Today many people probably have not heard of the movie Conrack (1974), directed by Martin Ritt. It received mixed to positive reviews upon its release, and it did somewhat poorly at the box office. Regardless, it is significant for its portrayal of life on Daufuskie Island (fictionalized in the film as Yamacraw Island), as well as one of the earlier portrayals of trick-or-treating in a feature film.Conrack (1974) was based on the book The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, which was based on his…

I’m also very proud of my wife, who after a 6am flight this morning arrived home to find her pack of “get out the vote” postcards that should have come a couple of weeks ago. The deadline for sending them was technically yesterday so she filled out all 100 and got them in the mail today.

Dear Las Vegas, This is why we refused to spend a gazillion dollars on buying the Raiders a new stadium. Love, - Oakland PS: Have they started blaming you for their poor record yet? Get ready.

There are a lot of “sophomore slumps” in television, but the second season of The Agency just knocked it out of the park.The focus of Martian in this go-around is two-fold —To capture “Viking,” the American solider who turned traitor and is working with the Russian mercenary group ValhallaTo free his lover, Samia, from her abduction by the Sudanese (or is it the Iranians?)This intersects with Daniela’s undercover work in Iran, which was an unfulfilled subplot in season one. And of course, there…

about humble beginnings and gratitude for all the support

Subscribe and Listen: https://youtu.be/bqVoaq8OqjM🎙️ The PHP2Shell Reality Check and Autonomous Agent FrictionThis week demonstrated the operational friction of autonomous models. We started Monday with enterprise platforms treating agentic systems as literal insider threats… and by Tuesday, OpenAI confirmed its own internal agents weakened misalignment monitoring during routine coding tasks. By Wednesday, the entire industry was scrambling when PHP’s maintainers disclosed the PHP2Shell remote…

The first thing you need to know about Beatrix is that she is the sort of person who reads the fine print. Don’t ask her to sign her name to anything unless you’d like to wait while she reads every word and fully understands what it is she is signing. She ordered her absentee ballot weeks ago. She knew we’d be picking it up from her in person (to deliver to the ballot box, in person — we’re not trusting the USPS this cycle) so she had plenty of time to spend on it. This is the first time she’s…

I print a very limited number of calendars each year for my friends. This year I was asked if I would post some of the pages in order to share them with a wider audience. So here are four pages that you may find interesting. Click through them to see them in full. The map […]

Happenings This was a week off with my wife and my eldest son (youngest was still in childcare). Took him to a really cool play center, with everything made of wood (a nice change from softplay, actually). Took him pumpkin picking in the middle of a rainstorm. This was probably ill-advised, but it was genuinely character-building for him, as initially he was freaked out by the harsh conditions and wanted to come home, but he rallied. Had my friend and his partner round, was nice to have some…

Quoted NYC coffee shop serves up pumpkin spice lattes — inside real pumpkins by Shane Galvin (New York Post) The Coffee Lab in Astoria is drawing eyes and lines for their $15 fall bevs including Pumpkin Spice Lattes, Pumpkin Biscoff Lattes, Caramel Apple Latte, Maple Sea Salt Lattes, and many more — offered Ice or hot — all served in hollowed-out gourds that fit in the palm of your hand. I read a report (such as this is) in the New York Post titled NYC coffee shop serves up pumpkin spice lattes…

Stephen Fry: Like London and the wider human world, the world of Holmes and Watson is a work in progress, capable of being modernised and made over in countless ways, but always, underneath it all, entirely its noble and magnificent self. ~ Link: Stephen Fry: ‘Sherlock Holmes altered the course of my whole life’, by Stephen Fry, The Guardian (From the introduction in * Sherlock: Short Story Anthology*)

A twisted and gnarled tree on the shore of Lake Whitney at Central Texas’ Lake Whitney State Park. The post Gnarled on the Shore appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I was visiting a newly-opened Asian grocery store and picked up UGUQ Corn Juice on a lark. Have a seat near me on this green velvet couch as I pop it open and imbibe: Smell You open it and, right away, it smells like sweet corn. Texture The texture is unfortunate. Like a homemade thick soy milk, except maybe a little thicker. Like the thick texture of a European apricot juice from a carton. There is a small amount of corn pulp in this juice, so it’s not one of those totally smooth and filtered…

I have posted a recap video of my storm chasing experiences with the Monsoon Season here in Arizona in 2026. Enjoy! And if you know anyone that is interested in this sort of thing, please send them along to my YouTube channel. As a privacy note: because I produced this video at 60fps, it is a very large file. I am currently searching for a place where I can host this video that is not connected with YouTube. I will update this post when I find a location. (PeerTube will not work for me in this…

Not too shabby, if also not quite what I hoped when I started this build. Assumed audience: Folks who like reading about endurance sports and training. Back at the end of September, I ran the Boulderthon Marathon as my fall goal race — my third consecutive year participating somehow in the Boulderthon event. As always, the numbers up front: Official time: 2:53:36 (6:37/mile) Place: 5/2,588 overall 5/1,742 among men 1/202 among men 35 – 39 Yep, you’re reading that right: I won my age group and…

