Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not the biggest fan of poetry, but poets, particularly Evelyn Araluen, have been doing well in some of the literary awards in recent years, which is certainly a boost for the craft.

We went on a short holiday this week to Hafan y Mor in North Wales. It always feels like a special place to us whenever we visit and we have a great time whatever the weather. This weekend we were super lucky and the rain stayed away for most of it (but not all!). We spent our time swimming, walking, and playing games together. All in all, it was a fanastic break from work. To top it off, on the way home we stopped at Pistyll Rhaeadr for a mooch about to break up the drive. You may recognise…

At the start of the month, developers at Capcom—the team behind one of my favorite video game engines—gave a talk about RE Engine's future. News began to swirl about slides, statements, and translations revolving around AI. Satoshi Ishida laid the foundation for what this new "RE neXt ENGINE," aka REX, is setting out to address. Here is Eurogamer's reporting on the talk, which was in Japanese and originally reported on gamebiz.jp: "Ishida pointed to three challenges driving the REX Project –…

Homer, Odyssey 14.55 (tr. Daniel Mendelsohn): You spoke to him then in reply, Eúmaios my swineherd: τὸν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφης, Εὔμαιε συβῶτα· The line, or something very like it, occurs 15 times in the Odyssey (according to commentators), and Mendelsohn always translates "my swineherd." The possessive pronoun "my" doesn't occur in the Greek, and I don't understand the reason for its intrusive presence in the English translation. It smacks of the colloquial "my man," and sounds out of place…

Does getting bigger *never* mean getting better? Or can a chain be good?

🇨🇦 Happy Thanksgiving everyone! It’s a strange weather day here in Toronto. Balmy 21°C, in the middle of October. Braised beef ribs in the oven. Horizon Hazy IPA in the glass. Been pottering around the house, getting closer to where we should be - the back of the basement is still a total mess, but it is a little bit less of a mess.

Musk has flooded Republican campaigns with more than a quarter of a billion dollars. But it's ok, because Gruber doesn't see any politics in his timeline. File this under "Surmounting our problems"? FML ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 15:46 Monday, 12 October 2026

Alarm-snoozing, parsley-chopping, video-calling, trampoline-halling, eggplant-stewing, eyebrow-barbell-debating, shampoo-shopping, lorrie-moore-reading, dessert-breakfasting, thc-munching, denim-is-my-favourite-colour-proclaiming, letterboxd-bragging, red-jacket-buying, double-friendsgiving. I loved the people and the energy and the food in my friends’ homes. You have a book by Richard Ayoade, that’s crazy. But I really meant cool. One by one, there was a sharing of thanks and I said I was…

I’ve made something today to help me use my phone less. It’s a little background for my lock screen. Here is how it looks. And boy, it’s effective! I tend to pick up my phone so often, to do simple searches or to read Mastodon, it’s ridiculous! I even do it when I have my laptop in my lap! I want to remind myself that I have better options than grabbing my phone for anything when I’m at home and my laptop is near. Funny thing is that on my phone I can easily lose myself in all the apps on it…

Passwords are ubiquitous and have been for decades now. We're told to pick strong passwords and made to shuffle them every so often on some services, but we don't think enough about what makes a good password. Here I want to provide a quick primer on why we focus on secure passwords, how we manage password risk, and why password managers matter.

In case it’s not obvious from the title, this is mostly just a rant. For the longest time, I was a Mercurial holdout and used it for every personal project where the choice didn’t affect other people. After a long time, I finally switched when: git had won (GitHub etc.) and, Magit gave me a decent interface, better than the Mercurial CLI. But it is still awful. We can forget. I consult for a team of developers, and it involves people who are not software developers by trade who are learning to…

🇬🇧 If you follow my full RSS feed, you'll know I was in the UK last week. As I was busy with work I decided to combine the past 2 weeks into a single post.🖼️ Despite all of my visits to the UK over the years, I never managed to make it to The National Gallery. I wish I had gone sooner. It reminded me of art history in college. Such a concentration of great art from throughout the ages and they just let you see it. I found it quite moving.🇯🇵 Outside of the museum on that day in Trafalgar Square…

Consider the following C++ code snippet: static [[nodiscard]] int GetSomething() { return 64; } If you invoke this function e.g. inside main() like this: int main() { GetSomething(); } this code compiles successfully with MSVC! Even at warning level 4 (/W4, which I use on almost all my VC++ projects)! Why am I upset? Because in the above code I did discard the return value of GetSomething(), and even with the [[nodiscard]] attribute applied to the function, and compiling at /W4 (warning level…

Speaking of Backblaze and System Settings, though: this beauty is fresh of the presses in 27.0.1 – probably more Backblaze’s “fault” than Apple’s, given how extremely non-native their Java app is, but still. What a mess. The Backblaze preferences themselves also had this highlight: You might not even see it at first, but this window has tabs on top. Six of them, actually, each with a full word as title. When you click into this black hole of UI elements, they unfold and show up normally (until…

Kurzgesagt breakdowns — in their trademark plain language manner — the recent Hugging Face hack perpetrated by rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI. The fourth sentence in the narration is a doozy: Fully aware that they are acting unethically, they execute a sophisticated cyberattack Emphasis on the word aware is mine, but it makes you think. I lost count of the number of times I shook my head throughout. At twenty minutes in length, it’s slightly longer than the usual Kurzgesagt video, but well…

