Daily Drawing 1027

Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.The 5 A Day campaign is based on advice from the International Geographical Union, which recommends playing at least one map game every day to lower the risk of geographical ignorance, chronic misplacement and…

A quieter week in the workshop but progress never the less on several projects both customer and personal this week for us to talk about. Get comfortable, preferably with a hot drink and let’s begin…Etched brass kits are a strange beast really. You get a moving model fairly quickly and a basic shell that ‘looks’ complete in short order but then spend hours and hours adding all the little details. This pair are nearly, nearly finished! I finished off the chassis detailing earlier in the week and…

I started my business journey in 2020, I hit rock bottom as my income dropped 70% and I lied to my family that I am still employed. It was a lonely and frustrating journey. I never really got over those moments. I share my stories to whoever that wants to listen. I know I am vain, please don't judge me. Today a friend interrupted my story, he said that my rock bottom has a basement. When the moment that I decide to take action to turn my situation around is the moment that I hit rock bottom. If…

2006 horror, dir. Neil LaBute, Nicolas Cage, Kate Beahan: IMDb. Not the bees! Spoilers.

Part 1 appeared October 20, 2026. A few years ago, Richard Elmore asked me to write a piece about how my ideas have changed over the years. Daily experience in schools as a teacher, administrator, and researcher (and the reflection and writing that I did about those experiences) have indeed altered my ideas about the nature of reform and how reform policies worked their ways into districts, schools, and classrooms. Elmore included my piece in I Used to Think… And Now I Think (Harvard Education…

"Birdwatcher" is a 2008 science fiction short story by Garth Upshaw. It is about a teenaged boy who witnesses the arrival of aliens bearing gifts. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "Birdwatcher" is a little slice in the life of Doyle, a boy who is singularly intent on wiping out the crows in his back yard. On one particularly hot summer day as he watches the crows ponder his peanut-butter-and-poison concoction he sees the sky flash brilliant colors. Suddenly the power is out and his mother is…

Masterplan (2026) • View trailerThree stars (out of five); rated TV-MA, for mild profanity and dramatic tensionAvailable via: Amazon PrimeBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.25.26 Nothing is blatantly wrong with this larkish, lavishly produced heist thriller. Cinematographer Matteo Cocco lovingly lenses the Rome and Paris location settings, particularly the latter’s Palace du Louvre, and its iconic glass-and-steel pyramid entrance. Production designer Paki Meduri devotes…

I peeked out the bathroom window this morning after doing what coffee makes me do and noticed a pretty colorful sky. It was surprisingly brightly colored for not really having any clouds. The air has been so dry recently that the sunrises and sunsets have had little extra color. Of course, I had to throw on my shoes and go outside to have a better look at it. It wasn’t the brightest I have ever seen by any means but It Wei nice to see. It was fading by the time I got outside too. My phone’s…

Now it’s typical, isn’t it? The weather holds itself together in a fragile truce of lukewarm, semi-acceptable mediocrity for weeks, but the exact second the bags are packed for a half-term escape to Devon, Mother Nature summons Storm Austen to blow the roof off the tent and hurl coastal spray directly into your morning brew. Still, if anyone can find misplaced optimism in a tempest, it’s my twin brother Chris. He rang me while I was up in Glasgow to detail his latest marine skirmish a gruelling…

It's a function of nothing other than my advancing age that I'm bemused to see Northern Monk as part of England's brewing establishment. I remember them as young contract-brewing upstarts, a less-convincing BrewDog, but they're still on the go and don't seem to have been affected unduly by the general downturn in their sort of craft beer. Good for them.That said, I don't drink much of their beer. For today's post I picked three, all pretty chonky ones, to remind us that this model of brewing…

Why I'm purposefully limiting my AI use to keep my development skills sharp and maintain a healthier relationship with technology.

Twilight Sword is a new game from Two Blind Mice, where you play adventurers not entirely unlike like Link and Zelda, and work to save the Lands of Radia from the Scourge. A few months ago, when the first PDFs of the Twilight Sword game came out, I took four doughty adventurers through the First Trial of the Starter Set adventure, Twilight Island. I promised to write it up, but I never did. This week, my physical Twilight Sword game came, and it reminded me of my promise. from left to right,…

The Phantom Blow: John Evelyn and the Mysterious Stigmata of a Deptford Maid (1670)We all know John Evelyn for his legendary forty-five-year devotion to the gardens at Sayes Court, or as the landlord who had his estate completely trashed by Peter the Great in 1698. But there is a much darker, weirder side to Evelyn’s time in Deptford.John EvelynAside from being a diarist and a gardener, Evelyn was a prominent member of the Royal Society—a group of pioneering minds dedicated to using science,…

Excerpt from the foreword by Warren Ellis: 900-odd years from now, Earth is just a power station for Mars. Something that occurred to Ganzeer after recalling a teenage trip to the Aswan Dam and seeing a giant, impossible machine that he later learned was an environmental disaster. A machine to generate and transmit power. A machine whose construction displaced 100,000 people and caused significant ecological and health issues. We follow two young people subsisting in the glare of the Grid. The…

Garmin introduced a new personal api and it is fairly robust and clean to build on, but a lot of what it does is nowhere in the documentation and has to be found by calling it and seeing what comes back.

