Started reading: Audition by Pip Adam 📚

In the 1970s there was an explosion of Gothic suspense novels mostly appearing in mass market paperbacks. You didn't have to go to a bookstore to find any of them, you could buy these book in Woolworth's, local drug stores, newsstands and train station book stalls. There were ubiquitous. To some extent they still are as I find them by the dozens at library fundraising sales, used bookstores and estate sales. The stories were even more formulaic than traditional detective novels with the…

March 2018 For this walk I was staying at the Permier Inn Caernarfon. I had breakfast at the hotel and then drove down to a fairly remote beach called Whistling Sands or Porth Oer. The logistics for this walk wern’t very easy as there are very few villages along the coast on this part of the coast with a bus service and it was too far to walk between Nefyn and Aberdaron in one day. So instead I had found that a very infrequent bus ran once per day, in one direction only past this beach and to…

geneva_drive is the first thing I’ve put out for money on my own, without an org behind my back - and a rollercoaster on many fronts. One of the less obvious ones is the actual distribution: how does geneva_drive get to your servers or dev machines, once you have that ticket? It works via paquette - my little engine for serving libraries. Here’s how it got made, and why. I am currently available for contract work. Hire meto help make your Rails app better! The idea is simple: you purchase…

By this point I’ve written too much about my conflicted attitude toward generative AI. The TL;DR of it is that, in theory, “enhancement vs. replacement” is a way to determine whether a given use of generative AI is ethical or not: Asking Claude to write an Emacs function for me saves me a bit of time; asking it to write a research paper for me replaces work I, not the machine, should do, and more than likely perpetrates deception. So—at least in a vacuum, where we pretend we’re not concerned…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-111813 for Apache Traffic Server, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to patch systems running its experimental magick plugin. In its default unsigned configuration, the plugin lets unauthenticated clients control arguments passed to ImageMagick convert, allowing anyone to execute whatever command they want on the server. The affected plugin is written in C++, whose users were relieved that this time the attacker did not…

I just came back from a few days in Venice for the art biennale so wanted to share some of my favourite works as it’s still on till November 22nd. Here they are, in order of how much I loved them: Canicula, a series of 8 films at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto (an old care home) Helter Skelter show at Prada Foundation which features Love is the Message The Message is Death by Arthur Jafa and his scuptural representation of the famous 1933 photograph of the back of an enslaved man. That image…

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 17th August 2006 In 2006, I was still in the midst of my ‘do I like Cradle of Filth or not’ phase, having started down the fandom road on 2004’s ‘Nymphetamine’ and yet still not quite ready for what ‘Her Ghost in the Fog’ had triggered back in the day. So when their new record ‘Thornography’ came out that year, it felt like the perfect opportunity to decide one way or another. ‘Thornography’ is an album that seems kind of underappreciated in the canon of…

Here is the famous Sleeping Beauty problem. Puzzle. Sleeping Beauty agrees to take part in an experiment. On Sunday, she is put to sleep, and a fair coin is tossed. If it lands heads, she is awakened on Monday only. If it lands tails, she is awakened on both Monday and Tuesday. After each awakening, she is put back to sleep and given a drug that erases her memory of that awakening. She knows the rules of the experiment, but during each awakening she cannot tell which day it is or whether she…

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 9th August 1996 I experienced Therion in two different stages of their career, very close together. I found them through the superb Swedish Death Metal book by Daniel Ekstrom, and that awesome debut ‘Of Darkness’, and my next taste was a more modern record (I think it was 2004’s ‘Lemuria’?) which was obviously so different. In fact, I was very guilty of mixing up Therion and Tiamet a LOT when I first was getting into them, as they were both bands who…

I have. It's been quite a day. Fortunately I work with some legends which made this a lot better than it could have been.98 words · 1 image

A thing I learned about John Constable from Tyler Green’s conversation with the curators of the Yale Center for British Art’s new show of Constable’s landscapes: The V&A claims copyright on this 205 yr old John Constable full scale study of The Hay Wain, 1821, oil on canvas, 6 x 4.5 ft, while the National Gallery purports a Creative Commons license applies to the version Constable showed at the Royal Academy in 1821 Constable made full-scale studies in oil of his 6-foot paintings in the same,…

Something I return to a lot in this blog is feelings rather than actual events being memories. For instance, I can remember the feeling of walking into a junior high dance that was being held at the gym. I do not know which year it was. I don’t know who I was with. I don’t know what poor little girl was subject to my horrible prattling on. I wasn’t necessarily a real perv back then. And I’m not one now. But I was all into chatting up the ladies 24/7. And I don’t know what happened that night. I…

In fabulous news for New Zealand writers and readers, Aotearoa’s Pip Adams has won the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, for her book “Audition”. Audition is science-fiction as social commentary, in the best of Le Guin’s tradition. It deals with the dehumanisation of our obsession with incarceration. The award: www.ursulakleguin.com/prize26 Get the book from Unity: www.unitybooks.co.nz/products/… or via Book Hub: bookhub.co.nz/p/auditio…

