On the peculiar corporate ritual of grading someone's judgment by consulting the dice they rolled Two FridaysTwo engineers, two Fridays, one identical decision. Devi ships a database migration at 4pm on a Friday. She has a rollback plan, a tested script, a canary, and a colleague on standby. The migration works. Nobody notices. On Monday she is a person who ships fast, and her manager mentions her in a channel with a rocket emoji. Marcus ships a database migration at 4pm on a Friday. He has a…

The Terror of the Creek: "Dillsey" Brister and the Deptford Gang of 1745When we look through the records of London’s Central Criminal Court—the Old Bailey—in the mid-eighteenth century, we often find characters who seem too cinematic to be real. One such figure was William Brister, universally known to local constables and terrified residents along the Thames waterfront by his street moniker: "Dillsey". Born in Deptford to "honest poor parents," Brister was initially given a good start in life.…

So much minute-to-minute combat in classic Resident Evil boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal — in theory — is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. On its face, Resident Evil 3’s combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. Shells for the shotgun weren’t even sparse in Resident Evil 2, and…

I stand by my complete agreement with this assessment. I will continue to not touch my screen.

Would you look at that, we made it to the second edition of the Studio Log! I’ve not managed to spend quite as much time as I would have wanted to think about the contents of this months (yes, making this a monthly thing) edition of the Log, so this is a bit of a rapid-fire list of what I’ve been working on and what’s going on in my daily life.I definitely want to turn this Studio Log into a bit of a thing once I get into the groove of writing these. I’m just note sure what that thing is just…

Reactor asks Do You Distinguish Between “Best” and “Favorite” Books? Of course I distinguish between best and favourite. It's wild to me that there are people who don't make that distinction, as in the quote in the article. People of exceptional taste I suppose. It also makes me a bit sad because it suggests something very pristine. I always make a very specific distinction between my favourites and the things I believe are the best. With the proviso that 'best' translates to 'best to my mind'…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1182/the-poisonous-appearance

You can watch the video on our YouTube Channel! This week we discuss Pen, Paper, & Ink Problems, and the different terms commonly used in the stationery world to describe these issues. We specifically focus on problems with ink flow in fountain pens such as skipping, hard-starting, and railroading, as well as paper bleed through and show through. We also recap our recent "On The Paper Trail Live in Nashville Event". A huge thanks to all of you who turned out, and it was wonderful to see so many…

An eclectic song of mine that started out with a complicated chord progression and some prog rock affectations, like an almost spoken word intro, but ended up just shuttling between an A-maj/Asus2 and a C(add9) it was ostensibly about song writer’s block, but once I got started with it, there was no block, although I can’t say it’s not an unfinished symphony either. I ditched the two sequential choral endings one of which had a heavy metal guitar solo and hand claps, the other a tambourine. The…

⚠️ spoilers the whole way down! sorry! ⚠️ also this is my first real pass and i havent really edited it and i'm sorry if it reads a bit janky but its 4am and i just want this thing to be done ✌️😗 i really liked control. it's setting is blissfully weird, it dives into the cinematic feel headfirst, and it was the first game to properly give me the "AAA ray tracing experience". it was by no means perfect, but it was something that felt truly new, at least to me. i was pretty excited for control…

The Nucleus of the Empire: The Vanished 1513 Tudor Storehouse of Deptford When Henry VIII founded the Deptford Royal Dockyard in 1513, he didn’t just build a shipyard; he laid the physical foundations for Britain's global naval dominance. At the absolute centre of this massive new military complex stood a magnificent, 140-foot-long brick naval storehouse. Serving as the powerhouse for ship construction and refitting, this single building was the earliest purpose-built naval storehouse in…

Helen Levitt, 1978 Public transport can make for strange bedfellows, or more accurately, strange seatmates. New York photographer Helen Levitt did a whole series focused on these accidental meetings. Perhaps she was following in the footsteps of her mentor, Walker Evans, who was famous for his secret subway photos. Why this pair? Perhaps it was for a study in contrasts—tall and short, thin and thicker, young and old. However, she might have been struck by the similarities. She found two very…

I got a fun little email today from the folks at GitHub letting me know my vibe-coded novel-writing program was a top open source project for 2026! Tens of thousands of people are now writing their next project in NEO, which is absolutely bonkers to me. There’s a mention of NEO in the Octoverse Report as well. I’ve been begging for this exact tool for a decade now. Tried several times to get developers to make it, even hired someone to code it for me, but never got a working prototype that was…

Ali G unwittingly becomes a pawn in the Chancellor’s plot to overthrow the Prime Minister of Great Britain. However, Ali is embraced by the nation as a voice of the youth, making the PM and his government more popular than ever. Fun to rewatch this before the new one is out, it’s a nice reminder of a time when movies were raunchy, yet still funny. Nice a throwback, four popcorns. To see all 30 photos, visit the article page. This article was originally published at:…

Today has mostly been crying and calling various urgent care clinics to see who can help. My health issue that was fixed my my last round of antibiotics is back, so no I have to persue the idea that it's something potentially worse. Sitting in a walk in clinic for a primary care. I'm tired and sad and the discomfort is back. I was fine until last night, where I got woken up a couple times but didn't think too much of it. This morning it was undeniable that it was back. It's hard not to feel…

by Brian Rector Late in the festival season, AFI Fest often brings an opportunity for Los Angelinos to catch up on titles that received buzz earlier in the year while bringing a few new films to the forefront. For instance, Brad Bird’s new animated movie Ray Gunn had its west coast red carpet premiere on the final day of the festival. On the otheer hand, Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea followed from its Berlin Film Festival debut, where it won a cadre of Silver Bears, including for its director and…

My insomnia screenshotting habit, revealed.

