The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had…

Enjoying with Matías.

Abstract architectural detail of Downtown Dallas’ One Main Place. The post Squared Off appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

The C Bounded Model Checker https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc is a useful tool on the pareto frontier of soundness and pragmatism. ASMC https://github.com/philzook58/asmc is another attempt to glue lifted Ghidra assembly semantics into it.

A song that you discovered in an unusual way. Ahhhh illegal music, downloading MP3s galore, Napster, Limewire, WinAmp. I had more music than I could ever listen too, most of it still on an old iPod. I download all sorts. Compilations made up by others were a favourite, 20 tracks, all random and it was in one of these that this track appeared. Most of those compilations weren’t great, in either artistic/musical talent, or even decent digital recordings. But this, this sonic treat that I only…

I’m six weeks out from a book deadline, which means all of my brain is going to be dealing with that and I will have no brain cycles left to do much of anything else, including evaluating new fiction to see if I want to blurb it, so: I am on blurb hiatus through the end of 2026 at least. If you send me an email asking me to consider a book for blurbing between now and, oh, let’s say, January 15, 2027, it’s going to be a pass from me. The issue is not the book, it’s my writing deadline and a…

I can still remember buying my first BMX Bandits record, 1993's Kylie's Got A Crush On Us, from Impulse Records in Motherwell. I bought the 7-inch and CD single. I was already aware of the band through my religious reading of both the NME and Melody Maker every week. Also from homemade cassettes that would get passed around. The Bellshill Beat TV show was broadcast the same year, presented by Duglas and featuring the Bandits, Fanclub, Vaselines, Pastels, Superstar and The Soup Dragons. It was…

In fiction face slapping is about getting revenge for past wrongs. There may be some actual physical slapping involved but the revenge is the most important thing. The humiliation of the person or group that once wronged the main character is key. The face slapping trope is tied to Asian culture and is popular in web novels, light novels, mangas, etc. Pick a random web novel from any genre and you’re likely to find someone bullying the main character while they’re still weak and unable to…

The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North Odysseys is back on Ithaca. Things do not go well for the suitors, and thus for Penelope and her maids. And where Christopher Nolan sent Penelope and Odysseys sailing off into the sunset leaving Telemachus to take the reigning reins…. Claire North, and Athena, give us the battle of Laertes’ Farm. A satisfying end to the trilogy. Publisher page: The Last Song of Penelope – Claire North

Opus 6: The Taming of the Shrew

So Pat posted the following a while ago: the recurring complaint about throw loops in SF2-SF6 makes me wonder: has anyone ever complained about RISC in a similar way? RISC kind of has a similar effect on repeated blocking and throws, but with a far more explosive and situational payoff. — Smokage of the Burning Leaf (@pattheflip.bsky.social) 10 Sept 2026 20:24 In thinking about the question, I realized RISC falls into a category of things that I really enjoy in games, but that many (claim to)…

October 9–16, 2026 This week, my open-source work ranged from interpreter compatibility across the django CMS ecosystem to performance improvements, security maintenance, and two major releases in the json2xml project. There were some satisfying milestones: json2xml 8.0.0, the first stable major release of its Rust accelerator, performance work landing in django CMS, and substantial django-filer improvements moving through review. There was also the less visible work that makes those milestones…

Literary critics have long discussed Shakespeare’s so-called “problem plays,” meaning the ones that fail to slot comfortably into one of the established genres of comedy, tragedy, and history. (The last of these genres being, of course, another invention of Shakespeare himself.) The Taming of the Shrew is not a problem play by this definition. It is, however, problematic in a whole different way for the 21st-century reader or viewer, what with its plot that revolves around an alpha-male putting…

Hello Walkers— A lot has happened since the last dispatch. It feels like I’m finally past most of the list of things I decided to do this year, so fair warning: this one might be long. Ludo and I celebrated our wedding, I bought some steel, I built a copy of our studio inside my laptop, and my website got redesigned. Again. Let’s start with the steel. While we were in Tbilisi, Ludo and I went to the infamous Eliava Market to buy steel for our wedding. Romantic, I know. If you’ve never been,…

The cynical part of me wonders whether Helen Ashton had embarked on writing a biography of Jane Austen when she decided it would be easier to make it a novel instead. That’s probably unfair, since she turned her hand to a number of biographical novels for a range of figures – but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite get the thought out of my head throughout my whole time reading Parson Austen’s Daughter. The ‘novel’ (more on those inverted commas later) follows Jane Austen from before her birth…

Derek G.Glendale, CA★★☆☆☆ March 30, 2024 | 11:54 PMtook my girlfriend to cheesecake factory tonight for our 2 year anniversary cause it’s her favorite and i was trying to make it a thing even though she’s been all moody lately. we got the buffalo blasts and 2 vodka sodas to start. she ordered her usual chicken madeira and i just got a side salad cause i already ate a PB&J at home. my girl looked at me like i ordered a bowl of napkins and the waitress (danielle maybe?) just wrote “sad salad.”…

