This weekend, I can be found at the top of the escalators at the British Motor Museum, Gaydon, for the Great British Model Railway Show. All being well, I'll fill a couple of tables with various projects I've carried out of the years. In deference to the organiser, many with be from The Hornby Collector and TT:120 club magazines, but there will be a few BRM and Garden Rail projects too. Please drop by and say hello. I'm there to talk all things model railway, and not to get any modelling…

Not happy with this one. I should have misread the prompt as “bacon”.

Can I ask you a favour? Please complete this sentence for me: «I like reading the Weekly Filet, because...» Just hit reply and send me whatever comes to mind.This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love it when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!» It's great to have you.Btw, if you speak German and have kids, this little side project of mine might be interesting to you: kelana.games1.…

I am always down for a character with a Jack o' Lantern for a head so I made sure to preorder the PIX! Garbage Pail Kids Jack O. Lantern for this year's "Trick or Treat Through 31 Days of Toy Terror" since he fits the theme perfectly. Thrilljoy is a newer company (founded in 2024 by former Funko CEO Mariotti) and PIX! seems to be their signature line. Like Funko, they're releasing vinyl figures of multiple different pop culture characters at fairly reasonable prices. Thrilljoy's PIX! figures…

It was sixty years ago today, on October 22, 2026, that the album The Supremes A Go-Go hit no. 1 on the Billboard album chart. It was historic as the first album by a girl group to hit no. 1 on the chart. Included on the album was the no. 1 single "You Can't Hurry Love." It was written and produced by the team Holland–Dozier–Holland, who wrote hits for several Motown acts as well as The Supremes.

As I mentioned last week, I'm on holiday for a few days. I'll try to post something later today or over the weekend to let you see a couple of things we've been up to.

We’re all gonna get lumps. We’re all gonna get bumps. Nobody can predict the future but we do know one thing about it: It ain’t gonna go according to plan. Yes, we’ll all have massive highs, big days, and proud moments. Color faded, postcard-streaked blurs will float and flash through our brains on our deathbeds, of wide eyes on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings, and healthy baby screeches in the delivery room. And dotting those big moments will be smaller ones too: fragile…

I saw a Reddit post where a DM tried to figure out how a city in their campaign could exist and feed itself. But in the end, after many hours with Excel spreadsheets, it couldn't. And they were disheartened.But I thought instead it was actually a great justification for fantasy adventure gaming's active and close gods who meddle in mortal affairs. Most of the time we ignore this, but why? Why not give a very strong reason your mortal population is praying to the gods.How can a city exist when…

I made this image in Canva today to accompany a piece I wrote over at the basketball Substack. In a very real way, making this stupid thing was the best part of my day. I wrote a lot today. I wrote at the Substack, but I also write some structural notes and ideas in both TextEdit and iA Writer. My Notes app (both mobile and desktop). got a break, but I was, due to the Substack, busy on both Threads and Bluesky and had at least one long, writerly conversations in the DMs of one of those apps.…

After over a month in Neiafu, we heard the seiren song of the open ocean once more. We checked out of Tonga and raised the main sail in 1st reef and gybed our way out of the calm waters of Vava’u archipelago. After the last gybe we raised the stay sail and were on our merry way. After passing the last tall island, we put in a second reef and were bracing for the increasing sea state. From 1 to 1.5 and as of writing 2 meters. Now that we are properly between the Vava’u and Haapa’i groups, the…

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Everyone knows Alien, the movie franchise with countless spin-offs and prequels and sequels. But not everyone knows that the designer behind the… well, alien monster of the first movie, was a Swiss artists called H. R. Giger. (Somehow it seems to me that to make a dent in the world of fantasy one has to be remembered by fans with a name mostly composed of initials: J. R. R. Tolkien, P. C. Hodgell, George R. R. Martin, J. V. Jones, H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, N. K. Jemisin, T. H. White, H. R.…

Halloween decorating doesn't have to involve a fog machine or a life-sized skeleton that costs more than your dishwasher. Also, I've never understood Halloween inflatables. They're scarier lying deflated on the lawn than they are standing up. And even then, they're bobbing balloons. That reads jolly. Not jump scares. If you want Halloween decorations that...Read More

Rats are better people than people. Having escaped Fort Joy proper I figured we'd get some leisurely exploration in, but it was just one combat after another. Can't go five metres in this place without somebody trying to kill you. First went along the north coast and ran into the witch who was on the slave ship, who said some ominous things and then died. Fane got the mask he wanted without me having to find one of every race to face-rip, win/win. Further along there we found a turret with some…

