Yesterday, I listened to Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall. The album came out in 1979. I was a high school senior and on my way to university the following year. For those unfamiliar with it, the album was conceived as a rock opera and is the story of an alienated young man who responds to the slings and arrows of his life by building a metaphorical wall around himself ("All in all it's just another brick in the wall"). At the time, I appreciated it as a work of art that showed me a person…

Wyrdcry has a competitor, and it’s a tough one: Black Death City by Sean Parsons. The fellow who made Warcry is making his own skirmish game, his own take on Mordheim. In what feels like a plot twist, it’s more complicated than I had expected, borrowing from Kill Team and some of the old school mechanics of Warhammer. I need to give the game a try, because Parsons is probably one of the best game designers working right now. It’s an exciting time for Mordheim fans. His most recent video is…

Wyrdcry 1.0 is out. The game is a mashup of Warcry and Mordheim, two of the greatest war games of all time. The game is available for free. Game play is almost identical to Warcry, so that is to say basically perfect. Deeper list building options and the factions you can play are what pull this towards Mordheim.

The security community recognized several years ago that Git hooks can represent an attack vector. Security-focused developers discourage downloading zip archives of Git repositories for this reason. A simple “git status” will kick off an executable script with the full power of a shell. In a world where unsupervised agents are humming away writing software, this is no longer something we can ignore. Copilot and Claude Code have recently had this class of exploit reported in their agent…

I try to use AI (Claude in my case) consciously. My usage varies a lot during the week: on some days I don't even open it, while on others I'm fully immersed in it, creating a repo with multiple agents and skills that collaborate like a team, or coding a full-fledged app. Unfortunately, willingly or not, this is what you have to do if you want to stay competitive in today's market. But I draw a line, multiple ones actually, when it comes to certain things: Things I use AI for Writing or…

Prompt #5 Source

Do you read Markdown on your Mac? Plans, notes, READMEs, the files your AI writes for you all day? Then why not make every one of them a pleasure to read? Mardo is the best Markdown viewer ever made. Select any Markdown file in the Finder, press Space, and Quick Look shows it beautifully rendered — tables, code, diagrams, math, and all. Then watch it come alive. Leave that preview open while Claude Code, Codex, or any other app rewrites the file, and every change arrives in real time, right…

connecting with people that share my values is rewarding. a win-win situation spending time with people that share ancestors, hobbies or location are less so h/t jake

On our last full day with the van, we drove from El Capitán State Beach Campground to Golden Shore RV Resort in Long Beach; a place we had previously stayed in our class A motorhome; a little different in a van.An interactive map of our route:US-101 South:We stopped at Santa Claus Beach for lunch; again a non-planned stop that I found en route, but an excellent spot:A random lunch of some remaining food:Pacific Surfliner train:Back on US-101 South:Another El Camino Real bell marker:Long…

We're hearing some rumblings that Star Trek may not live up to fan expectations. Should Wizards be concerned about it's cash cow? The post Will Star Trek Continue Magic’s Epic Run of Success? appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

An interesting series of early science fiction works has appeared from MIT Press: The Radium Age. The series covers science fiction that appeared between 1900 and 1935, before the Golden Age of science fiction. The series is edited by Joshua Glenn, who is not a science-fiction expert but instead is a “semiotics analyst,” semiotics being […]

I have been spending a lot of time lately looking back at the origins of my witches, both in Advanced Witches & Warlocks and in my Jackson, Illinois setting. Last time, I discussed why witches have been such an important part of my gaming and writing for nearly forty years. My fascination began with books on mythology, folklore, magic, and the supernatural, eventually finding its way into my games and the characters I created.But no one creates these things in a vacuum.When I look back at the…

Here is the latest selection of indie games I (Josh Bycer) covered during last week.

