June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation. I’m going to share one extra link up here with you though, but it’s not my fault if it wrecks your productivity! My friend Kris Jenkins has written this devishly simple but addictive browser-based game: Escape the Moon.
The English-educated Chinese in Malaysia are dying out, and that could be a good thing. I am what many Malaysians would call a banana: Chinese, but more proficient in English. To others, I’m not “banana” enough, because by some freak of geography and luck, I can converse badly in Mandarin and in a rare form of Hokkien, the northern version spoken in Penang. But that doesn’t mean I’m Chinese enough for the Chinese-educated, who still firmly consider me a banana because I can’t read well, nor…
Sometimes you get to known more of yourself and an issue by arguing the opposite site of what you believe in. I believe in (A): a free (as in speech) and anonymous global web is a net (no pun intended) positive to the world Taking the other side could mean (B): a free and anonymous global web is a net negative Or ( C): a controlled and identifiable local web is a net positive There are so many ways to cut it, and frankly we live in a mixture of ABC depending at which issue our part of the…
Many times in Germany. But never in the south of Germany. Munich remains a place I would like to visit. That’s where we are heading today on the blog. It is possible that the band Bismarck Idaho best known fact is that Momus produced four out of 5 tracks of the band’s one and only release, the “Beckenbauer EP” CD from 1994. The EP was released by the label Blickpunkt Pop (BP 001) ran by Marc Liebscher, also Munich based. This label is well known for having releasing the band Sportfreunde…
During the 1950s, Martin Caidin was the official historian for America’s Fifth Air Force during his stint in A-2 military intelligence. In that capacity, he had full access to military combat files. In his book “Ghosts of the Air,” he described a story he found in one of those files that was reported from air force operations in North Africa during WWII--a story that he admitted was “flatly impossible” but that was nevertheless “witnessed, and attested to, by several hundred officers and men of…
I realize this puts me at risk of being one of those people who uses tragedies as an excuse to flog a pet cause, but it's a topic that deserves more attention. Europe's heatwave 'linked to 1,300 deaths' as more records broken by Neil MurphyEurope's unprecedented early summer heatwave may be responsible for hundreds of excess deaths, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).Temperature records were broken across the continent again on Sunday – including in Germany, Poland and…
From William Paterson -
In what has been a mediocre year for new writing with too many incomplete-feeling shows rushed to the stage or not fulfilling their dramatic potential – notably Under the Shadow at the Almeida and Relics at the Lyric Hammersmith along with both The Misanthrope and Pride at the National Theatre all getting sidetracked from their […]
First and foremost, a massive thank you and congratulations to Robert James Russell for guest editing Shenandoah 75.2’s comics section. I sometimes tell my classes, the ultimate goal of any course is to make the teacher irrelevant. A version of that aphorism is proving more true of my eight-year role as Shenandoah‘s comics editor. Which is to say, this is not the first time I’ve handed over complete control and then been happily wowed by the results. Robert also teaches comics making, so his…
Overcast and humid. The aspen sapling in my yard sports three new leaves, still more pink than green. At the far end of the garden, a beebalm too is reddening on top.
Why Tailscale SSH can log you in when OpenSSH would reject you: tailscaled, ACLs, root privileges, and Unix users.
By Dinko "Salty Nick" Galeti?Salty Nick's TavernGeneric/Universal/D&DLevels 5-6 Strange phenomena plague the land: saltwater rain, shared dreams of a tide covering the land, shallow puddles reflecting deep, strange oceans. Some people have even fallen into puddles and disappeared entirely. The epicenter of the phenomena has been traced to the mausoleum of an eccentric who believed the whole land was once under the sea. Whether to stop this, explore it, or just to loot the tomb, the players have…
Daily Drawing 911
A big piece of technology that redefined the world has issues attached to it. Huh? No, I’m not talking about AI crap, but good god am I waiting for something beautiful to happen. No, in this fictional world, everyone has BitPhones, an advanced technology that people integrated in themselves. Unfortunately, there are hackers going around causing people to act out of sorts. Wow, intrusive technology opening the way for people to do fucked up things, never could have expected that. While the world…
Chinese local congresses rarely reject the projects their governments put before them. On February 4, 2026, one did. At the fifth session of the Huangyan District People’s Congress, in Taizhou, Zhejiang (台州黄岩区), 267 representatives voted on sixteen proposed investment projects. Two were rejected on the spot, each budgeted at more than a billion yuan: a sports complex and a water-control project. The representatives also voted to add a national highway that the government had not put on the…
My cousins had two games that never stayed on the shelf for long. One was Hungry Hungry Hippos, which everyone has heard of. The other was Mr. Mouth, which people remember less, if they remember it at all. We would rotate between them on the floor of their basement, and the noise level was about the same no matter which one we picked. We all played to win. The version of Mr. Mouth we played was the yellow head version, not the frog that came later. I didn’t think about it then, but both games…
