Something is afoot with LEGO® Sonic the Hedgehog™ 77120 Shadow's Mech vs. G.U.N. Trooper. Today I take a look at the new 2 x 4 plate with ball joint, before analysing the other parts and the construction of the set that introduced it.Continue reading »

Most of what I post here is short: a thought, a link, a line or two. Bear's post lists are built around titles, which never felt right for notes. So this blog now runs a small CSS "micro layer" on top of its theme: Notes show up on the homepage as cards with their full text. Each card's date is its permalink. There are no titles to click. Longer posts like this one keep the theme's big-title look. Because the layer only targets Bear's own markup, you can swap the theme underneath and the notes…

Marcin Wichary details how a redesign of the volume control interface for the iPhone sometimes caused music to become extremely loud all of a sudden. I have encountered the same design bug multiple times too, but ln the reverse. All of a sudden, whatever audio that is playing seems to have stopped playing through my earphones. The first time I encountered this, I thought my bluetooth earphones had lost the connection. I switched playback to the iPhone speakers and then back to the earphones.…

After reading about GTA VI, I decided to try reVC (a port of the original GTA: Vice City) and quickly realized that while the nostalgia held up, a lot of the mechanics hadn’t aged nearly as well. So I modernized it myself, bringing over features I liked from newer Rockstar games while keeping the original world and story intact.Pretty incredible to throw together a set of mods in a day that make the game exactly the way I think it should be.

Tags: #moods · *duration:144hHey Folks, I’m on vacation for the week. Posting will resume next week. Have a comment? Leave one on the post, or email me about it.

Flash-flood warnings changed our packrafting plans, so we headed for higher ground and a quiet local hike among red rock and traces of those who came before. Read More ... Continue reading Changing Plans at PMags.com.

Belly buttons means business, buddy. Yes, your innie or outtie is where heaping truckfuls of DNA were dumped into your ittie bittie body when you were a cute little negative-year-old. And of course, as a special thank-you present from those few fetal months of dump-truck deliciousness, you get a lifelong tummy scar that occasionally gets plugged up with rogue bits of T-shirt lint. Now, when this happens you know what to do: Slap on some sunblock, grab your rod, and motor out into the deep to…

It wasn't until the first week of October that I realized that Sonic is running a Universal Monsters October promotion in their Wacky Pack kids meals. A quick trip to sonic and one milkshake later, I was the proud owner of the full set of all seven toys from the series. Five of the the prizes are more traditional toys while two are spoons. I've previously reviewed items from Sonic's He-Man and She-Ra promotions from a few years back and those included some spoons and straw caddies as well,…

Yay, I have a Golden Meeple! This is my avatar on BoardGameGeek.com. I recently received a GeekMail informing me that I have a new achievement microbadge - the Golden Meeple. This is for reaching 10,000 likes. I've been on BGG since August 2003. I used to upload many files - my concise reference sheets. That is why I have that fourth microbadge, Herculean file uploader. I didn't realise

I have the Sunday scaries. I’m afraid of all my commitments. I want to quit everything and dig a hole in the ground and be a mole person for the rest of my life. I will create a hovel and be a happy mole person in my underground hole. The world will pass me on by above and I will eat worms and dig dirt and read chapter books by the hearth in my mole person secret hideout. Yes. That is where I’m at rn. Thanks.

Heading into the last week! The double feature for tonight is 1987’s The Gate and the follow-up The Gate II. The sequel was made in 1990 but did not see a U.S. theatrical release until 1992. While both are about teenagers opening doors they ought to leave alone, they have very different ideas about how to handle the demons that come through them. I enjoyed The Gate. The Gate II does not quite measure up, but I can appreciate what it set out to do. The Gate fits my theme, so I figure adding the…

I did a LARP! I was invited by lovely friend and international games narrative mainstay Books Schwartz to be part of a one-shot LARP, in the style of Wayfinder Adventures (a youth camp LARP experience on the east coast). All three of the coordinators for this LARP (including Books) were former instructors at Wayfinder, and I believe it's how most of them met. About 50 people participated, which was a lot of nerds to be running around in Griffith Park! The LARP we did was certainly in the play…

Rivers often join together. They rarely split apart. If you’ve studied geography, or even just stared at a map for a decent amount of time, you’ll know that this is the rule. Little rivers join together to become big rivers, which join together to become even bigger rivers, which flow out into the sea. There are some small exceptions to this rule. Winding plains rivers commonly split and rejoin around islands. Some rivers split into many small branches as they reach the coast, forming a “river…

Busy week!!!! Monday started with playing ping pong with Snow for the first time in a while, she found a room in a Harvard building she has access to with one so we went there after work, and just as we were setting up another duo arrived to play. We traded off games on the table until like 3 or 4 in we just said we should play doubles which was super fun! One of them was clearly super good!! Snow got their contact info since they said they wanted to play again, which should be fun Tuesday I…

Crucial Track for October 25, 2026: “Crash Into Me” by Dave Matthews Band A song from a TV show that you like. “Crash Into Me” played at the end of the pilot episode of Roswell (1999). Twenty-seven years later (!!!), this is still the best pilot episode I’ve seen. ∞ via Crucial Tracks

