Just a short note that First Proof is announcing the result of their “third batch” evaluation at a webinar at 3PM ET hosted by ICARM today. (Registration required.)

Fangs for the Memories: Apparently, the ’70s weren’t content to give us shag carpeting, disco, fondue sets, airbrushed vans, and bell bottoms—they also gave us creature features in which nature had apparently had enough of us, and ecology has gone berserk! As far as Willard 1971, Bruce Davidson’s Willard takes revenge by enlisting a few … Continue reading A Trailer a Day Keeps the Boogeyman Away! Nature Bites Back: ’70s Horror and the Law of Unnatural Consequences

Ganeshotsav is a 10-day festival celebrated in the praise of Lord Ganesha, a Hindu god worshipped for his powers to remove unwanted hurdles from any tasks. His presence is considered auspicious and hence rituals worshipping him are performed before the start of any new venture for e.g. marriages, house warming, new business, construction, etc. During this festival, devotees all over the India create Pandals (makeshift bamboo encasements) with various themes and sculpt Ganesha's statues matching…

In a previous post, I discussed the differences between push-based and pull-based customization in the context of trying to implement support for formatting and structured bindings. For those problems, pull-based customization (adding an annotation to a type and having a partial class template specialization that looks for that annotation) works pretty well — until you suddenly run into ambigui...

someone who keeps to themselves and is a little hard to read can seem really interesting from afar. when you don't know much about someone, there's room to imagine all sorts of things about them. then you get to know them and realize that maybe it wasn't them you found so interesting. maybe it was just the fact that you didn't know them. i think real charisma is something else. it's when people are comfortable being themselves, even when that means being a little different from what people…

Inbox Zero for Privacy, not Productivity inspired me to achieve an actual Inbox Zero at my e-mail provider, thereby sufficiently solving the challenge of e-mail encryption for my risk profile.1 As a result, I am able to choose a budget-friendly e-mail provider without paying a premium for 'privacy features'. I chose to use the Thunderbird method as described in the blog post linked above. In practice, I rely on the following approach: Recently received e-mails: These e-mails remain in my Inbox…

Tom Carter - King’s, Raleigh, North Carolina, September 6, 2013Denver show alert! Avant-guitarist extraordinaire Tom Carter is making his way to the Mile High City on Friday, October 16, 2026 to play at St. Thomas Episcopal Church. A sweet situation made even sweeter by the fact that another avant-guitarist extraordinaire Golden Brown will be opening the show! I hear rumors that there may even be a little collaboration between these two esteemed musicians, too. Get your tickets — this is…

We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture. Alas, this is not the case. Anthropic devotes considerable effort to cultivating and maintaining such a culture. It shows, especially among the members of technical staff. Having conversations with them can be a very different experience than talking to those at other labs, and there is a much greater sense of understanding and responsibility. But even there, the appreciation of the problems and their difficulties seem woefully…

Red Wings used for what Red Wings are for.

I mentioned yesterday a sculptor named Farhad who was punished by Khosrow II for becoming a rival for the love of Shirin. He was given the impossible task to carve steps into the cliffs of Mount Behistun.As it happens, if you go to Mount Behistun in western Iran you'll find a long smooth section carved into the stone that is decidedly not natural. Called the Farhād Tarāsh, it is 30 meters high and 200 meters long.Its origin is unknown. A medieval geographer named Istakhri, who died in 957, had…

The root DNSSEC trust anchor, the Key Signing Key or KSK as it’s called, was rolled, i.e. renewed, on Sunday 2026-10-11. To be precise the key was created two years ago, but it is now used for signing the root DNSKEY resource record set (RRset). I’m not involved in the process, but I am an avid follower, and as such I tooted before the event and after: The second screen shot shows an arrow pointing at 38696 which is the key tag (or key id) of this new key, and dig(1) is showing how it was used…

amanda in wonderland → Crypty's Brain Crypt → lobstermandan → Lumen's Website! → ratwalks → hope is in the stars → snowy hiccup ●～* → inaka → hat's 猫コミコン → incessantpain → Unimaginable Heights → Goodboyjojo → Minifeed (listed at Indieseek.xyz Indie Web Directory)

The Story Shen Jia Lan, the eldest granddaughter of Grand Secretary Shen, is betrothed to Lin Jin Qi, the eldest grandson of the Minister of Personnel. But when turmoil strikes the imperial court, her grandfather is accused of treason and her entire family is massacred. Jia Lan is secretly saved by Xu Wan Quan and his wife, who give her the identity of their recently deceased daughter. Now living as Xu Lan Xiang, she becomes a low-ranking maid in the very household her adoptive family serves,…

I’m trying something new, under the name First Takes. These will be quick write-ups of ideas I find interesting. If this goes well, expect to see these more often than my traditional posts, and covering a wider range of topics. If you’d like to only receive my traditional, high-effort pieces, see the instructions at the end of this post.Anthropic’s engineering team just dropped a fascinating post: Redesigning source control at Anthropic. It describes a major engineering project undertaken in a…

About a month out from PulpFest, the sixth Thomas Adam Grey thriller by Duane Laflin, The Ancient Bones, came out. As I’ve been enjoying this series, I quickly got and read it. This series continues to be great, and I look forward to the next one. Laflin is a retired professional magician who now writes […]

