Perfume PosseWhat to Wear Hey friends – I had a cold for the last week+ which left me feeling poorly; I still have a bit of residual upper chest drama which is abating, thankfully. So no perfume adventures, instead I’ve been organizing (Winter is… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseWhat to Wear

AllSides puts three opinion pieces side by side: one from the right, one from the left, and one they call center. All three are about whether hooking up is bad for people. Here's how it reads to me. From the Right: Emily JashinskyHer point is that hookup culture is a sweet deal for guys and a raw deal for a lot of women. Plenty of women are still hoping a fling turns into something real, and the guys know it. She puts some of the blame on Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast, for telling…

Nota bene: Last month (see here), I mentioned that I would begin two new series on Adam Smith. I have already completed my first series on “Adam Smith and the ‘Absurd Prescriptions’ of Doctors“; now, as promised, it’s time to start my other series: “Adam Smith: Bureaucrat“. In an ironic twist of fate, Adam Smith, the champion of free trade, was somehow appointed to the post of Commissioner of Customs(!) in November of 1778 — two years after the publication of his free-market manifesto, The…

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Lab: In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, according to legal experts. Meta is adamant it will not misuse these capabilities in the way these legal experts say it can. If promises are…

The first recording today starts with the end of Dennis The Menace. There’s a trail for Autumn programmes on CBBC. Then it’s a repeat of What’s New Scooby-Doo? – Uncle Scooby and Antarctica. Media Centre Description: Children’s animated series about a group of teenage sleuths and their cowardly dog. The gang accompanies a penguin back to its home in Antarctica and find a finned creature from the sea dragging victims to an icy fate. Recorded from CBBC Channel on Saturday 11th September 2010…

With my previous post on “using the platform”, I was surprised that the comments on Hacker News and Lobsters tended to veer toward web components. This surprised me because I didn’t mention web components at all in the post. I was less surprised when I did some research and found that the entire “use the platform” mantra was first popularized by Polymer, which was Google’s early attempt at a web-components-based JavaScript framework. In 2018 they even called it “our motto”! So this explains why…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 29th May 2026 French tech death metallers The Scalar Process have been very busy in the five years since their 2021 debut ‘Coagulative Matter’, honing and expanding their craft into new, vast horizons beyond this earth. Their new record, ‘Agnomysticism’, is out now through Transcending Obscurity and it seems to me that the band are ready to explode onto the conscious of every death metal fan out there. The cool, calm tones of opening track ‘Physical…

Our shy skittish cat jumped up onto my lap—and, in doing so, knocked against the rickety side-table, so that first my dinner plate and fork crashed to the ground; and then, a brief moment later, my 850-page book—or perhaps the crashes were the other way around, it’s difficult to reconstruct. In any case, the cat transformed from cat to whirlwind, and I have a spiral of long parallel scratches tracing my lower arm from wrist to elbow. They’re almost pretty; I could imagine getting that pattern…

Credit: Ryan Lynch, for Perils & Princesses ... So to explain what all this is about. My Problem with HirelingsI play RPGs to watch, closely and intimately, as characters the table is enormously emotionally invested in tumble down a fantasy-shaped Plinko board.1 I want to put human agency in a body weak enough to be familiar, then pit it against the arbitrary cruelty of monsters real and imagined. These games are a ritual that indoctrinate me into believing that good people are more powerful…

Any weird things going on in your home lately, H.C.?I’m continuously clearing black gunk out of my bathroom sink, but it keeps coming back, almost immediately. I suspect it’s evolving.If you had to use a word that was not a color to describe how the portal looked, what comes to mind?Radiant, and blindingly so. Or, maybe more of a shimmering iridescence?How do you think Doug’s therapist reacts the next time he walks into their office?I don’t know. But I suppose, if I had to start over and…

Super selections and wonderful words by our favourite four-to-the-floor expert, The Insider. ROOTDOWN 30 COMPILED BY RAINER TRUBY / DAYBREAKERS “Root Down 30” isn’t just a compilation, it’s a birthday party, a love letter and a victory lap for one of Europe’s most quietly influential club institutions. Daybreakers hands the reins to Rainer Trüby, who curates the whole thing with the easy confidence of someone who’s been shaping dancefloors since long before the word eclectic became a marketing…

serve a sentence, asks the weary pointer and i just think: "save our souls?" "like that's not the natural condition?" "like how many rocks do you need for a typeface you'd see?" i asked you before: how do you grieve? and i still don't know - and to be honest, for once, i don't think i've ever really let anything go now, i'm asking: when were you last reduced to a desperate prayer? i will give you my answer, now oh, whoever, whichever, whatever, the name: take me, take me, and viva travesti, you…

Content warning: use of prop guns, assult with a deadly weapon, racism, intimations of attempted sexual assault. "Gun and Powder" was one of the last shows I saw in 2020 before COVID halted theater for a while. I kept an eye out, hoping it was still percolating. It's also worth noting that the original Martha Clarke I saw, passed away. I was so excited when I saw the move to Broadway announcement, and, as we can see, booked tickets for previews. The show has evolved, more than the title.…

tl;dr: Shuffle lands on Alice in Chains’ MTV Unplugged, a master class in pain bleeding into a microphone. Like it says in the overview, pick one album from your library at random and listen to it front to back. When it’s done, write a little blurb-y thing about it. This week’s album Alice in Chains - Unplugged (MusicBrainz, Discogs) Unplugged is a live album by the American rock band Alice in Chains, released on July 30, 1996, by Columbia Records. It was recorded on April 10, 1996, at the…