Lobby, JP Morgan Chase Tower – New York, New York Yesterday, I featured the dramatic style and height of the JPMorgan Chase Tower. Today, a peek at the lobby of this gleaming corporate headquarters. I mentioned that the site required some fancy structural work to create a narrower footprint than the tower above, using fan-shaped columns and triangular bracing. You can see some of that elaborate structure in this photo. I’m often complimentary about the grand old structures of years past, but…

“Let the country make the railroads and the railroads will make the country.” –Edward Pease Misaki formally joins the Railway Exploration Club, and to celebrate their new member, Kodama, Ushio and Usa go to an izakaya. Here, Kodama chooses the club’s next destination, the Choshi Electric Railway line in Chiba prefecture. After arriving, Kodama immediately […]

Sourfaced Louis Koo leads a hitman squad, staging deaths as accidents, along with older Uncle, female Woman, and Lam Suet. They pull off their latest job – electrocution via kite string – but Uncle is losing his marbles, then an out-of-control bus plows into Lam Suet. Louis starts tailing people involved with the job, convinced his team is being taken out by a rival. He thinks Woman is against him so he kills her, then their final client falls from a window. Gorman: “Master of the surveillance…

i got an email the other day from partykit about their hosted service shutting down since they joined cloudflare. this has been a very common type of email that i've been receiving lately as it seems like things are constantly being pivoted and abandoned at higher and higher speeds these days. my email is full of sunsetting notices from various things i've signed up for and tried out over the last few years that are now gone. nothing seems to last more than a couple years now. wibby also talks…

When I thought about senior engineers 10 years go, I thought of them as superstars that got things done at a miraculous pace, and no matter what challenges they faced, they overcame them with seemingly no fuss at all. They just wrote code, maintained like a hundred popular open source projects, were always online and taking part in discussions and social media, and somehow also had a day job. 10 years later, I am a senior product engineer and nowhere near that level, which has made me quite…

A spectrum of intimacy. A long time ago, I realized the concept of a best friend was flawed. I had “best friends” in high school, people I resonated with deeply and was inseparable from. We gravitated to each other, did things together, and shared interests or were willing to learn each other’s. I lost that after high school, when those friends left to study abroad or changed schools. I had really good friends after, people I spent a lot of time with, but I’ve always found myself swimming…

Parking lots and hospitals! This hotel picture has it all! I’m in Aurora for MileHiCon, where I am a guest of honor along with TK Kingfisher and others. There will be panels! And signings! And hanging out! As one does. It starts tomorrow. Come on down! — JS

During my college days, back when I had to come up with headlines for our newspaper, we used the AP Stylebook. I roughly remember that words that don’t have meaning of their own were lowercased and meaningful words got capitalized. This is more or less what I’ve done here, on my blog. The title of this post, “How do you Title your Posts,” is an example: “How” is the first word, so it gets capitalized (beginning of sentence). “Do” and “you” are meaningless on their own; they just glue to other…

Here’s another harvest related RPPC for fall…on the reverse is written “agricultural corn cob display c. 1910” I see the corn cobs lined up but what’s on the wall? Some type of plant (or plant art) Is it in a barn? A Museum? Real Photo Postcard c. 1910 collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

well, i did it. on a whim, i decided to just get a dumbphone. i opted for a dumb.co phone, because it was cheap and accessible for such a radical lifestyle change. i was honestly expecting it to be a little more challenging to make the switch, but there are enough tools i'm used to having built into the dumb.co phone that i'm actually not missing my smartphone at all. in fact, i'm pretty much just leaving my phone in my pocket for the most part, just using it to send text messages throughout…

"The fruit shall set you free!" Victor declared during The Traitors: New Blood episode 7. But NBC won't free us from its bonkers schedule so we have to wait a week to see the pardon play out.

Liam is the local male prostitute, biking between clients, everyone in town paying each other for sex on an app called Snaxxx. His girl Thea is having sex with guy Ray whose kid colored his face with marker, then she pops back into Ray’s apartment real quick and maybe murders him in the brain. Soon all their clients are dying, and Liam is the prime suspect. There’s a tiny bit of style via split-diopter giallo murderer shots and film-end flares, but I don’t mean to make the movie sound cooler…

by Cláudio Alves Olivia de Havilland won Best Actress twice in the late 40s. First, for Mitchell Leisen's TO EACH, HIS OWN in 1946, and, then, for William Wyler's THE HEIRESS in 1949. At long last, after a month of endless TIFF and NYFF reviews, the Alternative Best Actress series makes its grand return. For now, let's ease back into pre-fall festival season rhythms with a write-up that considers only four Oscar years, 1946-49. They were those of the immediate post-war, when the Best Actress…