We are somehow almost four and a half years on from the last Warpaint record, 2022’s Radiate Like This, and while they’ve not been completely out of sight – they played one show this year, their first since 2024, at the behest of Harry Styles – they haven’t teased much activity either… until now. Or […] The post Warpaint – “Stars” appeared first on Space Echo.

I have no intention of getting an iPhone Duo, but the sheer amount of clever apps being released based on its foldable design has been fun to see. iA Writer’s cheeky takes on the typewriter and ‘presenter’ are great examples.

Eine Synagoge mitten in der Altstadt, ein jüdischer Friedhof hinter einer unscheinbaren Mauer oder ein Museum, das eine einzelne Lebensgeschichte erzählt: Jüdische Spuren in Deutschland begegnen Dir an ganz unterschiedlichen Orten. Manche gehören zu den bekannten Stationen eines Städtetrips. Andere liegen nur wenige Straßen entfernt und bleiben dennoch leicht unbemerkt. Auf meinen Reisen nehme ich mir zunehmend Zeit für diese Orte. Mich interessiert, wie Jüdinnen und Juden Städte und Dörfer…

In my recent article on the price and performance of some commercial OCR (optical character recognition) models, I predicted Google’s Gemini 3.8 would cost $35.30 ± $23.70 to convert 1,000 pages containing computer printouts to text. Now, after scanning 5,877 pages, I can adjust this prediction to $34.02 ± $30.82, demonstrating the sample was representative. Details below. Why Gemini 3.8 Flash? In my evaluation, I found Gemini 3.7 and 3.8 to have the highest quality output (i.e. lowest CERiws…

My higher education did cost 30k to my parents. They blamed it on me at the end of it all, because I was really ill and couldn't get a job whatsoever, even with a degree. actually I only got a text message that reads "I made the calculation. Your education cost us 30k. You'll no longer get money from us. Bye." At this point, I was stumped. I was a couple of weeks from my final exam, I was disabled, depressed, and broke, and they thought it was the right time to tell me that after I graduated…

Deep Space Lounge, paper collage, 2026 Here are some new experiments in collage art. Most of these collages come from a stack of 1930s-1950s National Geographic magazines I recently acquired. I’ll probably be working with those magazines for awhile, as they have some really terrific images in them, which I’m excited about. Not all of […]

by Gideon Marcus Before the Storm The 1930s: when we weren't trying to make ends meet during the brutal Depression, we anxiously read the papers, trying to divine which way the winds of war might blow on the other side of the Atlantic. Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, and even before the invasion … Continue reading [October 28, 1971] “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…" (Avalon Hill's Origins of World War II) → The post [October 28, 1971] “The only thing necessary for the…

JETSTORM BEAST MACHINES (McDONALD’S) In this site’s 14 year run, there have been only two McDonald’s Happy Meal toy reviews, and only one of them was actually written by me. These days, they don’t tend to be anything all that impressive, but back in the day, back in the ‘90s? Well, also then they were frequently not that impressive, let’s all be honest. But every so often you got some that went above the grade. Offered something at the very least close to the level of quality you might actually…

—Zack Rhodes

Today I had such a good conversation. Part of the experience of going abroad to study is meeting many different people, from different countries, with different backgrounds, culture, language, families, ways of thinking. I met good friends during my first time abroad in Lisbon, and I got to reunite with them while here in China. They were for me an example of what a good friendship was like, and what surprised me more at that time was the ease with which they accepted my feelings and thoughts…

I still need to get used to it getting dark so early again. My favorite route goes through the park near my apartment, but it's basically a forest for most of the way, and even though I don't really expect wolves to jump out from behind a tree, I did turn off the noise cancellation on my AirPods just in case...

History is almost entirely made up of periods of chaos and struggle. We grew up in an anomalous lull. Everyone seems obsessed with the idea that times are getting worse. We even like to joke about (some aren’t joking) our timeline getting shifted and this new timeline being a far more awful version. But I think that we probably just grew up and have lived our entire lives in an extraordinarily peaceful and easy period of time. The natural order of existence is kind of shitty and destructive and…

When the Bristol Channel flooded in 1607, it was not just one of the worst natural disasters in British history, it was also a sign, for many, that they had strayed from the path of God. Erik Crnkovich examines the overlap of miraculous weather and the early modern printing industry, which cultivated a thirst for all things occult, exotic, and odd.

Last of my new-to-me reviews from games I ran at RinCon in Tucson a few weeks ago. This is a short one. But very sweet. A palate cleanser after last week’s look at Elder Mythos. Decaying Orbit Available from Storybrewers Roleplaying Sunday I offered an amuse-bouche, a charcuterie board of small games that would not take up the full four hour slot. The first thing I ran for my group of 6 (me included) was Decaying Orbit, which I’ve written about before. If you don’t go through the link, the…

TL;DR 11. How to Become … | Hunter Gatherer 21C To cook well, you need three things: tools, space and decent ingredients. On theme. Good simple advice.

