Cool people and nice views, lots of things to like in Bergamo. Photos taken on Saturday, 04 Jul 2026
Went to Legoland! It was hot! I took my sweet little Olympus Pen FV there with a roll of Lucky C200, the Chinese made colour film. I know it’s yet again more half-frame stuff but I just wanted something I could take lots of shots with but without worrying about changing rolls. I’ll be honest I don’t have a ton to report back here. Legoland was good but it was a busy one for me with my young nephew, so I didn’t take a ton of photos. I do quite like how these colours turned out though. What a fun…
Many espionage stories' protagonists fall into one of two categories... The first category is the espionage professional: Ian Fleming's James Bond, Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon, and John LeCarre's George Smiley all come to mind. Cool, calm, collected, they are trained and paid to do their nation's dirty work. At the other end of the spectrum is the unwitting amateur that finds themselves thrust into a situation which they are seemingly ill-equipped to deal with. Eric Ambler's and Alan Furst’s…
One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era. Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you rotate an image on an iPhone and on a Nothing Phone: It’s a pretty standard control – tap once to rotate counterclockwise, tap a second time to do it again, etc. – with a helpful…
In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation, investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial Valley of the Northwest. Locked in the mountain ranges were valuable ores awaiting electricity to turn them into needed metals. Two years later the State engineer of Oregon urged the development of the Bonneville site as a national-defense measure: he saw in the…
For this post, I became a paid supporter of Cam Marshall’s comic work via their Patreon. I love Matchmaker and Flying Saucer Video, and I feel like their stories occupy a similar space (with more humour and manic goblin energy). So after you’re done with this post, or watching the films, please go check out Cam’s work or look to financially support another LGBTQ+ storyteller! I. Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex, Dreams, Love trilogy of films—each titled, appropriately, Sex, Drømmer (Dreams), and…
I really appreciate the great response and kind comments I've received for my review of Count Ironmoon from Fresh Monkey Fiction and Big Bad Workshop's The Order of the Crimson Moon toyline so today I'm excited to check out Major Noir, another figure in the line who pays tribute to the Action Force villains from the vintage Palitoy toyline. The Order of the Crimson Moon is definitely a spinoff line of Operation Monster Force but it set in 1974 in Transylvania and focused on a werewolf cult.…
Retractable Cable USB-C Chargers (65W PD) Like all my other modern electronics, my Framework Laptop1) charges via USB-C. When I got it, I bought a Ugreen Nexode charger, an Anker Powerline Flow III cable and 3D printed an oganizer for it. It works, but the result is a bit bulky and the cable is already showing some wear from being pinched by the organizer. So when I came across a 65W charger with a built-in retractable cable, I was intrigued. Could such a charger be a good solution? When I…
I have a special place in my heart for David Lynch’s ultimate road trip film, Wild At Heart, as it was my introduction to his work. I missed the film when it drove into theatres on August 17, 1990. Three years later, I discovered the CD soundtrack at my local library. Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” –... The post New Book Details the Road to David Lynch’s Award-Winning ‘Wild at Heart’ appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.
Evie Fae’s carnival „An album that got you through a hard time“ really got me thinking: Did I ever have a hard time that an album got me through? This was an especially hard question to answer because I don’t think I’ve ever had a time in my life in which music didn’t provide an escape. For the longest time I didn’t bother processing any anxiety and instead turned my brain off by focusing on something else. Ever since discovering the novel for myself at age 11, I’ve had a book on me everywhere.…
Black People and Affinity to Bright Colors Stereotypes?I’d be more concerned with your characterization of how to write a Black man.For some reason, I associate Finn with the color orange and I don’t know why. We look good in bright colors and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe Finn wants to express himself after wearing black and white his entire life.~Mod BreiHe can have all the nice things!I don’t see a draw towards colorful clothing as a bad thing or a stereotype at all. Additionally, a lot of…
Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, supports web feeds marked up with h-feed. h-feed allows you to create a web feed in HTML using microformats. A h-feed may contain zero or more h-entries, each h-entry representing an entry in the feed. For example, my longform feed page is a h-entry. I use Granary to convert the longform feed page into RSS.While h-feed is commonly used for marking up lists of blog posts, it can be used for anything. For example, Tantek has a “daylists” page on his…
Patrick Rhone’s post sums up the feelings I’m sitting with today. True patriotism is not unquestioning loyalty to leaders at any one point in time, but constant critique and effort to move us closer to ideals we have not yet achieved. 🇺🇸
So, after my guinea pig rant, I thought I might write something a little more simple and upbeat. You know, to give you lovely readers a break. It’s the 4th of July here in the U.S. And honestly, if you can just ignore the 104-degree heat that feels like living inside a toaster oven, the dawning realization that our country is actively falling apart at the seams, and the random firework explosions at 3:00 a.m. that sound like a tactical military assault on your neighborhood, you just might have…
Read the full post at - Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson The Ministry for the Future is one of the better science fiction novels about climate change that I’ve read. It’s fast-paced, well-written, and grounded in realistic scenarios. The setting works. The characters work. The whole thing works. My one real complaint is the ending, which felt a little Deus Ex Machina — a little too tidy and hopeful given everything that came before it. With humanity, progress is always messy and…
