I can already tell that my paddling adventure is going to much more than a way to get out on the water—admittedly my personal happy place. After only two outings, it's challenging my ability to absorb new information, move in new and sometimes daunting ways and—at 71 years of age—to accept some of the limitations that come with being an older person.* It's also teaching me about the waterways that are such a critically important part of our life here in the Pacific Northwest. Kayaking trip? You…

What would a competency test for a politician look like? I was wondering that a few mornings ago. I've been through demonstrated competency evaluations. The ones relating to Self Contained Breathing Apparatus come to mind because they mattered. The assumption is that the air outside the mask has too little oxygen, or too much of something bad, like methane or chlorine. You can bet that I and the other people involved paid attention. The most intense one happened going on site for a big gas…

I’m an Australian father of four, living in the US. Something of a corner case. Nevertheless, getting my kids Australian citizenship by descent, and then Australian passports so we can fly home legally, has kicked off a carnival of errors with a very dark side. Australia is generally thought of as a developed western liberal country with relatively high state capacity. And I have generally found that at least state government services, now administered through centralized offices, have become…

A beautiful paragraph opening one of the chapters from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett:One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening…

Brooklyn Bridge from Above – New York, NY – Fujifilm X-T5 – KinaColor 26 One of my favorite in-camera tools for Film Simulation Recipes is Clarity. This feature goes a long way towards emulating a soft negative film aesthetic or a crisp slide film look seemingly captured through a lens with great micro contrast. But if Clarity is set to anything other than 0 (a.k.a. Off), it causes a brief storing pause. This pause, which is about the same amount of time as advancing to the next frame on a film…

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours East End Riverside As you will have realised by now, I am a night bird. In the mornings, I stumble around in a bleary-eyed stupor of incomprehension and in the afternoons I wince at the sun. But as darkness falls my brain begins to focus and, by the time others are heading to their beds, then I am growing alert and settling down to write. Once I used to go on night rambles – to the railway stations to watch them loading the mail, to the markets…

The website was down from Wednesday to Friday (week beginning the 18th of October 2026) due to the PHP2Shell exploit. I was too busy being at university to fix it, so I took the server down. Apologies for the downtime. The server also keeps crashing randomly needing a manual physical restart. I have tried everything, watchdogs, etc. Checked the logs as well to find the culprit. I have no idea so far. So that’s why it goes down at times. Unfortunately, fediverse.observer is down now as well,…

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I like Bukowsky's work. I find a recognition in the way he expresses himself. A kind of - I don't give a damn air about his poetry. It's something raw, unpolished, and even coarse at times. I miss this in modern times. There is so much online and on mainstream news and media that is so over-polished, pretentious and soul-lacking. Bukowski's words shake my soul a little. His words are holding sweet pain in him. I can identify with his soul torment, with his agony, and with the poignancy of the…

Actor Tom Skerritt died on October 21, 2026, at the age of 93. He appeared in such movies as MASH (1970), Alien (1979), Steel Magnolias (1989), and A River Runs Through It (1992). On television, he starred on the show Picket Fences and guest starred on shows from Gunsmoke to Chicago Hope.Tom Skerritt was born on August 25, 1933 in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from Mackenzie High School in Detroit, then enlisted in the United States Air Force where he served as a classifications specialist.…

One of the heartbreaking features of the past few years has been the passing of many people who have been my intellectual heroes. At some level this is to be expected but it hurts all the same. Over the past couple of years I have written a handful of posts remembering people who shaped my […] Source

The Style Is Father of the Man, by Benjamin Kunkel, Harper's Magazine Are We in a Reading Monoculture?, by Véronique Hyland, Elle The Fall of Scientific American, by Emmet Fraizer, The Nation To See the World Through a Kaleidoscope of Butterflies, by Lea Korsgaard, Nautilus Have You Been to the Sixth-Worst McDonald’s in America?, by Sylvie McNamara, Washingtonian

James Blake. Queens Hall, Edinburgh. Oct 23, 2026.

