More than twenty years have passed since my father died at this time of year and thoughts of mortality always enter my mind as the nights begin to draw in, as I prepare to face the spiritual challenge of another long dark winter ahead. So Luke Clennell’s splendid DANCE OF DEATH engravings inspired by Hans Holbein suit my mordant sensibility at this season. First published in 1825 as the work of ‘Mr Bewick’, they have recently been identified for me as the work of Thomas Bewick’s apprentice Luke…

AI development has been fueling a lot of the demand for data centers in recent years. The second-order costs for their construction and operation are largely borne by the people in the respective local communities. Just as plantations diverted streams to maximize production while leaving communities dry, today’s tech giants divert energy, water, and public resources to feed their own system. If we build AI the way sugar captured water—extractive, consolidated, and dismissive of community…

The trio Asa Tone, following their recent collaboration with the sadly departed Ariel Kalma, return with a new album. The set, titled “Mutalkind”, finds the friends – Melati ESP, Tristan Arp and Kaazi – indulging in further electro-acoustic experiments, exploring creating a musical language that blurs and blends their Mexican, Indonesian and American roots. Now also adding Balinese percussionist Putu Septa into the mix. The latter’s presence is felt, in particular, on tracks such as…

Not sure it’s worth recounting the whole Scooby Doo story of Hark’s debut feature – there’s so much of it. Flipside of the King Hu movie, pulling off as much plot and action and as many cool compositions in under half the runtime. Sean and Jake are saying the same thing, and they’re both saying it better than I could’ve. The initial team: Multiple clans unite to solve the killer butterflies mystery, including Green Shadow (who’d return in We’re Going to Eat You!). They arrive at a castle, where…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) ★★★★☆ My server was hacked a few months ago. It wasn’t an obvious “bad password” kind of a situation, but I believe a hole in PHP propped open by some code I wrote 25 years ago. (It’s entirely possible some ancient scripts I wrote for GUIdebook were to blame!) The hacker replaced some of my pages with garish ads for Indonesian casinos, and did some other slight damage. For a few days and nights, I played a…

John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers: It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked…

I am spending a silly amount of time staring at this icon.

I am as I am. I’m waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child.What for?For you, if you abandon everything else.For how long?For as long as it takes.There are other things in life.Find them and be more normal.And if I don’t?I’ll give you what I’ve given nobody else, but it’s worthless, it’s simply the answer to your useless question.Useless?I am as I am.No promise more than that?None. I can wait for ever.I’d like a normal life.Live it and don’t count on me.And if I do count on…

I've been stung by bees maybe twice in my life. Once on my shoulder at the pool (I wasn't wearing a shirt); another time on my arm at a park. It is always unpleasant, starting with a sudden sharp and throbbing pain before the, "Ouch," sensation fades away (thankfully) quickly, replaced with a warm soreness and slight swelling on my skin where I was stung. Well, I was stung today, and it remains something I highly dislike. Oh, and it was right on my index finger, to add insult to (literal)…

The moon continued doing it’s full moon thing into the pre-sunrise hours this morning and it was glorious. I snapped this shot after my first meeting of the day, right before the sun popped up over the Rincon Mountains. I’m still smiling from our weekend excursion to Chiricahua National Park. My husband and I had enjoyed exploring the area and I’m already making plans to head back as close to a new moon as possible so I can do some night photography. It took me a few moments to get going this…

I was a guest on the Tehno klistir show of the slovenian Radio Študent. We talked about Omarchy and why it is such a dangerous power grab within the FLOSS community. You can check out the interview on the episode website, if you speak no slovenian (like me) you might want to skip forward to about 15 minutes into the runtime when the English part starts.

New to the ongoing blog series called STQK "Would you like to know more?" Disclaimer: Episodes 11-15 will be using an oracle system I am developing for solo players; you can see it in action here. Once I am happy with the way the oracle plays it will be available for the community. Hello there, We continue with the next episode in the Dragon Quest SPI System. (Content Warning: Violence, Death, Traumatic Events) Scene 11 As the figure who stopped the salamanders emerges from the side of the tent…

I might by now have seen all Monogram’s cheapie horror films. But I’m not sure — they do tend to merge. The only reason I hadn’t seen REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES is because I thought I had. Zombies, John Carradine, Mantan Moreland… that sounds like about four other Monogram movies, doesn’t it? This one tacks […]

Musician and composer Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist, the Second World War memoir that was a big literary hit in the 1940s and is most recently known for the Oscar-winning film version, doesn't seem an immediately obvious candidate for a musical adaptation. And while that's largely how it's been marketed, I'd say a musical isn't really what adaptor-director Thom Southerland has delivered either. Wladyslaw (Dan Krikler) is one of four children in a fairly well-off Jewish family in Warsaw,…

“It's October! It should be cooler than this!” “It is. The asphalt isn't as tacky.”

