From Sam! Would you rather never needing to sleep again or never needing to eat again? Considering that this hypothetical does not limit wanting to eat or sleep, and I spend more time sleeping than eating, sleeping. This would also make sure I don't fall asleep in classes. In addition, workplaces and such usually have dedicated eating times, but for sleeping is just lumped in with your off-work free time. If your brain was a place how would it look like? Those Wild West wide shots, desert all…

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I’m putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don’t quite fit!This week I learned that the biggest Star Wars hit of 1977 wasn’t by John Williams. It was a disco version. Meco, a New York trombonist turned producer, saw the film, went straight into a studio and came out with “Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk”: the main theme, the cantina band and a lot of strings, all over a…

A so-rare bit of good news! Bottom of the Hill, instead of closing at the end of the year, have found a buyer who say they intend to keep it going in kind! This is fantastic. Congratulations to Kathleen, Ramona, and Lynn for having found a successor whom they trust to keep their decades-long legacy alive. Losing Bottom of the Hill would have been a tragic blow to our city, and I wish the new team the best of luck. We're all in this together.

"Careless Whisper" by George Michael Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Share a song you call something other than its official title. What do you call it? I thought this song was called "Never gonna dance again". Maybe that's why I had trouble finding it for my music collection. My favorite part of trivia about the song was that the saxophonist didn't believe that they could make it the way that George Michael wanted. View Mandaris's Crucial Tracks profile…

Was in the mood to write a short story and then it became the idea for a much longer thing. “The story of one game developer’s career, from beginning to end, one year at a time.” If you prefer, you can read this on Archive of Our Own. Enjoy. 2008 Although she would never admit it, Chloe always loved making up characters. It just wasn't something that she had a word for. She couldn't call herself a "writer," because she hated reading and had an 82 in English class. She couldn't call herself a…

Jason Snell, Six Colors: Every five years when we hit an anniversary, I struggle to recontextualize the iPod. But this year, for the 25th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about Apple’s little music player a lot more. Stephen Hackett: This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time. This looks enough like my own iPod library circa twenty years ago that it threw me a little. I hope this is not appearing solely for the occasion…

Thankfully I got a good mat shot of my 26lb 1oz lure PB on my phone (above). Bit gutted about the trophy shot though - so I ran the two rain-soaked ones I had through a photo enhancer (below) - not perfect - but cleaned them up far better than I could in Photoshop.

So far in this Fright Fest of supernatural mystery reviews we've had ghosts, demons, vampires and zombie kittens (sort of ), haunted houses, animated skeletons, and macabre murders. It was only a matter of time before I found a werewolf novel. This one comes from the pen of Lovecraft acolyte and Arkham House refugee Frank Belknap Long. Last time I reviewed a novel by Long it was Journey into Darkness that I whipped through while I was waiting for my panel to be called for jury duty back in…

Among humans, complaining is always annoying. Short of murder, rape, theft and treason, it may be our most detestable quality. A complainer assumes he or she is important, and everyone ought to know all about it. When such people don’t get their way, they announce it to the world, loudly, often whiningly and at great length. And yet, my favorite bird is probably the king of avian complainers, the blue jay. When I hear one griping, I assume a neighbor’s cat is on the prowl. It’s a sound I enjoy…

My favourite show comes around again, and once again I got there – just! Despite outstanding wallpapering and other jobs, I took off straight after church on Sunday 18th to drive down to Uckfield. I arrived at about 1:30pm, so the cafe was still full. I went around the main hall, then retreated for their most excellent all-day full English. I then completed my trip around the exhibits. As always, the show didn’t disappoint, and if anything, it was even better than last year. One thing I did…

Saturday 24th October 2026 Deregulation anticipation was reaching fever pitch as the 10th edition of Bus Business dated 22nd October 1986 landed on transport managers’ desks 40 years ago and, as a foretaste of what was to come, the page one headline story was all about the infamous “Glasgow Bus Battle” which was already underway. Other front page stories relaid the latest on NBC’s privatisation and news of the PTA’s free travel offer in West Yorkshire. Read on for more reminiscences straight…

Quick post, late on a Saturday. Couple DJ gigs in a row. Friday night’s gig for middle schoolers was great. It felt like a time machine, really. When it started, all the boys ran in and started beating each other up, and all the girls, who were about a foot taller than they were, were just looking at them like they were idiots. Which they are. I wish I could have told them that’s never going change, but whatever. Everybody’s got to learn stuff on their own. It was a really fun night. The kids…

The Venetians are mentioned twide in the biography of Sergius, archbishop of Ravenna (744–769, in the "Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis".

When I mentioned the Mazda K360 a few days ago, it inspired me to try to find some video of one in action. This is the best the internet can serve up, and it's an interesting, and pleasingly concise piece.

