‘The Scream’ - Edvard Munch (1893) Do you like horror? Do you enjoy a good ‘jump scare’? Some folks love that adrenaline rush and look forward to those Halloween haunted houses. They look forward to those stop-your-heart surprises and gotcha moments. Some love a good horror flick. Freddy Krueger? Chainsaws? Mad clowns? Bring ‘em on! Walking down creaky steps into a dark cellar where something or someone jumps out at you? My response? No way… never… nuh-uh… absolutely not!!!There’s a lot of…

We awoke on the shores of Tamarack Lake to a soft lapping of waves on the shore. It wouldn't be long before the sun was once again high in the sky, but for now, it was just peeking over the horizon. I'm not usually a huge fan of lakeside sites, but this was definitely a gem. The golden glow that last only a few minutes. With a full day ahead of us if we hoped to finish the route - which we did hope to do - we were thrilled to find the tent completely void of dew, even with…

Sometimes, people don’t recognize the importance of a piece of work until years, decades, or even lifetimes later. Anthony F.J. Van Raan describes these types of dormant scientific papers as Sleeping Beauties. The top 100 of them have a publishing year and an awakening year. Important work being rediscovered after publishing isn’t restricted to science, of course. David Byrne expands the definition of Sleeping Beauties to encompass other fields like tech and art. One quirk about Sleeping…

We have I suppose to recognize that a transformation is under way in how content is being communicated between researchers and readers. As AI becomes more and more involved in generating responses to searches, full attribution of sourcing is being diminished. If after years of research you discover Fact A and write it up in a scientific journal you may prefer that the fact you discovered remain connected to your name (and travel with a reference to full discussion of the matter) rather than…

Back in May of this year, I returned to the Mastodon account I'd opened when Twitter went to shit the hands of Elon Musk. I don't remember the exact date. The years around the COVID pandemic are fuzzy. I hadn't really used it before, and this time I decided to start following people other than the dead accounts from that first week, the angry signups that eventually turned into abandoned accounts. I followed some people from Latin America I came across, along with some of the authors of blogs…

Who are you?My name is Ariel Vanece. I am an Author and program coordinator for a higher education institution. I am based in Boston, MA.What do you write?I have a proclivity for taking copious amounts of notes about any and everything. I am constantly writing down things I've learned, names I find interesting, hobbies I want to try, and sometimes ideas I want to see come to a reality. When I was young, my mom signed me up for a spoken word program for middle and high school students hosted by…

String on various maps appears in the main office setting in Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013). ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲ Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter (dir. Louis D'Esposito, 2013) ▲…

I try to keep my introductions to Link Love pen or at least pen-adjacent but this week, I need to address the Meta-sized elephant in the room. There is a lot of panic (myself included) swirling around about Meta’s change in policies especially for anyone with a business account (that would be me) and the news that they have stated that they will be using “automated software” (AKA ai) to scrape data to improve its “products”. The statement below says they will “pull updates for such domains, web…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 170-175: Early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies. Of the six most important powers, five were monarchies of one kind or another; only one (France) was a republic. The relatively new nation-states of the Balkan peninsula – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania – were all monarchies. The Europe of fast cruisers, radio-telegraph, and electric cigar-lighters still…

🕹️ I’m trying to play fewer open-ended video games. I should select games that are designed for some idea of finishing and reaching a satisfying ending. But, Marathon and its (open-ended) skill-climb is often compelling. Possibly, I will never not play an activer Bungie game. Which works out, since it seems like their future is on the fence. I need more close-ended, finish it, and you’re done games. Or, to replace gaming with something more fruitful and becoming of a grown man. I could be…

This is a real paper that actually exists Assessing the Psychometric Properties of the Dynomight™ MBTI: A Comparative Analysis with the Original Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Journal of Psychology and Behavior Studies, 4(1), 27-37. Zrari, A., & Sakale, S. (2024). A cohort of n=77 participants consented to engage in the study, meeting the inclusion criteria of being currently enrolled at the Tulua institution and expressing willingness to participate in both the initial assessment and the…

The creek has run dry. This is Pebble Creek after about a month of no rain.

Near the end of a recent swim, I saw this smallish Green Turtle. It was cruising along in shallow water near the ladder I was aiming for. It disappeared into the rocks, but I hung around hoping for another sight of it, and was rewarded when it came back out and swan past me before returning to the shelter of the rocks. I didn’t follow since I don’t have a shell to protect me from the bumps the turtle was undoubtedly encountering.

For a few months now, I have been carrying this brooding melancholy deep within me. In truth, it has lived inside me for years, so long that I have forgotten where it came from. Suffice it to say, I have no way to be rid of it. Usually it surfaces, lingers for a couple of days, then sinks back beneath the surface, and I am back on track. This time, however, I am realising that it isn’t receding; it has lodged itself in me. I keep trying to shrug it off, but so far I have failed. For a few hours…

tag(s): #useless-facts #meta #español Recently I wondered why I default to English in this space. Is it a matter of reach? Or am I truly "brain bilingual"? Thus English and Spanish are really equivalent for me? (Spoiler, no, they are not... 🙂) Or something else entirely? As I shared in that post, I recently started learning Japanese. I am looking up translations for words and symbols kanji often. In one of those instances, I noticed that I mostly do it to/from English. I connected this to my…

