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…

I wrote the other day about the apps that have an unlimited screen time because they help me with anxiety and finding calm again. A good reason to write a list of the apps I use! Antistress a collection of simple and silly apps that really help me, especially the pool app! Stardew Valley - my favourite game. I love to build my farm and do all the quests Neko Atsume 1 and 2 - two super relaxing games, all aimed at taking pictures of cats in your virtual yard. Instant calm! Sudoku - the ad-free…

Continuum is a TV show from 2012–2015 which Christina and I have just finished watching. It tells the story of Kiera Cameron, a detective from the year 2077 who finds herself trapped in the present day. The main cast is Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron, Victor Webster as Carlos Fonnegra, Erik Knudsen as Alec Sadler and Stephen Lobo as Matthew Kellog. Kiera is from the future, Carlos is a cop from the present day, Alec, who is a precocious scientist, is from the present day too but is going to be…

This question is not to be taken lightly and nor does this question have to mean everything, but it does. The question is not light by any means. However, the question I am about to ask myself does not have to weigh so heavily or weigh me down.No.To be fair to all sides including me, myself and I or with the idea of being fair to my mind, body and soul, questions like the following are often unanswered if not avoided.And of course, there is always a reason why we run and hide.Therefore, let me…

Alas, our time with the Noovo Plus van was coming to an end.We needed to return the van with a full tank, so we did a fuel stop near the Boutique:Back at the Noovo Boutique:Then we caught a Lyft to LAX airport.We didn’t have a direct flight from LAX to SEA, due to timing of available flights; instead, we had a stopover in SFO.Our plane from LAX to SFO:Boarding the plane:The stopover was a couple of hours, enough time for a quick Japanese dinner in SFO:SFO:Boarding our plane from SFO to SEA:And…

Airship 27 has for quite a while been doing their excellent series of new canon Sherlock Holmes stories, so it’s great they started to do a series for Arthur Conan Doyle‘s other series character: Professor George Edward Challenger. So far we’ve gotten two volumes of The Challenger Chronicles. Professor Challenger is probably best known for […]

i just can’t be bothered. most things going on are not worth my time. why? it’s not ignorance and turning a blind eye it’s just that most things are out of reach where to spend money. with whom to spend time. these are changeable… …but most things are not

In many ways, this last issue is unlike the first three. It is still recognizably Coven 13, but it has a transitional air about it. The witchcraft is in evidence, to be sure, but fantasy and sword-and-sorcery have encroached on the center of things. That makes sense in hindsight because this is the final issue published as Coven 13. Afterward, Fantasy Publishing Company acquired the magazine, and it continued as Witchcraft & Sorcery.The March 1970 issue contains Buddy Saunders' "The Bidderfrost…

Due to project recovery I haven’t had a lot of extra time to spend on blogging, so I hope today you’ll be content with Dog Online, as linked from Aftermath, a web game in the vein of the Neopets of old and the Kingdom of Loathing of slightly-more-recent. Remember Neopets? It was popular enough to get actual console game spinoffs. A quick aGooglin’ reveals one was released just this year. Huh! It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that…

Do I wished I’d seen The Invite in a theater? Maybe… This is the sort of flick you want to talk about right after viewing. Alas, I can barely get to the gym with regularity, let alone the cinema. This flick works fine on a small screen though, for a few reasons… The dialog. I’d compare it to Before Sunrise with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and though it goes down a very different branch, it shares an earnestness in delivery. The small cast is all on point. It’s framed nicely. Aside from script…

When my daughter was barely over a year old, she entered — as many kids her age do — into the Church of Elmo: an act of worship whose potency is made both stronger and more peculiar given that, at the time, she had never actually watched Sesame Street, having merely seen the cast of characters and studied (furiously, as Lucy studies all things) a handful of book covers at my parents' house from when I was a child. This in and of itself is not particularly noteworthy -- Elmo's success was a…

Sun glowing through thin clouds—not just whiter, brighter, as a bygone ad for laundry soap once put it. The nasal call of a nuthatch. A slight breath of wind and a black birch at the woods’ edge divests itself of another hundred leaves.

AI does more of the making now. The deciding is still mine.

Originally Published in Pyramid Magazine – March 2nd, 2001 As far as I can tell, Reiner Knizia doesn’t know how to design a bad game – and Lost Cities is no exception to his exemplary track record. Although connected to the reputed theme of the game (adventurers traveling to lost cities around the globe) in only the loosest of possible fashions, the mechanics here prove to be simple, but not simplistic: To borrow the cliché, Lost Cities is easy to learn – difficult to master. Despite the fact…

Thanks to Cameron Kaiser’s excellent blog Old Vintage Computing Research, I have a growing interest in the Apple Network Server line of computers. One of Kaiser’s posts mentions the ANS 300, a model I wasn’t familiar with at the time. Turns out, it is wild. Tom Owad wrote about it back in 2004: The Apple Network Servers are high end servers built by Apple that run IBM’s AIX variant of UNIX. Pictured above is the Apple Network Server 700, Apple’s top-of-the-line server with a 180 MHz PPC 604e…

I have just returned to the Yorkshire fishing port and tourist attraction of Whitby for the first time in years With an increased number of drinking establishments in the town since I last was here, our visit only took in a small proportion of them. Read on to see how it all went....The weather forecast was not good for the weekend, with high winds and heavy showers courtesy of Storm Boelo due to land early on Saturday evening. With its position on the north east coast of Yorkshire, Whitby was…

"I Am Not My Poetry," my translation of "Ang Tula Ko Ay Hindi Ako" by Axel Pinpin, appeared on Asymptote Blog last month. This translation was made back in 2010.Read it here.

I'm organising a workshop around self-hosting next month here where I live: The idea is to help people create and improve their self-hosting setups. From experience, one of the hardest parts of this hobby is to choose where to start and what to do! There are soooo many options for every minutia. That's why I'll be focusing on providing "good enough" answers for the more common questions: which system to use, where to run it, how to expose it and how to do backups? I'll be using Yunohost as the…

“It’s the economy, stupid.”That old political saying remains a reliable way to figure out what’s on the minds of voters. But with mid-term elections less than a week away, and despite a drumbeat of bad economic indicators, that expression actually might not capture everything that matters to voters as they choose congressional officeholders this time around.That’s because repeated investigative work by the news media has elevated the relevance of some other issues that many voters might not…

There is no evidence that Albert Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," although he often gets credit for it. Novelist Rita Mae Brown was the first to use it in print, although she probably learned it from Alcoholics Anonymous.The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool is housed in the lower level of the Fremont Baptist Church, a congregation that serves its community by providing space for several 12-step programs.…

We have MCM’s on Sense and Sensibility‘s men, but wait, we haven’t done the ladies!

Referee: Oldhawkeyes Players: Theotim, mathmologist (nobody) DeNiro Paunchilo, exographer (Chaoclypse) Diego Furniture, alchemist (me) Monkey Man Dan (aggie) A Letter HomeDear Lydia, hope everything is well back home. Troika is nice so far, a bit smoggy and loud but my roommates seem like nice people. It's good to have friends in a big city. We went on a weekend trip the other day. There's usually a special offer going on a barge trip down at the International Barge Port, and today it happened…

welcome to the penultimate episode of this season of my 'what i made in my ceramics class' series. this would be my fourth wheel-throwing class, the third retake with this instructor/day/time. it was during this class that the studio experienced a kiln malfunction which impacted some of my work but i learned a lot from the experience. anyway blah blah blah, check out what i made during my sixth ceramics class. i made two wax melters, a closed vessel, a plate, and a cup. all were extremely…