Yunzi's Lets try searching the small web. surprised me with how many No results found search results Kagi Small Web showed for hobby, interest, and related searches. I felt inspired to test Kagi Small Web against all 191 of YouGov Ratings' The most popular activities in America 2026 at the time of writing. Have some more notes on both the ranking and the experiment: This version of the ranking seems to have been published about a week ago, with data collected during the third quarter of 2026.…

Once I was in a meeting with a guy who asked why everyone couldn't be above average. Because that's not how averages work, Paul. I'm no mathematician but the average, as in its most usual definition, the mean, is surely often pointless? A ten and a ninety gives you an average of fifty. What does that mean? Of what use is that in many situations or discussions? It's not even that half are under and half are over. Get a wild enough outlier and every other number could be on the same side of the…

It’s 19:30 in my hotel room. The hotel room wouldn’t have looked any different in 1974 except the the flat-screen TV. There is an clock-radio built into the wood pannelling. The radio doesn’t work and it seems neither does the clock[^itseems]. I have the pizza and the beers and some chocolate. It’s not a great pizza and the beers aren’t great beers. The chocolate I haven’t tried yet. I didn’t sleep well last night, somehow I remember counting the number of times I woke up as five finally waking…

John Gruber, “X Once Again Marks the Spot”: If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. Okay, you know, I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this, but since I was…

I like when higher-definition remakes of old games are faithfully awkward and weird to play. The 3D Secret of Mana remake wasn't universally beloved, but I like it because it replicates the, I guess, stamina management combat of the original. Were the Mana games the first soulslikes? Anyway, 1993 gameplay is not sacred and you aren't fake if you don't prefer it, but modernization isn't inherently improvement, it's just change in pursuit of ephemeral norms. If a novel is fundamentally its text,…

Vier von zehn Termine liegen hinter uns und ich bin Fan geworden. Die Buchbinderei ist Basteln auf hohem Niveau, unsere Kursleiterin eine begeisterte und begeisterungsfähige Buchbindemeisterin und unsere Kohorte klein und witzig. Und ich habe erste Ergebnisse vorzuweisen. Wir haben bisher aus Makulaturpapier ein kleines Notizheftchen geklebt und für einen weiteren Notizblock einen Einband hergestellt. Das heißt Schneiden an der Pappschere (die VHS hat eine toll Ausstattung, u.a. eine…

On the most recent episode of the Waveform podcast, the hosts talk about two new announcements in the MMORPG world (relevant bit starts at 1:21 and goes on for 14 minutes): The context is this: RuneScape launched in 2001, and World of WarCraft in 2004, each game already had a “relaunch”: RuneScape via Old School RuneScape in 2013, and World of WarCraft with its Classic edition in 2019 – both revisiting and perhaps straight replaying the respective original game, but with some new improvements.…

‘Currently impossible’: North Korea defections in freefall: Are SK or NK incentivized to report fewer defections? If the defections are high-profile people or high in number, then the answer is likely yes to avoid drawing attention to it or showing others that it’s possible? Feels like a shaky argument though. SK has a big interest in certain defectors (military, government, etc) but probably doesn’t want the average NK to defect (uneducated, difficult to integrate into society, etc), so they…

Shapes (2010). Hasselblad 500C/MUh oh, famous blogger says our favorite social network maybe isn't the best social network for him. HOW DARE?! Fan...meet shit. ✍️ Reply by email

Some pictures from last weekend's event, just a small number of the dozens of guests and happenings going on around the arena and conference centre or as its somewhat randomly named Liverpool Experience Campus which just sounds like a University though its actually an arena and conference centre. If you want to book for next time, due to be held in April 2027, tickets are already available from the website www.comic conventionliverpool.co.uk If I had to offer any advice on going to these…

It’s time for my seasonal post 😛 That’s it for now. Will try to post more in the following weeks, I miss writing (of course, I always say that!)

Finished Silo season 3, and I have questions. Of course I do. That’s why they’re making season 4. The big one is still why. I was glad when Juliette started pushing people to ask that too, and I like that it was a good catalyst for what eventually led to the survival of Silo 18 at the end. What I don’t like are all the clichés and the parallel storyline which, while important to the show and interesting in its own right, was too long and too involved. They should have kept it to one dedicated…

The leaves say: It's time for Coffeeneuring!What's the secret to our success? I say it's the autumn appeal of low-key two-wheeled rides on bikes, coffee and fall-inspired drinks with friends, a goal to strive toward, and the best community.--MARY G., CEO OF COFFEENEURING Week One0. Saturday, October 10 (Mostly sunny, 83F)Coffee at: Bruegger's Bagels, 3310 Mount Vernon Road SE [round trip 3.5 miles]I found out about coffeeneuring two years ago, and have been an eager practitioner ever since.…

Went back for the perch today. Once I'd caught some small enough baits I put my faith in the circle hooks and after two definite missed perch takes (descaled baits) hooked one chubby but small perch and 4 pike, this the biggest. I packed up early as the poplars were shedding branches in the rising wind. And no mud bath.