Celebrating Halloween with my fellow queers. On Monday evening, I went to a Halloween party hosted by Luzerner Theatre. My new choir buddy, A, invited me. "If you bring a costume, you get a free shot," she wrote. The party started at 20:00. Somehow, I assumed it was a casual party so I didn't think I needed to arrive on time. I started getting ready at 19:30 after having dinner and watching an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion. My costume was a recycled one from a few years ago when I dressed…

Apple just unveiled its new high-end notebook, the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. The name is a mouthful, but it makes a lot of sense, as the normal MacBook Pro is still alive and well.1 The most important thing about this laptop is that the Apple logo lights up on the lid. I will never forgive Jony Ive and Tim Cook for taking that away ten years ago. John Ternus’ new X (gross) profile photo is all about this detail: In terms of specs, the two classes of MacBook Pros are very similar.…

A team of researchers conducted a three-year study of philosophers’ judgments about the philosophical capabilities of generative artificial intelligence. Their finding: “As participants became more familiar with generative AI and increasingly recognized its formal competence, they simultaneously sharpened the boundaries they drew around what they regarded as genuinely philosophical thinking.” philosophers are people, too The study, “Can Intelligent User Interfaces Engage in Philosophical…

When I heard about Bike Lane Uprising I thought it was super cool! And, it is super cool to use. You take a photo of a vehicle parked in the bike land and it uses magic to identify the vehicle type and read the plate and get your location and add it to the database. Cool. But… it doesn’t report it to your local parking enforcement so they can deal with it. It should though! I wish the technology behind Bike Lane Uprising was integrated into the local reporting system, but what we get is……

La lune gibbeuse.

Well happy Halloween. I must thank my wife and mother in law for finding these. NONE of our Walmart stores locally have them and they don’t even sell them on the Walmart website – it’s VERY irritating. On eBay they wanted an atrocious price for them. I think the price on Amazon was atrocious enough. So yeah; four Walmarts and a wasted afternoon over 3 weeks after they were supposed to be out. We didn’t get the two BBQ limited editions around here either which was equally irritating. Anyways,…

But Claude is my hero today. That may be just a bit premature, but I'm fairly confident and very excited about a productive session I had with him (it) this morning. As I've lamented here before, it has been a struggle finding an HVAC contractor to do the install for our house. Now, shame on me, it turns out I don't need an HVAC contractor. Because I am installing a mono-block heat pump. There are no refrigerant connections to be made, no lines running into the house, it's all contained in the…

Some savvy folks are donning mourning clothes as they proclaim the death of the Internet, while simultaneously getting all dolled up, hoping for something new to rise from its digital ashes. And some wish it would just go away. I’d argue that whatever phase of life the Internet is in it is certainly safe to say it is a sickly one. I’ve seen what I’m linking to here pass through my feeds this week and last, some via RSS, some via social media, some via an email subscription. All while I’m online…

I spent much of October 21 debugging an iPhone migration. The useful discovery was that an app's restore operation could survive the deletion of its visible placeholder. You could have no app to open or delete in Settings, yet still have an operation preventing its download. The more consequential discovery …

Last week saw the arrival of two CVEs for PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, each rated a staggering CVSS 9.2. For comparison, Heartbleed was rated 5.0 under CVSS version 2 and 7.5 under version 3.1. Soon after the news landed, the cyber security team and others at work were setting up war room channels to patch immediately. It was a huge amount of work. We had to check each system to find its exact PHP version, then wait for patches to appear. Many vendors released at the time of the…

At $dayJob we reached the seat limit on a SaaS product. I reached out to their sales team for a quote on a few more seats. We already pay for this software. I'm not a new customer. What I expected was an email saying: "Great, glad you want to use this more. It will cost £X." I needed that price because I can't green light the spend on my own. I take the number away, get the approval and come back. Instead I got an email asking how many employees the organisation has. A pointless question when I…

NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/M. Weiss This artist’s illustration shows the smaller, hotter companion star Siwarha creating a wake-like disruption in Betelgeuse’s outer atmosphere. Betelgeuse is the red supergiant star known as the shoulder of Orion, famous for being the brightest red star in the night sky. It was long thought to be a single star, but recent observations have shown it has a companion star. A young yellow star not quite on the main sequence named Siwarha. We can’t observe this companion…