In 1984 here in America there appeared the anthology Supermen, the third volume of the Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction series. A British edition followed in 1988. We here at MPorcius Fiction Log have read seven stories from the book (links to the appropriate blog posts below) and today read three more. To experience these super stories yourself, in the very form in which I will be reading them, try this link. "Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny"What Rough Beast?" by Damon…

Blur, the NFT marketplace that overtook OpenSea in trading volume shortly after its 2022 launch, announced it will shut down its website in a month. They also announced that Blend, Blur's NFT lending platform, will stop matching new loans on the same day. Borrowers have until then to repay their loans or let them default.The announcement comes days after the Blur team said it would also shut down Blast, its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, because it cost more to run than it earned. Tweet thread by…

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 9th August 1986 They are Motörhead and they play rock and roll. The only real introduction you’d ever need to one of metal’s most famous and influential bands, and all I’m going to give to be honest because if you’re here reading this, you know everything you need to know. But I am going to take the opportunity to wax lyrical about my favourite Motörhead record, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, ‘Orgasmatron’. The first to feature Phil…

Renée DiResta, writing for Lawfare: There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem: as platforms have reduced access to data, and as “disinformation”…

A dramatic silhouette of a person standing against a vibrant red light backdrop by BEETTHOW (Pexels)"You must choose," the fate keeper says. "What is known or what is unknown." By the time I blink she has already disappeared, leaving me standing in the doorframe. I know what is behind me. Cold darkness that clenches my heart and drains the very life from me, but it's safe. It's comforting. It's a place I've known. Security is worth a lot, maybe even the corrosion of your soul. Security lets us…

Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 created by the team behind the Blur NFT marketplace, is shutting down less than three years after launch. In the announcement, they disclosed that its costs now exceed its revenue and that it sees "no credible path" to fixing that. Despite once boasting of more than $2 billion in total value locked in June 2024, generating revenue from network usage of around $3.5 million, that revenue has collapsed to less than $2,000 last month. Tweet by Blast "Once a $2 billion…

We get a lot of flak at WordPress.org for supporting older PHP versions, but an area we’ve always pushed the frontier is in Web Standards, getting websites and browsers evolving together to make the web richer. Ever since I caught the religion from Zeldman, promoting more functionality in the browser has been a life mission. It’s a little nerdy, but we wanted to do client-side media processing (use all that amazing Apple and Google silicon instead of burdening the poor servers) so we used…

When I started to conceive of this campaign setting, I thought of this post by my colleague Tom Kilian who asked: What if Gondor had been in Earthsea? You may say that this is a fork of his original post. And I've started to write so many strange things that are so different from his original conception, I must give them my own names. But I hope Tom will be indulgent (or at least forgiving) with the way my ideas have run away from his initial inspiration. The story of the Isles is one of…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 31st July 2026 The smothering, suffocating debut full length from French black/death/doom titans Viande, ‘L’abime dévore les âmes’, was an album I was very much absorbed by back in 2022 (just read my review of it), and so when the subsequent four years cough up another dread horror from the catacombs of the western Alps I couldn’t have been happier. ‘Monument aux morts’ is out now through Transcending Obscurity. Opener ‘Linceul immense’ is an incredible…

I try to avoid writing about AI when I can because I know all of us are already drowning in it. Stick with me here, because there is a point to this and something I want you to take away that’s not just AI doomerism. If you want one thing to blame for this post of mine, I suppose it would be Epic Games going “all in” on AI. But really, this is bigger than that and something I’ve been feeling for weeks. I don’t like preaching like this, but I think you need to understand my thought process for…

It's not brand new, it just has a new theme. Everything is still there from before. I made some changes to the reviews by getting rid of sliders and making it a radar graph. The colors aren't as gross anymore. I do have some image rendering issues on the cards but that's a task for next week. Noodlist ^ Go see it.

Dear Constant Reader, Since she moved out west, Ava has been seeking shows a bit closer to her and thus has been a regular at KimBurly’s Tittie Tour. She, Devastasia, and Betty performed their ridiculous banana number there over the summer, but I had not joined them… yet. When Ava told me Kim was looking for some additional performers for Halloween, I applied and was thrilled to be accepted. It turned out Betty and Devastasia were also performing. Ava was performing up in Gloucester at a…

Alternate title: Dog bites man According to this recent report (see also here) from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group (Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein, “The Anatomy of Tariff Pass-Through into Consumer Prices“), Trump’s tariffs raised consumer goods price inflation in the U.S. by [only!] 2.6%. File under “Department of Underestimation.” Amiti et al. 2026

Reclaim Hosting (you know they are the best web hosts in the universe) published a new case study on the massive use of WordPress blogs at Baruch College in New York City. Big as in 10,000 sites for 60,000 users over 20 some years. I have great memories of the years I got the invitation from Mikhail Gershovich to be part of the Schwarz Commuication Symposiums and as well when he and Luke Waltzer started it up, here’s a screenshot I had from 2008: Blogs @ Baruch runs WPMU flickr photo by…

Playing New Vegas on Linux Mint has been surprisingly easy. Minor hiccup setting it up with a mod manager, but mostly smooth sailing. My current setup: OS: Linux Mint 22.3 Xfce 64-bit Game: Fallout: New Vegas from GOG Mod manager: Amethyst The basic steps: Use the Heroic Game Launcher to install Fallout: New Vegas. In Amethyst, add the game. On the Amethyst game configuration screen, under "Proton prefix", make sure the the Proton prefix field points to the game's Prefix folder. Should be…

The first recording today starts with the end of Copycats. There’s a promo for the Doctor Who online adventure game. Then a trail for Big Fab Fridays. Then it’s Deadly 60 – Louisiana. Steve catches an Alligator Gar by littering the bayou with cola bottles and fish. He finds a nest of Fire Ants. He uncovers a Cottonmouth Snake. While looking for alligators, they find an Armadillo. He has to go to a wildlife sanctuary to see a White Alligator. But he does find some Alligator Snapping Turtles.…

Finally feeling better and getting Maui cuddles. Selfie a day for a year, day 48: Oct 15, 2026 edition.

