#coffeeneuring2026 No. 1 16.3km round-trip The Coffeeneuring Challenge 2026 kicked off a few days ago, and after dithering last year, this year I’m resolved to give it a go. So, between now and 25 November eight rides to seven (or eight) beverage-serving locations, no more than two a week, and despite clocking the first ride today, I’m saying the week started on Monday 12 October. One reason I didn’t participate last time was because it really is no big deal getting an excellent coffee here in…

Dolly Parton’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hollywood, Calif., 2026. For more, follow me on Instagram. About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

Writing about Evoluon a couple of years ago I mentioned my affection for all those one-off Space-Age constructions with suitably science-fictional names: Evoluon, Skylon, Atomium, Space Needle… You could add Futuro to this list, a micro-building in comparison to the latter pair, with a similar flying-saucer styling as Evoluon. Futuro wasn’t a one-off design, however, but a prefabricated dwelling intended for mass production. The original plan by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen was for a…

I feel like I spend a lot of these weekly “upcoming Boston-area shows & announcements” posts writing about date conflicts and tough choices. Well, this one’s going to be no different. Maybe even moreso. There’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot going on at the same time as the things going on. Buckle […]

I distinctly remember last year I suddenly started hearing about this book everywhere I went: online, among peers, someone at the university mentioned it etc. And everyone only had good things to say about it. So when I started looking for my next read, I picked this up on my Kindle. I remember reading the first dozen or so pages before pausing the book in favour of work and eventually forgetting all about it. This was no fault of the book of course. When Nadja Bester proposed this book for the…

*and if you disagree you’re doing it wrong. This too is Pawn Stance. Defining our Terms Pawn Stance is an approach to play that treats the characters and events of your game as tools for accomplishing your goals. It’s also objectively the correct way to play games. A History Lesson Narrative stances as used in this context were first formulated by Kevin Hardwick and Sarah Kahn and became part of the jargon used in the rec.games.frp.advocacy (RGFA) Usenet group sometime before 1996.1 They laid…

I received a $90.00 check from the US Treasury yesterday. This morning I deposited it in my bank. After the check clears, I’ll donate it to John Ossoff's Senate campaign. Around 20,800,000 people received this $90. These are the people on Medicare. The people who, on average, have more money and assets. This Trump “program” adds around $1.872 billion to the debt. Trump announced this two days after the 2025-2026 budget figures were made public. He ran a $1.9 trillion deficit in the fiscal year…

back in 2024, a few of my friends and i started a small book club, choosing a book each month and meeting online to discuss it. over time, it became harder to find a time that worked for everyone, so we decided to call it a day this month. we'll still keep in touch, of course, just without the monthly reading commitment. i didn't want to let go of the idea entirely, though. one of my favorite things about the club was choosing a new author or exploring a different country each month. it gave me…

On July 6, 2013, I published json2xml 0.1 on PyPI. Its job was straightforward: take JSON and turn it into XML. Thirteen years later, that is still its job. The interesting part is what has accumulated around it: compatibility decisions, regression tests, profiling sessions, a native Rust extension, millions of downloads, and code that appears in public projects maintained by Google Cloud, AWS, and NASA. A small library can travel a long way through an import statement. With version 8.0.0…

Mood: Ready to parry. Snap-hiss. It is arguably the most recognized sound effect in cinema history. Ben Burtt, the genius sound designer for Star Wars, created it by recording the idle motor of an old movie projector and mixing it with the electromagnetic hum of a television picture tube. To most people, that sound signifies "Cool Sci-Fi Sword." To me, a blind man living in a world of silent threats, that sound signifies something else entirely. It signifies Hope. Here is the thing about…

https://sting.com/ery excited to see Sting tonight. I’ve seen every time The Police toured the US and almost every time Sting has toured solo. Excited to add one more to the list. We’re all getting older and I don’t know how many more chances I’ll get.

This blog is intentionally distant from most of my readers, which frees me up to try out many ideas. However, being more immersed with my readers is a useful idea to me, one that I was reminded of in a recent conversation with a friend. After my brain started chattering with new ideas, I paused. I had a hunch this had come up before. Then I remembered I had already been posting at Hacker News and LinkedIn. These were intuitively comfortable environments for me. I could publish everything here,…

“Slowly and then all at once”. That’s John Green’s paraphrasing of Ernest Hemingway’s quote in The Sun Also Rises about how change happens (though John wrote it specifically about how we fall in love). Ernest was referring to how you go bankrupt. But it applies to many if not most types of change, large-scale and small, the way they creep up on us until we hardly notice that what we once took for granted is ‘suddenly’ gone. You know, like ‘responsible’ government, like a stable economic system,…

Ecliptic Mariner: Diaries is something a bit new for the lab - a video game, built in an engine. As most of you know, we’ve built a few game-like and toy like things here in the lab, but I’ve never actually set out to make a “video” game (we’ll see why I use those quotes in a moment), let alone one built on someone else’s engine. Since the last update, progress has been plugging along (at something resembling a pace), so it seems like a good time to share progress again. Godot Kind of Hurts My…

I love colors, and I spend a lot of time looking for the right palette for a website. And I am frequently changing the colors in my website and I never settled for one a single one. Instead of keep changing the colors, I thought I can create a set of palettes for my Lightbi theme and I can apply the same here whenever I want. So decided to create Lightbi Palettes, a collection of website palettes. So I can pick a palette and see how the whole site looks from the navigation bar, to footer. What…

Who are you?Tunisia WilliamsI am a middle school counselor and kidlit author. I live in Augusta, Georgia.What do you write?I mainly write picture books; however, I do plan on writing in other kidlit categories.I started out as a journalism major in college then switched to public relations. My career began as a public relations professional at my alma mater, Augusta University. I worked in the university’s PR department writing articles and pitching stories for about 10 years before becoming a…

Kai Carpenter’s cover for the The Witcher: The Last Wish, The Complete Collection (Dark Horse, 2026) binds the Witcher in red string. ▲ The Witcher: The Last Wish, The Complete Collection (Dark Horse, 2026), cover by Kai Carpenter From contributor Colin Beineke.

