I’ve talked about how Olaplex and other bond builders probably don’t act at broken disulfide bonds before – they do work to make hair feel and behave like it has more bonds, but they likely do this via other mechanisms, such as adding more hydrogen and ionic bonds. But there’s an independent study titled “Bleached Hair as Standard Template to ... Read more Source

Forty-four apps on five ThinkCentres, two NAS boxes, one rented server, and a list of things I tried and threw out.

Last time we started a JezzBall clone by allowing you to move a cursor around the screen and draw lines across the playing area. This time, we add balls bouncing around. Will we get far enough for them to collide with the walls? The code is at https://codeberg.org/andybalaam/jezcage. Follow me on mastodon: @andybalaam@mastodon.social

A frost first thing but nice later. Gave moped a clean and adjusted clutch cable. Little Jane came in the morning and stayed until five. Went to pub.

More gaming with nearby friends.

"The First Men" is a 1960 science fiction novelette by Howard Fast. It is about a group of gifted children, raised in a controlled environment, who evolve into super humans. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "The First Men" is a story in two parts. The first part is an exchange of letters between Harry Felton, a man living abroad, and his sister Jean, a child psychologist living in the United States. Through their exchanges we learn that Jean and her husband have received a grant for a project…

Taken on 20th September 2026 Tianjin, Drum Tower

On this day in 2025, my best good girl left this world. This post I wrote to commemorate her ran here a few weeks before, on Sept. 24, and is also live today at Terra Affirma. I miss her every damn day. The post She began to dream again appeared first on The Last Word On Nothing.

The Social Reckoning (2026) • View trailerFour stars (out of five); rated R, for profanityAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.18.26Although director David Fincher’s The Social Network was a blistering indictment of the greed and betrayal involved with Facebook’s founding and subsequent rise in popularity — fueled by scripter Aaron Sorkin’s marvelously barbed, Oscar-winning adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires — that film now…

I have ME/CFS. I’m in remission now, which still feels strange to write, but for years pacing was the whole game: working out how much I could do before the crash came, and doing a bit less than that. What helped most wasn’t clever. It was paper. An hour-by-hour diary. Writing down what I did and how I felt, on a simple 0 to 4 scale, showed patterns I couldn’t see from memory. The crash often came a day or two after the thing that caused it, which is exactly why it’s so hard to spot. A crash…

8715/21634I am trying to get myself into some kind of routine so that I don't waste my remaining day/days (somewhere between 1 and 10,000) and I nailed this morning. I did my daily puzzles whilst making breakfasts for the kids and me and then got on with making lunch (all before 8am), then took the boy to school, came back finished off preparing my lunchtime pie, wrote my blog, prepped for my podcast, realised I had half an hour to slot in a Newsround and then interviewed the incredible Matt…

Jesus fuck. The three children killed were aged five, eight and 11. A seven-year-old and a 54-year-old teacher were taken to a hospital in a critical condition. It is unclear if the attacker had any links to the school. On June 16th 1999 —over 27 years ago— I wrote my 4th ever blog post about a shooting incident in America. I now can’t recall what happened that day, but the history books do. I wrote about another shooting 21 days later. The issue remains. As complex as it may seem. It’s the…

After a series of not-very-well-received (by me) "normal" beers, Wide Street makes a triumphant return to the sour game with Wildwood, a 5-year bourbon-aged affair, and a surprise find on the taps at The Porterhouse last month. It pours a gorgeous rose-gold shade and smells decadently of fine sherry: unmistakably oaked though without the honking vanilla of fresh bourbon. The body is fuller than I would expect for a highly attenuated beer of just 5.5% ABV, and that gives it a pleasing slickness,…

I discovered this morning that the Winnie-the-Pooh turned 100 a couple of days ago.

I bought this new Suunto Race 3S. Add me on Suunto (kevinwammer) or Strava and shame me into actual running.

October 16, 2026 It’s a question you send me more often than I would have ever expected, 16 years ago when I plunged into this adventure: “What do I do when my two favorite accent colors don’t go together?” WELL… I could, of course, launch into a diatribe about how “all colors go together – if they exist in the world, they are meant to be together…” Which is small consolation when you still don’t feel like they look right together! Let’s start with this gorgeous thing: Scarf – Silk & Soul To…

In the last few years AI image generation has gone from something very rudimentary and nigh-on unusable for commercial purposes to the go-to option for small businesses' signs and menus from SF to Rome—this sucks. Somehow, as the models have gotten better, they've left something behind. I find myself thinking more and more wistfully of DALL·E 2, an image generation model from 2022 that conceptually shouldn't hold a candle to the current state of the art. So why do I miss it?

