The blip is over. We have Fable back. Utah teapot: happy fable/mythos easter Wednesday, to those who celebrate Here is the official letter restoring Fable, great job everyone. Notice it is addressed to Tom Brown, not to Dario Amodei. Anthropic had to make the controls more stupid for now, but this is a big win. j⧉nus: YES!!! I’m really proud of Anthropic for their successful negotiation with the government. Also positive update on the government being sane and possible to cooperate with. Afaik…
Link: Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & StrategyArts organizations learned long ago to prove their economic value with hard numbers: attendance, tourism revenue, multiplier effects. News, as Yoni Greenbaum argues here, likes to cling to civic virtue and assume that the work should speak for itself.“Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about…
When I talk to my cats, I do this in a special voice (don't judge me; I know many people do this!) but even after all these years, my "I'm talking to a cat" voice does not elicit any response from them. It's as if they are unable to hear the difference between my regular voice and my cat voice. Now, imagine you're on the planet Arion-7. An ugly bugger of an alien slowly and ominously moves toward you, growling, with highly acidic saliva dripping from its teeth and the corners of its mouth (yes,…
Traps & Treachery has received more use in my D&D games than any book outside of the core rules. Originally Published March 14th, 2002 If a publisher walked up to me and said, “Justin, I want to produce a D20 sourcebook. What should I do first?” Then I would say: “Buy a copy of Traps & Treachery so you can see how to do it right.” CONTENTS Traps & Treachery is a 172-page, hardback D20 supplement which retails for $24.95. Although printed in black and white, this makes it roughly equivalent to…
Andy King writes: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗱’𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗽𝗼𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗮 𝗚𝗶𝗻𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗲 My wife called to me. A constable was at the door. He handed me a subpoena to appear for a deposition in the case of Francesca Gino v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Srikant Datar. The subpoena puzzled us. I don’t believe I’ve ever met Francesca Gino, and I am certainly not an expert on her case. Why not call me or email me with any questions? As directed, I arrived at the offices of Ropes & Gray,…
I was recently summoned to a meeting in Stockholm, a city I had somehow managed to avoid despite living in Copenhagen for years. My Swedish experience, up to this point, consisted entirely of trips to Malmö — the closest Swedish city to Denmark and, more importantly, home to a Costco. As an American living abroad, I am duty-bound to report there every six months so the proper authorities know I'm still alive and to procure my ceremonial barrel of peanut butter pretzels. It's less a shopping…
2026-07-03Hello! Short article today after yesterday's ramble.This is just some props that I had lying around: a deck of cards, a cardboard box, some paper, and a printer. And a flashlight. I set the cards at the perfect position to stay freestanding.Abstract photography is always a bit strange, since by its very nature it is difficult to describe. I'm diving into it because, without my usual camera kit, I can't make use of camera equipment to make interesting shots. I set up a scene that would…
(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)After spending too much time on an airplane, I’m back from the 2026 St. Louis Pen Show. I attended this show last year and much of my experience was similar to last year, so it may sound a bit like a broken record. This year, I was a bit (a lot?) out of sorts due to the passing of a…
Session 322 part 2 was played on 3/14/26Morgana, wizard 10 (Rob)Borumar, Triton Thief 11 (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter 8 (Lanse)Nick, Fighter 8 (Me)Koltic, Cleric 9 (Cindy)Aroon, Fighter 8 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 8 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 8 (NPC)Blotto, somehow, ends up being the one to go out and meet with the dwarves as they arrive and immediately begin to erect a number of tents. Riding upon Esmerelda the Rust Monster, the dwarves keep a wary eye on the goblin as he approaches, but otherwise remain…
Today, we celebrate Independence Day with...the American Flag. O-oh, say can you SEEEE? BYYY the bakery light?How so soundly they failed... to give our flag any meaning: Those brown stripes and blob "stars" ARE a scurr-i-lous sight! And the RED parts they botched... are so def'nitely leaning: And what's that O-VER THEEEERE?! [cymbal crash!!] Did the BAKER NOT CARE? [slide whistle!] A goof, what a sight - it's more THAN I can bear. (Yes. Really.) No WAY does thi-is new-fangled airbru-ush yet…
I’d also love to know what you think of the broader idea. A WordPress Playground that doesn’t just show people a site, but actively teaches them how to use it. Turn Any WordPress Playground Into a Guided Education Experience | Pootlepress This looks like something with amazing potential, a way to build in guided tours in the WordPress editor. It works in the WordPress playground via pootleplayground.com. Pootle Playground helps you create blueprints for the WordPress Playground1. There are…
I want to congratulate Gianni Petrella, for his PhD defense today at the University of Luxembourg, and the wonderful thesis Windows, walls and invariants of quiver moduli that he has written. The thesis will be available online at some point, but you can also check out the papers it builds on: Rigidity and Schofield's partial tilting conjecture for quiver moduli, a joint paper with Ana-Maria Brecan, Hans Franzen, Markus Reineke, and myself, published in the Journal de l'École Polytechnique…
a dream narrative poem Dindga McCannon, Pat is Pregnant, 1977. Courtesy of Fridman Gallery you still linger…hard to forget you,but I want to.hard to move on,but I had to.you are the dry rotof towels, a smell thatremains regardless of thenumber of timeswe wash and bleach them.constant without contact,abuse without words,the fact of life thatdies to teach one morelesson while the heartis already breaking.I had a dream that youroldest daughter found me,and hugged my neckso tight I lost my voice.I…
[By the mid-1970s, the clock was ticking on Cazzie Russell’s NBA career. The former top overall pick in the 1966 NBA draft, Russell had bounced from New York to Golden State and onward to Los Angeles. It was a 10-year run that hadn’t lived up to expectations, mainly because those expectations were too high and unrealistic. Russell was an outstanding scorer, but he wasn’t a franchise player as advertised coming out of college. During his NBA twilight years in Los Angeles, Russell still believed…
The post Kindertrauma Funhouse first appeared on kindertrauma.
