There are two schools of thought. One suggests that you should always play the long game. Have a grand vision and then work towards it. The other advocates living in the moment because the future is uncertain. There is some truth to both. The future is indeed uncertain; it always has been. The job you were so happy about, the one you took that mortgage for, can disappear overnight. The business you thought would change your life can be rendered obsolete by a software update from a tech company.…

The End of the ProgrammeThe final instalment of Travels with Pevsner sees Jonathan Meades in a melancholy mood. He starts to reminisce about his fallen heroes - first Duncan Edwards (Dudley used to be in Worcestershire and then Peter Collins. Son of Kidderminster and previously unheard of.Peter Collins (1931–1958) was a British motor-racing driver born in Mustow Green, near Kidderminster, Worcestershire. One of the leading drivers of the 1950s, he raced for Ferrari in Formula One, winning three…

The High Llamas in Chicago - The Lounge Ax, November 15, 1997 / The Rainbo Club, November 16, 1997 / Metro, April 3, 1998The High Llamas just announced an enticing 2027 gig in Dublin. The details: “Hawaii is a wide-screen epic, stretching through realms of classic pop and jazz, soundtrack music, exotica and neo-Americana, while charting a journey through musical landscapes of abiding lightness. For this one-off show, an expanded The High Llamas are joined by strings and brass to perform their…

New Q&A! These questions come from Patreon supporters: Patreon.com/KnifeSteelNerds The post Q&A: Are We Running Out of Premium Knife Steel? And Other Questions appeared first on Knife Steel Nerds.

Towards the bottom of Broadway in Manhattan, not far from Wall Street, you will find St Paul’s Chapel, the oldest surviving church building in in New York City. Duck inside and you will discover a rare little corner of calm amongst the frenetic energy of Manhattan. St Paul’s has a fascinating history, its story inextricably […] The post Why Is There A Bell From East London In Manhattan’s Oldest Church? appeared first on Living London History.

I spend a lot of time in antique stores, second hand book shops, and flea markets, and sometimes the desire to add something to the collection overwhelms my inherent cheapness. Let's look at a few recent items added to the shelves and stacks at MPorcius HQ. I think if you click, you can see larger versions of the photos.At the most recent Big Flea event in the DMV, I think at Timonium, MD, I spent fifty bucks on this copy of Victor Arwas' Art Deco Sculpture, which is more than I like to pay for…

There’s an older deaf gentleman in my town who’s very friendly, and likes to communicate with rudimentary hand gestures, but I have a hard time understand what he’s trying to say. I’d love to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at some point (shoutout King Ron), but until then, I wanted an app that could convert speech into text. Every transcription app I found required a pretty expensive subscription… so I decided to build my own using web technologies! Demo Before we dive into how this all…

Transfers on transit are funny things. On the one hand, it is undeniably helpful to have multiple lines connect to each other and feed ridership; trying to have a single-seat ride for every trip would require infinite money (a glitch which, if found, would change city planning in more ways than this). At the same time, there is a limit to what makes a reasonable transfer. And today I want to talk about one of those limits: how much walking you have to do inside a station that claims to be…

⌾ : Ricoh GR IV monochrome.⚲ : ///invent.dogs.skip A short trip up the Parramatta River to Abbotsford Wharf and the Sydney Rowing Club for drinks and dinner. It was a textbook spring evening that demanded lingering out on the deck as the sun set. Of further note was the food. As a person who eats a plant-based diet, eggplant is frequently encountered on restaurant menus. Not that long ago, it was incessantly posted as the token ‘vegetarian’ meal…you know, to keep those crazy vegans at bay. And…

Due to the unprecedented PHP vulnerability today, I took the blogs down until Debian pushed a fix, as advised. (And also Quimby.) They pushed a fix now, so things should be back to normalish. Except that the web server on Gmane is still down — I need to do further upgrades on that machine, so it’ll remain down for the time being. I.e., you can’t sign up any new mailing lists or Gwene RSS feeds, but that should be back up within a few days. (The news server itself and other services are up —…

Today at 14:00 UTC, the PHP project shipped emergency security releases (8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35) to fix 2 critical vulnerabilities in the core PHP engine: CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Collectively tracked as PHP2Shell and rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0 by the PHP security team (and a straight 10.0 by several independent researchers), the bugs allow an unauthenticated attacker over the open internet to leak live server memory and execute arbitrary shell commands on standard PHP…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 3-4: Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of 11 June 1903, twenty-eight officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade.* After an exchange of fire, the sentries standing guard before the building were arrested and disarmed. With keys taken from the duty captain, the conspirators broke into the reception hall and made for the royal bedchamber, hurrying up…

This morning, two critical PHP Security Advisories were published: RCE via OOM corruption (9.2/10) RCE via stale global state (9.2/10) If you're running PHP for any service, you need to upgrade immediately to 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, or 8.5.12. And if you use Remi's repos on RedHat-derivative Linux distros, you need to switch to official repos temporarily as Remi's on vacation and can't update his community repo. (Reminds me of xkcd 2347). I'm glad I finished migrating this website from a…

