The old Games Unlimited in Pittsburgh was the game store of our childhood. It’s where we went to buy RPGs, modules, dice, and a whole pile of miniatures. We rummaged through the shelves in the far back and then greedily carried our treasures home on the bus. But now, decades later, they have a new space up the hill, which I got to check out on a quick trip through town. And I have to say, I am jealous. If you live in Pittsburgh, you are lucky to have such a fantastic resource at your…
Toe twins 🐾🦶
Here's Byrne Hobart at The Diff, writing about the existence of a trillionaire: It was inevitable that this would happen. 2% real GDP growth, 3% inflation, a 5% or so equity risk premium, some dispersion among equities, and—critically—being a species with five rather than six or seven fingers on each hand meant that some time this decade or next we'd cross the threshold where a single person is, on a mark-to-market basis, worth a trillion dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about this,…
John Gruber, writing about Apple’s pending price increases: I won a steak dinner from my Dithering cohost Ben Thompson, betting that Apple would not raise the prices on RAM when they introduced the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros in March, largely on the basis that Apple considers the pricing part of the product’s brand. For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. I think Cook’s warning is about the fall, starting with the iPhones 18…
I had an idea last night to clean up the Muv activities screen a bit more.My goal has been not simply to rehash a list of activities you can easily find in the Fitness app (and others).The second image is the updated summary view of every way you moved today.
10 years ago I woke up in a tent in Glastonbury and realised that the utterly unthinkable had happened. We spent the morning, we festival goers, wandering around in a daze. It can be true?! Can’t it? It was. The magical otherworldliness of Glastonbury faded quickly that day as the real world, the horrible hateful reality, crashed over us. You can track back a lot of what is going on now in the UK to that point. The single most stupid, selfish, ill conceived idea for a referendum. There is…
If you looked at collages of photos of the "older brother core" aesthetic, you'd get a pretty close approximation to my lifestyle. Even though I fit really heavily with this, I'm a bit too old to really identify with it. It doesn't really feel like a modern lifestyle more than it does if you gave NostalgiaCore a caffeine addiction. I tried finding something in that realm of "POV: Your Gen X parent is blasting Hair/Heavy Metal in the car while you ride in the back seat" vibe, but for the late…
Dread Delusion is a difficult game to correctly describe. A quick peek at some of the many screenshots in this playthrough log will no doubt trigger happy Morrowind memories because of the otherworld giant shroom foliage. Yet the blockier graphics, including obligatory PS1 texturised distortion effect, give away that the game was part of one of the Haunted PS1 demo discs. Once you start playing it, the min-maxer in you will resent the flimsiness and overall uselessness of the combat. There…
The next entry in my Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer series is the first of two (possibly three) stories about Max Brandt, “ghost layer.” A Sleeper Bewitched: Mr. Crane has been asleep for a month. No one knows why; no one can wake him up. And there’s a strange, disembodied hand hovering over his bed. Mrs. Crane calls in Max Brandt, “ghost layer,” to help save her husband. Brandt started out as a ghost debunker, working with his cousin in the real estate business to rehabilitate the…
Making the rounds last week was this magnificent article on the complications of Arabic typesetting, An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt. The author, Saleh, promises: The reply took and the closure of the ticket took half an hour or so. The reasons behind it took five hundred years to pile up, and they involve a twice-mutilated vizier, a Qurʾān that vanished for four centuries, a Beirut newspaperman with a deadline, and an…
It’s been a long time since a ‘regular’ update but life has continued pretty much unabated. I’m fully in the home straight when it comes to my parental leave and have only got two weeks left. Let’s go with one of those big ‘state-of-the-union’ style updates where I keep a track on my big ticket items… Goals I didn’t want to waste my parental leave - to look back and think ‘where did the time go?’ Key things that I wanted to achieve included: Lose weight Keep writing Achieve ‘things’ Let’s take…
This week was wild, one of the most hectic days at work, watching the World Cup at church, getting some late birthday presents for myself, taking pictures, maybe a date? I don’t know what’s going onnn. Alas, here’s some notes on it all, from June 16 to 22, 2026. Let’s go! 👔 Happy Father’s day to the people fulfilling that role in the family. We had a fun time at church, every non-dad prepared some food to eat together at the end, which is always nice to have. There was also a fun photo shoot…
It's a history of emoji. Quickly moves past early pictographic writing on up to little pictures on early Japanese pagers and smartphones. I was kinda famililar with a lot of this history. For a fews years, Unicode emoji changes would make the news; I remember reading about such things at the time. But reading about them all together shows some trends that weren't so obvious year-by-year. Reading the first couple of chapters, I was kinda worried. I read this as an e-book. The first few bits talk…
Why don't I go there? Yes, nobody stays there long enough, as if she cared, maybe she sill thinks about the things I said, the words she said to me were so banal and yet in my memory they glow bright like embers in the darkness of a cave, my mind is a bit like a cave, and I really don't mind the fact that really nobody cares about the afternoons because the mornings and the sunsets are so beautiful but I feel like an afternoon always, always between moments of great beaty and importance, what…
David Richter, a mathematician at the University of Western Michigan, recently found himself with a surfeit of ceramic orthogonal polyhedra and, knowing of my own interest in orthogonal polyhedra, generously offloaded two of them to me. They fit nicely in my office together with the paper and crochet orthogonal polyhedra I already had: The blue one is an orthogonal realization of Boy’s surface, an immersion of the projective plane into three-dimensional space with three-way symmetry and a…
Really this is just notes for myself, but maybe someone else finds it useful.