Due to the way that our medium functions, we writers have a natural tendency to write about things which people have already written about. This leaves a huge chunk of our job undone — there are a million lines written about rulers, military figures, and other people we dub “successful”, and often zero lines for many good people who are much more worth writing about. And I too (even though I write about concepts, other than people) largely follow tendencies. But this essay will be different. I…

For a bit over a year now I've been reading all my books in a little app called Bookwise. That's 64 books over 340 hours of reading time. Until today the app was in a private beta, but today the app officially launched with a new name: Readwise Books. It's still invite-only1, so here are a whole bunch of invites. Depending on the device, the app will display the cover on the lockscreen. And holy shit, finally I can talk about it... It has been a long 15 months since they first invited me to the…

I normally have my macOS set to dark mode because developer, but sometimes I need to take screenshots for talk slides. For readability and accessibility, it’s important to have enough contrast, and often dark text on a light background is best. Aliases #Rather than having to click 🍎 > System Settings… > Appearance > Light, here’s a couple of aliases to do it from the command line: alias light-mode='osascript -e "tell app \"System Events\" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to…

Were I an artist, in the traditional sense, I would be a sculptor. My tools would be the hammer and the chisel. Progress is slow over the face of a marble slab, but every stroke is deliberate. The chisel is pointed at a particular angle in a particular spot, the hammer carried forward just so. Steps are tiny and incremental. The statue is nothing without the thousand strikes preceding it. Give my hammer away to a thousand hands, my chisel to a thousand more, and what becomes of my statue? I can…

I've had this love/hate relationship with achievements in video games since their inception almost 2 decades ago. Getting an achievement and hearing that little "ba-dunk" chime on my 360 is straight heroin in my veins. However the hate comes from the near-compulsive behavior to ruin my own fun due to the pursuit of achievements. Some instances where the achievement is quite literally impossible to get, no issues. I accept that I can't get the multiplayer achievements when servers are shut down…

This “weeknote” is another 2.5 weeks late. I might as well change to monthly recaps if I keep missing the streak… 🫣 Anyhow, this covers the period from Oct 14 to Oct 27. Going Out More⁠§I went out more than usual in the last two weeks to attend a few events in town. It was nice enjoying some of my other hobbies lately and being away from my computer.I also caught up with a good college friend for some light street photography and hanged out like the good old days (haven’t been shooting on the…

How do we make biking liveable? By this I don't just mean, how do we make biking pleasant, enjoyable, a part of everyday life that's embraced (as we might mean by liveable cities or a liveable neighborhood). I also mean: how do we make it survivable given the current car dominance of American cities?I ask because everywhere I go in the US it seems like bike infrastructure outside of the absolute largest cities is basically out to kill its users.1. The Edges Aren't OptionsHere's a fun question:…

Today was a productive day. Also, two weeks ago I started running as exercise, and today I was able to run continuously for 1km before taking the first walk break!

The Bodleian Library in Oxford is actually not from the Middle Ages. It was founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley (1545 - 1613), an English diplomat and scholar. What he accomplished, however, was the salvation of what had existed in the Middle Ages.The first library at Oxford was a collection of books left by Bishop Thomas Cobham of Worcester (died 1327). Those books were chained to tables for research, not for lending.Between 1435 and 1437, the brother of King Henry V, Humphrey, Duke of…

With so much happening around the world, we all could use some uplifting stories. Which is why I enjoy publishing my monthly post highlighting positive and good news. A new dwarf planet candidate, three men traveled from Italy to Ireland to return a lost wedding ring, and a happy 25th birthday to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine are few of the interesting stories I’ve enjoyed in the past month. I hope you enjoy them, too! What I Found Interesting Oooh, a new dwarf planet candidate has…

Earlier this year Danah Henriksen and I wrote a paper for our TechTrends series about the metaphors people use for generative AI, the mirrors and black boxes and stochastic parrots. (I blogged about it here, and later rebuilt it as a Talmud-style page here. That paper was about what the metaphors mean. While we were […] Source

In the summer of 2026, I was a Meighen Forum panelist at the Stratford Festival on “How language is made” in fictional worlds, to compliment their plays about The Hobbit and the King James Bible.Closer to home, I led a conversation at Argo Bookshop for the book launch for Jo Walton’s Everybody’s Perfect (where I was grateful for my public speaking and improv background). And I returned to the…July, August, & September 2026: Several horrifying meat textures

No sooner did I post yesterday than the slight tickle in my chest turned to body aches and overwhelming malaise. By evening, my fever was nearly 105°F. I spent the night tossing and turning, waking every half hour to drink water and wander the house in near-delirium. I'm maxed out on ibuprofen for a few hours. As I write this, I hear the Wing drone hovering over my backyard, delivering a bottle of rapid release Tylenol. I still think it's cool that I can tap my phone a few times and have…

I will say, how israeli elections work mean that bibi isn’t necessarily the victor quite yet, as he needs to form a coalition with other parties to be a majority of our parliment, and as it stands neither him nor the opposition have a majority without the arabic parties. So, the opposition have a chance if they decide to stop being racist and start being practical. Or we could just do more elections. We’re probably doing more elections.

Seconds from Charing Cross Station is a brilliant historical surprise: a small museum, hidden mostly below ground: the oldest museum in the world dedicated to all things optometry including spectacles, lenses, eye tests and more. Unbeknownst to almost everyone bustling in and out of the train station, a stone’s throw away is an extraordinary collection, […] The post A Hidden eye-Opening Museum Near Charing Cross appeared first on Living London History.