I recently took part in a Pokémon Draft League with some friends and was able to take the title home, so I wanted to write a bit about the drafting process and prep that I did. For the uninitiated, a draft league involves drafting (wow, big shock) the ten Pokémon we want for our team in snake fashion, and then playing a match a week against each other — we played in the Regulation M-B VGC format (that's doubles). We had two pools of eight (I was placed in Pool B) with the top 4 from each pool…

I remember hearing about this Māori gothic horror movie when it came out, so I

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).Nick Bagley and David SchleicherWhy do Americans love private rights of action? Because we really, really love them, as Diego Zambrano shows in his compelling new book, How Americans Enforce the Law. Today, more than 10,000 statutory private rights of action allow Americans to sue over things as serious as wage theft and as trivial as pet leases. They have an ancient pedigree,…

Built to endure the tests of time, the pyramids of Giza stand as some of the oldest and last remaining wonders of the ancient world. Rising from the desert sands of Egypt’s Giza Plateau, these monuments were constructed from a masterful blend of limestone, granite, basalt, gypsum mortar, and baked mud bricks—materials quarried both locally and from distant sites along the Nile, including the

One of the unfortunate things about moving a music library between macbooks is that for some reason, album artwork gets lost. I think there is a file somewhere that contains this information, but obviously I neglected to transfer it (or else, the new macbook is looking for the file in a different place). This results in the unpleasant experience of seeing the ugly generic music note in place of pleasing album cover art. Apple Music does a decent enough job of finding album artwork, but it is…

🗞️ I’m all for supporting good and free press, but it’s not actually cheap. My free trial of our newspaper ran out and if I continue I’m paying 372€ per year, for only the digital version. How are prices elsewhere?

Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? I usually do, and I enjoy thinking about and building upon them throughout the morning, as I often dream crazy stuff with elaborate plot and incredible scenery. I also go through periods of nightmares, and that's less fun. I love a horror book just like the next witch, but seeing horror stuff? No thanks! The other thing I like a lot is trying to figure out what does dreams mean, even if they do not always correlate with what's happening in my waking…

My step-father was a USCF-rated chess master. One day, we were talking about what makes the elite of the game so good at the game – grand masters like Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov – than everyone else. Him: “Well, those guys can see every possible move and every possible counter move for the whole game. So, from the very first move and every move after they can game out all the ways it can go until mate in their heads.” Me: “Wait, if they can both see the whole game and every possible move…

📷 271/365 - Someone left the garage door open.

Collaborative drawing software.

You know, as you do. The article is a list of science fiction monster novels (or at least, science fiction novels with monsters in them), staring with the early 19th century and going through to earlier this year. Yes, I tried to do a full survey of the science fictional landscape with this one. Some of them are significant, some of them are ones I like, and at least one of them is a novel I don’t necessarily think is great, but is a hell of a vibe. If you go over to read the article (that’s a…

Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, ⊕ [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is…

Girl on the Net (I will call her GOTN moving forward) wrote about the Cornell rape allegations. There’s plenty to read on her website and in the Wikipedia page if you want the details — it’s unfortunately a familiar story in American colleges. What moved me to think was this part: Far harder to start an awkward conversation. One-on-one or in the group chat with your guy friends. Somewhere there aren’t any women to show off to. Yeah. I know exactly what she’s talking about. I’m an IT guy. I work…

Previous posts in this series introduced Frml, explained how it checks simplar scalar code and handles contracts between functions, and then discussed how it deals with loops, checks arrays, and checks built-in functions. The final language level, complete, doesn’t add any new features. Instead, it serves as a placeholder in case we want to extend the language further. I’m not going to do this myself, but if you are a student (or a professor looking for projects for students) please get in…

[Zip codes starting with “9” instead of “0” should have a real clue.] If not for the whims of a penny, there would be a Boston, Oregon, to go along with Boston, Massachusetts. Instead, Oregon’s largest city is named Portland, after Francis Pettygrove’s hometown of Portland, Maine. A couple centuries later, that fact resulted in ads about Maine’s Senate race being incorrectly shown to hundreds of thousands of Oregon residents, who were no doubt bemused and/or amused.Link:…

Donny catches up with Martina Fačková and Tommy Arnold, to discuss an exciting new offering coming to market. The post Martina Fačková x Studio Tommy appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Bluesky. And her latest book, The Atropine Tree, is now available!) I don't think my obsession with pocket pens will ever fade (I sure hope it doesn't), so it stands to reason that my gotta-try-em-all quest would bring me, eventually, to the Esterbrook Niblet. And I'm so glad it did. I'm a huge fan of Esterbrook and their bold dive into all things analog. And while I…

