends, was collected in Flash by Mark Waid Vol. 6. That's where I pulled the image at the top of my post about the DC Plus specials, and, since I had already checked the collection out, I figured I would give the story a reread. The idea is definitely a fun one, a sort of team-up of two different team-ups, the original Flash Jay Garrick and the original Green Lantern…

I was going to add this to yesterday's (very brief) post but I think this deserves a post all its own. KLPS posted this a few minutes ago on Facebook:Yes, of course this is Bill. Of course it is.Bill was, as previously noted, arrested yesterday after police searched his home. He was taken into custody (Gwen was not - she's still a free woman). He's not on the docket for a bail hearing yet, but that isn't unusual; sometimes it takes all day for that to be updated, especially if someone is…