Yassss, it's Halloween cake time! I look forward to these all year!I like to split my favorite spooky sweets into two categories: cute and creepy. And this week we are all about the cute: (By Meng Jo Fong in Malaysia)Who knew a stitched together monster could have such adorable widdle ears? This roly-poly bat has a glitter bow tie: [By Whipped Bakeshop in Pennsylvania]And the teeny wings! Ack! Some lucky one-year-old got the world's most stylin' pumpkin cake: (By Jenny's Haute Cakes in…

FediWriMo 2026 Announcement FediWriMo 2026 #FediWriMo2026 is quickly approaching. Here are all the details for the upcoming #FediWriMo event: The event schedule is as follows: 🖋️ Dates: November 1st - 30th, 2026. 🖋️ The goal is to #write a 50,000 word novel over the 30 days of the event. 🖋️ Making the effort is more important than achieving the goal. 🖋️ Posting excerpts is optional. 🖋️ Usage of AI Writing Tools is not allowed for this event. Human creativity is the focus of this challenge. 🖋️…

Watch the 7-minute video above, or keep reading if you prefer the written word. Here’s a question that keeps me up at night: Why do photographers get so intimidated by editing down to their best images and the “now what?” that comes once we put the camera down? And are we missing really important creative opportunities because of this? For years, I’ve been signing my letters to you with the words “for the love of the photograph,” because I do. And so you do you. Nothing else explains the time…

In 2011 PreSonus released the 1818VSL, an 8-channel audio interface, with low-latency mixing software. I wrote: All I really need is a box with some amplifying inputs that send tracks from the mic to the laptop and some outputs that let me send mixes back out again. Then any sort of complex eq, compression, or other effects can happen in software on the laptop. So I got one: it's a Presonus AudioBox VSL1818, with eight usable inputs and eight usable outputs. At the time I did worry about how…

I write about things here that plenty of people would rather keep to themselves. Dating, sex, rejection, aging, AI companions, and the sometimes embarrassing business of wanting affection while also wanting to be left the hell alone. That makes this a candid blog. It doesn’t make it a complete inventory of my life. Anonymity gives me room to speak openly, but I still have to decide what belongs in public. Something can be true, relevant to me, and worth writing down without belonging on a…

2026-10-25Hello! 1,111 words of unique text as counted by a writing program. I've really rambled for this one.What is this website for? The easiest answer is that it serves as a creative portfolio to show off my work. But, to be honest, I'm not proud of all the work here! I wouldn't want to show half these photos to a client, and I don't!Okay, so it's a blog. That word means so many different things, but I'll choose to interpret it as a web-based journal made public. That's a bit more accurate,…

John Gruber has been going on about how X remains the platform where all the interesting action still happens. That the worst of the rank muskiness has receded. That playing host to Barack’s thoughtful, sharp and eloquent essay is reason enough to reconsider the platform. I was convinced. So I spent Saturday afternoon culling down my Following list with the help of DS V4.1 Flash in the OpenChamber browser. I took down all the “find me on mastodon” links on my profile. I waited 24 hours to…

We have been to several autumn festivals at Faith Lutheran church, but yesterday was the first time I've taken part in the hayride. Last night, as the full moon rose, and just before the sun sank at the horizon, a tractor pulled a low flatbed with hay bales around the back field of the church. It was gorgeous, and I have no pictures, and I am fine with that.It was so delightful that I went a second time, later. We stopped to pick up some pumpkins out of the side field on the way back. We had…

In 2016 Jack Shear wrote a blogpost called Just Use Bears which was the premise that you can use the Bear Statblock for any creature. This article provides 12 templates that you can use as a base for any creature, which expands in scope from a solitary statblock. Each template uses a Schema that is derived from two sources: The Reach of the Roach God an out of print, hard to find, OSR book; the second is an article that expands the original schema called Lore Blocks. I have combine the two. The…

A tree (a beautiful weeping willow) fell down in our favorite park during last night's storm. People passing by were genuinely sad. Unfortunately, today the wind wasn't steady enough to properly fly our kites. The afternoon will be spent inside playing Switch Sports Resort. Switched cameras with dad again. This time I used the GFX100RF. This is way more in line with my weight preferences. Beautiful camera. 👉 View 3 more images

There’s a fracture in my mind. Between who I am and who I was, between who I am and who I think I am, between who I think I am and who I want to be. I guess everyone has that fracture and everyone feels like they’re the only one. Deciding to quit my industry has forced me to think of what I want to do. What do I want? What even are my values? What life do I want to live? Who am I? Who even am I? This question keeps coming to me. How do I define myself? There’s my love for my hometown, sure.…

Interesting Atlantic interview by Charlie Warzel with PHP developer and security hero Ondrej Surý in the wake of that almost Black October internet meltdown last week. Surý is a relatively unknown volunteer working on a relatively unknown, but incredibly important programming language known as PHP. PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page” and was a language used to create websites. The name was changed to mean “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, which is a recursive abbreviation where part of…

📷 281/365 - Always watching

The clock at East Boldon was spotted from the train on my journey from central Newcastle to Middlesborough, to see the Turner Prize exhibition at MIMA. Its location close to a Metro station meant that it was worth going back to investigate. The clock stands by a garage on the main road. However, it seems to have “major” controversy in 1989 when it was moved to its current site from Black’s Corner, further along the road. The issue seemed to be that the clock was now longer on the bus route, and…

