JAXA, being the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, last week launched a probe towards Mars, with the ambitious aim of landing on Phobos, one of the red planet’s moons. The probe, called the Martian Moons eXploration mission (MMX), will collect samples from Phobos’s surface, and return them to Earth for study. The whole mission is expected to take five years. Astronomers have long wondered if Phobos, and no doubt Deimos, Mars’ other moon, are asteroids captured billions of years ago. That seems…

My analysis of cultural drift has (at least) three distinctive elements:We have a big problem: we broke our process for the evolution of (not in) cultures.Instead of reviving blind evolution, it might be better to evolve deliberatelyI have three concrete ideas for institutional mechanisms of deliberate evolution.I asked an LLM for book authors who have also made my #2 point, on deliberate cultural evolution. It gave 3: Skinner (’71), Stewart (’00), Wilson (’19). All seem to understand the…

A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process. Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric? Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what…

The internet is becoming a more dangerous place, and fast. LLMs are only getting better at identifying security issues, and more people are taking advantage of this. Some people argue that LLMs will eventually make large-scale vulnerabilities a thing of the past. I’m not so sure. Either way, I think it’s a good idea to have less stuff that can be hacked online. One way to do that is with statically generated sites. This past week was a bad one for security issues. The most prominent one was…

Around the workshop Wonder of the Word Hub – I reworked a couple of layouts with the Hub and the Wonder of the Word Kids Hub page. I also updated translations for the Hub page in other languages. I started working on adding a background color to the footer for the light scheme. The color will be our primary Heritage Blue color. I had to update all the other colors in the footer to use white. I also fixed a couple of focus styles and added some focus styles to one of the buttons that did not…

Right, I haven't written anything about AI writing yet. Everyone else on Bear seems to have said something. I wasn't going to comment on it even though I run an online literary magazine. However. Today I was scrolling through reddit on my phone and as usual I get shown some "recommended" subs. The name of this sub? r/WritingWithAI. It's exactly what you think it is. Folks who like reading stories and want to very quickly step over the bit where you need to learn to write before attempting to…

No store bought decorations for Dull Tool Dim Bulb. Our Halloween decorations are vintage Homemade and handmade pumpkn monsters, Hollow and containing glitter inside to catch the eye! Circa 1980 maybe...who knows. Group of three with wooden stakes to hold them upright in the yard. Three Halloween Pumpkin Heads, handmade. Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Why your best work is judged after you stop touching itThe one-star review arrives at 11pm. It says the beer tastes like a skunk that lost a fight with a wet cardboard box. The brewer reads it twice. He knows this beer. He knows its gravity, its pH, its dissolved oxygen at packaging, the exact hour the hops went in. That beer left his building in a state approaching grace. What he does not know, because nobody tells him, is that the pallet spent nine days on an unshaded dock in Phoenix in…

I was in Berlin last week and visited the Brücke-Museum for the last days of their landscape-focused exhibition, 'Art... Beneath Pine Trees'. It was partly curated by landscape architects Atelier Le Balto who have been working for the last five years to revitalise the forest that surrounds the museum. The Grunewald and its lakes are looking lovely at the moment. In my photograph of one of the museum's windows you can see how the building is surrounded by autumn colours. The Brücke-Museum was…

I used this poem at the top of my letter, “Everything you can see.” See also: “Do you have a nemesis?”

I wonder whether the iPad mini prices will come down at Christmas or next year?

The Kyushu banzuke has been released. How did my prediction do? The Good The prediction got the named ranks exactly right, as well as the M1 rank, for 11 perfect predictions at the top. Admittedly, the only real question mark here was whether Fujinokawa’s 11 wins would be enough for him to leapfrog Atamifuji, which … Continue reading Banzuke Prediction: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

For more of my career than I care to admit, I thought the phrase “c-level executive” referred to executives who performed poorly (not like those A-level and B-level folks!). I now know that the C stands for “Chief” as in, “Chief Executive Officer” or “Chief Technology Office”. You can imagine how this led to some confusing conversations.

