The world is still sad and annoying, let's talk about classic video games instead! Previously: SNES Games I finished ~30 years ago!, 30 NES/Famicom Games I finished as a kid, my list of completed console games from around 2002 Intro Last time I wrote about SNES games that I managed to play/finish with an actual cartridge. Today I'm writing about SNES games I played purely through an emulator. Back then my emulator of choice was ZSNES, which seems to have stopped development back in 2007. I'm…

This prize-winning sci-fi novel about wolf rewilding made me cry When There Are Wolves Again by E. J. Swift somehow delivers both a determined call for more wildernesses globally – and a great novel. Sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson is thrilled she gave it another chance. This August, the novel won the hugely prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Public comments It sounds right up Steve’s alley. Has anyone read it?

A song you didn’t realize was a cover? The Pet Shop Boys were a formative band of my youth. In an era of Stock, Aitken, and Waterman cookie-cutter pop, they stood out both with their sound, and their art house stylings. One of the few bands of that time that I still follow, I had most of their albums and was lucky enough to, finally, see them live a few years ago. A version of this song features on my favourite album of theirs but the original PSB version got heavy rotation on the radio when it…

I had a great idea in my early days at The Institute, which finished up creating a Dr Kavanagh, PhD, while generating some quite noisy [ie useless] data about Lithium in the groundwater. There are so many Kavanaghs hereabouts [like Powers down the Déise, and Burkes in Galway] that nicknames are given [Butt Kavanaghs; Bonesetter Kavanaghs] which adhere to descendants long after the actual short-arse or healer is dead. I forget the inducement, but, in September, I reserved a bunch of books at the…

The combination of chunks of stewing beef with French onion soup mix, thyme, and apple juice, slow cooked until melt-in-the-mouth tender gives this cottage pie a wonderfully rich flavour with just a hint of sweetness. Topped with cheesy mashed potatoes and baked until golden brown, it's the kind of meal that feels like a warm hug on a chilly day. Red meat isn't something which we eat in this house very often. Not only has it become very expensive as of late, but its not that good for you. They…

Advertwatch Well this is depressing. The invasion of previously pristine real estate at Elizabeth line stations has begun. This is the directional signage at Farringdon station, formerly just a route diagram on a plain white background. Alas it now has an advert squished into the gap at the bottom, spreading up almost as far as the bottom of the 'g' in Reading. Arguably it doesn't get in the way of anything important, or arguably it's an unhelpful distraction. It's part of a new campaign at…

Believe Women? This is a soul-crushing sort of item to write, and one we've been putting off. But we can do so no longer. Click here for full story

I hope that this time our ghost doesn't get hoodwinked into something he didn't intend to sign up for. Though, unlike the previous encounter, he isn't trying to assimilate but reactively responding to a signal from someone in need.

Roden Readers — Hello from the other side of hiding in Europe during Japan’s extended summer / record-breakingly rainy September. It is I, Modo-san. I was working on a book in London. And then co-leading a Walk and Talk in Norway. And then participating in an artist retreat in Italy. Erroneously, I thought we had been approaching “layers season” in Tokyo. False alarm. It’s 29℃ and about 80% humidity today. American tourists are still in shorts. One day soon a sweater might be worn in this great…

Morning sky as seen from Darwin facing north at 4:00 am ACST on 22 October (90 minutes before sunrise), the Orionid radiant is indicated with a starburst. Similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at an equivalent local time. Click to embiggen.Morning sky as seen from Brisbane facing north at 3:44 am AEST on 22 October (90 minutes before sunrise), the Orionid radiant is indicated with a starburst. Similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at an equivalent local time. Click to…

I just spent all morning searching through all my Gemini chat sessions for a particular conversation thread we had several weeks ago. I remembered that the later part of the thread had the useful information I wanted, where we went slightly off topic and discovered something really interesting. The search features are kind of limited as far as I can see. It's basically just simple text string matching, with no obvious way to search using date ranges for example. The results do have a date…

A map, guidebook or race course has one set of mileage listed. Your GPS device has more mileage listed or, rarely, less mileage. Why? Updated Oct 2026 Read More ... Continue reading GPS mileage discrepancies – Updated Oct 2026 at PMags.com.

Mt Shirouma-dake (白馬岳, shirouma-dake) is a 2932m peak located in the Northern Alps of Japan, right above the village of Hakuba. With a hiking course of around 12 - 14 hours, it can be done as a long day hike for those with endurance, or more commonly with a stay at the Hakuba Sanso lodge near the summit. Mt Shirouma-dake is one of the more popular hikes in the Northern Alps, and after hiking this mountain I can see why. The trailhead is fairly accessible, the ridgeline views from partway up the…

It is out there, in the real world, where the waves are breaking, crashing against the rocks.

