In March of this year, Apple acquired a motion graphics and visual effects subscription company called MotionVFX. No doubt this was a move to bolster Apple's own Apple Creator Studio. Ironically, I had just become a subscriber to MotionVFX a few months prior to this acquisition. Their focus on Final Cut Pro with a drag-and-drop approach was a perfect fit for me and my business. MotionVFX has these stylish collections of effects that help give videos a cohesive appearance. Some of these…

After my recent survey of modern black metal, a death metal follow up was all but inevitable. Commercially speaking, death metal seems to be in a healthier place than black metal, with bands like Blood Incantation threatening to transcend the genre in terms of their brand reach. Tastes in death metal also seem to behave a little more coherently than black metal, with certain styles trending in and out of favour in reliable phases. Black metal by contrast seems to cohere around key artists more…

Journal Spent a couple of days turning the first couple of years of blogging (2000-2002) into monthly pages for the forthcoming archive site. Back then I was using Blogger and it was pretty much a status—update tool, albeit without a word count. Most of the posts are a sentence or two and none of them have titles, so it’s a bit like Twitter was, maybe? In August 2002 a relationship ended and I moved into a shared flat which prompted me to start afresh, using titles this time (it’s very notable…

A popular engineering podcast1 asks their guests if they'd rather finish a project or start a dozen projects. Surely nobody starts any project without the intent to see it through to completion, but unfortunately, the realities of life often take over and thus we accumulate a shelf, box, or even garage full of unfinished projects. This describes me perfectly: I always have such high hopes for every project I begin, yet inevitably, the fun personal efforts fall victim to either massive scope…

Today is day 23 without alcohol. Not that I was drinking daily like in my "glory days," but if I did drink it would often turn into a binge or at least more than I initially intended. Self-control when it comes to substances has never been a strength of mine. But I figured if I am ever going to overcome this debilitating (wow it took me some time to spell this right) depression, anxiety, bipolar2 or whatever you want to call it, and if I really want to optimize the medication I am on, I should…

I had a list on my phone about things I needed to tell you but I can’t find it and now I’m just going from memory, which is not good for anyone. So first of all, I’m back from 48 hours in Iceland and I want to write all about it but I need toContinue reading "This is a lot of stuff and I don’t know where to put it all."

I spotted someone else online swatching this Paladin ink from small artisanal ink maker Penultimate Inks (also: Instagram), and thought it looked pretty neat. I decided to order some to add to my growing collection of fountain pen inks. Due to the arcane calculations of free shipping, and a perceived hole in the range of greens I had available, I ended up adding some of Penultimate’s Ranger to my order. They have a whole line based on common TTRPG class names, all of which look pretty…

This is a "minor" child's space book. It is a fictional story about Huckleberry Hound and his friends who decide to build a rocket. It is an almost "standard" story of they never really take off for the Moon but convince themselves that this strange place they found is on the Moon.I was attracted to it for the painted illustrations and an amazing cover of the "gang" taking off for space.For those of you below a certain age here is a little about Huckleberry Hound and his Hanna Barbera cartoon…

Trident House is an aching place where nobody dwells by choice. The Inquiry team was sent to Trident House ostensibly because it was the only office building in the Council’s property estate with space for enough desks and for the hundreds of boxes of historic paperwork. That it is a distasteful business – that the Council is ashamed of and embarrassed by the Inquiry – also played a part. Trident House is out of sight, on the wrong side of the ring road, where nobody from the Council has to…

Puzzlin'. As you might have noticed, I am retiring the like function of this blog. It wasn't widely used, I think. (I only get the number of likes per post, I have no idea who likes a post.) The likes were saved in a cookie in the user's browser, so if you have ever liked a post, you should have seen the popup, which allows you to export those likes as a bookmark file. Going forward, if you find a post or photo interesting, I’d love for you to reply via email!

“Twitter co-founder and current Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat has climbed to the number one spot in the Social Networking category of the App Store in France and also entered the top ten free apps in any category. The surge in downloads followed a nationwide cost-of-living mobilization on Saturday that saw looting and mass arrests, calls by former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal for temporary, targeted social media blocks, and a nearly ten-hour Orange mobile network…

The concierge saw her car arrive on the security cameras and tossed his tuna sandwich into the trash can. He would be in no mood for food any time soon. Wiping his hands and lips with a napkin, he threw his cap on and hurried to the entrance door. He drew a long and painful breath, and was just on time to smile across the glass door as she climbed the steps. Her driver rolled the windows down, and the yellow lanterns of the entrance lit his scarred face. He used to be a professional boxer. Now…

wake up at 4am a feeling of dread head buzzing heart pounding heavy thoughts use you as the anchor it'll be alright I'll be alright

So that’s a weird combo, eh? Tomorrow, my wife and I will embark on a short out-of-state trip. For the first few days, we’ll celebrate 25 years of marriage. The last couple of days, I’ll have surgery to fix my innards. We’ll combine the “…for better and for worse…” into one trip. That is, of course, if everything goes as planned. Fun Stuff First up will be some road trippin’ and dining at restaurants. Next, hotel check-in, unpack, relax. Then it’s on to more eating out and shopping at new…