Open Universe is a new offshoot of the respected library music house, Sonoton. This new enterprise is being curated by Jon Tye, ex of ambient techno pioneers MLO*, one half of Seahawks, and currently recording and performing solo as Ocean Moon. The imprint’s inaugural release finds Tye adopting this moniker and collaborating with Bristol-based musician Bethany Ley, herself assuming the alias Silver Ley. The sonic synergy showcased is so seamless that individual artistic contributions, who did…

Just to make a change from tiny aeroplanes for a moment, here are a couple of character minis I made for a Fantasy Hero campaign I was running, years and years ago.The little guy in front is Sir Basil de Brass, a tiny little brass automaton, whose personal shame was that he needed to be wound up at least once a day. He was absurdly confident and brave, in spite of his very diminutive stature. The little lady to the left with wings is Pandora, a fairy. She was a real mischief and practical…

Years ago, Marco Arment said something that I think about all the time: Don’t bet against the smartphone. It’s amazing how many products have run straight into this idea, like a sprinting outfielder who hasn’t slowed down in time to avoid the wall. There are some obvious examples, especially in our AI-crazed day. The Humane AI pin never stood a chance. The Rabbit R1 is beautiful, but is at best a novelty. The friend is never going to escape the gravity of its own domain name. I think there are…

I listened to a couple episodes of the Catholic Answers Live podcast on the topic of prayer and a few things stood out to me. I should preface these notes by saying I feel I have struggled with prayer most of my life, especially as I have gotten older. Latter-day Saints believe in praying “from the heart,” as in no written or rote prayers except in the case of prayers said when ordinances are performed. I know the form of prayer as taught in the LDS church, and I know what to say vocally in…

A few weeks ago, one of my professors sent out an announcement that our university has positions open for an internship that's relevant to my major. I sent in an email application and was interviewed a few days later. 30 minutes after the interview, I was accepted! It will start next semester, and I will be paid $19/hr! This will be about $2 more than my previous job (if you can even call it that) lol. What's even better is that after my interview, my invitation said that they need more people…

Time announced its roundup of what it thinks are the best inventions of 2026. Among them are John Ternus — or so it would seem — and the iPhone Duo. Andrew R. Chow profiled Apple’s new CEO, and this excerpt has caught some eyes: But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In the midst of a populist AI backlash, they contend that they are building a modest but personalized and privacy-preserving form of AI that will actually help ordinary people as opposed to merely dazzling…

⌾ : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.⚲ : ///mock.brings.shops I travelled to watch an NRL match in Sydney last night. Australia vs New Zealand. The first time I have been to see rugby league played in such a large stadium. The thing that impressed me the most was the visceral wall of sound that was pumped into place. Thumping bass beats and an over-caffeinated announcer encouraging mass sing-alongs (Sweet Caroline is apparently the anthem for this) and kick-off countdowns. As soon as there was any break…

Love in Venice Seen in 2017. I wonder if that particular craze has passed. Quote of the Day ”These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day.” Brad DeLong on LLMs. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mozart | Concerto For Two Pianos, K. 365; 3rd Movement. Link Long Read of the Day…

There are two things that as a male I’m statistically way more likely to be into but for some reason am not: gambling and video games. On gambling, McKay Coppins’ article “Sucker: My Year As A Degenerate Gambler” in The Atlantic was really eye-opening, as was the recent Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know episode “Are Prediction Markets Ruining Everything?” There are giant, obscenely funded industries dedicated to preying on human psychology and parting people from their money, and I’m just not…

ChipmunkLen PetersonToronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949299 pagesClaude Widgewood specializies in buns at Toronto's Modern Baker. He's an expert at adding just the right amount of cinnamon. The other bun-makers aren't so exacting. They don't care. There's no better employee than Claude, and yet he's afraid of being dismissed. Proulx is the problem. Claude considers this co-worker a Communist intent on spreading the Red Octopus's tentacles into his workplace. Leaving for home at the end of his…

Unacceptable: Apple Health Sync is now behind a $99/year paywall for new accounts: What’s changing for new members: for accounts created from October 13, 2026, automatic sync to third-party apps is part of Withings+. Add Withings to my personal boycott list. If they’re gouging new customers today, I predict that within the year they’ll also charge existing users who purchase newly-launched devices. They’ll never see another penny from me.

Thinking of moves again. Avec kitty, PNW or Mountain States. Somewhere rural, on some acreage, but a reasonable drive from proper amenities. Maybe near a university town. Occasionally work as an adjunct, if I work at all. Sans kitty, the options open up. SEA and East Asia are top. Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam. Japan, but their visa options suck. Already lived in the UK and wandered all over Europe. I’d be poor there, and honestly, I’m over it. Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia are…

David Lynch’s passing in January 2025 seemed to send a unifying spark into the universe. Since then, fans have gathered monthly in movie theatres, coffee houses, and at events around the world to celebrate the incredibly talented artist. For those who are near Portland, OR-E-GON on October 17-18, 2026, I invite you to attend “Night... The post Night Blooming Jasmine: A David Lynch Screening Weekend at Portland Art Museum, Oct. 17-18, 2026 appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.