You’ll find it on County Road 350 W near Stilesville, in Hendricks County, Indiana — this old church, built in 1867. According to the sign next to the door, services are still held here one Sunday a month. Primitive Baptists believe a church should follow the simple pattern of the New Testament. The movement took shape during an early 1800s Baptist split over mission boards, Sunday schools, and other church organizations they regarded as unauthorized additions to that pattern. A distinctive…

the horrisonant forest THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+) Mieville has always had an eccentric vocabulary. I had to look this one up. Borrowed from Latin horrisonus. Adjective horrisonant (comparative more horrisonant, superlative most horrisonant) Having an unpleasant sound. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horrisonant Amusing title and cover. Jonathan Knight’s “Exhale” series: Doomscrolling alternatives: There is, of course, a lot of this stuff going around. Robin F Williams: What a weird set…

I’ve written about interfaces becoming services: you ask for something, the system works out the steps and presents what you need. I still find that direction interesting. I also think it makes an ordinary bit of interface design much more important: being able to change your mind after seeing the result. An AI product can understand the general request and still change something you wanted to keep. The result might be perfectly reasonable, just wrong for you. If the interface makes that…

After the VS Code theme, I built a Chrome theme based on my website colors. I built light and dark versions, so you can choose the one that suits you better.

Like this post? Donate to me so I can keep writing. Ever since discovering that I could write my novels in plain text and or Markdown, and also that I could write my fiction podcast scripts in a plain text syntax called Fountain, I began wondering what other plain text avenues I could explore, and if I could adapt my workflow around plain text. Why use plain text? Some might wonder, why even use plain text when I could just use Microsoft Word, a fully accessible paid word processor that works…

As the nights draw in, the darkness deepens and we approach Halloween, or Samhain if you prefer the Pagan. I thought I’d put together a small set of blogs on some of the lesser known ‘dark’ folklore or legends of Worcestershire. Based in truth perhaps, but long since passed to legend. As Irwin tells his charges in ‘The History Boys’, these are all ’nuggets’ and nothing that would make a complete blog post in itself. I don’t seem to have the time or the impetus at the moment to write lengthy…

Budget coverage in the media is understandably all about the details. What taxes are going up or down? How do the OBR forecasts compare to last year or six months ago? Has the fiscal headroom gone up or down? In all this it is easy to lose the big picture. Yet when some media outlets do attempt to do big picture previews, they often get things very wrong. This post tries to correct that, and suggests why the Budget is unlikely to change that picture. The big picture presented in much of the…

Life Αα has been scaling new heights of cray. Perhaps related: she is riddled with bum worms that are keeping her (and everyone else by proxy) up at night. We can hardly keep up the payments on the medicine and the laundry cycle is relentless. It’s heartbreaking, but also at some point it becomes more than irritating having ‘ITCHY BUM’ screamed at you for hours on end. Σσ is bearing the brunt of it, as per. We survived the Halloween school disco, which I’m fairly sure is the worst night of the…

A song from the 1960s that you like or means something to you. As I’ve mentioned before, my parents weren’t all that bothered by soul music, so it’s the one musical genre that I discovered and explored by myself. Don’t get me wrong, they enjoyed the usual classic tracks like everyone else but my Mum was a Beatles fan at that time, and my Dad was off in Simon & Garfunkel territory. This track is the one that clicked for me in terms of a more dynamic soul sound, punchy rhythm section, the guitar…

In the third and final panel of an unplanned triptych of post-AI thinkpieces (see previously, what happens and what is post-AI), I’m sharing the free/open source Strudel project’s new post-AI policy. Community All community members should be treated with respect and kindness. We welcome contributors to the community who are ready to follow this policy as well as the above code of conduct. Principles We wish to protect the humanity of our communities and projects, to support the motivation and…

A simple explanation of an unimportant point. Unless you think it is important.Inspired by recent events.And observations.Detail from an Aesop soap box.

Your repositories, dependencies and development tools are already installed on your machine. With the Codex App Server, you can work against that environment from a terminal, or connect to it through the ChatGPT desktop app. This is useful for a Mac mini at home, a Linux development box, or a workstation you want to access from another computer. You can leave the project where it is and choose a different interface to work on it. Let’s look at starting the server, connecting locally, and…

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Cincinnati on his birthday, February 12, 1861. He was traveling to his inauguration as President of the United States. According to some accounts, Lincoln barely escaped death in the Queen City.The election of 1860 was the most contentious in United States history, conducted under the certainty that Civil War was inevitable. Although Lincoln won the election by carrying 18 of the 33 states, he earned less than 40 percent of the popular vote. It is no coincidence that…

For decades a command-line tool shipped with a man page so a person could learn to drive it. Now the reader is an AI agent, and it needs the same thing in a form it can read. Here’s my take: skills are the new man pages.