I use AI for my work, for which this blog is a hub. Using AI necessarily raises questions of authorship and attribution. Who did the writing, the author or his agent? Is this blog the work of a machine or of my mind? Of course the mind is never unmediated by technology. I hope my readers will not begrudge me the use of the codex and the text editor1 if I call the thoughts posted here my own. But still, having AI write is fundamentally different from using those other assistive technologies for…

My GitLab server is running on a virtual machine behind a Traefik reverse proxy. This saves me money, since I don’t have to rent additional IP addresses, but it also means that GitLab pages does not work properly. It requires it’s own dedicated IP for custom domain hosting. To make the handling of the routes a little bit more git-like, I created a repo, placed a YAML file containing the Traefik routes for GitLab pages into it and used Traefiks HTTP Provider to poll the YAML through a very…

matters of inflection: cold with more to come - look, i had something, today, but i cannot put it together now waiting for all these die to fall other things said fuck cancer i am jealous of these americans, with all their 'fall' wordplay, getting all crunchy just for them, right now Yesterday :: Sunday, 25th October 2026

Six months after it began, the front yard is ready for its complete unveiling. The plants are in, the fence is stained and the porch still isn't painted. The plants are also all tiny. The full, mature English cottage garden I'd spent nine years creating had to be sacrificed and started from scratch. Here it...Read More

St. Patrick’s Snapshot – New York, New York Yes, I took a picture of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, too. So think of this street photograph as a preview of my cathedral coverage. There are some places in New York City that always deserve a photo. I suppose this is one of them. I’ve certainly taken pictures of St. Patrick’s on numerous occasions, but how could I resist taking another shot of this lovely Gothic Revival building? I also like how this cathedral is right in the middle of Midtown Manhattan…

In my post about Scraper Junkyard results, I hypothesized a single, centrally-controlled web crawler that made requests from Contabo GmbH IP address ranges. After a closer look at the Apache combined format log files, I can confirm that at least one web crawler works out of Contabo IP address space.

Ran a 10k trail race this weekend with 1,300′ of climbing. It was cold and windy, and we were at a high enough elevation for their to be frost on the ground, and it was very rocky. I came in 29th place, out of 33 people. Volunteers had some very good dogs with them, which made the journey lighter. I was suffering to keep up with the three 60+ aged men in front of me. I’ve been running, and I’d say I’m in shape, but I’m not in race shape. The winner finished in 50 minutes, 45 seconds, and I came…

This is a Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter of WWII, in 1:144 scale, FDM printed on my old Ender 3.It's a very simple model with virtually no surface detail at all, and I don't recall who designed it or where I got it. It was some considerable time ago. I have no immediate use for it, as I haven't built any armies for the Pacific at all, though I do have some US Marines in 15mm sitting somewhere waiting to be painted.

Less a movie and more an encapsulation of toxic masculinity via 70s grindhouse. I know it’s important historically but god damn you know?

During the 1950s and 1960s, American motels and hotels gave travelers a place to rest in surroundings that reflected the changing tastes of the era. Their bedrooms ranged from simple roadside accommodations with basic furnishings to stylish interiors featuring colorful bedspreads, patterned curtains, modern furniture, and the latest conveniences. Vintage postcards captured these rooms in […]

RM Schindler, Lovel Beach House, 1926, Newport Beach, ext. via thelovellbeachhouse.com Stop the wire transfer to Cap Ferrat. Because a new architecturally iconic, oceanfront fixer-upper just dropped. After keeping it, and keeping it intact for a century, the Lovell family has been doing really great work unloading their architecture. And now the Lovell Beach House by RM Schindler is for sale, for $18.8 million. With the King’s Road House out of contention, the Lovell Beach House is literally…

19th october to 25th october what i did reorganising in the house to accommodate our long-term guest made everything a lot more comfortable for everyone <3 some other small repairs and updates have everything coming together. a busy week with doctor visits and exams and rescheduling things. it’s all very tiresome but important. my brasil re-elected our leftish president. thank god, thank god. what i read my partner and i didn’t get much time with faulkner this week. what i’m looking forward to…

We've really established in this blog that bands are weird things. Everybody's got an idea of what's best and what's going to work best. None of those are the same. Everyone has an idea of where the band should go. And again, none of these are the same. It's all a huge balancing act re: 'what's it worth to you?' And how much do you want to fight for it versus being in the band in the first place? And what you're getting out of it is really weighed in there, too. So add to all of this a healthy…

The full moon looked so beautiful as it rose over the Rincon Mountains, with the sunset painting the sky with lovely pink hues. I was driving south on Houghton Road when I noticed this view. I snapped this photo after pulling the Jeep over to the side of the road and aiming my iPhone out the driver side window.

Fremantle2026 October 26 (Monday), 10:42AM Someone I used to know was fond of the saying that "mortar doesn't hold bricks together, it holds them apart." It seems like neither is true of this window at the Robert Jowitt warehouse: ← Previous My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au to leave a comment.