“When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.” –Catherynne M. Valente On this day a decade earlier, the remnants of Typhoon Songda were bearing down on the Pacific Coast. The attendant low-pressure system and the knock-on effects of this storm were felt even on the other side of the Rocky Mountains – a heavy […]

Last week I started my October look at the short-lived occult horror magazine Coven 13. Issue #1 came out in September of 1969 and established what editor Arthur H. Landis wanted the magazine to be: a modern successor to magazines like Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, but one firmly grounded in the contemporary world with modern takes on horror and the occult. This week we move on to Issue #2.Coven 13, Issue #2, Nov. 1969Our second issue is dated November 1969 and still has the 60-cent cover…

I have had a generally good time playing Romancing SaGa 2. Until 2016, the 1993 JRPG had never been officially localized into English in any form, but then in 2024 Square-Enix made one of their upgraded remakes of it, giving it the whole modern-day spit-and-polish. As someone born in 1973, I refuse to use the term “glow up,” and am only camel-casing the title because it’s essential to the series identity. That’s the kind of thing that happens when someone with an English degree writes about…

Never thought I'd be shadow banned, or index blocked (or whatever it is Bearblog does) for a post about a man pouring urine into local public infrastructure. I thought the world needed to know what sort of chaos is running in the streets these days. It's basically a public service! I thought it's some sort of bug, so I started troubleshooting and it's interesting because it appears that no views are getting logged into the analytics, but the toasts still show up. This applies to all my posts.…

It usually begins with “I don’t follow politics” or “I’m nor political.” But the topic can be interchangeable. Tech, sports, etc… It’s a choice. Even not choosing is a choice. One can argue, (I frequently do) that when you tune out or become tired or uninterested in a topic, then you’ve essentially surrendered. Whatever the other side is, you’ve let them win by removing yourself from the board. Life can be tiresome. Increasingly it feels more so. Certianly in the wake of so much merciilessly…

This will most likely only resonate with other working, local musicians. But here is a little insight to the cover band you see entertaining you at the local dive. The biggest misconception is that the gig is easy money. You get up and play music you like, people enjoy it, maybe tip, and you get paid. Sounds like a gravy train right? The honest truth is that all of the band works full-time jobs. Most gigs, on average, pay anywhere from $400 to $500 plus any tips we make. Usually not more than…

What does the future hold I don't know if software is going to be dead or not, the whole web seems to think it will be though. Anyways, tinytown.studio was meant to be a small focused app studio. Looking back, I wish I had put more effort into growing it into what I originally imagined. I didn't. The things that are running like Ping and Toggles aren't going anywhere. But I'm not sure what "app studio" means now when it takes a few prompts to clone whatever the hell I have built. I'm trying to…

Présenté en direct du stade de Saint-Ouen... non, Saint-Étienne!Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne's debut, came out on this day in 1991.I didn't hear it straight away. I got to it some time in the months after, when I'd just turned 16, living at a boarding school in Louth, Lincolnshire. I remember being smitten by it from the first listen.My world then was books, encyclopedias, maps, TV, films and magazines, not the internet. Music came on records, tapes and the odd CD, and from whatever the NME and…

One of the pleasures of my boyhood was going round to my grandmother's flat to watch TV (we didn't have a set at home at the time). On Saturday afternoons my brother and I would join her to watch the wrestling (Kent Walton ringside), and on weekend evenings there would be such delights as Danger Man, starring the very cool Patrick McGoohan, and The Saint, based on Leslie Charteris's stories, and starring Roger Moore. As it happens, today is Roger Moore's 99th birthday, though he isn't around to…

8713/21632Ernie had the day off school today. The lurgy hanging over the house had hit him (and me). It's not too bad, just making us all a bit snotty and tired. I had to go into town for a meeting and it seemed that everyone on the train was struggling too. Lurgy and fruit flies are the two plagues hitting our house and the UK right now. Oh, and soon, the actual plague.

Here we have the final iteration of the Zoey cups. We started with the Korean version, then the plain jane Shin, and now the special Burger Hero. I could see consumers being very confused – I certainly was. Anyways, let’s begin. Nongshim KPop Demon Hunters Shin Ramyun Zoey Burger Hero – United States Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Contains beef. To prepare, add in sachet contents and fill to line with room temp water. Microwave 3.5 minutes at 1000W. Finally, stir and enjoy!…

I think many companies could use a formal learning review process for non-mutual employee departures. A “non-mutual departure” could be initiated by either party in an employment relationship, either by the employee or the employer. What they have in common is that one side is unhappy. Maybe the company was unhappy with the employee’s performance. Or maybe the employee left after 12 months because the job was not a good fit.

I think many companies could use a formal learning review process for non-mutual employee departures. A “non-mutual departure” could be initiated by either party in an employment relationship, either by the employee or the employer. What they have in common is that one side is unhappy. Maybe the company was unhappy with the employee’s performance. Or maybe the employee left after 12 months because the job was not a good fit.

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Sally Otto, University Killam Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the United Kingdom's Royal Society, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to evolutionary biology, particularly the mathematical understanding of how evolution works. Our conversation centres on…