Whenever a company asks me to review their gadgets, I always ask if it is USB-C powered. If not, I'm not interested. So, welcome to the future where your chair is USC-C rechargeable! WHAT?! The LiberNovo Omni looks like a standard office chair - but has two secret features. First, is that it is exceedingly comfortable. Full foam cushions, lovely headrest, and a recline which almost gets you horizontal. Second, it is USB-C powered. There's a small battery pack which plugs in to the chair. Why?…

Draftline — Yet more writing software. I’ve been playing around with it, and I’m really liking it so far. It has some really nifty features, offers a lot of what I’ve been looking for in a non-Scrivener application. Matcha Mountain — Adorable animated short about a little old lady who lives on a mountain made of matcha, and one day discovers someone in need of her help. Encyclopedia of Invisibility — “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility is an object that includes information that has been deemed…

This blog post is a weekly update of my journey in Djangonaut Space , an 8-week mentoring program for future open source developers in the Django ecosystem. Series: 3… 2… 1… becoming a Djangonaut Djangonaut Log 1: Lift-off and first week in Djangonaut Space Debugging a flaky test — how I methodologically tamed an annoying bug Assumptions are sneaky Djangonaut Log 2: Leaving the atmosphere and first merged contributions (you are here) Last week, I started making my first contributions and first…

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Noirvember(the month to celebrate all things Film Noir) begins next Sunday. To say I am excited would be an understatement(it’s my favourite month of the year). Celebrations will begin even sooner here in the UK. The UK’s only Film Noir festival is back for its third year. Film Noir Fest 2026 gets underway in Weston-Super- Mare on October 30th, and runs until November 1st. You can book tickets, passes and find out screening times on the festival’s website…

Without really having any art school training, I started thinking about what ‘post-AI art’ means relative to ‘postmodern art’, so thought I’d start with the structure of a text on postmodernism. What is post-AI? Post-AI was a reaction against AI. AI and generative art were generally based on idealistic observations around generativity in nature, a futurist vision of agentic life in society, and a belief in unbounded accelerationism. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or…

I have released Outpost for the ZX Spectrum 48k! I started working on this game in April 2021 or, at least, that was my first commit in the repo. It is likely that I started bootstrapping and working on some ideas a bit before that. And it is 2026, so what happened? When I made Brick Rick: Graveyard Shift for the ZX Spectrum 128k I wrote my own library from scratch, and all the sprite routines required a lot of learning. And learning sometimes requires writing stuff that you end not using. When…

★★★★: Tightly written, not a moment is spared. Tea Gives you all the twists, even if they aren't obvious on the first watch. There are a _lot_ of time jumps, maybe too many. I imagine it's hard to follow on a first watch. But the whole thing comes together so excellently it's hard to say the editing didn't work. There's never been such an excellent story of determination, rivalry, obsession, and revenge. FYI: My reviews are scored out of 4. Also, thanks for subscribing to my RSS feed and…

This is an external post of mine, originally published at Extending BlogShake with Per-Tag Atom Feeds.

Sometimes, an innocent-seeming game can have a deeper rabbit hole than you think. Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden seems to be a normal Nichibutsu strip mahjong game, on somewhat earlier hardware than Koi no Magic Potion. But there’s some weird stuff going on beneath the surface, with a lot more variations than I’d expect even from Nichibutsu. So let’s take a quick look. WARNING: This is a strip mahjong game! There is no explicit nudity in this post, but there might be a picture or two of a pretty…

Congratulations to the University of Central Florida! Our college football team defeated #2 BYU yesterday!

Can you believe it guys? Halloween is just a week away! And like every sunday this month, let’s feature a spooky game! In Ticket To Nowhere, you are a train conductor, taking care of everything on board: Speed, direction, and also the most annoying passengers ever seen. But there is something out there you have to outrun. Can you handle everything at once? You can play the game here.

Walang Mabanaag (Unable to Decipher) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (University of the Philippines Press, 2026) “Never mistranslate. Translation is sacred,” says a character (in subtitles, of course) in Bong Joon Ho’s film Okja (2017). In Walang Mabanaag, the latest offering from the prolific Filipino writer Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, the poet-translator has committed an

Clocks went back and I didn’t notice. But mancub did. So I got beaten until I climbed out of bed to feed the little bastard. MONDAY is the last day you can talk to your local comic shop to order GHOST DRIVE STATION. Nobody orders for the shelf any more unless it’s a big DC or Marvel book. Your chances of seeing a copy on a shelf are slim to none. And comics shops need a signal that someone is going to buy something ahead of its publication date. If they don’t get that signal? They just won’t…

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).The Latest Drippings ☕️Apple Music Has a Hidden iPod You Can Play With. Earlier in the week, I had mentioned that I was working on modernizing an old iPod to have a new 3800mAh battery and…

October 19, 2026Fall has settled in, as much as any season ever does. After one big cold front, we’ve had a lovely stretch of near-perfect days. Warm afternoons, cool mornings, not too hot, not too cold - Goldilocks would approve. I approve.Do you see the woman watching over us in these clouds as clearly as I do?We’ve had some clear, still mornings with gentle fog. We’ve had some amazing sunrises as the pinks and reds of cooler temperatures start to appear. I’m enjoying the dawn light again,…