Congress Stands Up to Trump ... and Trump Stands Up to Congress Republican senators are starting to stand up to Donald Trump on a few issues. One of the big ones is the "SAVE America Act," which makes it more difficult to vote in a variety of ways. Trump really, really wants this bill but Republican senators do not. Passing it would require abolishing the filibuster (which Trump wants) but it is doubtful that there are 51 Republican votes for the bill in the Senate at all, even if the…
Pastors are often told that the solution to better AI output is a better prompt. I think that is only partly true. A better prompt can help. But if you have to re-explain your church, your sermon series, your theological boundaries, your congregation, your voice, and your approval standards every time you open an AI chat, the workflow is already leaking energy. That is not a small inconvenience for pastors. It is the difference between a tool that helps and a tool that becomes one more thing to…
John Gregory Dunne was married with Joan Didion. In 1973, he'd had enough of life, of his marriage, of more things; he left his wife and their child and moved to Las Vegas. As he left, he didn't know he was going to stay there for a year. This experience turned into a book: Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season. I am always being told things like that on first meeting, being told by strange women that they have cancer of the uterus, by men on airplanes that they have a colored mistress in St. Louis.…
My wife and I went to see the band Foreigner yesterday. If you’re not familiar with the band…like…have you been living under a rock!?!?! I promise you that you could have gone to the concert and you would have recognized 90% of the songs, just from hearing them in movies, TV shows, on the radio, singing them back in school, whatever. Let me give you a selection: Urgent Juke Box Hero I wanna know what Love is Cold as Ice Waiting for a Girl like You Feels like the first time Trust me — you know…
I stumbled upon this shrine while wandering in Kyoto. It commemorates a story involving boars, and the grounds are full of boar statues and figurines. The figurines contain fortunes, and people write wishes on the outside before leaving them around the shrine. I do not know why, but I found it fascinating.
I put out a game yesterday. You can check it out here: The game is called The Revisionist (or you can stylize the title as THE REVISIONIST as I have in the itch page). It's a relatively small project, with something like a 30 minute reading time in total. I highly recommend you check it out, because I poured a lot of myself into it despite its size, and also because this blog post is going to talk a lot about it. I wouldn't necessarily say I am going to "spoil" the game, because the nature of…
False, that I walk through a gray Tokyo evening, arms out like a windswept umbrella, crying to Jeff Buckley. False, that I have fallen in love. False, that my abs won’t show, no matter how long I plank on the ribbed mat. False, that I choked on a mackerel bone. Fickleness that knows few bounds. I reread my writing and wonder how I got so angry. These feelings don’t fit comfortably against such a soft, impressionable heart. These feelings compress me into arrest. I keep throwing my body against…
I called late 1990 "Silly Season" in pinball, but late 1991 manages to outdo it. Bally/Williams brings us Party Zone, bringing together the Party Animals, Party Monsters, and Party Dudes from Dennis Nordman's previous tables into one unhinged conclusion. They also conclude the roller-coaster series with Hurricane, which is not exactly their best work. Gottlieb, however, is bringing us their best with Class of 1812, doing the "legally distinct Monster Mash" theme before Bally does, in a game…
Enjoy the little things in life, like the unsubscribe button in an email taking you to a form requiring you to type in your full name and email address and reason for leaving, so you feed the email to SpamSieve instead, and then a few minutes later seeing that a brand new email from the same company went straight to spam because the filter knows how to file it appropriately now. Life’s too short not to appreciate the quiet moments of beauty.
When I planned my trip to Kyoto, I referenced the Noma in Kyoto magazine for ideas. I never made it to the pop-up, but I wish I had. They published this "magazine" that is really a full book, and it is a dense artifact of local culture, food, and craft. It highlighted Weekenders Coffee. I found that its roastery would be open on the day I was in Kyoto, and I went there. The coffee was excellent, and there was a beautiful garden in the back.
Table of Contents Why Hardwood What’s in Hardwood 1.0 Performance The Hardwood CLI Building Open-Source With AI A Big Thank You What’s Ahead Hardwood is a new Parquet library for the JVM, written from scratch to do one thing well: read (and soon, write) Apache Parquet files fast, with no mandatory dependencies. It is performance-focused and multi-threaded at its core, fanning page decoding out across all your CPU cores by default. Today, Hardwood reaches 1.0. After five preview releases since…
Returning to some of the older tapes that I used to do has been low-key revelatory on what I've been missing the during all those sessions in the past. One major point of tension I've realized and catch myself in realtime desire to *do something*, attempting to *do something*, pushing and applying mental force to *do something*. It's a natural reflex that oddly enough isn't as pervasive once I'm already projecting. And it isn't necessarily an issue with simply accessing those more immersive…
During Homebrew Website Club tonight, Joe reminded us of this quote as an attempt to end on a positive note: “What do we got on the spacecraft that’s good?” — Apollo 13 My motivation to write has been in a slump but there have been some good things recently, so it was a good nudge to document them. On Memorial Day weekend, I started taking walks around Golden Hill park. I did not set out with a plan to make it a daily thing, but I have kept at it. I usually go in the evening right before…
weather: ☀️ yeah it's summer critters: swallows is blocking even a function on bearblog? idk. but i don't want you reading my shit if you can't accurately identify techbro hyper-zoltar for what it really is (moloch). never speak to me, delete your account, throw your computer off a bridge. thanks 😘
In 2014 I decided to try my hand at writing a book. I did, and it was terrible. Then in 2018 I tried again and wrote something not terrible but not great. Neither of these books had anything in common. In art school you are told you need to pick a style, or create a style. That way you stand out and become something marketable. The same thing applies in writing but you also have to choose a genre as well. Most people use Steven King as an example for this. He writes horror novels. If you picked…
Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚 After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile. Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more…
If you are very lucky you may see a fire rainbow once or twice in your life. It sounds almost as if it could be the title of one of a series of children’s books – Harry Potter and the Fire Rainbow has a certain ring to it: but this phenomenon is not fiction. If you are in the right place and at the right time then a fire rainbow is something that you will remember. Image Credit Flickr User Emerging BirderImage Credit Flickr User PhillipCTo name it properly, a fire rainbow is a circumhorizontal…
How the New York Times changed its coverage of trans people from The Dissident. Spoiler alert: it's not great. I mean - the article/research is excellent. The outcome isn't.
