This week I am reviewing a wild card read, as I was not quite sure what to expect. Antony Carr (1916-1995) wrote five mystery novels during the 1950s. Online information is limited but two of his other mysteries appear to be A Comedy of Terrors (1955) and The Man in Room 3 (1958). The title for Candles of the Night is derived from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
It’s been a while since I’ve tried making a game. I write little ideas down in my notebook here and there, snippets or ideas that I think might be fun to do something with, but it’s been I think two years since I’ve made a finished game, my last one being Monarch’s Flight for the NES. So I was pretty excited when a while back I got an idea in my head, and started playing around with a concept in Gdevelop. The idea started off as an homage to Paperboy, a game I used to love playing on the NES…
In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank, and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it was expected, and because it bought the grown-ups an hour's peace. The hall was squat and smelled…
Why read the book? Yossi Cohen served as director of Mossad from 2016 to 2021. In The Sword of Freedom he describes how Israel has faced existential threats and still found ways to defend itself. He explains key operations, including the 2018 seizure of Iran’s nuclear archive and the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist. He also writes about the work that helped lead to the Abraham Accords. Cohen shows the importance of human intelligence, careful planning, and the will to act. The book…
How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know? How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know? At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports are not referring to the harmless ordinary versions of things. Either way, buckle up for the…
He stepped inside, arms full, milk tea from Auntea Jennie in his right hand and various plastic bags holding plastic containers and featuring a cute yellow duck. The post The People of Jiangsu, and How to Confuse Them first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.
Five Curious Habits of My Poodle The offering Most dogs aren't happy if someone stands beside them while they eat. If you are standing next to mine at mealtime, you might get a piece to taste, just like he sometimes gets one from our food. Yes, my poodle spits out his very first kibble right at the feet of the person standing next to him. It almost looks like giving a symbolic share of the prey. He only does this if a loved one is standing nearby. Since he always eats only the amount he needs,…
There's certain topics and writing styles that do really well on the indie web; especially on Bearblog's Trending page. There are enough joking and seriously annoyed posts about it every now and then. We cannot stop talking about how tech is bad, analog media is good, blogging is good, and how good RSS is. I was wondering whether LLMs are trained on enough data from here to generate a post that would do really well, and is realistic, while also parodying us bloggers a little. So I prompted:…
A poemAre there any good guys? Like, the rich pedophile billionaires that run the country; are there any good ones that aren't pushing for an authoritarian rule over the country? I hope so! A Blow'emIn my desperation and loneliness, I have begun wearing the single right-ear earring in hopes of attracting a mate, like a skinny-fat bird of paradise. I finally got the earring in after not wearing one for like 3 years. I had to push it through a layer of scar tissue, hearing a pop as it finally…
In which I, yes, stare at the navel a little bit. I'm waiting for pizza in the festival line when the clock strikes midnight. We're sweaty, tired, and ecstatic all the same. Greasy cheese becomes a delicacy. K comes back from the washroom and I show her the time. Nineteen, I say with a shrug. She says the standard congratulations, and we wander home through residential Budapest. i. The window is open, breezy, smelling of the last traces of summer, and I'm all alone once again. Everything in my…
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin (Tor, 1980) Hugh, suddenly overwhelmed by the dreary, lifeless routine of work-television-work, runs from the house he shares with his mother. He does not know where he is going. He runs down streets and past suburban homes and finds himself at a strange and beautiful creek. The water is cool and revives him, brings him back to himself. He soon visits this place as often as he can, finding in it something sacred and unspeakable. He thinks he is the only…
It has been almost 65 years, since Martin K. Speckter dreamed of the better world, the world where we do not waste punctuation marks. It was one gloomy night he was by the fireplace with his wife, when it hit him. “Honey, we need to save puctuation marks! We just can’t waste two of them to express excitement, confusion, disbelief and the like … right‽” “WTF‽”, said his wife. Even she had gotten used to her dear husbands outlandish ideas, head of the advertisement company after all, this one was…
As part of the beyond tellerrand partnership with TYPO3, TYPO3 invited me to curate a few slots at this year’s developer days. For one of the slots we picked Matthias Ott. Great talk once more, reminding us what creating with the web actually means and why this is important. Reply via Email
The doomer take on the internet is that it is designed to divide, to polarize, to isolate, to weaponize… maybe in the pursuit of monetization but usually - according to the pundits - a more nefarious purpose. While I consider myself to be a default optimist, the algo does infiltrate my positivity at times. For a few months, I found it hard to hop out of the doom cycle, the negativity. That lasted until I started talking to Emmett every day. I should actually say that he started talking to me.…
Writing is a sample of the sonorous inner monologue of life: a handful of the words that seem to mean something; that carry with them weight: greeting, friendship, questions, realisations, hopes, dreams, anxieties; sounds that carry life, and how we use language to coalesce all that we take in, transforming our ideas into something others can read in their own voices.As I write, I sit on the precipice of three voices: one I create, one I imagine, and the other that you, the reader, fill in. The…
Now, I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.” — T. S. Eliot in 1953 One was born in St. Louis but became a British subject; the other was born in York and became an American citizen. One was straight, the other was gay. One was born into a Unitarian family but later became an…
Tomorrow I’m heading to the Loreley! 🤘🎸 The open-air stage sits high above the Rhine and was built as a Nazi “Thingplatz” in the 1930s. And what makes it awesome now? These days, it’s hosting anti-fascist concerts. Hot Water Music and the Broilers. That’s going to be awesome! 😈🔥
Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, Frederic William Burton, watercolor and gouache, 37 x 24 in. (95 x 61 cm), in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. Link is to a Wikipedia page with access to a large image. Taken from a medieval ballad is the story of Hellelil, who falls in love with her bodyguard, Hildebrand. This is to the displeasure of her father, who sends Helleli’s seven brothers to kill Hildebrand. Much unpleasantness ensues. Burton has chosen a…
My relationship with my father has always been unstable. As I was growing up, I have always been the "good boy". Every aspect of my life was his design. He even tried to influence my children. I never dare to say no to him, but the resentment builds within me. Eventually everything boiled over in my early 40s. We did not have a fall out; I decided to do what I see and feel is correct. Many times, his words, his actions become my problems as I need to undo the damage or maintain peace at home. I…
A look at the CSS line height unit and how it works.