ULTRON THE VAULT (TOY BIZ) We have arrived, dear readers, at another Friday, so it’s time for another installment of Flashback Friday Figure Addendum! Today, we jump back a decade and some change, with a follow up look at Ultron! Countdown to Avengers: Age of Ultron: 5 days remaining. Alright, now we get to the main event! Before, I was looking at figures of the various Avengers members from the upcoming movie, but from here on out, it’s all Ultron all the time! Poor Ultron went quite a while…

Mediocrity rises to the middle… or in the case of this month's Galactoscope, to our first book review installment. Still, if there's nothing exceptional amongst the following SFnal quarter, that doesn't mean they aren't worth noting: By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall Les Guérillères, by Monique Wittig (Trans. by David Le Vay) Uncredited Cover Illustration Do you … Continue reading [October 16, 1971] The Double Molecule Men… (October Galactoscope) → The post [October 16, 1971] The Double Molecule Men……

ConBody is an exercise program that Coss developed while he was in prison for selling drugs. Coss lost 70 pounds in six months by working out in his 9’x6′ cell. Con body is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and also offers classes online for those who want prison-style workouts from the solitary confinement of their own home. Coss speaks with Jessica Harris about how he launched ConBody, from scratch. Listen to the interview

I haven’t read all of Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859) famous book “Democracy in America” (published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840), but I’ve read some of it. My main memory is how de Tocqueville emphasised the violence in American political culture. My other encounter with de Tocqueville was in David Runciman’s brilliant lecture on “Can democracy survive in America?” (or something like that). The lecture was before Trump’s first term, and Runciman didn’t answer the question yes or no.…

Puking out some feelings. Yesterday I had my first session with a pelvic floor therapist. Without getting into too much detail, my "homework" has been to buy a toilet stool and to learn how to relax. Apparently, I have a strong pelvic floor but there's so much tension that my muscles are exhausted and slow to respond. This all seems fitting, as I also wrote a post yesterday about caring less, which is like, relaxing, right? Well, in the span of 24 hours, me caring less about everything has made…

Ok, people who read my post on the Anthropic science blog: we need to talk. It’s understandable. You saw me write about AI being used to tackle a serious, publishable physics problem. Naturally, some of you want to share that you accomplished something even more impressive with AI, something the scientific journals and arXiv moderators won’t acknowledge. Maybe you’re hoping I’ll write about it, maybe you want me to check your math. Maybe you just think it’s neat. But here’s the thing: most of…

The magnum opus last week wasn't planned like that.I started with a relatively concise outline, fleshed out a few paragraphs in the afternoon, added a sprinkling of relevant scientific references, and dropped in the images to round it off. The following morning I completed my usual 'did I really mean to write that?' proofing, and the standard pre-submission tweaks … only to discover it was ~2,000 words longer than intended 😮.But I pressed the 'submit' button anyway 😄.This week I'm not going to…

I spent most daylight hours yesterday driving in torrential rains in pretty bad visibility, and I was astonished how many cars didn’t have their lights on. It looked something like this. The cars with tail lights on were somewhat visible, but the cars without them didn’t stand a chance: I read up about it, and it turns out that the issue wasn’t as much forgetfulness or carelessness. Rather, it all might have to do with iconography. Cars have two main settings for lights: “regular driving,”…

Welcome to my first little foray into reverse engineering an AES ECB-128 decryption key found within an earlier version (v1.1) of the desired firmware (v2.2) for the W2250A wifi extender. This was uncovered by analysing the entropy of both the versions, which (upon comparison) shows that v2.2. is likely encrypted (high level of entropy) whereas v1.1 contains a readable/extractable filesystem that we can analyse. (let's see where this bouncing ball takes us...) Disclaimer: Before we go on -…

sumac - attis' blade i was listening to this as i played Beyond All Reason... my T2 Heavy Tanks started obliterating the front at around 9:00. it felt... really great

I haven't been this excited about an iPhone launch since the days when I'd actually get up at 4 AM to line up outside the Apple Store and get my hands on an iPhone 5 or whatever on launch day. Since then, I've preordered most of my iPhones and always received them on day one. So the fact that, of all iPhones, it's the iPhone Duo I won't be getting on launch day has genuinely put a dent in my mood today.

The classic tabletop weird west roleplaying game Deadlands has celebrated its 30th anniversary. One of the most iconic tabletop roleplaying games of all time, the game has weathered changing financial fortunes and numerous failed adaptations to the screen to remain a mainstay of the TTRPG market.Launched in October 1996 by Pinnacle Entertainment, Deadlands used a novel rules system built for fast, six-shootin' action mixed in with magic and weird science. The game combined different die types…

Slow Fiction sound like a lotta things; there’s all of shoegaze, post-punk, garage rock in there, but you wouldn’t even think about using one of those as a single descriptive adjective for them when there exists the perfect one – New York. Just like the city they hail from can’t be done justice by any […] The post Slow Fiction – “Turning Down Flowers” appeared first on Space Echo.

The plate for Chapter 82, in the pop art style. That’s Samantha and Cooper, running up the road below the cabin. Yesterday Phin and I finished chapter 82 of Zero Knowledge. Counting the chapters I’ve inserted along the way, that’s 116 chapters of the shitty first draft, with 21 to go. The last time I wrote about this here was twenty chapters in, back in July. A lot has changed since then, so I thought I’d do a full update. If you’re new to this, Zero Knowledge is a near-term sci-fi…