My one-year-old has taken his first steps! A few days ago, my wife an I were at a pub/hotel for a weekend brunch and I’d taken him for a little explore. On the way back, he pulled himself up on a table and just…set off. He managed three or four steps before I shouted to my wife, and then a couple more with her watching before he dropped down to his bum. We kept it a secret for the rest of the day, hoping that the other kids would get to see it for themselves. Later that evening, we filmed him…

Been holding off on this one until I had some seafood – and now I do. This is a spicy seafood stew called jjambbong – and they tend to be among my favorite varieties from South Korea. I think I found this one at Boo Han Market in Edmonds, Washington across from 99 Ranch Market. Well, let’s begin. Iga Natural Singil-dong Spicy Jjamppong – South Korea Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Contains shrimp, chicken, squid, beef, pork, and shellfish. To prepare, add vegetables, freeze dried…

My review of Street Fighter (2026). But first, a long-ass preamble.I didn't grow up actively playing video games. I only had sparse encounters. I remember watching other kids at my after school program play Street Fighter 2 on the small TV. I'm sure I watched my older cousins play it, and I might have given it a go in an arcade or two. I'm pretty sure I watched Street Fighter (1994) in my youth, but I didn't remember much from it. That all changed in 2023 when Daniel bought SF6. I watched him…

In early 2026, the latest collection of new Solar Pons stories came out from Belanger Books: Solar Pons: A Year of Mystery 1919. This volume contains 20 stories by various authors, all set in 1919. This was done as a Kickstarter campaign, and I got the work as part of that. Pons is a Sherlock […]

We were doubly spoiled yesterday with cookbook releases, and I love Ayesha Nurdjaja so much that I needed to dedicate a day to celebrating her debut cookbook, Mediterranean All the Way! If you’ve ever had the privilege of eating at Shukette or Shuka in NYC (two of my favorite spots!), you know we’re in for a treat! And if you’re not already following Ayesha, what are you doing?! She’s one of my absolute favorites on here. She shared her Spicy and Tart Chicken Wings earlier this year, and OMG,…

After staying the night at Stanger Vineyards in Paso Robles, we drove the Noovo Plus van south to El Capitán State Beach Campground, with a couple of interesting stops on the way.An interactive map of our route:At Stanger Vineyards in Paso Robles:Curvy road:Historic El Camino Real bell marker:Ocean view:Vandenberg Space Force Base:A nice thing about a van is we can stop whenever we feel like it; we wanted a place for lunch, so I looked on the map and saw Ken Adams Park nearby, so we just…

We are back with my October exploration of Coven 13. The first issue established Arthur H. Landis' vision of a modern successor to Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, while the second made his editorial philosophy even clearer. The supernatural should not simply be dropped into a story because the author needs a monster. It should be part of the world around it, with its own history, rules, and consequences.Now we get to Issue #3, dated January 1970, and are now into the decade that would see the…

I’ve enthused here before about Kirby Air Ride, and its improbable recent sequel Kirby Air Riders. Racing games, and more than racing games, from the mind that invented Super Smash Bros., and with more than a little similarity to the perennial fighting megahit, but at the same time completely different from it. In fact, there is no other big-publisher game in existence like the Kirby Air Ride games, especially its innovative City Trial mode. If you’ve asked yourself how well would City Trial…

When the Handwich was added to the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches in 2023 and I discovered it there during my regular review of the page looking for sandwich inspiration, I wasn’t sure it was appropriate for the Tribunal. Defunct theme park food didn’t seem to fit into our mission, which I see as a sort of sandwich anthropology, the study of human cultures through their sandwiches. At the time, I had this to say about it: Something called the “Handwich,” an item that was served at the Disney…

📷 277/365 - The arena

Witch Wife in an Alien WorldOut 9th October on Cruz del Sur Music As the erstwhile darlings of the new wave of traditional lesser spotted heavy metal, this album is a bold move for Smoulder. Sure, aside from a clear pivot away from doom into faster classic metal stylings, the material is contiguous with previous effort ‘Violent Creed of Vengeance’. But the demeanour is darker, the delivery more eccentric, the overall experience more bombastic, reaching to the essence of old school USPM in…

A standard career ladder document is often aggressively detailed, listing out competencies, delivery outcomes, behavioral qualifications, technical achievements, and more, for what it takes to reach each level in an organization. What is usually missing from those same documents is any sense of the pyramidal shape of the structures they define. That is, at each level of the ladder, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. If a team of ten engineers each work hard and meet the requirements of a…

Making a Career in Dictatorship by Christian Gläßel & Adam Scharpf (Oxford, 2025) What if the standard career path was a driver of authoritarianism? That’s the theory put forth by Christian Gläßel and Adam Sharpf, who draw on copious historical data from Argentina’s army, as well as case studies from Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Jawara’s Gambia. What they find is that two of the defining characteristics of dictatorships—huge security apparatuses engaging in surveillance,…

The title was always a magician’s trick.

View from BenCab Museum's Café SabelI’m out of the corporate world since April. I felt a huge weight lift off me the week I sent my resignation letter. The past year has been really tough and I kept questioning whether I’m actually a creative or just someone who makes videos. Café Cueva! at Ili-Likha Artists VillageMixed-media figures and wood carvings of Jose Rizal Leandro's Bistro at Ili-Likha Artists Village Not being able to do anything meaningfully creative in a creative role slowly wears…