This post is aimed mainly at folks new to the fields of short fiction and illustration, or those who don’t have extensive connections to professionals. My platform is small, but it’s worth using it to boost a warning. In a nutshell Back in 2025, a new publisher bought four magazines owned by Dell and one owned by Gordon Van Gelder: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and…

Cortlandt Alley – New York, New York I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I don’t usually do any deep analysis when selecting places to photograph. If something seems interesting, that’s good enough for me. That’s the case with today’s image. In the past, it took considerable effort to track down a location that I photographed in the city. That was the situation during my Paris series, where I also walked around the city and snapped pictures. I often had to find landmarks and use Google and…

It's October. New month, new agent-shell update. If you missed the last post, have a look at the 0.78 update. While the latest changes are focused primarily on bugfixes and polish, we have a handful of new features too. As usual, this post showcases highlights, but please check out the full list of changes if you're after the nitty-gritty. What's agent-shell? agent-shell brings your favorite AI agents to Emacs, keeping you at home: familiar buffers and bindings, no terminal emulation. All…

[This is a guest post by Sophie Huiberts, being an expanded version of a post on her own blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When you prove a theorem, you are imparted a responsibility to the field of mathematics. At minimum you need to explain what you did, including which steps required new ideas and which steps are already well-known. More substantively, you are expected to nurture the literature. If an important idea was poorly…

For the past two years, I've been working with a client , an enterprise software company (built with Ruby on Rails, of course), particularly in the niche of software used by enterprises of all sizes + MSPs and IT administrators for real businesses like law firms, municipalities, architects, hospitals, manufacturers, financial institutions, and government agencies.Working with an enterprise software company has revealed a whole new world of B2B software companies and managed service providers…

Crocodile Dundee was the second-highest-grossing film in the U.S in 1986, and stood as the highest-grossing non-U.S. film ever at the American box office. There is a strong consensus that the film relied heavily on outback stereotypes that do not represent most modern Australians, who largely live in coastal cities. Contemporary critical commentaries pointed out that the movie featured out of date social dynamics regarding gender, race, foods, drinks and clothes that many modern Australians…

Play it here! (desktop browsers only) Or try the “remastered” one! (desktop and mobile) There used to be an Adobe Flash game where the goal was to pass a driving test, with the instructor being ready to berate you whenever you screwed up. It’s virtually unknown outside of Estonia, but I remember playing it as a child, and it was a lot of fun. Sadly, Flash is no longer relevant, and the original website has gone offline a long time ago. For a while, the only way to experience what the game is,…

With this quick Promise-based utility, it's easy to write type-safe unit tests for Vue composables.

Quite possibly the wettest film.

The Grand Tetons and Yellowstone are really close together — it just takes an hour on the John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Memorial Parkway to move between the two National Parks. It’s a lovely little drive along rivers and framed by trees. Not sponsored: I only know the name of this stretch of road because of an app called Guide Along. It offers audio tours triggered by location and lets you know what’s coming up with history along the way. Highly recommended, even at $20 a pop. Saw some otters along…

My mother, a literal witch, entertained me with stories of fighting evil covens, hunting ghosts, and summoning demons during her youth in the bayous of Louisiana. Then, in high school, I met my best friend, who loved the macabre even more than I did. So it only makes sense that we would one day take an adventure or two to brush with the unknown during our untethered college years. It was our first weekend together ever. This was at some point in mid-2008, as I was living in an off-campus…

I’m helping my father in law with a project that has entailed me looking up some hardware specifications for something. I might share what that something is at some point, but it’s kind of irrelevant for this post. All you need to know is the 1998 iteration was as good as what they release now. And in some specific technical specifications, the 1998 version was better. 1998 was almost three decades ago, to put that into context. Yes, I feel old, and I apologise if I’ve now made you feel that…

I mentioned in my last post that I’m working my way through Practical Deep Learning by Ronald Kneusel. The math so far has been straightforward, and the code is written in Python, which I find easy to follow. “Easy to follow” does not mean “correct” or “to my liking.” Some of the code in the book simply doesn’t work, and I’ve had to make changes here and there to get it to run. It’s possible that some of the APIs the book relies on have changed their calling conventions, but I also found a…

A KOReader plugin that puts Lichess puzzles on my e-reader, so I can do a few before bed without picking up my phone.

