I’m still thinking about what AI era teams look like. The metaphor I’ve been pondering is that these new team shapes will compare to the classic DDaT/GDaD ‘two pizza team’ in the same way that Sevens does with Rugby Union. This might be influenced by the fact it is the opening weekend of the Nations Championship! The teams are smaller, things happen faster, it can look chaotic and unstructured but there are tactics and method in the madness. The same goals (heh) remain. The roles share names…

I've written on-and-off over the years on the sometimes tempestuous relationship between television and the movies. The big studios have variously viewed television as a novelty, a threat, and a partner; for its part, network television has gone from lusting after major studio films to owning the studios themselves, while ceding actual movies to cable and streaming services.We are, however, primarily interested not in the present but in the past, and so we go back to a time when big-screen…

Megalodon Adult vs Baby Size ComparisonAwe. Who doesn't love babies? They are the cutest little things, right? Well, mostly....Perhaps not quite as cute if they could bite your arm clean off! A baby Megalodon would have been an impressive neighbour but not a welcome one if you were on the menu. They were pretty big right from birth and they just kept growing! Even the lower published

If you like this content then you can support it by becoming a member or buying my book on Analogue Productivity. On Highlights Just this morning I started a "thinking" book on my ereader which is rare. I almost always sit down with a physical book and take notes on paper. I've always struggled with what do do with the highlights after. Yes I can type notes, but ereader keyboards have always been pretty terrible so it's not a pleasant experience. Then I decided that I'd worry less about the…

In the spirit of the Prismatic Wasteland blogwagon here are a few suggestions for players, that in my experience, avoid slowing down the game. Nothing earth-shattering, but I think it's worth bringing up because these items represent perennial issues that have detracted from the game across generations (I'm sure I could find similar suggestions in the hallowed annals of Alrums & Excursions).In the spirit of I CAST LIGHT!, the advice is coming from playing 2-3 years of weekly megadungeon-based…

I recently finished the largest set of changes I've made to my rhythm stage setup in 4.5y. The basic interface is similar, but I have a lot more flexibility, more control, more options, and it's easier to travel with. My favorite part is the speech recognition for calling chords. I started off playing mandolin and piano, and then over the years added progressively more expressive footdrums. I added a breath controller. I built out a complex but expressive system where these different interfaces…

Aversion, revenge, satisfaction, schadenfreude and a touch of disgust. While story isn’t deep, it catches you and is fun to read. Some parts are hard to swallow, but you get over them quickly. This book is often classified as horror, but let’s be honest: it isn’t really. I’d recomment this as a gripping book in between, that’s definitely wort reading and will entertain you.

Watched: The Mongoose 🍿 This was really dumb.

Liveness analysis on block local SSA IR + a bit of ralloc for a vm and an x86 jit

Wizard of Id pulls a Black Mirror.

Clouds in the east briefly matching the rust-red of the threadbare oaks. The muffled drone of NPR voices from my mother’s house. As finch twittering gives way to woodpecker drums, a brisk wind springs up.

Get off My Lawn Whatever Remains Contents Salutation Introduce Yourself Explain Summarize and Close Addressing Possible Opportunity Urgency Meetings Caveats After pushing out my post on elections and beyond last weekend, somebody drew my attention to a small oversight in the post. Well, I call it small in the context of that post, which mostly revolved around holding your nose and voting for the candidate who you have the best chance of pushing in the right direction, and that doesn’t include…

After 23 years of living, my answer has varied. However i never strayed too far from "Yes" as my answer. In Chinese class, the teacher asked if money could buy happiness. She called on me first, and I just said yes. She proceeded to ask everyone else in the room, most said no. I'm on the younger side of my classmates and the only American, so maybe I just sounded ignorant. But was wondering if those classmates genuinely believed the answer is "no" or if they said "no" because that's the "right…

I felt this a bit of a departure for Karen, a more exotic, less civilised location with some genuine peril and more mysticism. The story falls into two rather different parts. A medical student, Tara, meets and falls deeply in love with a biologist from an unconventional upbringing. He betrays her in a deeply hurtful way and almost destroys Tara’s life. In the second part we flash forward eleven years to a holiday in Costa Rica where we find that Tara has overcome the betrayal and made a career…

This is a difficult but essential book. I was initially put off by how graphically autobiographical it is. The disaster planning I came for was frequently interrupted with the author's loves, disasters, health issues, pains, and domestic issues. As the book wore on, I realised how vital that is. Disasters - whether natural or caused by human actions - cannot be tackled in a dispassionate way. It's all very well having a plan to repatriate bodies, strict timetables for witness statements, and a…

Fremantle2026 November 7 (Saturday), 8:34PM In my quest to build a website that is resilient against the bots that are ravishing the web these days, I've also set it up to be even more dependent on US big tech (or even small tech, if that's what Wikimedia and the Internet Archive are). It works, and is solid and performant, but it feels like it continues the trend of relying on ever bigger and more centralised services. And I would rather not do that. Even if they're charities, the…