Last weekend, my wife upgraded her Apple Watch; she had her current watch she's wearing, and a series 11 watch that was gifted to her (her sister won it in a raffle draw, but her sister is smart and uses Android1). Since we were in the Apple Store, I had a look at the new line of phones for 2026. Obviously I had to at least look at the Duo. I'm not interested in a folding phone (and least of all the Duo) but they're fun to look at in the store. (Actually, if I were to get a folding phone, I…

The other day I changed a light bulb, and then stood there for a minute holding the old one. The bulb I had taken out was an incandescent: sixty watts, around eight hundred and sixty lumens, rated for about a thousand hours. The one going in draws nine and a half watts for the same light and is rated for twenty-five thousand. Same socket, same room, same brightness. A sixth of the power, twenty-five times the life, a few dollars at the hardware store. That is an absurd bargain, and yet it has…

To have a cat choose you for the first time is one of the greatest feelings you could have... Ten years later, and it still amazes me and warms my heart whenever Mumu is sleeping somewhere in the room, looks at me, gets up and comes to lay by my side touching my body. I also remember one of my bestie's dog. He was a tricky boy, but I had to dogsit for her sometimes, and when he chose to lay down by my leg (much like Mumu is now on the pic), I about melted. It feels so good to be loved by a…

Unfortunately, it seems like my medication (for Bechterew's disease and Crohn's disease) is no longer fully working. You can even go back and read it, seeing that in almost every monthly summary post on this blog has a mention of a flare up. It all seems like one little outlier, even to me, until you see that pattern emerge every month and become worse. Now October is my worst month yet, and my body is tearing itself apart again. I got an appointment at my rheumatologist soon, but until then, I…

I was checking my trailcams this morning and was looking through the app to save what I wanted to keep, like the rabbits (on that note, the fox hasn't came back) Source

On Tuesday, 3 November 2026 about 70 new elements will be added to LEGO® Pick a Brick (PaB). The included elements are from sets released in July and include exciting Classic Space and Castle pieces – the bright light blue astronaut and baby and elements from the gift with purchase (GwP) 40912 Sea Serpent – however, several of these will not be added to the USA & Canada store until December at the earliest. To reserve stock levels and make things fairer for all, temporary limits have been…

One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. Frameworks are “blazing fast,” tools will “supercharge” your development, the right abstraction will benefit both you and your users (DX and UX all in one!). All of this breathless boasting is usually offered with zero evidence. Alex Russell has called this “frontend’s lost decade”, Baldur Bjarnason has called programming a pop culture, and I’ve tried to counter this trend in my…

Laurie and I just returned from ten days of vacation on the Oregon Coast — and an overnight stop in Ridgefield to check out the refuge. Of course, we took our cameras, although to be honest, for the most part, they stayed in the car because of poor light and just not that many opportunities to photograph birds. I did end up spending time in the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge and again in Newport on the jetty where I ended up with some photos I liked, and so here they are. It was nice to add some…

My partner and I have been planning for this trip for a long time. We knew early on that we wanted to go to California, but we couldn't decide where. Northern? Central? Southern? There were so many places in California we wanted to visit, but there was no way we'd be able to see everything. Bummer, I know. In the end, we settled on San Francisco, Monterey Bay, and Yosemite National Park. We had a pretty rough itinerary to work with. Was it the most efficient use of our time? Probably not.…

Some of you may not know this, but I’m a DJ in my free time. I founded Floppy Disco, a music collective to bring the magic of Disco and House to Berlin, and I’ve played clubs all over here and in other places in Europe. I love DJing, and my favourite part is finding new music and playing it for people. Preparing my tracks, however, has never been truly fun. It rather felt like admin: fixing beat grids that were often wrong, fighting clunky software like rekordbox, building playlists by hand,…

😎 joe really likes ’em! Early Web Links Before the internet went corporate, it was weird, wonderful, and deeply personal. People built websites just because they had something to share. This directory is full of sites that bring back that feeling. [ 📌ramblinggit ] The Outer Web “An index of authentic and informative web content” It's just a name we came up with to describe what's also referred to as the indieweb, blogosphere, small web, personal web, slow web and old web. Some of these terms…

Lou Reed - Geneva Theatre, Geneva, New York, October 30, 1976“This place has the worst fuckin’ acoustics in the world, man,” Lou Reed complains midway through his set just about 50 years ago up in Geneva, NY. And then: “Lou Reed’s show on Saturday night was the worst ‘musical’ event I’ve ever witnessed,” one reviewer wrote. But guess what?! The surviving tape sounds pretty damn good — both in terms of acoustics and performance. What a difference a half-century makes, I guess. So listen in with…

Ian EdgingtonSimon Davis2000AD / Rebellion / HatchetteEngland, 1928. Lord Ampney Crucis, together with his loyal butler Cromwell, is an investigator into the paranormal. A survivor of the Somme, where he witnessed something otherworldly that tore his sanity in two and left him susceptible to the entities beyond everyday reality, he knows full well that dark creatures lurk in this green and pleasant land... Chilling Lovecraftian capers abound in this complete collection of Ampney’s adventures…

📷 284/365 - Fancy reception.

A project manager is excited to finally have a job offer after months of looking; but when she reviews the benefits package she discovers there’s no employer coverage for dependents’ premiums. After talking to a benefits manager, she finds herself steered towards a high-deductible, health-savings style plan. The people officer at a two hundred-person tech company shares the news that their health provider is raising the rates by twenty percent. Unwilling to bear the costs, they are switching…