Today was probably the first day in five years that I’ve done a proper day’s work. During COVID, they forgot about me in Scotland. The US office assumed I was reporting there, and the Scottish office decided I was America’s problem. That led to years of collecting a paycheck while I took long walks around Edinburgh and had brunch. The gravy train is over, it seems. I’m in the thick of it again, LARPing as a project manager. Dealing with consultants and corporate employees seconded to this…

Photo from RDNE Stock Project This earth life is an experience we are having, not all that there is. I love the overall sentiment of the following poem. It’s like the Desiderata’s little sister! Here it is in both English and French. 🌏 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE VISITING EARTH A poem by James McCrae In the event that you wake up and find your soul separated from source and manifest into material form, don’t panic. Your condition is only temporary. You have been selected…

On the blog this week, we’re talking about useful advice as well as the other kind. Share your wisdom here. Friendly mid-month reminder: The audio book edition of A Gentleman in Pursuit of Truth is on sale in the web store for $1.99 for the rest of October. This is the one were Lord Julian has to find a missing hound, despite a pack of lies, deceptions, and false trails leading in directions! I am busily constructing a final cover for A Gentleman in Winter, a very hefty novella set at Caldicott…

⌾ : Fujifilm XT5.⚲ : Sydney Harbour. Nodding thoughtfully, I bluffed my way. I met these two young men on the ferry into the city today. They were carrying a couple of fishing rods, an overstuffed Transformers backpack and a large white plastic bucket of expectations. Although we stood next to each other on the back deck for the entire trip, I didn’t much speak to them. On my trip back, there were there again. This time I asked them if they had an luck. One of the boys pulled out his iPhone and…

#31daysofoctobera little 19th century horror....adapted from my favorite short story...read it HERE:https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4dec242280.html#play #yellowwallpaper #adaptation #chicagoplays

I live in Ireland, and avoiding rain is a national pastime. Sadly the best data we have, which comes from Met Eireann the national meteorological service, is delivered in a pretty low quality app that makes it hard to use and understand. To fix this I built the app Rainy.ie It’s a simple but powerful web app that let’s you easily see where rain has recently been and the forecasts ahead, all by just moving the button at the bottom. That’s all it does, and it does it really well! The code is all…

I am proud to publish these excerpts from THE SILVER LOCKET by a graduate of my writing course. The author says ‘A lifetime of reading and book collecting leads me to share stories of literary life: books old and new which inspire and comfort me and the people I meet.’ Follow THE SILVER LOCKET I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend in an eighteenth century weaver’s…

Saturday, we went to the 49th Yokohama Family Fair which was sponsored by Itochu, Japan's largest trading companyThere were tons of food products, clothing, electronicsEach person got a free packet of pasta sauce, just heat and add to your own pastaSatoshi's classmate was one of vendors there, so we went to visit with him and check out the fairIt was my first time at the Yokohama Area, which is

Guitar Playground

IntroductionA few days ago, I published a rather lengthy blog post titled Building Services to GDS Standards Without a Frontend Framework, exploring whether modern frontend frameworks are really necessary when building UK government services. To demonstrate they aren't, I built the same service using eight different backends.Shortly after publishing, I had a conversation with Matthew Somerville, of traintimes.org.uk fame, who suggested adding Perl as a ninth backend. It's something I plan to…

Right then.You dragged your asses all the way out to the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. You broke into the billionaire’s bug-out complex. You managed to do all that without a scratch or detection.And you were eight fucking minutes late.The PlayersAble - Like a brick wall gifted the power of speech by a cruel genie. Don’t ask about the chemical burns.Baker - Running a true crime podcast is a better way of keeping tabs on the unnatural than anyone wants to admit. Ignore the blindfold with…

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Sometimes a contractor or service-provider will ask if I’d rather pay in cash. The implication is that a cash transaction can be done without tax – and either or both of us can “save” some money. What’s not said, in these exchanges is: Hey, want to cheat on our taxes together? No thanks. I’ll pay the tax. I enjoy the schools, the roads, public broadcasting corporation. I don’t have some sort of extra-strong moral muscle. It makes me sad that people see the collective pie as something they can…

Classique I’ve watched a pile of YouTube videos in search of omelette mastery. I’ve only ever had diner-style omelettes at restaurants, and while I liked them plenty, it turned out that there was a world of omelette-making techniques to explore. The version I love the most bears little resemblance to the diner-style omelette, but that doesn’t dampen my appreciation for the diner-style omelette when I eat at a diner. Rhonda and I met up with Aaron last weekend, and we got to talking about…

Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint. My substack about the Sydney mint by rights should come first, but I’m fresh-ish off the plane so I’m doing this one first. It was a bit extravagant building two mints in Australia. As I flicked through the massive file of equipment to order and repair I wondered why they built another one. I’d assumed it was just that Melbourne was much closer to where most of the gold turned out to be. Image…