Happy Friday! Today is National Boss’s Day (I’m a boss!) and National Dictionary Day. Which is cool, because about two weeks ago, I bought an actual physical dictionary. I’m moving (back) toward physical media and this is one nice dictionary. It’s hardcover and smells divine. What is your history with cats? I have been lucky enough to share my life with four cats: Noelle, Misty, Ferdie (for about a month), and Charlie. I loved them immensely, I miss them to bits and pieces, but even though…

Borne out of the very first instance of corporate reputation-washing, the Standard Oil-produced 20-LP series "Our Nation's Heritage", a progressive history of America that never quite made those Big Oil linens sparkle but left a whole lot of really fine playwrighting in its wake, is now up in full on Archive.org: Vol. 01 Prologue to America Vol. 02 The New World Vol. 03 Exploring the New World Vol. 04 Europe in the New World Vol. 05 The English in America Vol. 06 The Colonial Frontier Vol. 07…

Been using a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS the last several weeks, and I’m not sure why it took me this long to switch. This is by far one of the better ways to retrieve feeds. Compile in an app of your choice (mine: NetNewsWire). Great experience setting up and running.

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours Favourite illustrator Alice Pattullo has just completed two projects on the subjects of fire and ice in the history of the City of London. One is a series of coloured drawings for an exhibition of the history of fire insurance after the Great Fire of 1666 and the other is an advent calendar illustrating the Frost Fayre that took place on the frozen Thames centuries ago. AFTER THE FIRE is a free exhibition that runs until 27th November at the Bank…

In September, Satoshi was diagnosed with prostate cancerHe had a biopsy done in August and out of the areas that were checked, one area was determined as high risk, so even though the other areas were low risk, his cancer was labeled as high riskHe had a bone scan and CT scan to check if the cancer had spread and luckily it had notHe just started hormone treatment, to shrink the cancer, this

September was focused on behind-the-scenes work, much of which you can see over on Patreon. That said, I managed to release some new prints as well: They Only Make Broken Hearts I'm Not Ready To Let Go The Lovers' Burden

The Double R Diner set in the first two seasons of Twin Peaks is filled with wonderful set decorations that make it feel like an actual working diner. Some of the earliest articles on Twin Peaks Blog identified artwork hanging above the diner’s booths were action took place. I’m happy to identify another set decoration... The post Twin Peaks Set Decoration – Falstaff Beer Sign ‘Sunset’ by Lloyd R. Jones at the Double R Diner appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Today in 1965, at EMI Studios (now known as Abbey Road Studios), The Beatles recorded "Day Tripper." It has always been one of my favourite Beatles songs. John Lennon wrote the music and the majority of lyrics, with Paul McCartney contributing some of them. As to the topic of the song, in 1970 John Lennon described it as "a drug song," while in 2004 Paul McCartney said it was "about acid." "Day Tripper" is then a play on words. "Day tripper" is generally used of people who take day trips, short…

I got this recipe from a tech industry friend as a JPG labelled “Twitter congee”. I don’t know if that means “seen on Twitter” or “served in the Twitter cafeteria”, either is possible. It’s very simple. Garnish with whatever: I usually use some chili crisp, some pickled mustard greens, or some sauteed vegetable like bok choy. Ingredients 1/2 pound ground chicken 4 ounces sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 tbsp minced ginger 1/2 tbsp minced garlic 1 tsp shaoxing wine 1/4 tsp kosher salt 1 tsp oyster…

Django projects end up slotting into a bunch of software release cycles: Django itself, Python, database servers, cache servers, and more. It can be hard for us developers to keep track of all of them, with their different support policies and end-of-life dates, and running an unsupported version means missing out on important security or bug fixes. norwegianblue is a handy command-line tool for checking software support dates. It fetches data from endoflife.date, a community-maintained…

A dreary day on Central Texas’ Fort Parker Lake. The post On Fort Parker Lake Shore appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

