“Before the Flood” by W.S. Merwin --

In case you missed it:Let's get the obvious out of the way. To the extent that a car is defined as a vehicle for personal transportation, what we saw demonstrated last week was a flying car-shaped object (possibly with scare quotes around "flying"). The cold-gas thrusters that kept the "car" aloft for a few seconds didn't have anyone in it, partially because the passenger seats had been replaced with compressed air tanks, but mainly because the thrusters were so loud that anyone within by some…

Slides from my keynote at the CLICKNL Design Innovation Sessions, Digital Futures theme session, Dutch Design Week, 21 October 2026, Natlab, Eindhoven. CLICKNL invited me to give this keynote. I saw it as a great opportunity to intervene in the debate about design and generative AI. My take is informed by my past work on contestability. That work is all about approaching “AI” as an arena where various parties compete over how it is made and how it is used. My take is also informed by my…

For the last two or three weeks, I've been discussing with a few co-workers that I'm not enjoying a few things that are happening in my workplace. These things range from the lack of quality that we are shipping, to a lot of back-and-forth, and even roadblocks that were never an issue before but are now. I was asking myself if I was doing a poor job recently or what changed, but I couldn't figure out if this was really my fault or not. Then I talked to a few people, and one answer I got…

9720/21639OK, my job does come with some pretty cool treats. Not often two days in a row, but sometimes. So hot on the heels of visiting the actual set of Horrible Histories, I got to interview legendary actor Kyle MacLachlan in a sold out gig at the huge Central Hall, Westminster. Kyle is briefly in the country doing a book tour for his autobiography Fictional Selves which I can very highly recommend.

Jason Kratz wrote a rebuttal to my arguments against the precedent set by Aaron Parecki’s decision to use AI in his work on the IndieWeb and his method of defending it. It is a poor rebuttal for cherry-picking phrases, using strawman arguments, and labelling rather than participating in a discourse. Jason finds what I have written ‘mind-boggling’, ‘fucking ridiculous’ and ‘disgusting’, but I will not address these because they are not arguments. Much of Jason’s complaint is about one paragraph…

Via Newspapers.comI guess you could say that this is one of those UFO stories that has everything, including satanic fungus. The “Jacksonville Journal,” January 28, 1974:After sighting an Unidentified Flying Object and being felled by a ray apparently from an occupant of the craft, a strange "devil's head" was found growing in his yard, a Jacksonville man has reported to the UFO Research Institute.Norman R. Chastain, 62, of 2507 Kershaw Drive W., said he delayed reporting the strange incident…

World War I trench warfare transformed many green bucolic landscapes to barren crater-pocked vistas resembling the surface of the moon. Concentrations of heavy metals from munitions poisoned the soil. The landscapes slowly recovered after the war ended. No-Man’s Land during World War I. It looks like nothing could ever live here again, but poppies and mustard plants popped up, even during lulls between battles and artillery barrages. Flanders Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) seeds can rest in the soil,…

Last month (September 12th 2026) I took part in a Folk Tales Nature Writing Workshop at the Horniman Gardens in Forest Hill. The setting was the nature trail at the bottom of the sloping park next to the museum's gardens, near where a new children's playground and cafe have opened recently. I've been going to the museum for years but never knew about the nature trail, a long stretch following the route of the disused railway line. The Crystal Palace and South London Junction line - which had a…

By Jon PGwion's MistakeOSRLevels 3-5 Cross a mysterious bridge that appeared on the coast and enter a terrifying city of wealth and splendour. This 54 page adventure describes nine areas, each with a handful of rooms, in a city that mysteriously appears one day and begins raiding the local towns. I don’t really understand how the adventure is meant to be run, given the content, or what the challenge is? Maybe, it’s not interactive in any way, to be hyperbolic? I don’t fucking know man. I’m…

https://kenney.nl/starter-kits Generous contribution of 6 game skeletons in Godot. Impressive what one person can accomplish these days! I've made 6 open-source @godotengine.org projects perfect for as a base for your first or next game. Completely human-made and easy to understand code & comments. All visuals and sounds included, CC0! kenney.nl/starter-kits[image or embed]— Kenney (@kenney.nl) October 21, 2026 at 5:06 AM

“Could a donkey ever become an astronaut?” I always enjoy seeing a new story brought to the stage, especially one that isn’t already a household name. Toto, adapted from Ximo Abadia’s beautifully illustrated children’s book, follows a young donkey determined to defy expectations and pursue their dream of becoming an astronaut. At its heart, it is an uplifting story about perseverance, self-belief and refusing to let others define your future. Productions like this are a reminder of why it is so…

Status at 10:40 UTC: the fixed PHP is not out yet. PHP releases it on 21 October 2026 at 14:00 UTC. Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat and the third-party repositories follow after that. This post updates as the packages arrive.