Now there are few things in life more reassuring than meeting up with your identical twin brother, Chris, because you know you’re in the company of someone who shares your genes, your facial features and, presumably, the same questionable manufacturing process. We are, quite literally, two peas from the same pod, although one of us has clearly been stored in a slightly more questionable environment than the other.Chris escaped Coventry some eight years ago and established himself in North…

Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters?The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters - meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment.If you’re looking to explore actual,…

I just scanned two dozen slides, and there were some really nice randos mixed in. Here are two for your Friday.Let's begin with this beautiful October 1972 shot looking toward the entrance to Tomorrowland as seen from the middle of the Plaza (aka the "Hub"). The cerulean blue sky really compliments the whites and yellows (and even the reds!). This is truly a "postcard-worthy" view, it's got the rockets up in the air, several colorful Peoplemover trains, Rolly Crump's flowers (not purple and…

Labyrinth (1986)

One of my aims with our reading clubs is always to try to get in as many different kinds of writing as I can; in some of our years, it would be so easy to just read e.g. Golden Age Crime all week, but I do like to stretch myself if I can! Mention on another blog (I can’t recall which) of the author James Baldwin reminded me that as well as fiction, he had also written essays (I read some of these as part of my Penguin Moderns reading project). And another blogger nudged my memory with respect…

I remember playing this back when it was new, although all I can truly recall about that experience is it being a real pain in the arse to run and not having a good time with it. Thankfully my personal tech’s and personality’s moved on a long way since 2006, so I thought it was about time I revisited a fully patched up (official patches only) Neverwinter Nights 2 with a better PC and fresh eyes. Or not. Within seconds I’m staring in disbelief at the dialogue before me, wondering if perhaps I…

The 2024 Korean horror movie Exhuma was described to me as "a detective procedural starring ghost busters," and it's exactly that. It even feels a bit like a season of a detective procedural edited down into a cinema release - it's long, divided into chapters, and it goes places. The degree to which it goes places is pretty crazy. The beginning of the movie makes you think you're about to see a very specific kind of horror movie... and that's absolutely not the same horror movie you're watching…

Another week in the books so let’s see what the world of metal has to offer this week. Hails! Carnation - death - BelgiumSépulcre - death - FranceLeadbelcher - death - IrelandMinefield - death - GermanyGlutton for Punishment - death - USADoomscroller - death - GermanyMorgue - death/grind - FranceMortify - death/grind - JapanFate Unburied - death/groove - ItalyMaster - death/thrash - USAWorm Altar - death/doom - USAShores of Null - melodeath - ItalyInsomnium - melodeath - FinlandIapetus -…

I was listening to a podcast yesterday on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, how Trump has completely sold out Ukraine again and that it’s all for trying to unfuck his dumpster fire of endlessly poor decisions that have led him to scramble about trying to pretend like he gives a shit about his country before the midterms, but at the same time there’s endless backroom deals going on this-and-that oil companies, some billionaires from here, some from there, all these fucking people just…

If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents, where is all that software? People have been asking this question for years. As far as I can tell, the answer is that it’s spread out over a lot of modestly successful projects: Somewhere between 2x and 20x new software is being created, depending on where you look There’s no real growth in massively successful software projects (not…

This is so well put and ever since having kids, I have described it exactly the same: Your heart now lives outside your body. The hardest part of being a parent is that you have to trust these awkward, gangly, brave, but ultimately reckless little humans with keeping your heart safe, while also letting them be awkward, gangly, brave, and ultimately reckless. Because that is how growing up happens. It’s stupid. Mike Monteiro’s Good News

Okay, so, on Tuesday evening I was with a group of Ukraine writers and ended up recounting two or three times that I had felt so vulnerable in writing that I made poor decisions or I was led the wrong way. That suddenly sounds so much more dramatic than it really was. Nobody has led me into a dark life of crime and scandal, although there may yet be hope. What I meant was, for example, the way that my school careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to write and how that sent me off down the…

Welcome to Friday and another update on things here in North Wales in my little workshop that despite the autumnal weather remains comfortable at present. Get yourself comfortable, and let me give you a guided tour...It's rather lovely to be testing the 16mm rails in the garden! This build has been something of a slow burn, but very much on the home straight now with most of the paintwork and assembly fitted. The final stage is to add some weathering to breathe a little life into this cute…