When we are in love with someone, we observe everything about them. We notice every little thing. What bothers them. What makes them happy. What irks them. We try to learn them, one day, one moment at a time. We are so consumed by them that even our thoughts are filled with them. We replay the moments we spend together, interpreting what their actions might have meant. Then we stop doing that. There comes a point when we have them, and we stop noticing them. We no longer pay attention to their…

🏚️🏚️🏚️🏚️ 3.5/5 Black Houses - The world outside of Gormenghast is just as a mad. The post Titus Alone (Gormenghast #3) by Mervyn Peake appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

What I'm...Making A bunch of Canvas question bank creation for green construction A Canvas exam to replace an IRS online test that was taken down just before the last week of class Working on Still course issues are my primary focus OCPD workbook Contemplating Tofu Where are we going to move next summer? Why my computer occasionally stops working on my home wifi network for multiple days at a time but works on my mobile hotspot Why I may disagree with Buddhism fundamentally (is it really noble…

We say quite often in the solo gaming world that "prep is play." Meaning that preparing for your solo game - rolling characters, building a world or map to explore, getting all of the scaffolding of a campaign together - is a part of playing the game. I'm not sure I've ever managed to have as much fun prepping for a game as I have with Traveller. It's tedious and time consuming and just fun. I've rolled up four characters. I'm halfway through creating a subsector. It's taken days upon days of…

An interview with Kazuto Yamaki of Sigma that appeared in LensVid raised an interesting point. I wonder how many people caught it. "Sigma doesn’t use AI to design lenses, for now. Mr. Yamaki said the knowledge required to make a high-quality lens is not available publicly; it is proprietary and kept inside the company…” As I’ve written a number of times, AI as being practiced at the moment is backwards looking, and the big AI companies have been scraping pretty much any information they can…

Reasons why I will be playing this game again. Dispatch is a choose-your-own adventure game where you play as a down-and-out superhero named Robert Robertson who finds himself working as a dispatcher at Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN). Robert is assigned to manage the "Z-Team," which is comprised of ex-convicts. The team, known as The Phoenix Project, is the brainchild of Blonde Blazer, fellow superhero and Robert's boss, who hopes that Robert can turn these former criminals into the heroes…

We recently moved from a rural suburb in Massachusetts to a small coastal village in Rhode Island. It’s been transformative, and I wish I’d done it sooner! Trickle-Down Effects Unlike a city, a village has homes with yards. Unlike a suburb, a village has businesses and parks intermixed with homes. It’s the best of both worlds. Being able to walk or bike places has trickle-down effects. Instead of driving 20 minutes one-way to get groceries, I can ride my bike there in 5 minutes. Because the…

About two weeks ago, I read Regime Change, the account by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann of Trump's first year in office. I did not take any notes, and my brain, as usual, has far too many demands upon it, and I don't think I can write a review that would do it justice now. I can however draw on the general impressions that it left me with that shed a lot of light on the horrible flaw at the heart of the Trump administration, one that will keep it from doing almost anything effectively for…

Anthropic recently shared an article explaining a version control system (VCS) that they have been using internally to overcome their own limitations around managing their humongous monorepo. The VCS is called Scion and it flips the way how a traditional VCS like Git work. For instance, Git is built around a decentralized model where every client act as a full-fledged, offline-capable server with a complete copy of the repository. This way all these clients can work offline on their own…

Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise. Primetime (2026) by Lance Oppenheim Was okay. Robert Pattinson is fun. I keep confusing Skyler Gisondo with Nicholas Braun. It frustrates me that people keep interpreting it as being solely about how Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator faltered by making a spectacle out of (attempted) sexual violence; like that is one thematic axis, but the other equally…

🏰🏰🏰🏰 4/5 Castles - Drama, action... romance? It really has everything! The post Gormenghast (Gormenghast #2) by Mervyn Peake appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

Morning coffee with a nice fire.

CompleteTheHaiga is a haiku, senryu and tanka prompt project with images created by Josiah. All haiku by Cendrine Marrouat. Source

PSA: RSS and Atom XML Feeds FailureHello dear readers. Earlier this week, if you noticed a lot of new (actually duplicate) entries in your feed reader from me—I apologize! To fix it, mark all as read in your feed reader. If your feed reader didn’t fetch during the time I was messing with all of this, it might not have seen the wrong ID (then you’re fine!) What Happened?I should have triple checked before pushing the revised XML templates live, but I failed to pick up on one of the very specific…

I'm not sure yet which one I'd get, but for several years I've thought it would be nice to own an EV. There are several reasons. Gasoline prices have always been a factor, especially now. But generally, thought of not being dependent on gas for transportation has long been appealing to me. Other countries are way ahead of the United States in terms of EV adoption and they are seeing benefits such as less dependence on fossil fuels and improved air quality. Speaking of air quality, I live in…