Hi Kindertrauma, I just learned about you from the most recent Fun For All Ages podcast. What a great site! I'm hoping you can help me with a mystery that has been plaguing me for decades. I don't know much! Episode of a late 80s/early 90s horror anthology show. A strange character named Murphis (Murvis?) with a big shock of red hair, treated cruelly by a woman he likes. She takes him out on a date on a dare. I believe he gets some kind of revenge. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!…

A few minutes into Klara and the Sun, director Taika Waititi’s schmaltzy adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s popular novel, it struck me that Waititi might be aiming for an idiosyncratic classic about the relationship between a friendly robot and a teenage girl. Set in the near future, Waititi's instructional fable focuses on Klara (Jenna Ortega), a slightly dated android who longs to be adopted lest she be cannibalized for spare parts. Klara languishes in The Friend Store, where she and her cohorts…

a little series of poems devoted to one of my favorite spooky NOLA legends...you can read the full zine for free HERE: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/6ac10c4751.html

Also this week: Is the Sailor TUZU Sailor’s best steel nib fountain pen? It’s go time! I’m headed to Japan next week, and Myke and I took this opportunity to talk trip prep. Where am I going? What am I doing? What am I bringing? Am I buying ALL THE STATIONERY??? We break it all down in preparation for our upcoming two-week podcasting break while I travel halfway around the world for stationery. Show Notes & Download Links This episode of The Pen Addict is sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off…

This pheasant standing in the rain, peering into our conservatory this morning, looks a bit bemused. Maybe it's wondering where the big tree has gone?

you suggest a weighted blanket and I don't dare say I'd much rather be squished by the weight of a man

Last week I was organising a drawer full of wood and computer case screws, then sneezed, banged my knee hard against it reflexively, and sent a not insignificant number of the screws across the floor, which I then stepped on, jumped, slipped, fell on my arse, and banged my head against the table. It was, as my late grandad Jim would say, fun. It’s been a similarly fun few days for security. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica: The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the…

Much has been written about Over/Under, what it was and how it worked, what happened and who was there. So I’ll spare you a repeat. This retrospective is about what it meant to me. Someone smarter than me called Over/Under “RPG Woodstock” and I think that’s right. It was a month long festival of improvised free Live Text Roleplaying backed by the ever present (occasionally realised) threat of a wargame; it was mass delusion, hysteria, dogs and cats living together, the fruitful clash and…

Spent pretty much all day in front of the computer. You might have read about the PHP issues threatening the web today. Anyway, I just took today's photo. I guess it kinda fits. Not sure the blog will be back up before midnight, but rest assured it was published in time!

Last edited 6 minutes ago. So hopefully this will be a quick post. I've been a bit more active online — as in, not just quietly reading blog posts, but yapping on message boards and stuff. Because of that I also discovered a bunch of new corners that I wanted to share here and give a general update on the state of my websites/web presence. This will be a bit of a listlog, I'm afraid. Here we go: Registered on quxnet last week and have been loving the vibes there so far. Loved the design of the…

Everyone remembers Scrooge as a mean, cold-hearted man, even though his entire arc is that he becomes a better, kinder man and develops empathy. Author A. T. Sayre’s main character in The Asterist is quite the Scrooge, too, but maybe we’ll end up remembering him in the better light he deserves by the end. A. T. SAYRE: Asterist, noun /ass ter ist/ – someone who lives on an asteroid. Often used as a pejorative for people posted on solitary observation or research stations in remote areas of…

In the third Dune novel Alia is ruling the empire as a regent while Paul and Chani’s twins, Ghanima and Leto, are still children. They are like her however, pre-born, and although they are only nine years old they have had the knowledge and wisdom of all of their ancestors since birth. They are concerned about Alia, they believe she has become an abomination, that she has been taken over by one of the voices in her head. Paul’s mother, Jessica, is returning from planet Caladan at the start of…

Tacita Dean’s FILM installation at the Marciano Art Foundation. For more photos, follow me on Instagram.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

Each dot is one thing the plugin reads. As the story names them, they gather: the content schemas, the 540 brand variables (69 of them set per brand, in blue) and the 25 component families; the 297 component variants it writes arrive with Figma. Figma kits often tell a design system's story a second time. Designers draw the components, engineers build them, and the two versions drift because nothing ties one to the other. Every correction gets made twice, by different people, or often doesn't…

i grew up playing baseball. i liked it most of the time. i would typically stop liking it around halfway through the season. i think i would stop liking it because it would hurt, get boring, get grindy, it would just get... not that fun. that is how my life is feeling right now; grindy. Like when you are playing runescape or minecraft and it hits that point of not being fun anymore. i know that's a signal of burnout. i know it is a signal to slow down and take breaks. i know that if i change…

A few days ago I saw a post on Instagram about a simple test to figure out how you actually feel about someone: “two beers and a puppy” test. It was invented by Ross McCammon in his book, which has a ridiculously long subtitle: Works Well with Others: An Outsider’s Guide to Shaking Hands, Shutting Up, Handling Jerks, and Other Crucial Skills in Business That No One Ever Teaches You. Two Beers and and a puppy” is a test I developed while working on the Esquire story on the American “son of a…