It's the quintessential symbol of Halloween: the Jack-O-Lantern. Fortunately, it's also one of the easiest designs for a baker to make. Just take one round cake, ice it in orange, add a cartoony face, and...voilá! AAAEEIII!!Er. Heh, sorry. Let's try that again.Voila! That's...not a cake. [rolling up sleeves] Voila! Is that...plastic?Cheater. Voila! A Pumpkin Poo-nicorn. Well. That's a first. [through gritted teeth] Voi-la. What the...what IS that? Come on, seriously, there's no way you could…

At the recent Letterheads meet in Amsterdam I interviewed Morgane Côme about her Letterform Archive book, Lettres Décoratives. Those in attendance were also treated to a sneak peak of her second book, La peinture en lettres, Histoire & Renouveau (Sign Painting: History & Revival). As her personal ‘Tour de France’ (Le Festival) to celebrate the book’s publication continues, Morgane took some time out to talk to me about her journey bringing it to fruition.Morgane Côme talking about Lettres…

A time ago, I wrote a thing that felt like stumbling into a delightful discovery: On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park Sometimes I’ll amend a post, with updates from a later time, sometimes it’s easier to just make a separate part 2. Everything continues delightfully with picking them up from the grass I already walk around in regularly (frisbee, walking/scooting through or near the park). I’ve now encountered them far beyond {local park} I’ve now seen the same fruiting body in similar…

Rottnest2026 October 15 (Thursday), 9:00PM· Rottnest · ← Previous Next → My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds). Email me at sam@samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…

2026-10-15Hello! I haven't made a good landscape photo in a while.My bread and butter of photography seems to be a documenting process, photographing people or things that I see around me. Sometimes, I get to tap into the creative process a little deeper.I've employed three tricks to make this image's effect stand out. Also, a bit of editing with highlights and shadows, but I'm not counting that today.First, I tilted the camera. I suppose I could have done this in post processing as well, but…

Shit, I can hardly log in to anything right now. Almost everything is set up for “two-factor authentication” whether you'd like to or not. I feel like I'm witness to the doom that is soon to come to many. #journal

Four days ago marked 157 years since nineteen unarmed Métis riders, led by Louis Riel, confronted a Canadian government survey crew south of the Forks and compelled it to withdraw. The crew had been running a base line across Métis river lots for a township north of Ste. Anne. Nobody fired a shot. No weapons were seen. According to the surveyor's own memorandum, the riders stopped the work "by standing on the chain." The riders put their boots down on a length of metal meant to ensure the land…

Updated October 2026 Of Ina’s later cookbooks, I think Cook Like a Pro may be my favorite. I nearly had to make this a top 35 list instead of my usual top 10 because there are so many stellar recipes. Obviously, I didn’t love every single one, but on the whole, this is such a consistently fabulous book. In the introduction, Ina makes it clear that this isn’t about cooking complicated, chef-level dishes. It’s about using the tips and techniques professional chefs rely on so everything you make…

School of striped mullet in Pacific waters of Mexico 15 October 2026 Striped mullet, also called flathead grey mullet, (Mugil cephalus) are coastal fish with a worldwide distribution. Adult mullet spend the summer in freshwater rivers and estuaries, then migrate to warm saltwater spawning grounds in the fall. Historical biogeography of the Mugil cephalus species complex and its rapid global colonization (map from Science Direct) Because they’re good food for predators mullet travel in tight…

#bitsyjam100, the final bitsy game jam by the creator of the free bitsy game making tool, has just started and will run for the next few months. Obviously other folks will be organizing bitsy game jams after this but this is the final #bitsyjam. I will try to make a game for this one with my kids (I only participated in one bitsyjam before this a long time ago), and would like it if you (points out of the screen towards you) joined me.

Gavin Dalzell built a treadle bicycle in 1846, hailed in 1888 as the first until MacMillan’s earlier 1839 claim sparked a lasting debate.

If you met me during the last twelve years or so, I probably wouldn’t strike you as a religious person. I got a Master’s degree in a technical field, and I spent a few years as a PhD student doing research. Now I am an AI/ML engineer. All this time, I looked at the world through the lens of science. Sure, from time to time, I practiced some form of meditation, but there is some scientific evidence that it works, and it ultimately served my own benefit. But you should know, dear reader, that I…

Tickling my son, chasing my son, generally just being silly with my son, illicits his laugh and my heart swells with joy and love. The back and forth banter between my wife and I. Pronouncing bagel BAHgel. Mash Potato. Coffee at the perfect temperature, not too hot to scald, but hot enough to feel going down. Watching Dave, our old boy dog, slowly waking up and looking around the room, realising a new day has started. The turning of the leaves in Autumn. Losing yourself in a great book (finally…