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I talk with returning guest Matthew Bradford about everything that happened in the final episode of season 6 of Slow Horses. We talk about crowbars, birthday parties and beaches. Plus differences from the books, who is coming back next season and that shocking death. Finally, what does it mean for the show now that it’s diverging so far from the book series? All that and more in this…

[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, crossposted from their site. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In our September 29 recommendations, we outlined an approach to the release of AI-generated mathematical output by AI labs. Since then, we have been asked by people from multiple labs and by several mathematicians about a specific aspect of the recommendations — that the development of…

Ships of the Fleet, Vol. 4: Venus Fleet – a supplement for Dream Pod 9’s Jovian Chronicles game – is plagued by minor inconsistencies and errors of detail. Fortunately, it is also possessed of substantial strengths, proving itself useful for tactical and roleplaying games alike. Recommended. Originally Published in Pyramid Magazine – August 11th, 2000 Being truly excellent is a double-edged sword: On the one hand, of course, you’re excellent – and that comes with a lot of perks. On the other…

cat prints files. acat plays them. That's the whole idea. I built it today, and I've been smiling about it all afternoon. Why I had a recording of an X Space I'd hosted, sitting in my home directory as an mp4. I wanted to listen to it. Not open an app, not drag it into a window, not wait for something with a library and an account to wake up. I just wanted to hear it, from the place I already was: my terminal. So I typed what felt natural: acat song.mp3 And then I made it work. (The first thing…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay is filled with inspiration for both writers and teachers of writing. Ander Monson wrote of the book: “The lyric essay is at heart…

don't look at me you won't like what you see I think and show you another piece maybe it's something small no one else knows about me no harm really I just wonder what you see and you know I won't say don't look at me

I guess iPadOS didn’t get the memo about menu icons yet. Thanks Fuchen!

Here is curious fiber / linoleum game board of sorts produced in the 1930s by the Armstrong Cork Company in Pennsylvania. For some reason they called it their “Quaker Rug line” of flooring.It was aimed at children’s rooms, but I have seen images of salvaged pieces found lining walls in sideshow and gaming type locations. It is flexible and bends. The overall size is 18” x 19”. Weird product and weird name, as traditionally Quaker members discouraged gaming type objects and toys. “Quaker’ floor…

i wrote a big thing about privacy and cybersecurity and the law and justice and other unfairness baked into the structure of society. it was long winded. the jist is i dislike that everything on the computer can, will, and is currently being used against me; retroactively and into the future. But it only really will be used that way if you get in the way of a powerful institution. and i think that notion produces a melancholic effect in people. i know it does for me. maybe i'm thinking about it…

Someone writing an article for the Israeli press about “people abroad who love Israel but might be worried” emailed me the following questions: “1. What is something about Israel that you admire/appreciate over the years? 2. What are you worried the most about Israel these days?” So I replied as follows: “It’s hard to know where to start with either of your questions! But briefly: Tiny Israel standing up for itself, against an often hostile and unjust world, is a huge part of what’s given me…

I recently ran once more into the tangle drasvi recorded here; litmus is: From Middle English litmose, lytmose, litemose, from Old Norse litmosi (“moss used for dyeing”), from lita (“to dye, stain”), from litr (“colour, dye, blee”), from Proto-Germanic *wlitiz, *wlituz (“appearance, blee”), from Proto-Indo-European *wel- (“to see”) + mosi (“moss”). Cognate with Old English wlite (“appearance, form, brightness, countenance”). And Dutch lakmoes is: From Middle Dutch lecmoes (1252), Middle Dutch…

It feels like the band is getting back together, with all the tooling I used to use coming back into my life. Earlier this this month I started using OmniFocus again on account of it working the same way my brain did. In a similar vain, I was surprised and happy to see Zachary’s Notational Velocity, and Brett Terpstra’s nvALT fork both get updates, which let them run on modern macOS. Notational Velocity was another tool I first learned about from Back to Work in the early 2010s. It’s…

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons. The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer have…

While I mentioned a few weeks back that I'm now recovering from AI Psychosis, that doesn't mean I've given up on the technology completely. I'm writing more emails, and engaging with human beings as much as I can, and that part's been great. I still use agents as a glorified typewriter to generate code, and still very much get my hands in the dirt and sling code myself. I've also gotten quite obsessed with the idea of writing backend services in Go, and bundling all of the frontend code and…

Watched the livestream from Paris of the route presentation for next year's Tour de France, which will pass through Scotland, England and Wales. I probably won't make it to the Grand Départ in Edinburgh given the eye-watering hotel prices, but fortunately the next two stages start and finish within a couple of hours' drive of my parents. I joined a friend in Leicester Square on Thursday for a stand-up comedy show by Generation Z comedian Finlay Christie. I came away with mixed views on the…