When I was first creating for the web, “The Web Platform” was made up of “whatever Microsoft and Netscape thought would help them obliterate the other.” A lot of what that meant? Write two sets of code to do the same thing. I can probably still write the Flash <embed> and <object> off the top of my head. I wrote about my appreciation for “write-once-2020s” in The Web Is Better. In 2026, The Web Platform is made of not just megacorporations, but people. The Interop Project has a mission of…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 65-67: Two military disasters defined the trajectory of the Habsburg Empire in the last half-century of its existence. At Solferino in 1859, French and Piedmontese forces prevailed over an army of 100,000 Austrian troops, opening the way to the creation of a new Italian nation-state. At Königgrätz in 1866, the Prussians destroyed an Austrian army of 240,000, ejecting the empire from the emergent…

Tracking Minneapolis crime numbers on Glass on the Street comes from one dataset: the City of Minneapolis Crime Data on the open data portal. This post covers how to access the public API, pull the data and how to parse it.

😢 This makes me sad. They made such great games. I spent hours playing Knights of the old Republic and Mass effect. https://www.theverge.com/games/1015647/ea-is-shutting-down-bioware

Nothing much in South BristolThe great thing about following a planned walk - such as A Bristol Ring - is you have no idea what you might discover en route. The problem comes when the answer, is not very much.This is an OK walk - avoiding the suburbs by following woodland trails through Crew's Hole, the Brislington Brook and across The Coots to end on the Wells Road at Hengrove.There is a pretty stretch along and over the Avon and lots of climbing through woodland on the cusp of turning into a…

A Sleepy Orange Butterfly feeds on the flowers of a Porterweed plant.

It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year. Another key leak this week was…

A Python script that worked a few days ago wouldn’t work today. I suspect it might have something to do with my updating everything I could think of in response to recent security breaches. I got an error message that said error: The script contains multiple PEP 723 metadata blocks I searched on what that means, then took out the blank line in my header #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # dependencies = ["pyperclip"] # /// but I still got the same error message. The script in…

I got them cheap on ebay, and they’re from around 1999-2001. These issues are almost tabloid size, so I had to scan them manually. Like an animal. Where you can learn exciting news, like — Is DC finally going to publish the final issues of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run!? Nah, never gonna happen. These issues are, of course, on kwakk.info now (if you want to search them), and also on archive.org if you want to read them. If you have issues of CBG that’s not on kwakk.info yet, you can send them…

Axminster, my diagrammatic software design tool with LLM support, is now available for sale! Check out the product website for more info.

Trust me #124It's All Too Much by The BeatlesWith your long blonde hair and your eyes of blueYou're too muchTucked away on the second side of The Beatles Yellow Submarine soundtrack, It's All Too Much is six minutes of psychedelic bliss. It is the sound of George Harrison tripping off his nut, hopelessly in love with his wife Pattie. Intoxicated, overwhelmed by the drug and Boyd's incredible beauty. What a trip to be on! It grooves and drones, there is uplifting brass that cuts through and…

In the Quake III Arena source code, there’s a famous code snippet: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point...

Wow, this whole PHP (PHP2Shell) situation is pure chaos. Everyone seemingly wants credit for it, the disclosure process was apparently botched, (attempted) exploitation is being observed in the wild (though there’s a big difference between a PoC and an actual working, reusable, reliable exploit), and oh, it seems like official patches might also not fully mitigate the vulnerability. Wow, where to begin… Let’s focus on what I think the funniest aspect of this whole thing is (y’know, besides the…

Discord, or the Death of Lore « ASCII by Jason Scott I have no disputes as the popularity of [Discord], the things that happen there, and the unquestioned vivaciousness of being the party that never seems to end and everyone wants to join. I just happen to be the sort of person who notices there’s no decent fire exits and most of the structure is wood and there’s an… awful lot of pyrotechnics being set off. ✍️ Reply by email

As promised by the promotions for the film [NST #1460], a couple of classic investigation boards appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026). ▲ Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026) ▲ Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026) ▲ Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026) ▲ Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026) ▲ Spider-Man: Brand New Day (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026) ▲ Spider-Man:…

I could say something, if I knew what. But all that comes out is gibberish. I don't like this.