October 23, 2026 Does it seem as if October will never end? So let’s imagine a scenario – someone who’s convinced that assembling her clothes for the week ahead is a good idea. Someone who is willing to try arranging a “Domesticated Valise” in her closet at the beginning of the week. (her plan is Sunday evening, for less than a half hour, get everything in one place). But she MUST HAVE DENIM. It happens to most of us, from time to time… How about starting here? Scarf – Echo With this color…

It’s been just about a year since I started writing here in an effort to document something worthwhile not just for myself, but for my nephew (soon to be “nephews”) to look at in the future and get an idea of just who Uncle Marc was/is. What I’ve found over time is that my writing has morphed from more descriptive, externally-influenced pieces, to more self-reflection and introspection that comes from a year of upheaval and using this medium as a method to make sense of it all. That and…

So I got an email from the publisher Act 4, who is, in conjunction with Skybound and DC Comics, releasing the Bissette and Totleben’s Swamp Thing Artist’s Edition hardcover next year. Measuring 12 by 17 inches, and “collecting over 170 pieces of art,” this book will be available in either the standard edition cover: …or the Direct Market straight-to-funnybook-shops edition: Which leaves your pal Mike with the most difficult of choices: which version do I get for myself? Or do I get both? Do I…

I have two nice scans for you, both from the summer of 1977. This first one is kind of a miracle, a pretty decent night shot looking down upon the Mad Tea Party attraction! I'm wondering where our photographer could have been - I'd say the Pirate Ship, but it feels too close. Maybe they had a zoom lens? I can't imagine the teacups were whirling, or else they'd be blurs. I like the cooler colors in the entry to the Fantasyland Theater.The multicolored Skyway gondolas are what makes this next…

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

Gunpey is more than a puzzle game: Much like the Game Boy had Tetris and the Game Gear had Columns, the WonderSwan had this as its flagship thing-matching, object-tidying game. To know this but not have played it in either its original form or on any of the other numerous variants that have followed over the years has bothered me for a long time, like a gaming itch I’ve failed to scratch. Although I’m playing on PSP here, the basic rules remain the same on every format. I have to create…

From Jonathan Williams’ Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, as reprinted in THE LOCO LOGODAEDALIST IN SITU: Selected Poems 1968-70 (1971). A final essay from the Musikfest Berlin concerts I attended in September: Sofia Gubaidulina, Bruckner, and Hans Werner Henze, with a coda on Rudi Dutschke, bricks, and windows. Preview below, and full post on Substack.In his book Strung out with Elgar on a Hill, the poet Jonathan Williams writes:thinking of Anton Bruckner,the Master of Sentences,an old man in…

Rating: ★★★★☆ We all use apps and services from large corporations and I’d bet that most of us also pay for some of those. What we more often forget are the small apps and services maintained by one or just a couple of people. There are some apps from small developers that I’ve been using for years, and also paying for them, even if it’s in a donation mode. I’ve noticed that I have much more empathy, compassion and willingness to pay for something that is developed by a single person or a very…

The journey and the arrivalI read somewhere that there’s a ruined church in a field somewhere near the village of Avenbury in Herefordshire. Checking in Pevsner,* the church seems to have been abandoned in 1931 and left to the elements, with just the walls of the tower and chancel left above ground. This sounds sad, but I like ruins, and next time I’m in the area I find the rough location and drive up and down a lane, looking for signs of the tower in the loop of the River Frome that Pevsner…

So the slow guitar renovation project rolls on with this twenty four year old Yamaha. A bargain basement workhorse of a guitar. You'll not really lose money on this kind of honest Yamaha but you'll never make money either. It's solidly built in Taiwan and has no frills other than a basic electro-acoustic system that still works. At some point, and I can't remember when, I fitted it with Grover machine heads as a quick upgrade. Over the years it's been used everywhere in all sorts of settings…

To my great surprise, then and now, I walked 700km [aged 35], then 800km [aged 50], then 160 km [aged 70] through Europe. The last walk, with The Boy, was crammed into a few Blobs. That middle walk to & from Santiago was transformative: I even wrote a book(let) about the transformation. I never imagined that my detail-filled journal-of-journey would be of the slightest interest to anyone, even me, except as une aide mémoire. Sean Rothery (1928 - 2014) was an academic architect from Dublin, who…

Jessica Clark in Dolly, Omnibus Theatre. Photo: Carla Joy Evans Dolly at the Omnibus Theatre is not always an easy watch; it references many incidents from the uncomfortable to the downright terrifying that women endure at the hands of men. The sad fact is that there will likely be something that is familiar to every woman in the audience. We first meet Dolly (Jessica Clark) when she is doing stand up. She uses crowd work to set the scene and launch into the story of what happened at her other…

The Arc Browser will go away by December, as the company behind it will pursue their AI-first browser. I like the Chromium based Arc browser, as it moves its UI out of my sight when I don’t interact with it, and has its tabs to the side. I’ve been using Arc for some years since 2023. Last December it was announced they would not develop it further, and now it’s clear a year on it will disappear. A colleague pointed me to the Zen browser last March, which takes inspiration from Arc’s UI, and I…

Flawed characters, egos galore, relationships that feel real, and some stellar writing and acting, safe to say I enjoyed every minute of The Diplomat. Late to the party I binged watched my way through all 4 seasons over the last couple of weeks. It’s the first TV show NOT on Apple TV I’ve watched for a while but I’d heard good things. A political drama based in deep character work, the usual suspension of disbelief still applies but there wasn’t anything too out there to make me cringe. Instead…