a television show here said that the food trend this year is “swicy”...sweet + spicy = swicyI saw this at one of the supermarkets that I go to and bought one to try I don't think I've ever tried Buldak, but have heard it is really spicyThis version comes with the spicy sauce packet and a sweet sprinkle packetthere are sugar crystals as well as brownish oneseven if this was level 1, it was

Longer than I care to admit it (like “months” longer) the clothing rod in the closet had partically collapsed. The weight of the clothes on the rod pull both brackets holding it down about 30°. The bracket is a thick piece of metal at right angles, with a cross piece of metal at a 45° angle, forming a triangle. At the end of the horizontal segment is a curved piece of metal to hold a rod. The support bracket used to be straight, but was bent nearly in right angles itself. And since the bracket…

I'm leaving the Publix store, heading towards my car with a shopping car full of food. Standing next to my car is an older woman, eating from a bag of Trader Joe's Cheezy Poofs. I found it a bit odd, seeing how the closest Trader Joe's to this Public is two miles (3.2km) away, and the other closest Trader Joe's is five miles (8km) away. As I pop open the trunk, she mentions she likes my car, as it has “character.” I look at my car and see “it's in serious need of a paint job.” She then offers…

An attacker can get what they came for while your application carries on working. Pages load, background jobs finish, customers carry on with their day. Meanwhile, a credential copied from that machine is being used somewhere else, against a different service, on your account. That possibility is why I’ve become interested in canaries. There’s a gap between knowing your software is working and knowing somebody has been rummaging through it. The PHP disclosure on 21 October makes that gap…

Für den Podcast “Tech Bro Utopia“, in dem die politischen Ziele und Werte der Tech-Eliten analysiert und auch kritisiert werden, wurde ich auch interviewed. Insbesondere für die Folge 5 zu modernen Ludditen (wie ich einer bin). Ich finde die Folge einen wirklich gelungenen Einstieg in die Frage, was die modernen Ludditen eigentlich sind, mit einigen Sätzen von mir aber auch Dan McQuillan, Brian Merchant und Anna-Verena Nosthoff. Die Folge kann man sich in der Mediathek anhören. Auch die anderen…

We are overdue for a catch-up! The last while has been an up-and-down of feeling crappy. Nothing serious, just run-of-the-mill illnesses that have knocked me out of my routines (doesn’t… The post Digest 20261026 – Majorca, vomit and zines appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

It’s taken me almost a year to get to the level of mental clarity I have today. And I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about my future. The past year has probably been one of the hardest years of my life. Mentally, physically, everything. There were days I genuinely didn’t know how I was going to get myself out of the situation I was in. And the crazy thing is… From the outside, you probably wouldn’t have even known. But I knew. I knew how badly I was struggling. I knew how far away I…

you drag me off the couch around 22:24 - i had fallen asleep, finally just a little while earlier and i did not make it easy for you since i was rather far gone - but i notice perhaps, now, you are speaking to me in the tone i know makes me think you get it, now, my reaction: staying up for two days, drinking more wine than i had in the last three months, making concrete plans, for interhemispheric travel, with her other best friend here, because, well, it was perfectly rational in the…

[ An astonishing artifact landed in my inbox this morning... ...day in progress. ]

This month has been a little lighter, Real-Time Stratember and themed months in general are pretty busy so it’s nice to take it a little slower. I’ve mostly avoided big budget blockbusters and prioritised games from smaller indie teams. I’m no stranger to indie titles and outside of being a backlog slayer, the Steam Deck was made for indie games. It’s about time I started highlighting some of them. Source

A data broker called PublicAI is currently paying software engineers $1 per million tokens for their local Claude Code transcripts. If you read what they sell to AI labs, they are not paying for clean sessions where the model one-shots a feature. Clean runs are cheap. The expensive tier in their catalog is the slice where the developer rejects a patch, tells the model its diagnosis is wrong, reverts a file, or kills a session that wandered into the weeds. Fig. 1Noise vs. weights. For forty…

Journal There’s been some storms of late, but thanks to us being in the centre of this island they didn’t cause much, if any, damage locally. Still, one of the fence posts started showing a bit of wobble so I did the amelioration shown in the photo. The make-do stake is a paint mixing drill attachment which I used to use to mash up stale bread for composting before I got a mulcher. Everything has a use eventually. It’s also been clock change time, going backwards I think. I don’t really mind…

So I’m driving along the information superhighway, being careful to obey the speed limit, when suddenly I hear a siren. It’s the internet police. Not again! During my first run-in with the internet police, the officer explained to me the difference between “lie” and “lay.” I learned a lot but didn’t appreciate the exasperation and sarcasm. What would it be this time? “What seems to be the problem, officer?” “I noticed in one of your blog posts that you used the word ‘lead’ when you meant ‘led.’…

Roots of the upturned stump of a Coast Redwood resemble the antlers of a moose at Redwood National Park, California. The post Moosehead appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.