Marisabel is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on a theme of Pages. It’s no secret I love notebooks. Whenever I start a new job, one of the best parts is going to the book shop and picking up a new notebook to accompany me. As the luck happened to line up, this month I filled up my previous pocket notebook and get to start a new one. In the Field Notes fan subreddit FieldNuts, people have built a beautiful ritual out of it, called In/Out . With Field Notes, there’s the fun of picking a new…

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Cind Swanson. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.Epic Games is an unfortunately unavoidable part of the gaming scene. Fortnite is a global phenomenon that feasts on IP, a glut of corporate dystopia as every character you can imagine is assigned one of two body types and forced to wield Uzis for that Victory Royale. They’ve been one…

I was minding my own business in Noho when this building forced me to look at it: Completed in 1883, it was not actually the Mercantile Exchange, which was about a mile away, but apparently was back-office and sales space for the exchange. Physically, it’s a building with a cast-iron front facade, brick side and rear walls and (probably) wood-joist floors, just like most cast-iron-front commercial buildings in lower Manhattan, but the ornament on the facade is maybe unique. Since the building…

I am all about PDRN-based skincare at the moment. I only have a few in my vanity table because I do my research before I buy it. As much as I want to try all PDRN skincare out there, I won’t because I feel like brands are only putting the letters P-D-R-N in their products […]

Today’s guest post comes from Skyler Holobach! I’ve known Skyler forever, as one of our fellow deliverability experts in this world of email, and now she runs her own company focused on email deliverability consulting, incident response, and advising new ESPs on what features to build. Check out Threadsmith Group to learn more. -- Al IversonOne of the most jarring aspects of working as long as I have and as deeply as I have in email is occasionally realizing how little most people actually know…

I was twelve years old when my father bought me my first horror movie: Halloween. It was October, and Blockbuster had released the film under its own label. I remember standing near the registers and seeing a stack of VHS tapes. My dad picked one up, asked if I had ever seen it, and when I said no, he smiled and told me I was going to love it. That moment was strange for a couple of reasons. First, my dad was willingly letting me watch a horror movie. Second, he was actually buying a movie. My…

Recently, I took a look back at some old abandoned Scream fansites I found online. I had fun conducting a little internet archaeology and discovering these old works of love before they disappear forever. Sadly, Web 1.0 is dying as the internet continues to grow, and I guess I feel a certain obligation to keep some of that spirit alive. That's what inspired me to create this post to begin with, and I feel like paying homage to those who came before is only right. I originally used Angelfire's…

It is commonly said that AI today is the worst it will ever be. This is true. AI today is probably the most centralized it will ever be as well. Currently the most reliable way we know how to make AIs smarter is to make them bigger. This principle is called the scaling law. To improve the current best AIs, which are transformer neural nets, we need to increase the scale of their training data, the scale of their compute, and the scale of their inference, or delivery. That scaling results in…

As you get older, you might notice that it’s harder to have a decent conversation in a noisy room, especially if there’s background music playing. This might be despite not having any specific hearing problems, according to RNID online checks or other tests. So, it was interesting to see a tip on Threads from a sound guy who mentioned that he always dips the EQ at 600-2000 Hz when he’s playing background music at an event where people are chatting. He reckons this allows people to converse…

I’m getting annoyed enough with Siri causing Spotlight not to be able to launch apps reliably that I might need to switch back to Alfred.

The clock going back is one of the UK's most universally experienced seasonal transitions. It abruptly changes how a person experiences daylight throughout the year. And what I mean by this is, in Brasil, we also have (had?) summer time clock changes, but when you’re in a tropical country, there isn’t much of a difference, to be honest. That’s why I want to talk here a little about how naturopathic thinking would deal with this ‘north of the globe’ experience. Why the abruptness is…

“There are now more cameras on planet Earth than human beings.” A curious arithmetic, given how thoroughly the eye has been enthroned as the guarantor of experience. For centuries, to see meant that someone was there, even if that someone could only be imagined through the image left behind. Now vision takes place without the consolations of a witness. A photograph can pass directly into coordinate data, then find its way back to the world as an instruction. The picture may never appear before…

Daily Drawing 1025

After changing one project's stack three times, I picked Go, React, MUI, native mobile apps, and ConnectRPC for the projects I start next.

The first light of day on the Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier, Texas. The post The Pier at Dawn appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Once upon a time, there was an iPhone, and an iPhone without the phone app. We call the latter iPod touch. Then that iPhone without the phone app became much bigger, and Apple called it an iPad. A lot of people call it just a big iPhone. Then Apple forked iOS into iPadOS, and iPad started to be less of a big iPhone, with funky stuff like stage manager and traffic lights and whatnots. And I thought iPhone is with smaller screens, and iPad is with bigger screens. Then Apple released iPhone Duo,…

Translated from French into Dutch by Elisabeth Van Haegenborgh. Also available in Portuguese and Croatian, but not in English. Very literally, the Dutch title means 'the lines that draw up my body'. This is a graphic novel-style memoir about the author's childhood as a girl in Iran. It's about how terrifying and bleak life can be as a woman, and about how that already enters one's life at a very young age. There's a lot of anger and despair that comes with dehumanization, being lawfully nothing…