This almost certainly has nothing to do with the surgery, but for some reason I am really up in the hizzy with the phlegm. Is it related to seasonal allergies? The weather? Male menopause? Some other mysterious condition that will eventually be revealed in an unrelated CT scan? I don’t know, but I’m going to check with my doctor, because I’ve learned not to fool around with this stuff anymore. Meanwhile, my body continues to increment toward normal, if you don’t count the phlegmpocalypse…
Perfume PosseParfums de Marly Les Extraits Heya Posse! Last year I dropped into Sydney’s Parfums de Marly flagship store in our historic and beautiful Strand Arcade. Michael is the manager there and I’ve known him for decades. He’s a lovely guy, still deeply connected to the… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseParfums de Marly Les Extraits
Much of my working life was spent among writers indifferent to the precision, clarity and stylishness of what they wrote. They flung words on the page (or screen) the way a bored child throws mud at the wall to see what sticks. They were abetted by editors concerned only with meeting deadlines and avoiding libel. These practices permitted a sort of reverse snobbery to thrive in the newsroom. A concern with writing good prose – not fancy, not “poetic,” just clear, accurate and cliché-free -- was…
Today I am returning to Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s opinions on crime fiction. Working alphabetically, I have previously covered authors beginning with ‘A’ and ‘B’. No surprises that I am now looking at crime writers whose surnames begin with ‘C’ and I was particularly looking forward to this section as I was intrigued to see what this duo made of John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie.
Thursday 25th June 2026 I enjoyed another Awayday in the fabulous North York Moors last Saturday and once again came away hugely impressed with the dedication of the volunteer team who put together and oversee the Moorsbus network serving this stupendously scenic National Park. I’ve blogged about Moorsbus before, in July 2018 and July 2021 as well as mentions in other blogs, not least last month’s round up highlighting the network is celebrating its 45th Anniversary this year… … so will try and…
On other platforms: Web, Apple Podcast, YouTube. The episode is in Italian, below my takeaway from the chat. In the latest years, A lot has changed in the way we work: AI, remote work, more intergenerational and intercultural teams, etc. How does the leadership evolved to keep up to speed with all these changes? That's what we discussed with Tomas Barazza, CEO and Founder of wethod. One of the key point of Tomas' leadership philosophy is autonomy and trust. Sharing information and…
I heard someone today describe today’s young entrepreneurs as the Christopher Columbus generation, meaning that they’re just declaring old things new. Amazing. The example used was dirty soda, which is really the oldest form of soda. Go back to the soda jerk and soda fountain days, and people were adding stuff to drinks all the time. A: I thought this was absolutely hilarious and true. And B: a brilliant musical concept. In the tradition of stealing art, why not? Take something you love, that…
A cute girl who loves violence marries the prince who dumped her thinking she was somebody else. I enjoyed this. It’s cute. But I can’t help comparing it to the recent “May I Ask for One Final Thing?”, which has a similar premise of a cute princess who punches things. And in comparison “Always a Catch!”… lacks a punch. I’m sorry. But really. It comes across as half-assed. The first episode ends with the prince pulling a total asshole move of publicly dumping his fiancee and mistaking her for…
An incomplete list of the Byzantine exarchs (vice-emperors) of the Exarchate of Ravenna.
Listen people. It’s Chinese communist isekai. How can you say no to that??? I’ve read the manga too. It’s complete slop but this is the slop I love and I’m not sorry about it. The character designs and art are way better than in the manga too. Everyone looks the same in the manga. The only bad point is that it’s very short at only eight episodes and barely gets things started before it ends. Still, great adaptation. I’ve watched very little out of mainland China—- usually I watch the first…
Wandering around Skipton, I spotted something a little different. Yes, the canals are lovely (more photos in a future post), but there is a tugboat serving crumble!Of course, I had to know more, so once I'd walked my lunch of Yorkshire pudding, sausages, mash and peas down, dessert was to be from the towpath. At a guess, this is a converted Bantam tug, although the superstructure seems more boxy than normal. Food is served through a hatch in the side, presumably it used to be the side window.…
Rating: 🟩 Type: Fiction