I've just posted a new piece at Tolkien Oddments substack. Here is the beginning. You can read the entire piece freely at this link.More on MadlenerLast summer, I published a piece in The Journal of Tolkien Research on “Josef Madlener’s ‘Der Berggiest’: Not the Origin of Gandalf.” It is freely available here. My point basically was that it was chronologically impossible for a postcard
Knowledge and skills are the power. One can be self-reliant and seize a brighter future with the right capacity, even without status and wealth. Yet, its foundation — education — is extremely fragile and a prime example of today's global inequality. Too many students over teachers. Low relevance of the content to learners' reality. Limited choices due to financial and geographical hurdles. Receiving quality education is still a privilege in many parts of the world. To fill the gap, many…
I wrote this short essay about the “pursuit of happiness” for the editorial page of the StarTribune newspaper, where it was published on July 3. _____ Opinion | What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness? The authors of our founding document were deadly serious about a goal we might see as whimsical. By Timothy Taylor When the five-person committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared it to be “self-evident” that there was a right to “the pursuit of Happiness,”…
Alexander Pushkin is widely credited as the creator of modern Russian language. And rightfully so: everything produced after Pushkin is easily readable today. Everything written before his age, can be read only with some effort1. He did literally set a standard that everyone else followed, and that would be chosen as the model for the later state enforced standard curriculum.His whole upbringing, whole education, was in French. 90% of his training as an author was reading, and emulating the…
John Mattos is an award winning illustrator with an impressive client list, based in California, who I first featured back in 2008.He works in a beautiful Art Deco influenced style that takes advantage of the crispness and smooth areas of gradients made possible by vector art. His striking compositional sensibility has produced a number of famous and influential posters, and his work is featured in the collections of museums and of influential figures in film, technology and other sectors. I…
💡Typhon is an embedded, persistent, ACID database engine written in .NET that speaks the native language of game servers and real-time simulations: entities, components, and systems. It delivers full transactional safety with MVCC snapshot isolation at sub-microsecond latency, powered by cache-line-aware storage, zero-copy access, and configurable durability. Series: A Database That Thinks Like a Game Engine Why I’m Building a Database Engine in C# What Game Engines Know About Data That…
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A year before, a teenaged me had watched the Doors play live at Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Tension at the concert was high, as Morrison was already in trouble with the law for having grabbed his own crotch during a performance in Miami a few months before. (A decade or two later, Michael Jackson’s…
I have found a peculiar delight in encryption, and particularly in using pgp-based asymmetric cryptography. This is especially useful for securing email communications, but doing so requires remembering to run M-x mml-secure-sign or mml-secure-encrypt in Mail Utilities For Emacs (Mu4e) before sending the message. For this reason I have been wanting to write a quick method that automatically adds signing capabilities and encryption only the recipient has a public key. Thankfully, I did not have…
Photo by Millenary Watches on Unsplash In Rejecting the Luxury of Hobbies I talked about the “investor” types of people. The people that seem to feel that participating in a hobby based around collecting should not affect their bottom line. Well, here we are, just a couple of days later, and one of these “collectors” just showed up in my YouTube with his latest video: Affordable Watches Lose You Money. Here's Why. It didn't take long for me to understand the premise he was going with. He starts…
Ford has admitted to rehiring hundreds of human workers after its aggressive AI adoption strategy backfired. “We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles. Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.” A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding…
Alf Dubs on the performative cruelty of Mahmood’s immigration agenda. This was even before she decided to enlist the public to decide asylum cases or tax refugees for the time they’re forced to wait for a decision. What the Palestine Action appeal decision tells us about terrorism law. How leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison. A Guardian investigation has corroborated the report by the Drey Dossier on the secret office “developing or redeveloping…
The Venezuelan earthquake lifted the Trinidad & Tobago coastline by nearly 20 feet. Carbon capture can’t conceivably curb climate change. How the “Wedges” climate change paper became a big oil marketing tool. UK newspapers have already printed 63 editorials in 2026 backing North Sea drilling. Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat. The synthetic cell that feeds, grows and reproduces. By donkey cart into the void.
Mimnermus, fragment 1, line 1 (tr. Douglas E. Gerber): What life is there, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite? τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης; Horace, Epistles 1.6.65-66 (tr. Colin Macleod): If, as Mimnermus holds, without love and play there's no enjoyment, live for love and play. si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore iocisque nil est iucundum, vivas in amore iocisque.
Usual caveat emptor here: what I‘m writing here is my personal opinion, and while it does relate to a field my current employer (Meta) has interest in, it does not represent the views of my current, past, or future employers. Yes we all get bored by these preambles, but if you want to still be able to hear the opinions of seasoned engineers you’ll have to live with them. I personally would not want to lose my job because my posts are reported as being related to it. They’re not. Over the past…
Mere are bluish gobliny folk sometimes capable of psychic magic. They live on a moon orbiting a gas giant. All Mere are subjects of the Divine Emperor, and dwell on the Continent, a landmass at the center of the exterior hemisphere. The Empire has 10 classes into which all subjects are sorted from the time before they are hatched. To place an egg in an incorrect hatchery is a crime punishable by immediate death. Each class has specific obligations and privileges. Companies of adventurers are…