Looking at https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/utility/bitset/count, I was intrigued to see popcount mentioned in the “See also” section. Handy. That made me curious to see how the stdlibs choose to implement it. Here it is for Clang: libcxx/include/__bit/popcount.h template <class _Tp> [[__nodiscard__]] _LIBCPP_CONSTEXPR int __popcount(_Tp __t) _NOEXCEPT { return __builtin_popcountg(__t); } #if _LIBCPP_STD_VER >= 20 template <__unsigned_integer _Tp> [[nodiscard]] constexpr int popcount(_Tp __t)…

Today, I take a break from your regularly-scheduled AI mathocalypse programming to urge my American readers to vote in the Congressional midterms, early if possible, if you haven’t already. Especially if your state faces one or more major contests, as does my adopted home state of Texas. Me, I voted straight-ticket Democrat today, as I’ve done in every election since I became eligible over a quarter-century ago. So yes, I voted for the guy who studied theology a short walk from my house, and…

Michal Wallace (tangentstorm) loves pedagogy, producing many instructional videos, mostly for J and recently for Decker. For his dream programming course, he made a Forth-ish VM b4 and a REBOL-array-style implish. To assist with courses, he’s made tanco courseware around test-driven development and minavo, an “audio-video outliner” (a modern jprez.) Among many other things, he ran a webhost and worked as a professional K programmer, interviewed on the ArrayCast. Pedagogy What inspired your…

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to suggest light verse. Only—and this makes all the difference—the pieties are not quite in place . . .” After two hundred fifty years, America has produced a handful of world-class poets, and many good ones. Robinson I rank as the greatest to emerge between Dickinson and Eliot. His only rival among close…

I’m sharing this message to my kids after they came up with an algorithm for the CSES Movie Festival problem this morning. Here’s the (edited for clarity) message they sent me: We have found the algorithm to the problem! The problem can be solved by sorting the movies in ascending order according to the ending times. We can start from the movie with the earliest ending and watch it. Then continue moving to all the movies according to their ending times. For every subsequent movie, check if we…

⌾ : Fujifilm XT5.⚲ : ///lightly.tulips.covert There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual — become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest vision….At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise. We marvel at it. We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding themselves in the state of…

Twenty Years Ago on FITK Fríða Frænka, an Antique Shop in the lower two floors of a house on Vesturgata, is a pleasantly over-stuffed collection of curios, furniture and household items. The pack-rat genes that must be sharing my DNA have led me to this place every time I've been in Reykjavík. The mix of things here is more toward trash than treasure, but, like the shop's mythical namesake (

“Albertans made a clear choice. They chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other.” –Prime Minister Mark Carney After devastating the Sotoan fleet moored at Newfield island, Joker Squadron is deployed to participate in providing air support for ground forces as the FCU attempt to retake their capital city, Theve. On […]

I built a Mac dictation app in about a day. Press Caps Lock, talk, and your words appear at the cursor in any app.

Yellow Bike, Yellow Wall – Copenhagen, Denmark – Fujifilm GFX100RF – Provia Positive I got back from Fujikina NYC yesterday. Apparently, it was the most-attended Fujifilm-specific event ever in the world! I got to meet a lot of you, and shake a lot of hands. I had some great conversations with many different photographers. One specific conversation was with Dan Bailey, who I’ve talked with before but never met in-person until a few days ago. He gave me a suggestion that I thought was great, and…

OK, we are calling this done. This "quick" project has been rumbling on for over two months; it's time to declare it finished. Right at the end, the kit decided to fight me again. Assembling the roof was easy enough, but painting it...I sprayed the whole thing with grey primer, but fancied a lighter grey finish, so out came the acrylic pens. Three coats of grey later, it looked nasty, the paint was streaky, I suspect because it dried too fast to blend properly. Looking at the colour, it was too…

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I’m painfully aware that I’m a bit of a nostalgia poster. Most things I post about on here are basically baked in millennial nostalgia. When I post about current events or recent trends, it’s usually me being depressed. It’s hard for me to get enthusiastic about the present or future because of…*gestures vaguely at everything*…but at the same time I want to be careful about being all doom-and-gloom. A persistent belief that the present sucks and the past was always better is an ingredient that…

I was really excited this year because I had the chance to do something I've always wanted to do: Take a ghost tour! We took a train to New Orleans this summer and took a walking ghost tour while staying in the French Quarter. It was a lot of fun and a spooky good time. My wife and daughter had to keep me in line from asking too many questions ("Not trying to be funny, not trying to get a laugh, I don't want anybody to have the worst day at their job..."). Today's installment of Trick or Treat…

The first UK screening of Rogue Trooper took place at the British Film Institute (BFI) as part of the BFI London Film Festival, bringing together an incredible mix of cast, creatives and die-hard 2000 AD fans for a very special evening! Among those in attendance were members of the cast, including the brilliant Aneurin Barnard, Reece Shearsmith, Alice Lowe, Asa Butterfield, Rob Delaney, Al

The sunrise was interesting this morning. “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning” and all that. The weather forecast for the next couple of days looks interesting. I may have to do some storm chasing before things settle down for the weekend. I appreciated the red sky, but also the bit of orange higher up in the clouds. It made for a great start to the day.