One of my fundamental objections to LLM-driven software development was that model output is non-deterministic. Given the same input prompt, a model's output is not guaranteed to be identical on every run, at least under normal running conditions. I used to think that this was a severe limitation of AI tools. How could we possibly use this unpredictable building block to craft systems that require precise and exact calculations? But as I started to get more comfortable running AI as my primary…

Preparing an adventure for play in a week or two. This is an example of my approach for writing an adventure treatment ahead of time. When the game is scheduled, I will map out the locales and let my imagination spread its wings! OverviewYou are newly ascended Journeyman Heroes in the Guild who have sailed to Emerald Island for your first official job as Heroes. The island is protected by a mist that can only be traversed by those who know its true name. A man who claims to be an escaped slave…

One thing I love about the i3 window manager is what’s called the scratchpad. The scratchpad lets me toggle the visibility of a floating window with a hotkey. It’s great for keeping notes or a terminal at the ready, available in any workspace. It turns out that it’s easy to add a similar feature to tmux. Here’s my relevant config: bind-key Space if-shell -F '#{==:#{session_name},scratch}' { detach-client } { display-popup -d '#{pane_current_path}' -w 90% -h 90% -E "tmux new-session -A -s…

Years ago, when our kids were much younger, we subscribed to monthly “Tinker Crate”s from KiwiCo. It was a neat idea, and the kids enjoyed some of the crates. However, by May 2020 that was years in the past, and we were not going to be buying anything else from KiwiCo, so I unsubscribed from their marketing emails. A month later, I got another one. I unsubscribed again. Then the emails stopped, for more than six years, until KiwiCo spammed me again earlier this month. Now, when a company that…

In anticipation of a supernatural mystery game (a session of the "Three Friends Horror Game," described here), I thought I might need information about high church Anglican occultism. I asked for help from the mostly autistic folks at the Christianity on the Spectrum podcast's associated Discord server (see also here), since some of them would know a thing or two about esoteric Christianity. They, in turn, wanted to hear about my game. I decided to write up something properly, both for them and…

tl;dr: Shuffle picks Switchfoot’s Vice Verses, an album that’s never really left rotation. Like it says in the overview, pick one album from your library at random and listen to it front to back. When it’s done, write a little blurb-y thing about it. This week’s album Shuffle has brought me a long-running band, and an album that I’ve listened to beginning to end many, many times. Switchfoot - Vice Verses (MusicBrainz, Discogs) was released in 2011, at a time when I was working about 300 hours a…

These are the last warm sunny days in Kyoto. Soon the temporary outdoor dining platforms along the river (yuka or kawadoko) will be taken down for the winter. 京都では、暖かく晴れた日々も残りわずかとなった。まもなく、川沿いに設けられた仮設の屋外席、川床(ゆか・かわどこ)も、冬を前に撤去される。

Joining Bring Your Own Beamer at Tetem is evenint presenting 'The China Labyrinth' as a homage to Christian Freeling.

## The Big Idea Every tutorial teaches you how to get started. Almost none of them teach you what to do after the MVP, once your company depends on the thing you built. That gap is what I've been calling The Operator Problem - and if you're running into it, congratulations. It usually means you did something right. Last time, I wrote about [rebuilding Craftwork's first product without stopping the business](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/stangler-fig-pattern). This is the problem hiding…

Ok last week was back to being pretty chill after the craziness of the week before lol. Our little pinball league started up two weeks ago but because of my concerts I missed both dates so this week I went twice to make up for it. I had some okay games but was definitely playing a little worse than usual (but had friends in both groups that week so that was a plus at least). I'm curious to see how our little pinball league is going to be this season. I wrote about this on here earlier but the…

I’ve started working on a game about being a frustrated and ineffectual manager of a goblin village. Most of the work is writing narrative snippet and then asking Claude to turn it into code. On the phone, usually on the way back from school drop off. Here is the opening the snippet. You live in the Weald. It’s an ancient forest. It’s dark, it’s dank, the soil is terrible, and there are probably monsters in the dark, or at least very large boars. There are other goblin villages out there.…

Below Deck season 13 episode 1 is here with Fraser, Captain Kerry, Rainbeau, and new crew like my new favorite Mo, the chef. But there are already hints about what may go wrong.

Perfume PosseBetwixt Posse! It’s Betwixt Time here, where the weather seesaws and swoops from blistering late-Summer type days (today is supposed to be 90F!!!) to mid 50s by midweek! The mornings are cool, as is to be expected, and the afternoons can… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseBetwixt

is not a simple app. It manages real-time audio on Windows, a domain where the operating system itself does not make things easy: shared vs exclusive WASAPI modes, driver boundaries, clock drift between devices, a callback thread that is not allowed to allocate memory or wait on anything. On top of…

Some years ago, I noticed a handsome, narrowly growing oak tree on 16th St. NW. The leaves and the acorns suggested that it might be an English oak, but the "columnar" shape was not at all that of the usual English oak. Last month I happened to see a new sapling planted, and saw from the tag on a limb that this was a "Regal Prince Oak". That is "a hybrid of Fastigiate English Oak and Swamp White Oak". It is handsome, it grows to a good height, and it will not grow limbs out into the traffic…

Angry man. User:Tomia, original image en:User:Polylerus. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m late with my blurb this week, since I was traveling on the day I usually write it. And it’ll be brief and uselessly indignant, because of post-trip catch-up and exhaustion, yes, but also thanks to the very weird state of mind I’m still in about hoofing it to a football game after having just learned that this country’s administrators are going full Discipline and Punish/Stalin/Taliban and…