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
Last week I took some days off for a family event. It was a lovely trip. It’s commonplace to dread flying in the United States these days, and so it was terrific that it was uneventful. In addition to family time which I won’t share, Kelly and I got to tool around D.C. and Virginia a bit. Kelly had not been to the area since ’81 when Reagan was shot. And we got to go to a great museum: National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s a great example of how long the struggle to get…
Last fall, My close friend, Chelsea Matisz gave a wonderful TEDx Talk called, “How modern life could affect gut health”. Last fall, I had the opportunity to speak at TEDxCalgary about an idea I’ve been thinking about for years: the way that many modern struggles stem from the mismatch between the world our gut and brains evolved for, and the world we live in today.
Faces float and fly through our brains. Kicking pebbles, wearing backpacks, laughing about the school day, your friends flicker past you with red cheeks and windswept hair on cool and crisp walks home. Silverware clinking, gravy boats dripping, your family sits in thick holiday sweaters under a sparkly chandelier amongst half-filled wine glasses and steamy bowls of brussel sprouts. Furnace quietly clicking, clock slowly ticking, your boyfriend lies beside you on the patchy corduroy couch in the…
Two weeks ago, I quietly pushed up a new look for this website. Some redesigns happen over a year or two; others happen over a few months. Neither one’s easy, mind you, but this one’s the latter. A month or so back, I told an old friend I was in the middle of redesigning this little site. She laughed and said, “Again?!” Which, you know, extremely and completely fair! The last design went up in March of last year, giving it a little more than 15 months in the sun. I loved it when it went up, and…
Hello, loves! I think that the animated spikes are the last challenge for the new content scheme. Are we up to it? Let’s find out. An interesting comparison came to mind, between the old scheme and the new one. In the old scheme, I was creating classes that were intended to support multiple dungeon objects with different appearance and even somewhat different behavior. Buttons and spikes were instances of DungeonControl class. Using that scheme, I was continually striving to create reusable…
Hello, loves! A quick report on removing the old content objects in favor of the new. It goes quite well. I moved the new CombinedContent and ContentFactory to a file in the src tree. I figure I’ll keep them in just one file as they go together. Then I modified all the tests that used old content, basically just using an object from the ContentFactory instead: factory = ContentFactory() spikes = factory.spikes(name='spikes') That replaces an old spikes=Animated('spikes') line. Did that…
Every technological cycle is really a cycle of power. This is not a controversial observation when said about the ones we consider historical — the creation of the printing press and the resulting power of distributed narratives; the creation of the railroad and the resulting power of transportation; the creation of the mechanical loom and the power of production. But, it becomes harder to perceive the connection between technology and power when we’re in the midst of a cycle. Nevertheless, the…
Last week was the Origins game con. The folks running it seemed pretty disorganized this year and I was tempted to bail after the train wreck of registering for games, but we'd gotten a non-refundable hotel room so we pressed on. In the end we played some good games, played one game that sounded good but is definitely not for us (better to find out this way), and met up with someone I met online to play a game we hadn't been able to get into (which was a highlight, both the game and the…
I drove out to Las Cienegas National Conservation Area in hopes of grabbing some lightning shots over the open ‘prairies’ in the area. I find the area around Sonoita and Elgin so enjoyable because it reminds me so much of the flat landscape out on the Great Plains. Mother Nature decided to take her storms further south, so I just took a bunch of shots in the area. I met another photographer (@jessemophoto on Instagram) and we had a very pleasant conversation. I’m pleased with these shots.…
Yesterday I wrote about being in a bad place, mental health wise. If you don't want to click, the TL;DR is that I got levelled by a panic attack. In truth I'm still feeling the aftershocks and reverberations ~30 hours later. My vision is still a bit blurry. There's a high pitched sound in my ears. My pelvic floor is still hypotonic and is causing issues with my hip and my sciatic nerve. So, yeah, physically I'm a wreck. But somewhere in the late afternoon my brain came back online. It's…
Discovered a frustrating macOS 26.5.1 in iMessages. While I can send and receive SMS and RCS messages to Android users on my iPhone, I can only receive them on a Mac or iPad. I’m not alone in this as I’ve seen several reports. Most point to the same timing of the bug appearing after macOS 26.5.1 was released, although some as early as 26.5. There is talk of it being possibly corrected in 26.6. Given all the attention and focus on the OS 27 releases, here’s hoping that’s correct and 26.6 rolls…
My colleague Richard Rothaus and I have been including the Hadji Mustafa fountain on our afternoon walks around the village of Corinth. In fact, we visit it so often that we’ve become friendly with the local working dogs (but not too friendly) who protect a flock of sheep nearby. I’ve been working on getting a good photo of the fountain with uneven success (usually because I do things like forget to change my camera’s ISO settings or insist on shooting wide open or some insanity). I’ve tried to…
Walking into a school cafeteria in the 1970s meant more than just finding a seat. The moment you set your lunchbox down on that long, noisy table, every kid around you took notice. Before you even opened it, a silent verdict had already been passed. That small rectangular box, usually dented, always loud when it […]
Thanks to Steve Baron for alerting me to a Facebook post from yesterday that brought to light a car I wasn't aware existed. Austin Street Railway 63 is the last surviving (as far as I know!) car from that city's system. It's always fun to find a previously unknown survivor.This car is a Birney, obviously enough. According to Harold Cox's book on Birneys, Austin 63-65 were acquired secondhand from Southwestern Gas & Electric, the street railway in Texarkana, Arkansas. The date of their…
Here is some child-rearing equipment that we only began using the fourth time around: Glass bottles, like Philips Avent. We used Playtex disposable liners before and now regret it: what we got in convenience was not worth the cost in money, raw materials, and potential plastics exposure. Our biggest fear going into it was having glass shards all over the house from my sleepily mishandling a bottle at 3am. But no breakages yet! These Avent bottles are quite sturdy — I would expect them to chip…