Since deciding to try and hunt down all of the butterfly species of the UK, I've visited the north of England a couple of times and also spent an afternoon wandering around Grafton Wood on my way back from fishing with Ben down in Pembrokeshire. In the process, I've manged to see another seven species of butterfly and photographed six of them. My first brown hairstreak didn't want to be photographed sadly, so I'll need to try again at some point in the future. Here are the half dozen that were…
Two years and change have passed since I last addressed the topic of other jazz artists doing covers of Guaraldi compositions, back in this original post.To recap, the goal is to compile an ever-expanding list of jazz artists who've recorded a) original tribute compositions honoring Guaraldi; and b) covers of Guaraldi compositions other than "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" and the Charlie Brown Christmas quartet — "Linus and Lucy," "My Little Drum," "Christmas Is Coming" and "Christmas Time Is…
A quick one to take you into the weekend. Tokyo Shoegazer have released a second video clip from Remains, and like the video for『Missing』, it’s a pretty straight performance clip of a banger of a song given a distinct visual aesthetic by trading the multiple exposure camera techniques for high-key lighting. Short and sweet. The post Tokyo Shoegazer -『The Reckoning』 appeared first on Space Echo.
Jake Casella Brookins Hello, fellow readers! Lots of exciting things happening at ARB: we just sent out our first round of contributor honoraria, which is a huge milestone for us—thanks again to everyone who made that possible. Misha & I are also ironing out the last details in sending out rewards for our fundraiser: if you contributed there, please keep an eye on your email in case we need any details from you. And, on the actual magazine-contents side: we’ve got some very cool articles in…
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after writing his last bit of code for SimAnt, Will Wright climbed out of bed and smelled smoke. Looking out the window of his home in the Oakland Hills of California he…
Pasteis de Nata.
One of the surest ways to infuse my existence with misery is to sit me in front of a computer screen for multiple hours on end. Unfortunately for me, this past week has been mostly that, and the next week will likely entail more of the same. Some days I find myself clocking in something like 12 hours straight at the computer. Needless to say, this is not the life of the artist one aspired to as a child, but it is exactly what the job necessitates (at least for me I guess) in this evidently…
You know what's hilarious? Scientology speedruns.If you, too, are late to the party, this is a shadowbanned TikTok trend from April of 2026. It takes effort to run down actual footage without feeding the attention economy lampreys, but hey, wait, was that a “Subway Surfers” meme‽ ((Bonus points for the Jesus and Sonic outfits. Anyone got a Travolta mask?))I, much like L. Ron Hubbard, fucking hate runners.^[Look up “fair game” in Scientology. Also, see Leah Reimini's decade-old AMA on Reddit.]…
SPIDER-MAN — SPIDER-SENSE SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (TOY BIZ) Hey, whoah, it’s Friday! Welcome to Friday, here at the Figure in Question, where we like to celebrate the week with a little bit of flashing back, with some addendums to older reviews. Today? We’re taking a second look at a Spider-Man variant that really should have seen it coming! “Perched on a ledge high above the city, Spider-Man’s ‘6th sense’ begins to tingle – providing a split second warning that imminent danger looms…
Like anglers, beekeepers often obsess about the weather.They both need something to blame when things go less well than they had hoped. How many times have you heard “too little rain, no nectar” or “too hot, they weren't biting” ?Or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, this compulsion healthy concern simply reflects the influence of the weather on their hobby.I was reminded of this at 7 am today when I listened to the weather forecast … there's another 'heatwave' on the way, but overnight…