Old, with later facilitiesChurch Lane in Ledbury is one of those streets that features in books with titles like ‘Beautiful Britain’ or ‘England’s Historic Towns’. The combination of a narrow lane, houses, a pub, and other buildings dating from the 15th to the early-19th century in a mix of brick and timber-framed construction, has an irresistible pull, the eye drawn unerringly to the spire of the town’s medieval church that closes the view. Taking in the rich architectural mix, but with minds…

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Attributed to Albert Einstein A few years ago, I watched the film “Moneyball.” It is about General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) whose Oakland Athletics shocked the baseball world in 2002 by nearly beating the New York Yankees in the American League playoffs. Why “shocked?” Because Beane had a player payroll costing $41 million and the Yankees had laid out $126 million in the same year for…

DARK TROOPER Force Mech Suit Epic World of Action Amazon Exclusive Item No.: No. G1421 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: n/a Includes: 1 Mech, 1 big blaster, 1 small blaster, 1 figure Action Feature: n/a Retail: $21.99 Availability: October 2025 Appearances: The Mandalorian, probably Bio: Gear up for battle! Open the Star Wars mech suit at the feet and place the Dark Trooper action figure inside. (Taken from the Amazon's web site. Package has no bio.) Image: Adam's photo lab. Availability: Click…

As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back to a breach. And I don't think we can say the relatively benign outcome was only achieved because we did take it so seriously either; there's a massive trove of sites out there that have been left to rot and would…

Link from Nature, 15 October 2026.She was especially known for designing the Apollo Guidance Computer to be as reliable as possible — even in the event of human error. A key inspiration came from her daughter, who sometimes accompanied her to the office after hours. One day, when young Lauren pushed a button that crashed a simulator, Hamilton realized the system needed a protocol in case an astronaut did the same thing. Sure enough, during Apollo 8, astronaut Jim Lovell made the very mistake…

The north-western sky as seen from Brisbane at 9:59 AEST on Tuesday 3 November. The moon is obvious above the horizon, but you will need binoculars or a telescope to see Jupiter. The left-hand inset shows the magnified view just as the occultation starts, and the right-hand view is the view as Jupiter comes out from behind the Moon. The north-western sky as seen from Adelaide at 9:50 ACDST on Tuesday 3 November. The moon is obvious above the horizon, but you will need binoculars or a telescope…

To The Joker, Dracula is just a Normal Vampire Developer: Planet Interactive Development Publisher(s): DreamCatcher Interactive (North America), Cryo Interactive (Europe) Release Date(s): October 9th, 2001 (North America), 2001 (Europe) Available On: Game Boy Color Genre(s): Action, Horror The Game Boy Color had quite a few horror-themed games and sometimes even took big swings with them, too. Resident Evil Gaiden, for example, ain’t exactly one of the best entries in its series, but it sure is…

Regular readers may recall the ex Ballard and Wantage RS1, the last survivor of the trio, is now part of the HMLX lease fleet and has been out on hire with Alan Sewell…"#1000 has returned from switching the Laxton branch industries on the Thameside Model Railroad Group layout at the NMRA British Region Convention in Cookham, Berkshire. HMLX's contribution to the weekend was well received and a few photos are attached".Alan Sewell photo.Alan Sewell photo.Alan Sewell photo.Having finished…

I am fucking pissed off right now. In a meeting and after giving valuable feedback to make it make sense. I was told that I forced my opinion on everyone else. Like wtf I stepped up to lead the conversation because no one was taking it. And if you fucking have issues with it just say it instead of being fucking passive aggressive. I really find people who avoid conflict while doing passive aggressive shit very cowardly. And I don't care about needing to shut down because this is the first time…

Note from Patchwork Paladin: From time to time someone will post something on one of the discords that catches my eye, and that person will not have a blog. So, I invite them in for a guest post. Nik, the author of this post, loves making crunchy monsters for 5e, and had a great idea about making boss monsters better. Hi, I’m Nik. One of my absolute favorite things about TTRPGs is creating fun monsters, items, adventures, etc and sharing them with my players. Today, I am going to share one…

Final Fantasy Resonance Alright, I got a good grip of visions and I even got the next level of Magicite to be able to get some of them to level TWO. I made it through the rebel base and cleaned up most of the stuff to the weapons factory. Bahamut, not messing around I don't like fights that you're supposed to lose/cannot win. I think they're a waste of time. Just make it a cutscene. Or prevent me from wasting resources at the very least. I wish there was a way to check what the buff icons meant…

Hi there ULGers, Can we talk about how much I love it when a brand releases 10ml Travel Size bottles? Sure, they cost more per ml BUT which perfumista on earth needs 100ml of a fragrance unless they are going to split 60+ml of it? There are a few fragrances in my collection that I’ve […]

What is a gundalow? It is a flat bottomed cargo barge once common on the Piscataqua River and in the nearby rivers of New Hampshire and Maine. They were popularized in the 1600s, and were still used until the early 1900s. There is no keel on a gundalow, which was useful for mudflats and low tide. The name is thought to have derived from "gondola". Similar flat bottomed boats called "gandelows" ply the waters of the River Shannon in Ireland. Many people with ancestors from New Hampshire and…

Read all the Rocky Horror Picture Show posts in chronological order. Rocky Horror is something special. It’s not because it’s a send-up of B-movies. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Hardware Wars, and Kung Fury are all send-ups of B-movies and they haven’t become cultural forces. Plus, while it might have begun life in O’Brien’s head as a send-up, parody is secondary to its centering of sexuality and queerness and flouting of every taboo it thought it could get away with. Those themes were…

Released by Cold Spring on September 4, 2026, this vital boxed set gathers remastered soundtracks from director Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre across five CDs. Their passage from Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov’s orchestral writing to Eduard Artemyev’s electronic interiors opens a fissure that continues to emit productive fumes from deep within the core of the earth to this very day. The individually printed sleeves and accompanying artcards, reproducing Soviet and Japanese posters, return these intimate…

Walter Koenig was more than just Chekov on Star Trek…he was a screenwriter and a playwright, and acted on stage and in many other TV shows and movies. Did you know he wrote the Land of the Lost episode with the first appearance of Enik, the intelligent Sleestak? He certainly did! (In fact, “Enik” had originally been named by Koenig as “Eneg,” a backwards tribute to Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.) While Chekov is of course a beloved character, I think Koenig’s role as the antagonistic telepathic…