When you worry that something you care about is going out of fashion, but you have no evidence for such a thing happening, the best course is to make the best argument you can for it as if the decline were happening. And then, if the decline is not happening, your best argument will still be useful. So I thought: What is my best argument for participation? What would entice a listening-weary, stay-at-home population to leave home and travel to the other earths of the people around them? How…

WHERE THEY CREATE is a blog, book, and Youtube channel which unveils the working spacing of artists, architects, and other creative types. My new porn has been found. #radar

Philosophy is mental masturbation. Metaphysics, in particular, is closer to autoerotic asphyxiation. I say this as someone who wasted their GI Bill on a philosophy degree. It’s for insufferable types with a penchant for poverty and archaic diction to sit around and circle-jerk. Let’s be honest, Hegel is mostly incomprehensible, and you’re just pretending. Kierkegaard was a whiny altar boy, and Nietzsche was syphilitic. At best, philosophy is a personal endeavor, a hobby. You want to ask the big…

The Double Dorothyby Olivia WaiteGenres: Crime, Mystery, Science Fiction Pages: 112 Series: Dorothy Gentleman #3 Rating: Synopsis: Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple in the third entry of this cozy sci-fi mystery series, helmed by a formidable no-nonsense auntie of a detective. As the Fairweather approaches the halfway point of its journey, Dorothy Gentleman may have reached the end of hers… It’s been a long lifetime, and Dorothy’s current body is on its last legs. With a new terminal diagnosis…

A foggy, wet day in the outskirts of McKinney, Texas. The post Mud and Fog appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Today was a remarkably warm day for October – we hit 22C/72F this afternoon! We are expecting a thunderstorm this evening, now, while other areas to the West are already getting snow, and north of us is still getting blizzard predictions. Tomorrow is supposed to reach 15C/59F as the high. Things are expected to drop … Continue reading I can help… a bit

23 Oct 2026 it Table of Contents Preparations Purging roundness from the browser Fix toolbar buttons shape Fix menus shape Eliminate round corners for a lot of things Rectangle Quit dialog Rectangle UI controls Rectangle new tab Other customizations Borders around URL input bar and buttons Remove unnecessary gap on the bottom of tabs Changing the accent color Notes After recent update of Firefox, I found that it's designers done useless changes for the UI elements … again. With this update…

I was on a mini adventure in Hornsby Heights in northern Sydney during my lunch break earlier this week, because I… Hey, wait a minute. What does that say? Huh, ethernet! Is that what it is? Wow, it really could be! Oh, okay. Maybe they’re more into IB. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-24.

Korean director Lee Chang-dong isn’t in a hurry nor is he eager to clobber an audience with heavy-handed plot points. Instead, Lee (Burning) unwinds a story slowly, all the while deepening our understanding of his characters. In Lee's hands, the ordinary can become revealing. In Possible Love, Lee introduces us to two couples -- one, working class, the other, affluent. He brings them together with a provocative twist: Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) wants to make a documentary that focuses on…

The season of candy and frights is upon us. Everywhere I look, it is the same old suggestions for games. Resident Evil here, Silent Hill there, perhaps Castlevania. Halloween makes me think about jack-o'-lanterns and witches, ghosts and ghouls, colours, costumes, and the other Universal Monsters.With that in mind, here are three of my recommendations for the season. They are all modern (in the sense that they were released recently), family friendly, full of colour and charm, and great for…

I was looking up the datasheet for an old WD Scorpio Blue drive from 2011, and read this blurb on page 4, emphasis added: Western Digital customers – ranging from the world’s largest computer makers to the individual user saving a music collection – require exacting quality and performance from our data storage products. Rigorous testing helps ensure that these standards are met. Remember when regular people did that? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-24.

DC has posted their full complement of solicitations for January 2027, and here’s everything relating to the Flash. That month sees Linda stepping up to help Wally with his troubles in the solo Flash book, and his teenage counterpart is also having problems in Absolute Flash! Plus, DC is finally publishing the second William Messner-Loebs omnibus, which collects a lot of classic stories for the first time and will be well worth the read. You can see the solicitations in their entirety at…

Watched: Slow Horses Season 6 📺 The show is as perfect as ever, in its own way. It’s the best show on Apple TV that you’re probably not watching. Horses has everything: flawed people, workplace comedy, spy thriller stuff. And it asks the questions not typical in the spy genre: who are the people behind the extremely well-coifed spies, how do they keep getting away with all this, what if they all became a kind of begrudging workplace family in the end?

September 2026 Today I hoped I would finish walking the coast of Lithuania, continuing from Juodkrantė where I got to yesterday to the border with Russia, or at least as close as I could get. I was staying in Klaipeda, so after breakfast at the hotel I walked into the city centre and onwards to the ferry. This time I planned to get lunch before I crossed over but the shop near the ferry was closed, it didn’t open until 9am. I had assumed it would be open earlier. Oh well at least I know there…

I like geotagging & mapping photos. This wee AppleScript finds the location of a photo in the finder & opens OpenStreetMap showing where it was taken. Easily changed for other map webpages. Needs the wonderful exiftool. I run it from FastScripts, also wonderful.