Didn’t Watch: See Seasonal Impressions I watched way too much anime this season… 22. I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class — D+ They start dating in six episodes. Also let’s rank all the girls by how pretty they are. 21. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime S4 — Ongoing Surprisingly lack of genocide recently. 20. Ascendance of a Bookworm — Ongoing This anime has somehow made me hate a child for being a class traitor. 19. Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun — Ongoing This…
Ironically, both plural and multiple have a long history in the community, it seems. We mostly know of plural history things thanks to old websites (and web archives of old websites). We didn't really dive into the plural community until about 2010-ish, and aspects of the plural community may very well could be older than even the otherkin community even. So there is a lot of history we ourselves just don't know (or we don't have the sources to backup our thoughts, which is something we always…
The strange locomotion of Spirocuta
I've been working on a new Open Source project: Exhibit. It's a personal library for self-contained web artifacts — the kind generated by [INSERT YOUR AI TOOL HERE]. It is heavily inspired by Simon Willison's tools aggregator, and Matt Webb's excellent blog post titled "We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps". Simon also recently authored a plugin called datasette-apps which fills a similar void, but while datasette-apps is focused as an integration for datasette, Exhibit is a…
All creative people are nuts. On some level, I don’t really understand what this show was going for. It jumped through time, the titular character barely shows up for half the show, it keeps introducing new geniuses in totally different fields, and… none of this particularly seems to have paid off? I mostly enjoyed this from the perspective of “what is this crazy person going to do next”??? I think the high point was when somebody got shot for the sake of art. Storytelling – C – Very…
The writing prompt today is “What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?” and honestly, right off the bat, I feel attacked. My perspective is fine, thank you very much. It’s built on a rock solid foundation of panic and low-grade dread, and it hasn’t failed me yet. If you’re always expecting the absolute worst, you’re never surprised. What could possibly go wrong? But, I did see a video the other day that I desperately wish would shift everyone else’s perspective. I…
There were only two times over the last 89 years of the Golden Gate Bridge's existence when the City of San Francisco set the 4th of July fireworks show from its span: in 2012 for the GGB's 75th anniversary, and in 1987 for its 50th. So, this one for the USA's 250th anniversary is special, too. Although Karl the Fog may well arrive to valence the atmospheric extravaganza, it should still be spectacular, with refractive dimensions exploding all over the space... from the span, through it, above…
For the past couple of months I've been participating in private history lessons organized by a historian with almost two decades of teaching experience. The classes are organized as weekend courses, two hours a week, usually Saturday morning, and students can opt to join only for the topics that interest them. The participants are currently mostly from his network, many of them former students, but the audience is growing: just today the parent of a member of a previous session joined because…
I can’t remember when I was last in the Victoria and Albert Museum but it’s long enough ago for me to have forgotten how big it is. It being free to get in and very near to why I am we are staying it was an easy decision to head there this morning before going to the Pride festivities. In fact it was so enjoyable and so extensive we were a bit late leaving. It’s definitely well worth a visit if you’re in London. I remember the Raphael Cartoons from when I was last at the V&A. They’re very well…
I liked this page I just learned of called Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS. It might not mean much to you if you don’t write CSS, but could be fun to check out if you do. Here are some choice quotes: border-radius should have been corner-radius. It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this. white-space: nowrap should be white-space: no-wrap. It reminded me of a similar list called Known Anomalies in…
The annual summer festival in Dursley today, so I headed down around 11am to check out what was happening. It was a very warm day, so shading cap necessary as I’d be out in the sun pretty much all day. I arrived half way through the set of the Rednock Swing band. I’ve not seen them before and were really excellent. I’ll have to make a note to see one of their concerts next time they play. i took a slow walk up and down Parsonage Street to take a look at the stalls and also catch up with many…
This afternoon we attended a musical event with a difference. Sigur Rós: Ára is billed as ‘a fully immersive listening experience, expanding the sonic universe of Sigur Rós to new sensory dimensions’. In a small black box theatre, an audience of around 35 people sit or lie on beanbags, surrounded by the kind of darkness absolute enough that sometimes I wasn’t sure whether my eyes were open or closed. The music seems to come from all around you. Occasionally a sweet scent floats into the room.…
Post-apocalyptic Japanese Three Kingdoms. This ruled so hard. Shows like this are why I watch anime. Clearly created by someone who loves Three Kingdoms lol. Truly recalled the most entertaining aspects of the book. The politicking. The speeches. The backstabbing. Most of the wars being won by people being idiots. Putting all this effort into establishing characters only for them to randomly die off-screen. It looks absolutely fantastic. The characters have enormous personalities. This was…
Independence Day (At Concord Bridge), N.C. Wyeth, oil on canvas, 33 x 30 in. (85 x 77 cm), Image is from a Sotheby’s auction in 2021. (Click on the image twice to get the larger version.) Presumably the original is in a privete collection. The great American painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, like his teacher and mentor, Howard Pyle, painted a number of paintings of the fledgling years of our republic. He, he shows the Colonial Militia at Concord’s North Bridge, ostensibly on Independence Day,…