The calendar has wrapped around again and it’s time for some more Exfiltration Radio! This time out we fall down a deep well of songs that can trace their DNA to the influence of New Order or its parent band Joy Division. There’s not so much of a thematic connection among the songs this time, though a great many of them are from post-punk bands who released these records in the early 1980s. Instead, the unifier is the sound: prominent, melodic bass lines, drums that seem to take equal parts…

In March 2021 I posted an article about the 8th annual National Air Carnival held in Birmingham on June 4-5, 1938. This air show was a well-attended event over a number of years in the city. As fate would have it, I have come across an item on the 1940 Carnival in the Gadsden Times. Several individuals are mentioned; let's explore the details.See comments below the article.Source: Gadsden Times 26 May 1940Steadham Acker [1896-1952]Source: Birmingham Aero Club Acker was a Gadsden native who…

I hope you guys aren't sick of me talking about DC's 1996-1997 Plus specials just yet. That's because, when taking a closer look at them for last week's post, I discovered Azrael Plus #1, a title that wouldn't have been on my radar at the time, which featured what struck me as an intriguing pairing of character and creator.Now, for most readers, particularly in 1996, I think that character and creator pairing would have been The Question Vic Sage and writer Denny O'Neil. O'Neil was then writing…

Below MySQL 8.0.1, or on a server Laravel misreads, workers reserve jobs with a plain FOR UPDATE and can deadlock on the DELETE. One tinker line shows which lock yours use. Read more

In the city of London . . . he had never, in the whole course of his life, found above three or four whom he could call throughly honest. Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)

A Daily Mail piece about the Talarico-Paxton senatorial race in Texas speaks of "shy Republicans," a term I've heard more than once before, going way back to Dubya in 2004.The term has since been reapplied to Trump supporters, and is popping up in news media again.This time, however, with the unpopularity of the corrupt candidate Trump chose to replace the incumbent John Cornyn, the term is being used for Republican voters who plan to vote against their party's candidate. There is speculation…

No ProMotion feels like a miss, but the water and dust resistance is pretty cool.

One of the most annoying things about building an Instagram audience is how long it can take. You’re producing brilliant posts but only have a few hundred followers – annoying! Of course, building an Instagram audience takes time – as well as creativity and consistency. If you are a gamer, sharing memorable match highlights is a great starting point, as well as posting edited playthroughs. In other words, individuals develop a personal brand, but reaching new people is vital when it comes to…

I’ve been communing with objects again — the ravaged zinnias, the stolid garden rocks, a trowel head missing its arm. Its arm. Inanimate. That is, not spirited, I guess, non-breathed. But the zinnia takes its dying breaths and gives its exhalations, sips the last of its raindrop juice; the rocks take in and give off the rainwater and bits of themselves in a kind of slow slow inspiration/expiration, and the metal trowel has a stout life of some sort, still stuck in the earth. Or is that mere…

Despite being a Mac person since 2005, I’ve got a fair amount of nostalgia for Windows XP. The original “Bliss” wallpaper was a photo shot by Charles O’Rear in Sonoma, but there was also a modified version with a lower hill, punchier colors, and a lens flare dubbed “Energy Bliss” which shipped with Media Center Edition. Now, more than 20 years later, I thought it deserved another update. XP was the first OS that I really used. I started with Win 3.1 and then moved to 95 in the home computer.…

The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head downstairs to find the checkout registers. Instead of encountering a friendly face that helps with the payment process, we’re greeted with closed registers resulting in too long lines. The only…

As part of the Huston family of actors and filmmakers, Danny Huston can be considered

The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here. Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such…

Manton writes of Micro.blog’s Bookmarks: The Bookmarks → Links tab in Micro.blog Premium is practically unknown, but so useful. It archives a copy of everything you link to! HTML, CSS, everything. I didn’t know that’s what it did. The button for Links was there, but I never looked into it. All the links I ever linked to. Indexed, searchable, and apparently also archived as if I bookmarked them myself. I can see how this can be useful. I’ve discussed Micro.blog’s Bookmarks, which is a…

Inktober is in full swing and I’m playing social media manager since I did all the pieces in September—it’s the only way to stay sane during October. That said, I am practicing the ruling pen for a side project…that’s on the pile to scan along with other pieces from last year! , I tackled the Inktober prompts by difficulty, from easy to hard. I quickly realized I was going to try versals on ogre, so this was among the last pieces. Trying to do a full versal did not work, but the rough dry brush…

One of the best things about this hobby is finding the perfect use for a figure that you've wanted to use for ages. I've had Jes Goodwin's mutant ogre kicking around my boxes for a long time, but never really found the perfect project for it. Happily, that's now changed and he's going to see use as a possessed (with spines) in my Nurglite warband.Read more »