Welcome to another week of ttrpg goodness! This week I published Even Better Encounter Tables, and the most popular posts on the blog were Running Red Dragon’s Tale, Writing Interesting Encounters, Timelines and Events: Prepping an Investigation, Making Villain Actions in 5e and Dolmenwood Resources for You. If you like this newsletter, subscribe to receive it in your inbox every Saturday! Table of Contents Discord DiscussionsBlog Posts to ReadProjects to Bookmark and DownloadPlay…

This tutorial shows how to build a PHP CLI tool that returns JSON, package it for Composer, and run it from anywhere with CPX. It also explains why CPX is a nicer alternative to globally installed Composer tools, thanks to isolated dependencies and automatic updates. Read more

He had a number of pictures on hand; most of them were too large and ambitious for his skill. He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different. There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the…

Sweetgum leaves came in many colors, 1 Nov 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 7 November 2026 Fall color was spectacular in the City of Pittsburgh this week. Black locusts and tulip trees turned yellow and oaks turned red. Sweetgums turned both colors as seen in two leaves from the same tree at top. Above the trees, the sky was beautiful and often clear all week until Friday. Fall color in Schenley Park at Westinghouse fountain, 4 Nov 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) No wind on Tuesday as two mallards…

Checked in at Frankley Services Southbound (Service station) — Bromsgrove, EnglandProbably my least favourite services on the motorway network, an hour at Frankley on route to Cardiff is not what I consider to be the feature of a relaxing weekend.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. – Elias Canetti 1I am not one for reading projects. I have never planned to read a play of Shakespeare every day until I have read them all or set out to read every novel by a particular author in order of their publication. There are people who every year read all six novels on the Booker Prize shortlist to make a judgement to compare to the jury's or ask "Where to…

The seasons have changed. It’s 7 November, it’s cold, and the air is thick with the scent of a failed revolution. A heavy fog sits still over London, cloying with it the smell of last night’s fireworks displays. Guy Fawkes Night, the celebration of the unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot, is dissipating. But the fog appears like smoke, and smells like it too. If you look, the evidence of a tough summer is around us. After the harsh sun and droughts of June, July and August, flowers bloomed late in…

Lisa Russ Spaar, The American Scholar: Poetry can’t change that, though its practitioners have asserted that it can outlive us—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”—thus ensuring a kind of proxy immortality for the poet as well, in this case Shakespeare. But if one meaning of a “poetics” is a lens for understanding how poetry works and why, then I hope to continue my lifelong engagement with poetry to practice both losing and recouping…

I was not alone in having an absolute miserable night trying to sleep. My wife said that she hadn't slept well either. It has been unusually warm for November and that keeps me from sleeping well. The bedroom was 77F and once the temp gets above 70-72F I sweat and have trouble falling asleep.Last night I didn't drift off until almost 0230, having hit the rack at 2200. I woke up 4 times after that before rolling out of the rack after 0700. A real crappy night and I didn't feel better once I got…

What if a barber took 1/10th the time but with the exact same quality? Gut feel is I would pay 50% more and visit twice as often. Robo-scissors at just below the speed of sound, you wouldn’t even sit down. Locations like photo booths, call it Snip Snap. Cmon AI boffins get it done. While I’m going on about AI: It confounds me that "hill climbing" and </q>gradient descent</q> are both optimizing algos. Is GOOD = UP a valid conceptual metaphor or not?? Make your minds up. Atomic Kitten was an…

By NikolineSelf PublishedB/XLevels 1-4 Kurhan is wounded at its heart. The Akros, tower of its long-gone kings, stands crippled, torn in two by tyrant-mages; its ruler, Ataxes, is prisoner and warden both, disfigured, unmanned, and cursed. He has locked himself within, attended by the embittered and dissolute, deaf to his people’s cries. Tithes to the wizards pile high in lightless vaults, one-time heroes entertain themselves with stale recollections, and those who long for change wait, plot,…

No, I haven’t removed any packaging material. But by coincidence, after schlepping out to fetch the above box, I then had to schlep out to get another box: Packaging material! But: Again, a gross violation of the EU charter! Straight to jail!

troll flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says What do you think trolls look like? Show us by any of the usual #DS106 ways. Years ago we had a troll. She seemed lovely to everyone else, but she took against our lurker research and followed us around making spiteful comments whenever we posted. Eventually I blocked here, and last I heard she had retired and vanished. Good. Anyway, here she is at the top of this post.

Cars 2 has always been treated as the ugly duckling in the Cars franchise. I'm here to defend it. I think this film is the most logical next step you could have taken without playing it safe. To write the first Cars film, the weird geniuses in Pixar went out to find all the different ways that cars affected our life. The first film is feverishly devoted to vehicles, it's about (fictional) racing history rooted in real racing history. It's about settlements that get bulldozed over in the name of…