Use more gas and more brakes. Actually, just tap the brakes. It’s not a track, the speeds aren’t that high, the braking zones aren’t big. Oregon Raceway Park is a fantastic track. It’s in Grass Valley, OR which is perfectly named. It’s a lot of grass, in a valley. Talking to strangers about cars is half the point. The other half is mostly about solving a new course in a limited time and somewhat about picking up cones other people knock over. Sometimes, strangers and friends alike will feed you…

On Dec 20 2025, I and some friends waited patiently in the queue to register for the Amsterdam Marathon of 2026. After 30min, we succeeded. We added an expected finish time, paid for the event, and that was it. Months have passed since then. We started our training, and everything went really well. Until I started to struggle with my health. I had issues sleeping, my stomach started to act up, I could not sustain the required pace and I did not recover from previous runs. Digging deeper, I…

/>/>The story of how artists Dorothy and Sterling Strauser came upon Justin McCarthy’s naive art strewn on the lawn at an outdoor market in 1960 is told in numerous books and catalogs. Dorothy (or “Dot” as she preferred) saw them first and went to go get Sterling and share them. In July of that year, a brief article in the Pocono Record announced he would be selling “his fashion drawings” at the Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Courthouse Outdoor Art Show. Sterling was exhibiting in the same show (his…

Dec. 8, 1967 issue of Time Magazine, with cover by Robert Rauschenberg, at Gallery98 To mark the 101st anniversary of Robert Rauschenberg’s birth today, @davidhudson posted the 1967 Time Magazine cover Rauschenberg designed around Arthur Penn’s film, Bonnie & Clyde. Robert Rauschenberg, Storyline I, 1968 from Reels (B + C), lithograph, 21 1/2 x 17 in. sheet, ed. 62, collection MoMA Which is far more legible and pictorial than the Bonnie & Clyde-related lithographs Rauschenberg went on to…

I’m not an experienced driver or anything, but I have a controversial take: driving on the left side of the road makes sense.I’m not talking about horses or swords or whatever historical explanation usually comes up. There are two things that make it reasonable in my head: language and clocks.If you live in a world of left-to-right writing, you’re used to starting on the left. That’s where a line begins. That’s where your eyes go first. Left feels like the default position; moving right feels…

One aspect of Japanese comics I've always appreciated is that so many of them are hyper-focused on particular niche subjects, their creators approaching those subjects with the same sense of import and drama that is afforded to what we Americans would probably consider more "standard" subjects, like epic fantasies, sci-fi sagas, horror and so on. Now, my own personal niche interest, like yours, is comics, and, of course, Japan will occasionally produce a comic about comics, or a manga about…

AI-discovered PHP critical vulnerabilities with remote code execution flaws that existed for decades but were too complex for humans to exploit—until now.

Answers for the thirty questions for my Dolmenwolves group that starts near the Woodcutters' Encampment. 01 How do we discover places worth exploring around here? Most rumors end up at the Stump and Poniard sooner or later. Whether they're worth believing is another matter. The Woodcutters know the nearby forest, and the barge crews bring news from the High Wold. 02 What places do people travel great distances to visit? Pilgrims travel to Fog Lake to touch the crystals, which supposedly cure…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been talking with some colleagues about documenting Columbia Hall on the University of North Dakota’s campus. Built in 1952 as St. Michael’s hospital, it is a nice example of Institutional Moderne architecture. In 1981, I believe, it was leased by UND as the home for its medical school after St. Michael’s merged with Deaconess Hospital to form United Hospital and moved to a new site. In 2017, with the opening of the new Med School, the building took on a hodgepodge…

I have been reading fiction for more than a decade. I have lost count of the books I have read. So when I came across a post claiming that reading fiction is just another form of mindless consumption, entertainment masquerading as intellectualism, my first instinct was to leave a scathing reply. Then I stopped. I wondered whether there was any truth to it. My urge to defend fiction was natural, given how many years I have spent reading it. I write stories and have published two books. I love…

Community Memory was a digital bulletin board “for the unmediated sharing of information for use by the general public” (Farrington 1987) deployed in three generations around Berkeley, California from 1974 to 1991. With terminals placed in public places, members of the public could read and write messages to each other, entertain themselves, find information, and conduct business. In 1987, a staff member at the Community Memory Project created a report on users' search patterns, which survived…

“October’s bright blue weather” continues. As it warms up, I take great, greedy breaths of the autumn air, laden with geosmin and other earthy compounds associated with fermentation and decay. A mid-morning blast from the limestone quarry two miles away shakes the house.

Prairiewolf - Jamestown Mercantile, November 5, 2026Two weeks from tonight! On Nov. 5, Prairiewolf will make our triumphant (?) return to the Jamestown Merc, a spot we last played over three years ago. Jamestown is a tiny little mountain town (pop. 256) on the outskirts of Boulder County; a beautiful spot to spend an autumn evening in the Rockies, if I do say so myself. Two sets! Some new stuff, some old stuff, some in-between stuff. The ‘wolf wrapped up our epic four-date summer tour at the…

What happens when the things that make you a good friend become products machines deliver? Will we talk less to each other and more to software programmed to sound like us, but owned by companies with their own interests to serve? Does it matter if the shoulder you’re crying on belongs to a company? AI is breaking the world from what it has been to what it is becoming. I’ve spent much of my adult life at keyboards, interacting and building things for others in the digital world AI is now…