Could I force her to get up, and would she probably not mind all that much? Perhaps. Is it more respectful to spend 45 minutes whispering to her that I really need to get up and do something, while secretly being very happy that this means I don’t have to get up and clean? Yes. Yes, it is.

The elk you see here, Cervus canadensis, belongs to a lineage stretching deep into the Pleistocene—a time when ice sheets advanced and retreated across much of North America, reshaping landscapes and every living thing within them.Elk are members of the family Cervidae, a group that first appeared in the fossil record during the Early Miocene, roughly 20 million years ago. These early deer

I was down at Kilauea Volcano this past weekend, checking out the state of the volcano. Since December 2024 there has been a series of 54 episodes of the current eruption. Episode 55 was expected about three weeks ago, but changes in the volcano have not produced another fountaining episode. Instead, there have been lots of small earthquakes, signs of lava movement underground, and a continuing build up of pressure. The volcanologists aren’t sure what to expect next, so some areas and trails…

If you've read this blog enough, you're probably aware that I prefer to commute by bike, but can't always for a variety of reasons. Some of these are practicalities in the Quad Cities (infrastructure, weather, etc.). Some are choices I've made interacting with those practicalities (school schedules, where I live, where the services I wish to access are).And some are more about the human vessel that has to actually do the biking.1. Weather Can Be A ProblemI, as a person, do not mind rain much.I,…

Bob and I are headed to Nashville this weekend for the On The Paper Trail LIVE event. I am frantically packing and trying to get everything organized for our tables and the workshops I’ll be teaching. We can’t wait to see everyone at the event. Pens: Arrtx Acrylic Markers (via Jane Blundell Artist) Leonardo Momento Zero Pausilya Fountain Pen Review (via The Pen Addict) Video-Review: Waldmann Edelfeder (Steel Nib) (via Scrively) New Nib Day: Schon Design L’il Dipper (via CJs Wunderkammer)…

LA-Based Dummy link have a new record do you love the color of the sky? coming out this Friday. The fourth and final advance single is “N of 1” which came with a video directed by the band’s Emma Maatman. Says the band’s Joe Trainor “I liked the idea of taking glacial guitar drones and cutting ‘em up inti a new context of jungle-inspired drum. To me some much of the record is like the remixed versions of pop songs you’ll never hear. “

Bear with me while I wax poetic. I know, I know. Not my usual style. Still, we’re all friends, so humor me for a moment. Have you ever felt such a strong sense of déjà vu that you wondered how you could possibly remember something you never actually experienced? I get this feeling a lot. It’s a strange sort of homesickness for a place I’ve never been, a longing for somewhere I’ve never called home, in a time I’ve never known. Ireland. There’s just something about the place that feels familiar…

Welcome to the fifth-year anniversary of me trying to get into Western States 100! Yes, it’s already been that long. What started in 2021, when I was fresh off the pandemic and eager to experiment with mountain ultras, now has become a real tradition. Getting one of the 369 tickets for arguably the most popular 100-mile foot race in the world is as difficult as it’s ever been. So far I haven’t succeeded and the chances are not exactly doubling like the doubled ticket count each year would…

Epic’s new games launcher is ‘vibe coded’ theverge.com Epic Games is announcing a big refresh of its PC games launcher today in preview, saying that the new version is “way faster” and now supports Linux. But the company, which has been publicly making a big push into AI-assisted development, also notes that the refresh was “vibe coded.” I don't care that this is vibe coded and that title is pure clickbait. This is huge! Native support for Linux! And also: To bring Fortnite to Linux, we are…

It feels like the entire state of Wisconsin has caught Brewer Fever, and I’m here for it. There’s an electricity in the air the likes of which we haven’t seen in awhile- maybe The Bucks championship run? Even then I’m not sure it hit this level of fever pitch. It’s also, frankly, a nice distraction form a world gone sideways. No counting my chickens before they hatch- we’ve got a lotta games to get through before we get to any hardware- but man is this a fun wave to be riding!

We are always in a race to figure people out. We want to know quickly whether they are worth trusting. Whether we can rely on them. Whether they are who they say they are. Our first instinct is to distrust people, so we can protect ourselves from getting hurt. That is the whole game. Protecting ourselves. The need to trust someone stems from our desire to be vulnerable with them. To be honest with them. To share our rawest selves with them. So we can tell them what we truly feel and what we…

When my grandmother-in-law died, she left us with a set of The Great Books, a 54 volume set of renowned works by European men, from Homer to Freud. Published in 1954 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was meant as a comprehensive study guide for adults interested in learning about intellectual underpinnings of the Western world. The idea was that students would encounter the original works, rather than textbook summaries, and, more importantly, the curriculum was built around conversation,…

I wonder . . .Has there ever been a day or a time that stands out in your mind when you have seen your reflection in the mirror and felt good about it? I laugh at times and think about the young man’s struggle and the games and the dating rituals and how insignificant this really is. However, at the time, I used to invest everything on the outer layers and the looks, the image, or the identity of me or the person I dated.And unfortunately, I have to admit to my shallowness. However, and at the…