For quite some time, I had wanted to be more charitable. I would occasionally give money to a begger, or round up my change at Taco Bell or some other establishment. Then about a year ago, I started thinking about the things I typically spend my money on. Video games, eating out, gas (mostly for leisure and fun activities). I don't have a lot of money. I don't pay any bills, except my cell phone, web hosting, and a few domain names. I live with my mom & she pays the bills. I don't have much…
Part of the "FreeBSD on a Laptop" series. The FreeBSD Handbook has an extensive chapter on installing FreeBSD that covers a wide range of scenarios with descriptions of each possible choice. Its an invaluable resource maintained by volunteer contributors. After performing a few installs, these are my personal notes of steps taken and choices made. A "short and sweet" version of the above Handbook. 1. Start Here Acquire an installation image Prepare the USB installation medium 2. Installation…
There was a holiday disaster: Book: Flesh by David Szalay Here’s what happened: In 2025, only 2% of the books I finished were physical books. The rest were e-books on my Kindle or from Everand. And technically, it doesn’t matter as long as I’m reading, right? Except I had been in a reading slump like no other. My usual strategy of changing genres would normally work until it didn’t. I think I was just tired of reading in the same format. So in 2026, I started switching to physical books more…
I suspect I’m going to return from Japan with a lot of photos of temples and little architecture details since that’s what I find myself gravitating towards when traveling. This trip is already proving to be a good source of photos to (finally) start fiddling with the Aphera beta, which immediately made me want to erase all memory of Lightroom from my archives. Location Info Senso-ji Temple, first built in 942 AD before being destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt in 1973. Reply via e-mail or follow me…
One thing people won't accuse me of is talking too fast. I think "too long" and talk "too slow". I get interrupted all the time, and I always feel that there's not enough time to finish my thoughts and sentences. No one has ever told me that I think too long or talk too slow, but I can see it in their eyes and body language. They've got one foot in the future. One thing people sometimes say, though, is that I'm good at telling stories. I've never understood why. I mean, I just tell it like it…
and my faith is americans is that much smaller nowtwo days ago, jubilee released a video of dean withers debating women who are part of the "maga" movement. i don't typically watch jubilee videos. i feel like it's a great way to ruin my day—no matter the debate. i have found that a majority of people—no matter their opinion—are terrible at critical thinking and composure. it almost always resorts to insult, anecdote, delusion, raised voices, and "whatabout," which is incredibly disheartening.…
For a while there, many people thought vitamin D was magical—that it could improve bones, the heart, infections, cancer, heart disease, longevity, even mental health. But among people I respect, opinion is now overwhelmingly that taking vitamin D does nothing unless you’re severely deficient. The central argument is that while vitamin D levels are correlated with ~all positive health outcomes, when you actually test vitamin D supplements against placebo in randomized trials, nothing ever…
Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have. This seems obvious but surprised me to see first-hand.
Interviewed by Keumars Afifi-Sabet on ITPro. “Stop trying to overrule my preferences on how to use my computer.”
The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman thedesignsquiggle.com
...being, a letter to an old friend — knowable only to the principals and a certain observer — and hidden here in plain sight. Readable by posterity. ::chuckle::
I think it’s fair to say that Starmer led an authoritarian Labour Party and government that was morally bankrupt and utterly corrupt.
. An update on my attempt to start a Patreon. .
Douglas Stuart creates such compelling characters and has a keen understanding of place. As you come to the end of the novel, what are you thinking and feeling about this story? In what ways do both Johns benefit and suffer from patriarchy? How do these men treat (and think about) the women in their lives? In what ways do the women in this novel assert their own agency? Who, on the island is the most free? We’ll be in conversation with Douglas tomorrow, on the 24th. What questions do you have…
