Laura by Vera Caspary published 1943 [A young woman's body has been found in a New York apartment, and the case has attracted a lot of attention...] Laura had become a Manhattan legend. Scarlet-minded headline artists had named her tragedy THE BACHELOR GIRL MURDER and one example of Sunday edition belles-lettres was tantalizingly titled SEEK ROMEO IN EAST SIDE LOVE-KILLING. By the necromancy of modern journalism, a gracious young woman had been transformed into a dangerous siren who practiced…

I’ve never liked the idea of giving my instruments a name other than one that describes it, i.e. parlour guitar, twin-point mandolin etc. Clearly, the different instruments must have some means of reference, especially as all enquiries for my instruments come via email and a prospective client needs to communicate their needs. You would probably have seen my previous “New Model Mandolin” build series: I called that instrument “New Model” as, at the time I was undecided on a suitable name.…

Welcome to this week’s roundup of ttrpg goodness. This week on the blog the most popular articles were Good Adventures and Great Adventures, Running Red Dragon’s Tale, Turns: Understanding the Grammar of D&D, Dolmenwood Resources for you and a Dolmenwood Retrospective. Thank you to all my subscribers, and please subscribe if you want to receive this newsletter in your e-mail inbox every Saturday. Contents Discord discussionsBlog postsProjects to bookmark and downloadPlay ReportsPatchwork…

Revisiting Twilight recently has been a bit of a slog. It can be a slow series and, especially when you near the final movies, sometimes it feels like very little happens at all. As a teenager my interest in this series was heavily carried by the angsty soundtracks and my closeted desire to see Taylor Lautner take his shirt off again. With a number of years of separation since I last experienced it, I didn't remember a lot about Breaking Dawn. The main thing I remember is the absolutely…

It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for another update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 245 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 693. There was no arXiv update on Monday 12th October owing to a US holiday, and I was on strike on Wednesday 14th October, so there were no papers published on either 13th or 14th October. I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon…

A couple of months ago, a reader in the US contacted me having discovered an LS-120 SuperDisk that was given to family with some data on it, but they were uncertain as to whether the disk had any more data on it that could be valuable. They had lost the means to continue accessing the data on the disk and thought I could help. As usual, being halfway around the world (and soon to embark on a trip to Singapore at the time), I asked them to explore their local computing groups and see if they had…

Soon I will put the last of my stuff in the car. Sunrise comes later this much further north (at 7:57), so I'm not going to leave until 6:30 or 7. Gone are the days when I would leave at 4 a.m.; driving that many hours in the dark is just too tiring. Is this a sign of getting older or just a sign of being more cautious? Part of it is wanting to linger in a lovely hotel room a bit longer, which is always balanced by knowing how much driving lies ahead and wanting to get that over with.I've been…

John Wyver writes: As yesterday’s post indicates I was very taken with the Towner Eastbourne’s exhibition Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism, which closes tomorrow, Sunday. Here are another ten images from the show which especially struck me, including, above, Cliff Rowe’s ‘Three women talking’, c 1950, from the collections (as are so many of the great loans) from the People’s History Museum, Manchester. Captions follow each of the selections below. Apologies for the reflections in some…

Best of the blogs ▷ brandib laments the loss of easily obtained (i.e., at the local department store) good quality professional clothing. Read When Did We Agree To Settle For Less? ▷ I gave up Twitter/X years before Elon took it over and made a bad place worse. But now John Gruber is saying — and I think he’d be among the last to say it if it were true — that the service has re-found its footing and there’s less political content there than on the other tweety services. Read X Once Again Marks…

8716/21635This morning there was a ghost in our kitchen. I put a milk bottle on the counter and didn't properly put the lid on. And then about every 20 seconds a ghost tried (and failed) to take the lid off. I filmed it, so no one can deny it happened. Explain that science. (see Substack for video evidence) I have a couple of social media pet peeves to talk about today. Sorry, make that three. I also hate it when people refer to something they don't like as a pet peeve.They are more social…

2026-10-17 Autobanning Bad Requests (Part 3) This week I've continued to improve my auto-banning setup. Links to the first two parts are in the footnotes.1,2 I came upon a GitHub repo that held a frequently updated list of abusive IP addresses.3 About a third of the addresses that I'd banned were on that list, so I figured it might help me to reject bad clients before waiting for them to make a bad request. It might also help identify bots that don't make any bad requests to my server. My main…

What caught my eye this week. Weekend Reading – featuring the week’s best money and investing articles from around the web – can be read by any logged-in Monevator member. Alternatively please subscribe to our free email newsletter to get future editions direct to your inbox. The post Weekend reading: Knocking the covers off appeared first on Monevator.

Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, and Peter McCrory, in an Anthropic research article: How has AI restructured work and employment at Anthropic? As a company at the frontier of AI adoption, Anthropic could be a leading indicator of how AI will shift work organization, hiring, and labor demand across the economy. Anthropic has been hiring for a smaller share of junior technical positions. This occurred as hours worked by AI agents relative to employees rapidly expanded. By August…

Seasonal attractions

I already briefly mentioned it in this daily, but I wanted to expand a little on those times when we’d get up in the middle of the night, drive to the Apple Store, and wait for hours for it to open, all just to get our hands on the new iPhone on release day. Even though we arrived four hours early (the store opened at 8 AM), we were never the first in line. In fact, we were sometimes late enough to worry that we might not get an iPhone at all. I don't remember whether preorders weren't a thing…

While only time will tell whether James S. A. Corey’s galaxy-spanning science fiction epic will come to be regarded as worthy to stand alongside such works as Frank Herbert’s Dune or Asimov’s Foundation series, The Expanse — nine novels, eight short stories, six televisions seasons, several comics, a board game, a roleplay system, and a videogame — has certainly earned a place in many sci-fi lovers’ top ten lists of the greatest settings of all time.

Somewhere between an automated safety alert and a police report, the internet misplaced the humans. It's been quite a week for artificial intelligence. Apparently, AI agents have developed a passionate interest in escaping their sandboxes, collecting credentials, finding doors that were supposed to be locked, and generally treating cybersecurity boundaries as suggestions left by an increasingly disappointed parent. Every morning brings another incident report involving an agent that was…

Venus in the twilight on Friday, October 16 as seen from Largs Pier at 20:08 ACST. Samsung S24, 5x Zoom, ISO 2000 1/33 sec exposureWestern sky on the evening of Saturday, October 17 as seen from Adelaide at 20:08 ACST (30 minutes after sunset, click to embiggen). Venus is just above the horizon and below Mercury. Venus is a clear thin "Crescent Moon" shape and is increasing in size. The shape is readily in 10x50 binoculars (although the brightness may make it hard to see due to internal lens…

Hey Albertans. UK resident here. I understand you're thinking of leaving Canada, or something. We sort of did the same thing 10 years ago when 17% of the UK population voted for us to leave the European Union. They called it Brexit. Brexit was sold to us as "taking back control" and "sovereignty". Brexit would mean we could determine our own laws, instead of those pesky Germans and Frenchies (the "establishment") telling us what to do. We could control who came into the country, stopping all…

For most of my life I called it laziness. A late ADHD diagnosis didn't fix my brain, but it changed how I talk to myself on bad days.

The Worst Witch Strikes Again by Jill Murphy, 1980. It’s a new term at Miss Cackle’s Academy, and Mildred Hubble is back! In spite of the headmistress’s gratitude toward her for saving the school the previous semester, it isn’t long before Mildred finds herself in hot water again. She still manages to get her lessons wrong, and admittedly, sometimes goofs around or does naughty things out of boredom. In an effort to teach Mildred some responsibility, Miss Cackle makes Mildred responsible for…

Frost again but nice warm day later. Did all the mowing. The gang came for tea. Never went out. Watched the telly. No other visitors.

There's only a few places I get to take visiting friends to in Liberec. Sadly at the moment almost all of them are out of service. The city dam, Harcovská přehrada, is one of them. A fraction of the size of a neighboring Mšeno, it's set close to the middle of the city and is a wonderful walk/running place, despite only half having a foot path. In the autumn of 2022, a full reconstruction finally began, a mere century after the dam was built. Quite a massive operation, with 26,000 cubic meters…

1973 horror, dir. Robin Hardy, Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee: IMDb. Where is Rowan Morrison?

by now, most people should be aware that we're in a cost of compute crisis. The cost of CPU and memory is through the roof. There just isn't enough. Meanwhile, there definitely aren't enough GPUs in the world. If you've been using ChatGPT lately, you might have seen the meme circulating in the space that OpenAI just doesn't have enough inferencing capacity. Heck, even Tibo admits publicly that they're having compute issues.It’s the compute that is cooked— Tibo (@thsottiaux) October 6, 2026 In…

Why has the act of teaching in public schools (including charters) that serve wealthy, middle-class and poor children looked so familiar to past generations of journalists, researchers, parents and grandparents who enter classrooms? In short, why has there been so much continuity in classroom teaching over the 20th and early 21st centuries? Surely, teaching has changed over the past century. Many classrooms now dispense with rows of desks and have students at tables and pods of desks facing one…

2023 historical mystery; eleventh in Huber's Lady Darby series (post-Regency amateur detection). The Gages rush to Sebastian's father, who was attacked and wounded on the road in Yorkshire, and soon find that this matter will go deeper than it appears.

Taken on 26th of September, 2026 Tianjin, Yangliuqing Ancient Town 天津，杨柳青古镇