This article was originally a thread on social media, which is why it is formatted with lots of images and short responses.The text is about the image below that paragraph. Let’s analyse this wonderful painting: The painting is a bit too revealing, whoever put this on their wall may have shocked their guests or hid it when visitors were coming.In the 1800s someone decided to add a skirt to protect the ladies reputation and the poor innocent museum visitors, luckily the painting has since been…

Power users of either Codex or Claude Code tend to follow a few specific people online: Thibault (Tibo) Sottiaux and, until last week, Thariq Shihipar. Why? Because they work at OpenAI and Anthropic and are the first to publish new features or usage-limit resets, which are very important for token-starved vibecoders like myself. Employee-powered comms is one of the hottest trends in public relations now. Every startup wants its engineers posting on X and its PMs posting on LinkedIn. Warp and…

(click for PDF) Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation. Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation: Blazing fast character creation. Brutal systems for Combat and Stress. Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book). An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support. This last point, in particular, convinced me to make…

Standishgate Makinson Arcade Standishgate Standishgate

A mockumentary series about a group of failed MCs from West London and their passion for pirate radio. Extremely funny when taking in small doses, it feels like a neighbourhood variant of The Office. It’s funny at times, retarded at times, but it does a great job at entertaining. Five popcorns. To see all 30 photos, visit the article page. This article was originally published at: https://andrei.xyz/movies/people-just-do-nothing/

I don't like false rumors. A false rumor is a wasted opportunity to give players an information key to a future lock. Too many false rumors create an unvirtuous pattern where the players doubt everything told to them, and stop listening to rumors all together--at which point you might as well not have them.That said, not all false rumors are created equal. A false rumor that is false for a good reason can be a worthwhile inclusion on a rumor table. When the players discover that it's false,…

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Lisa Hanawalt.

I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole newsletter about the game called “Baseball on the brain.” It begins: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The…

There is an economic arrangement in which whoever cannot pay to survive is told, “Die, then.” We live in it. The world minted its first trillionaire in June 2026, when SpaceX went public and Elon Musk’s net worth passed $1 trillion. That is a quarter of what the bottom half of America (66 million households) owns combined,1 and the entire wealth of five million median families. This is what a trillion looks like. ▼ each speck is one million dollars (the median family owns a fifth of one) $10…

I have a rather complicated relationship with non-ASCII punctuation. On the one hand, I like to keep my files (for example Org mode files) clean of Unicode stuff – especially emojis – with the obvious exception of Polish diacritical characters (“ąćęłńóśźżĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŹŻ”, if you are curious). On the other hand, I am a big fan of long dashes (though I very much prefer en-dashes to em-dashes); I also like using “proper” quotation marks.

Ben Nadel creates a polyfill for ArrayMerge() in Adobe ColdFusion 2025 as a code kata using various techniques....

It's the quiet that gets to you. Ever since the announcement, I've made it my daily task to send out at least one application. At most, I've sent five in a day. This is all while juggling a business idea (pitching landing pages as a gateway to offering more web services online) and wrapping up some of my campaigns at work to help the team out, even just for a bit, while I don't have anything new and major going on yet. I've also been tapping into my warm connections: friends and old colleagues.…

News has sadly broken of the passing of actor and writer Walter Koenig, veteran of the science fiction small screen where he played key roles on both the original Star Trek (and associated movies) and Babylon 5.Koenig was born in Chicago in 1936 to Russian parents. He decided to become an actor relatively late, after receiving a psychology degree and a professor suggested he try acting. Koenig's first notable television role was on The Lieutenant, produced by Gene Roddenberry.Koenig was then…

I saw it decades ago. I think it takes place at a circus. Someone, either a person or a cute animal, gets shot out of a cannon and then goes into outer space where they keep orbiting around earth and have to be rescued. Thanks for any help in naming this! Sue

Recently I was at Hobbycraft and was buying, amongst other things, glue sticks for the glue gun. The cashier very helpfully pointed out that the fifty-pack, rather than the twelve-pack, was better value. "Thank you," I said, "but that would be basically a lifetime's supply of glue sticks." It's taken me well over fifteen years to use the glue sticks we had. They've moved house three times. I suspect they weren't even all used and we do still have glue sticks - it's just my wife isn't very good…

A week today is Melbourne Cup Day. A public holiday, at least in Metropolitan Melbourne and those towns that have not opted out in favour of another day, typically for their local show. It's often been a confusing day for bus users as not all routes run. While most run a Saturday timetable on public holidays like Cup Day this is not always the case; there exist some buses that run Saturdays, and, in two cases, Sundays, that do not operate on public holidays. However the complexities are become…

This week felt a bit flat. I’m not sure why except to say winter is coming. The evenings are getting darker earlier and the weather turned entirely wet and wild by the weekend. I miss summer already! This meant I ended up gaming more than I have in a while though so I suppose it wasn’t all bad. My weirdness of the week was receiving an email from a startup explaining that a link on a 2013 post about Crunchbang Linux was out of date. They then said “We would love it if you would add our linux…