The person I am, is. content

Something about the rain is so incredibly moving to me. The constant elemental purity of the rain, the fact it will drench you, the fact that it surrounds you entirely and becomes part of the fibres of your clothes and your hair and stops you seeing very well, it can form and move rivers down your clothes, and even the ever-fickle umbrella is unlikely to stop at least part of you being wettenned. It is strangely eldritch as a force - water falling in droplets throughout the air to the ground,…

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of…

last updated 0 minutes ago tldr; ease is not the enemy of social progress. it’s actually kind of weird to put them in direct opposition like that; making things easier can often be good for people and the planet. the ways people have gone about chasing ease might be (and have been!) shitty but doesn’t mean that the concept is bad. what does "inconvenience is the cost of community" and "if you want a village, be a villager" even mean? sort of based on "feeding vs being fed" (i need to "feed" -…

I’ve been having this almost-debate with Matt Pocock for a while about the best way to do spec driven development.Matt is a very accomplished old-school developer. A true software engineer. And he’s been using AI to enhance his capabilities to an extraordinary degree. His development skills are extremely powerful, and have been starred more than almost any other skills repo on GitHub.So what’s my disagreement?Basically I think he is at the top of the mountain for the old way of doing things.…

A few days ago, reporting on the existence of two states of the dustjacket on my book — as ghost-editor — Feast of Fear I wrote: And I cannot say with certainty that some of the numbered copies may not have gone out into the world in the first state wrapper. But now I can annouce that some of the run in fact did go out covered in the first state wrapper, because Paul Dobish just nabbed one. I offered to hold back doing the post until Dobish had secured an example, if an example could be…

I made 295 pull requests across 49 GitHub repos and did 30 project releases burning ~1.2 billion AI tokens in ten days. I am just one Engineer armed with AI. That is a lot of typing I did not do. I certainly did not read or write any code. This is a follow-up to AI Wants to Eat Your Project Backlog, where I described working through old Mongoid issues on two bus rides. I kept going. The work expanded into new spelling tools in three languages, library features, CI maintenance, releases, and…

Yes, you can have too much of a good thing. Overreliance on robots as a total replacement for human relationships is a real concern. That said, I don't believe that RNotte's behavioral observations around how the robot is your (only) friend helps that cohort or others as it well could. Frankly, if you're truly suffering from AI psychosis alongside whatever other preexisting or emergent comorbidities, I'm convinced that you need much higher-quality assistance than what either my post or the one…

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors: Apple Music has a 404 page easter egg on the web: a functional iPod that appears when you load a page that does not exist, such as music.apple.com/macrumors. [...] The easter egg is only visible in a web browser, so you cannot see it in the Apple Music app. To avoid being redirected to the Apple Music app, hold down the Command key when clicking on the link on a Mac, or press and hold on the link and tap "Open" on iOS. Such a fun surprise for the 25th anniversary of…

Part 1: What human genetics of lipids and psychiatric disease teach us about the answer to: What fraction of causal human biology do we actually know? I have been asking a version of this question for months now – at lunch, over dinner, on walks with friends and colleagues. For fun, I have gotten into the habit of politely pressuring people for a single number. Come on, just give me your best guess! Almost without exception, as we worked through the answers together, we did not land on a single…

Fall is finally here. After our youngest’s major fall activity ended, we are happily diving into a less-stressful remainder of the season. We keep plugging away. With work, Pika is still growing, but I’d like it to grow a tad more per month. Let’s go potential bloggers, get off the socials! We’re finding that we’re at an age where we may finally need to 100% buckle down on our nutrition and exercise habits. No more vacillating between good behavior and bad. At least that’s what the annual…

For many low-income countries, perhaps the greatest deficit they face is a lack of the human skills that build economic growth. The new artificial intelligence tools improve access to a wide range skills. Thus, the World Bank devoted its flagship World Development Report 2026 to “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence.” For a vivid example, consider agricultural extension agents, who are goverment-funded to travel across rural areas providing insight into how output might be improved. The WDR…

Ed Jefferson created a neat little thing: Local Wikipedia: Local Wikipedia is Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you. Polished, simple, and fun. This kind of thing is why I love the web.

Gill Partington’s LRB review (8 October 2026; archived) of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960-2025 by Steve Clay and M.C. Kinniburgh is chock-full of interesting tidbits; it starts off with sheets of typescript stuffed under Ohio windshield wipers in 1975 and continues: These baffling bits of ephemera were the first two issues of the Lost and Found Times, produced by the poet John M. Bennett and the painter D.C. Landies. Having sent some…

I haven’t been involved in many of the Steam Next Fests lately for a number of reasons.

I don’t usually like to write about negative things, but I’m idling here waiting on the FFXIV login servers to come back up after being down for several hours due to emergency maintenance thanks to a massive PHP security breach. SO. This is what you get from me today.