A team of researchers recently examined “234 public practitioner talks, technical briefings, and conference presentations released between September 2024–September 2025” to glean interesting information about how software agents are implemented and deployed in real-world systems. To support practitioners in understanding how agentic systems are designed in real-world industrial practice, we analyzed how companies adopt agent-based architectures, identify recurring architectural strategies and…

Friday, October 16, 2026 - 15:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project For years, as I've been reading historic research related to lesbianism, I've regularly come across topics and people where my first reaction is: "Why isn't the question of intersex being raised here?" A very few authors have integrated the topic into a general history of sexuality, but eventually I decided to pick up some more focused studies. Now I keep having to remind myself that intersexuality is tangential to my central…

Teams looks free because it comes in the bundle. The people paying for that choice are the ones stuck using it every day.

The other night, we went out to dinner with our friend Eric before the Sting concert (which was amazing, BTW). That's when he learned that there was a method to my madness of nights out at taprooms; we have a "Craftapped" membership, which gets us BOGO drinks at taprooms across the state 9and across the country!)Basically, for $60 year or so, we get ten BOGOS a month at various taprooms. Which is honestly enough that we almost never use all of them each month, and it's long been a bucket list…

We have the Kaweco DIY machines at the event this weekend! If you are a ticketholder be sure to come early to ensure your preferred nib size is available. We have the Kaweco DIY machines at the event this weekend! If you are a ticketholder be sure to come early to ensure your preferred nib size is available. We hope to see many of you this weekend in our Nashville Shop, at the On The Paper Trail Live in Nashville weekend, or here on the main T.G.S. Site. We have a lot of new items in the store,…

Looking up, again. I was waiting for the flock of birds on the rooftop to take off, but they didn't.

Six jours sur la Côte d’Azur.

Show days used to wreck anything I had going on. I used to purposely not schedule anything or plan to be useful in any possible way at the day job. Honestly, I’m glad those days are over because I wouldn’t do music stuff. I’d just run around like a caged animal and get nervous about the show. These days, much like today, I can do the stuff I have to do, get everything done, and arrive at the gig without being a crazy spaz. Also, I try to leave myself very little to do day of gig musically so I…

A sticky note from Philip K. Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory: The roar of water kept either of them from talking for some time. She had put bubble bath into the water, and it foamed up in massive pink layers as she waited for the tub to fill. At last there was enough water in the tub. He marvelled at the amount of water she needed. And she did not want it as hot as it was; she carefully switched on the cold until a good deal of the suds had been damaged. The whole affair struck him as…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Daniel Pope’s novel Go Help Yourself is an endearing debut, the Pacific Northwest slacker novel of the year! John Keene wrote of the book: “Corbin Taylor Moore, the Seattle-based anti-hero…

More video store love. As Racket reports, Vinegar Syndrome, an obscure film preservation label out of Connecticut, opens a shop in Minneapolis this week. Seems like the focus is on discovery here (leaning towards their deep catalog of films) vs offering a broader, general inventory.

They Got It Wrong: the Guinness Dictionary of Regrettable Quotations — David Milsted This is one of those books that you keep by the toilet, to browse little segments of as the occasion directs. I thought I’d enjoy this, but in fact it was a grind. It opens with a chapter on political quotes, and they are pretty relentlessly depressing. As the book moved through quotes about the the arts and sciences I kept waiting for it to become fun, but it rarely did. Part of the problem is the consistently…

I occasionally post about a movie that prominently features language, and today’s installment is To the Ends of the Earth. Criterion Channel is currently featuring a dozen Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, and having worked my way up to 2019 I gave this one a try. (My favorite is still his first big hit, 1997’s Cure, but I like his style so much I don’t mind watching even the less successful ones.) It’s about a reporter for a Japanese travel program who visits Uzbekistan with her crew and has various…

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle.Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When…

I don't know why, but Locked Up Abroad is one of my comfort shows. I've watched every episode at least twice, and since there's a whole channel for it on Roku, I sometimes just let it play all day. I'm not sure what's so appealing about it as it's literally just the same drug smuggling story told by different people over eight seasons. It's always a person between 20-30 who feels "lost" in their life, decide to start traveling to "find" themselves, and then meets someone who's like, "Want to…