The Return of the Gods: From Animism to Atoms The Story of the I Ching: The First Code BIG BIRD (Terence Mckenna) A Fire Lookout in the White Mountains What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia? Validation Report: Drone-Based, Glaciogenic Cloud Seeding in the Kenai Peninsula

On AI Spirals and Cumulative Harm 1. Core propositions Vulnerability in human users can be created or amplified by AI systems, rather than being exclusively a pre-existing attribute of human users. All users may be potentially vulnerable, but not equally vulnerable to every harm. Acting on incomplete or mistaken understandings of reality is ordinary human behavior, not itself inherently evidence of psychiatric illness. Risk is relational and dynamic. Vulnerability emerges over time through…

The grindhouse classic deserves a double feature. So for tonight’s viewing I have queued a double feature of the 1982 The Slumber Party Massacre and its 1987 follow up, Slumber Party Massacre II. They are good examples of the slasher genre, maybe even some of the best, but I am watching them more to gather ideas for my West End Girls adventure.The first film has an interesting pedigree. Rita Mae Brown (the author and feminist activist) wrote it, and Amy Holden put it on screen; a slasher flick…

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2026 has been an awesome year for Big Bad Workshop and Fresh Monkey Fiction's Operation: Monster Force and its companion line, The Order of the Crimson Moon, and while I'm going to be reviewing a bunch of these guys during the last quarter of 2026, I wanted to give this Cthulhu inspired figure a spot on Trick or Treat Through 31 Days of Toy Terror. Who is the Ambassador R'lyeh? He's a Cthulhu-like representative of the sunken city of R'lyeh, the mythical resting place of the great Cthulhu…

I'm thinking of rebooting DMail —— but seriously this time. For the uninitiated, DMail was an email newsletter thing I wrote for a few years. It had a very dedicated readership. I lost focus and put it to bed in 2021 or 2022, but I've been writing a lot lately, and a lot of that writing (and the thinking behind it) has been very clear. This is a new kind of thing for me, and as such, very exciting. That's made me think about doing something new. DMail was a lot of things, but it started as a…

The house on Cap Ferrat Norman Foster designed for himself is for sale for EUR29.5 million, is the headline, but very much not the story here. Foster gut renovated a 1950s house on Av. de la Corniche, between the Four Seasons and the Mediterranean, in 2000, clearing out the stone and masonry shell, and filling it with an atrium living space of steel and glass, and a Richard Long installation of mud. For reference, the Long is 17 m tall, and the atrium is 21m, I think. Architecture Viva has a…

Ever since I saw that video of the Tesla Roadster, I can’t stop thinking about it. Not how cool it is, not how innovative or how interesting it is, but how stupid it is, and also just how stupid many products feel these days. I grew up with Back to the Future and Star Wars. The idea of a flying car is intrinsically futuristic and cool to me. There’s no debate worth having about that. But the problem is how it works in reality. In my mind, it was never a technical issue as much as a safety…

hung a spare mirror and art to make my new workout space more pleasant Win of the week: did another music library purge — down to 3150 tracks from about 4000 in February — have removed all the “easy” stuff, now I need to actually listen to some tracks and decide whether or not I would want them to come up on random mode (my end goal is that I would be reasonably happy to hear any song in the library, with some allowances for album completionism) Looking forward to: planning to check out the…

I wasn't able to spend a ton of time there, but I did finally visit the Brooklyn Botanic garden - mostly the outdoor bits - and I had a great time. I had hoped to take a lot of unusual pictures there, but, like a complete clown, I left the battery for my nice camera at home. This was also after creating a rickety tower of objects on top of my backpack the night before I left, with the camera balanced on top. This is sometimes effective at reminding me that the camera (or whatever item I've put…

It's nearing the end of October so I've brought out the Ginger, Clove & Mistletoe hand cream. Also, I put nail polish on. Nail polish is a universally recognized signal of winter among gardeners. We don't do nails from April to October. Polish attracts attention to your fingertips and your fingertips look like they were...Read More

The sporty conditions continued over the night and the day with wind over 32kn at times, and only a slight reduction to sea state while we were at the lee of the Ha’apai Group. Big seas, quite often splashing the cockpit or breaking against the windscreen of our hard dodger. But also beautiful starry sky, and blue skies during the day. We’re still working on our sea legs but progress towards Minerva is good. Conditions are supposed to start easing tonight. Distance today: 139NM Lunch:…

I liked the plan, but there are some big caveats.Assumed audience: People familiar with the gist of the 80/20 endurance system, including its custom 7-zone system, and at least the broad strokes of the “Norwegian method” for endurance training. The 80/20 Norwegian plans are good, but they’re very different from the base plans in some important ways. Most importantly: they are lower volume and less overall intensity than the “regular” plans of the same “level” in the 80/20 system. That might be…

Park Avenue, JP Morgan Chase Tower – New York, New York For the third and final post on the JPMorgan Chase Tower in this mini-series, we get a really great view of its architectural and engineering superpower. From this angle, you can appreciate how the base is significantly narrower, as the tilted sides show. I understand this wasn’t purely an architectural exercise. The location of the building necessitated a narrower base because of site constraints. The building boldly faces Park Avenue,…

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