Fitness wearable company Whoop announced a major software update Tuesday that will finally allow users to learn the time while preserving Whoop’s core commitment to not making a watch.“We know our users want to check the time,” said Whoop Head of Product Ty Ming. “But we also know that they have chosen a product whose entire brand identity depends on not helping them do that.”The new Whoop 5.0 will feature a tiny, high-fidelity speaker that tells users the time out loud whenever its onboard AI…
In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic: Medicare Advantage plans denied prior authorizations at high rates Nurse Educator Shortage Threatens the Future of the Workforce Why exercise snacks are good for health American Diabetes Association Consumer Guide Abracadabra: Why Insulin Sparks Awe and Wonder Comedy, Character, & Crop Tops: An Interview with Gina Pillina News from T1Dto100 Webinar: Let’s Talk T1D & Mental Health with Jenna Eisenberg, Tuesday, 30 June 2026 Interview – Diabetes in My…
The oldest religious building in New York, the Friends Meeting House in Flushing, was originally constructed in 1694, and greatly expanded by 1719. So even the big alteration was some sixty years before the American Revolution. It is a fairly simply wood-frame building and both physically and in its current use would be recognizable to the early-1700s congregants, although I assume the electric lights would surprise them. While we’ve never worked on the building, it makes up a surprisingly…
Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself. While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily…
Bill Buxton’s “long nose of innovation” is the standard antidote to breakthrough mythology. A technology that seems to arrive overnight has almost always been gestating, quietly and invisibly, for decades — a long flat nose — before it reaches the steep cliff of adoption that everyone mistakes for the invention. The mouse took roughly thirty years from research curiosity to ubiquity. The rule of thumb that follows is sobering: anything with real impact in the next decade is already at least a…
It’s true at work as much as it is at home – model the behavior you want to see more of, fight for what you believe in, and hope for the best. ✊
Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter Mini-Server, Part 26 Entropy Arbitrage Scrawls Library Updates Next Again lacking a real holiday, today marks the 413rd anniversary of the fire that destroyed the original Globe Theatre. About a year later, the replacement on the same site opened its doors, which the 1997 reconstruction down the road mimics. And with that, on to the week’s projects. Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter For those of you interested in such things, I’ll have the June issue of the Entropy…
This is a blog about RPGs, but I want to talk about something else and I have no other platform for long-form content. If you’re looking for an RPG article, skip this post. Check out the root ring, it has a vast bounty of great RPG blog posts. This is going to be a blog post about a piece of visual media. It might be more entertaining in the form of a long-form video essay, but to my surprise nobody has made that essay, so I’ll try to talk it about it in my way. This is a blog post about that…
The vibeThis week still felt heavy in a lot of ways. I was not really feeling like myself for part of it, and the stress and anxiety from everything going on has definitely been hanging around. At the same time, I kept trying to move things forward where I could: writing, site cleanup, the how-to series, and a few small quality-of-life fixes around the site.Sometimes that is what a week looks like. Not amazing. Not terrible. Just trying to keep going.Highlights🧠 I shared a little on Mastodon…
I hope most of you read my last post “My Association with the Gambino Crime Family”.[1] When I grew up in Brooklyn, my brother’s best friend until they were ten years old was Dominick Montiglio whom we recently found grew up to be a hitman for the Gambino crime family. We were shocked that such an apparently normal child became so corrupted. The post tried to briefly explain the reasons why. In this post I wish to expound on one of those reasons that I didn’t have time to elaborately discuss…
We watch websites for a living at Oh Dear , so I figured I knew roughly how often things break. The data set me straight on which outages are worth worrying about.
Last night was the first one since the surgery that I slept through the night. I didn't wake up until 0750. It felt wonderful waking up refreshed and not tired and wanting to roll over and go back to sleep. Posted the blog a little after 0800 which is a wee bit late for me. I think the blog posting may be erratic until I am mended and feeling 100%.I am feeling better. The cough is up and down - some days I cough a lot and others I don't. The burning sensation from coughing is almost all gone.…
Book Review – June 2026 To paraphrase Rod Stewart, Wrexham is in my heart, it’s in my soul, it’s my best friend. It shaped me and continues to be a dominant influence in my life – despite the fact that my current house is actually on the border of Flintshire and Cheshire. Wrexham is where I live, if we take ‘living’, as the council did during the City of Culture bid, to mean wherever you ‘work, rest and play’. The ‘Real’ series is a collection of books by the Welsh independent publisher, Seren.…
A week ago, I was thinking about how I might be feeling in one week, when I was back from travel, back from my first time at a TEEM intensive. I am feeling the way I hoped I would be feeling. I am feeling relieved and hopeful--and not too exhausted.A week ago, I was getting ready to pack. One of the benefits of driving is that I can overpack. I ended up with three extra tops and sweaters/overshirts, which was fine with me. I decided not to bring long pants or skirts; I assumed we'd be in a…