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions. It’s Spooky Season, and the best cartoon for that time of year has to be Patrick McHale’s Over The Garden Wall. If you haven’t seen it, go seek it out: it’s only ten episodes, each 11 minutes long, and tells a complete story. If you’ve done that, or have already seen the show, then this will be of the most interest to you. About a year ago for the show’s 10th…

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and…

Hi. Sorry about the silence: I've been busy redrafting the current-newest novel in progress (it's back with my agent), and now I just flipped over to rewrite the much-rewritten novel before that (which ran into a brick wall in late 2025 for structural reasons, and which I set aside while I was working on the next book, figured out a fix for in late 2026, and am now fixing). As you can imagine, slaving over manuscripts isn't the only thing I do on a computer. Along the way I'm browsing the…

Mexico (2005)I wrote software for a living for a long time. Speaking for myself, I can confidently say that Claude Code writes code that's so much better than mine that it's embarrassing. I've gotten over it. I'm not a craftsman. I wish I was, but honestly I just want to tell the computer what I need done and have it do it. I suppose that's really all I've ever wanted. Now I can, and it's thrilling. That Tesla Roadster demo was a pretty cool stunt. Cool, but dumb. And only a stunt. ✍️ Reply by…

I see a red tree and I want it painted black. I couldn’t help but think of that song when I saw this tree across the softball field when we were at one of the granddaughters’ softball games. It was the first fall like day. It was mostly cloudy and breezy with the temperatures only in the upper 40s to lower 50s. A pretty big shock after being in the 80s yesterday and a lot of last week. There were a few periods of brief sun while we were over there and the first one I noticed this lone bright…

[1978]I can never go past a disco track with extravagant sumptuous stringsClassic bit of funky disco obviously inspired by Isaac Hayes' Shaft.Can you dig it?

The Crownless Company explore some Wizard Bullshit and find Master Fulkth, the wizard who controls the bugbears on floor 3. Party Members Tina the Titanic - Level 8 Fighter Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 7 Cleric Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich Huntsman - Level 6 Martial Artist FollowersTiny Tina (Cleric 7), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 5), Rutger (Robot 7), Captain Nasty (Fighter 6) and Jenx (Level 4 Bombard) Session RecapDeciding it was finally time to go…

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).Brian T. Fitzpatrick How can the author of The Conservative Case for Class Actions say a bad word about a book that argues that private enforcement of the law is a vivid example of American exceptionalism? I can’t. We conservatives are a patriotic lot; we shamelessly believe that America is mostly better than the rest of the world. In my view, this includes even our embrace of…

• 3-star hike • 2 mile out-and-back • Easy | Gain 200 feet • Francestown, NH | Monadnock Region . Autumn low-flow at Brennan Falls. Located within the Schott Brennan Falls Preserve, just north of Francestown, Brennan Falls is a modest 20-foot waterfall that puts on a spectacular show during high-water events. Found at the end of a pleasant woodland hike just under a mile long, this trail is enjoyable in both summer and winter. Start your hike from Campbell Hill Road, following an unmaintained…

📷 273/365 - Vintage decoration

There were two important articles last week about the protests in Delhi against CEC Gyanesh Kumar (among many, many more). One was an article in The Indian Express by Sumit Agarwal, professor of finance at National University of Singapore and president of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research, and Shashwat Alok, associate professor of finance, Indian School of Business. It argued, nonsensically, that the protests impose disproportionate economic costs on the poor and risk…

Overcast and cold. A white-throated sparrow sings in the wind. Kinglets forage, fluttering and wheezing, through the golden crown of a black birch.

It’s been a month since I first plugged my Glove80 into Hedwig and started using it, so I thought it was time for a follow-up. First things first: this keyboard is the most comfortable thing I’ve ever typed on, to the point that I cringe now when I place my fingers on a regular keyboard in the office. If I wasn’t a keyboard snob earlier with my Kinesis, I definitely am now. It’s not just the ergonomics, which I will get to below. I didn’t realize how important the switches are. I thought I’d…

There are many among us who aren't nearly as clever, smart, driven (hence accomplished) as the best of us. I long ago recognized that I was in the camp of the former. Long ago. ::chuckle:: As such, I've largely worked and existed within my limitations, to the best of how I'm capable. And even with that, haven't accomplished things in the usual ways that signify success in one's endeavors, in the arc of one's given lifespan. This has not troubled me greatly — though perhaps that might indeed be…

She Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne series by "Brett Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character. The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account ("this story happened to me, Brett…