UpdatesSunday afternoon of a bank holiday weekend here in Ireland, and the clocks have fallen backwards signalling the arrival of what feels like real winter. We're also in the middle of two storms, and from my window I can see a fairly choppy and grey Killiney Bay. This week, I've been pushing on with preparation for my (big) small business launch on 2nd November - mostly administrative tasks, but important to get ticked off. My biggest win was recabling and resetting my desk layout to be a…

Often, more often than not, a quote tweet gets more traction than the original.

Finished reading: Joyful Recollections of Trauma by Paul Scheer 📚 What a delightful read. As someone who still struggles with childhood trauma, I’m really inspired by how Paul has grown as a person and comes up with love for those who caused him pain. It’s also very funny.

A Whitetip Reef Shark zips close by. This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Scary Animal of the Month.’ See more responses here. I’ve dipped into the archives for this one, which is mostly water shots. What else did you think I meant by the headline? Captions on the photos as usual. A Devil’s Scorpionfish has poisonous spines and flashes colorful fins to warn off predators. Great Barracudas still give me the willies sometimes. They just look mean! They’re big and scary-looking, but Manta…

A fun and warm week (25ºC) after last weeks rain. I’ve enjoyed breakfast and evenings on the balcony every single day. But the clocks have gone back and it’s looking like awful weather for the foreseeable so I was glad to make the most of the sunny weather, including: Failing to watch the AEK game On tuesday my local team AEK were playing manchester city away in the champions league, so I thought I’d pop down to my favourite bar right outside the stadium to watch it with the locals at 10pm.…

What if the attempt you’re about to give up on is the one that finally changes your life? I genuinely believe life is all about chances. I’ve probably given myself over a million chances to lose weight. I’d start, make some progress, fall off and then tell myself I’ll start again on Monday. And guess what? Monday would come and I’d do the exact same thing loool. Fast forward 6 years and the chance I gave myself a year ago today actually paid off. I’m finally down 30kg. Same thing with 75 Hard.…

lazy I don't feel like writing in German today. I've been on a roll, averaging one English journal post per month. Well, today I'm breaking it. Bye bye, roll. I can't express myself as freely in German. Which is fine, for the most part. The Sunday entries are more like a recap of the week. But there's not much to recap this week. I just feel like whining and it's harder to do that in German because first I need to write and then I need to correct and then rewrite again. One paragraph takes me…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***DC comics are back.But do they have much front?Thanks to the power of television, a brand new heroine makes her debut and the world of comics will never be the same again!Exactly what happens in this month's main strip is sketchy within my mind but I do know it's all delivered by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano and titled Isis... As in Crisis!Happily, the tale also includes her…

Fontaines D.C. hold onto the top spot for a second week with “Marianne”, while Death Cab for Cutie slides into second place with “Stone Over Water” and Alabama Shakes‘ “I Feel Hope Coming” moves up to #3. The Foo Fighters enter the top 10 with “Window”. Once again there are two new entries to my chart, the first being “Who’s That” by Philadelphia-based rock band The War on Drugs. Formed in 2005 by Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile, the band has undergone numerous changes in lineup and presently…

An outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza on a US mink farm that has been raging for months raises serious questions about public health, animal welfare, and the influence of commercial interests on government decisions. If it were a chicken farm, the hens would have been slaughtered within days, if not hours. But, mink are so much more valuable than chickens… ProPublica asks whether this could be ground zero for the next pandemic. Mink are mammals and susceptible to influenza viruses just as we are.…

San Francisco, City in Crisis: A full 23½ hours later, the Arch-Diabolo situation remains undealt with. #SFHellscape

I tend to get milia on my chest. The aesthetician didn't know why that would ever happen and made me feel like some weird edge case of a human being, but getting my face smushed for 50 minutes made me forget that affront pretty quickly. This was a nice experience. Unnecessarily expensive, because I ended up getting something I never wanted, but while lying there, getting every pore of my upper body cleaned out, I decided to consider it a good investment in having something to draw about that…

While Masters of the Universe has been out of theaters for sometime now and wasn't a hit, it's apparently been quite successful on Amazon Prime and the physical media versions (Blu-Ray, DVD, and 4K Blu-Ray) just came out last week and seem to be strong sellers. I really liked the movie and I'm still holding out hope that the numbers for streaming and toy sales are strong enough that Amazon wants to visit Eternia again. There was a fairly strong toy presence at retail but one issue that I think…

During one beautiful weekend back at the very start of summer my super amazing wife and I had found ourselves in that most between-DC-and-New York of cities, Philadelphia! This was a city we had both visited in the past, and purportedly on purpose (long-time readers will of course recall my Peace Corps Staging took place in Philly). Our main goal in this trip was to see our friend, but besides that our main goal was going to be art. On my super amazing wife’s previous trip to Philadelphia she…

Quality and Health Licensure and Regulation People Projects Funding Collective Action Recruiting Education Advocacy and Pressure Politics Opening the Floor Again Yes, another late-in-the-day Sunday post means that I only realized that I should write it late Saturday night. Last month, I put together a post talking about the current threats in Free Software and Free Culture more broadly, how these threats build on the flaws in the movement from the start, and tried to think about how to…

Different echo chambers, different prevailing views on AI. Fascinating.

There are two major ways of assessing the quality of our understanding of a phenomenon: Prediction, and Explanation.Prediction feels extremely powerful because it seems to be proving its deep understanding by having reality speak on its behalf. You want proof that I understand how the planets move? Well let me tell you exactly where Jupiter will be in the sky on an arbitrary day.That's powerful indeed.🔭 Ptolemy's epicycles predicted planet positions well enough to be used for over a thousand…

AI builds everything as this huge monster of too much, and now I feel like I’m iterating by trimming things back and perfecting it over time. It’s a bit like working from clay, and allowing the software underneath to expose itself in the…

A few days after I returned from Maine, I made an impulsive choice to take another short vacation, or more of an extended weekend. The idea was to plan as little as possible: find a place to hike nearby, book a hotel or Airbnb, and just do it instead of thinking about it for months. It worked — I followed through this time. I was pretty much able to turn off my mental “work mode” without issues, which hasn’t been easy the last few vacations. The fact that I use my work phone when I’m out…

✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: Muse-ings, AdFection, way too many leaks, and... 4 🌞 Good News!: More publishers are filing AI lawsuits; a Mayor on Mastodon; and excluding AI "authors" from ebook searches. 🐘 Toots and Memes and Such: Data literacy & every fxcking website, slop edition. 📯 The Post-Script: The Curious Engineer & Why is Everyone in Tech so Sad? Cropped, edited, and glitched image. Original images by Bernd Dittrich and Makarios Tang on Unsplash. 📟 Short-Form…

12 fantasy CreaturesBesides using the Schema in the previous article I used a bunch of random tables from various sources for inspiration of monsters, their descriptions and abilities. BeaknidCommon. Harmless. Fragile. Curious, swimming, hides in depths. None. Flees from fast movement and danger. A fast, tiny aquatic creature that has white hair and long frog like limbs. They make a bubbling sound. When it moves it's body rotates like a rotor blade, propelling itself though the water with its…

When I first came across Ina Garten’s roasted sausage and grape recipe, I was skeptical. But one bite was all it took: the grapes turned jammy and caramelized, releasing this tangy-sweet, almost wine-like burst of flavor. It was so unexpected and quickly became a favorite dish. And they turned out to be the perfect burst of sweetness for my Roasted Cauliflower & Grape Salad with Honey-Dijon Vinaigrette! They perfectly balanced the cumin-rosemary-paprika-spiced cauliflower. Peppery arugula keeps…

The hunt for a new flat-share continues to dominate my thoughts, time and energy. The options seem few and far between. I’ve done one viewing since last week. Commiserating through Ghassan Kanafani and Shabjdeed. Reading captions and turning corners in the Ancient Egypt wing at ROM until I overhear someone say look at what they once did and look at them now. Celebrating a couple of birthdays at the Rivoli, drinking a no-proof. I gifted my friend fancy Japanese pens, a birding-for-beginners card…

The last couple of weekends I’ve been to two cons in a row: Fantasycon at the Crowne Plaza in Glasgow, and the one-day Pictcon 2 at the Salutation Hotel in Perth. Fantasycon is just like a science fiction convention, but without the science, and somehow more relaxed. I went to a lot of panels and events – GoH interviews, book launches, the awards ceremony – and enjoyed it all. Pictcon, which describes itself as a ‘Scottish science fiction and fantasy convention about science fiction and fantasy…

For the past few months, our local birding group has seen piles of large felled tree trunks in Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, near the Magnolia Collection. As we walked by last week, we saw piles of lengthwise wood planks finished on two sides. This week we saw a portable sawmill in action, as workers cut logs into lumber, repositioning the cant (unfinished log) on the machine for the cut. From my photo, you can see a cloud of sawdust rising from the sawmill as the log is cut…

My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “A Creative State of Mind Starts with Curiosity and Pronoia.” I’ve been wanting to explore these topics in a new book, but the way I was going about it wasn’t very useful. In the spirit of publishing before making it perfect the second time, I decided to take some ideas I was already exploring and post them. I stopped saving the good stuff, and started posting them as best as I could. People who might find the work useful don’t need to wait…

For my Wilderness Stocking – Expanded, we repurpose the “Treasure” results from the standard B/X Stocking Procedures to reflect a Resource that might be useful to the Players. While there are a few prompts included, I decided it might be helpful to flesh this out with a d100 Table of their own for more specific starting points and ideas. As with most of my Wilderness Tables, sometimes a little adjustment is necessary to reflect the local Terrain, Climate, Geology, Flora, and Fauna but in most…

Practise for the ECS Health, Safety and Environmental Awareness Assessment with all 327 questions from the official revision guide, including a timed mock exam.

Big bull case for AI is science

It’s been raining entirely too frequently this week, and I’m over it. The constant power cuts are annoying! Social On a bit of a whim we booked tickets for me, Swapnil, and Mayank to watch Street Fighter on Wednesday to take advantage of the day of. The movie was equal parts gritty and funny, and by not taking itself too seriously it elevated the experience IMO. I was mostly watching for Callina Liang (😍💖) but was surprised to see Jason Momoa sneak in a pretty good performance in there as well!…