The annoying thing about studying the Black Death (besides having to read about lots of horrific things of course) is that new discoveries are being made all the time.Thanks to new scientific possibilities and archaeological finds much of what we thought we knew about the most impactful disasters in human history has been turned upside down in the last decade or so.Books & articles published just a year ago are already outdated because just a few months ago the Yersinia Pestis bacterium was…
Problem Statement: Classic Traveller players are always breaking the goddamn law. '77 Traveller is pretty vague about how to handle planetary justice systems.1 I know that later versions do flesh it out, but I like tinkering, so I have written my own quick & dirty rules. These are meant to (mostly) elide the process of arrest and trial while affording some opportuntiy for players to affect the result. Note: Currently untested. I will make tweaks and update this note once I have had a chance to…
The retroflex L is uniquely Indian but still missing from Standard HindiThe sound ळ is a retroflex L/ल. Garhwali has this sound Haryanvi has it Punjabi has it Rajasthani dialects have it Marathi has it Tamil has it, in fact, it is the last sound in the name of the language itself. 1 Malayalam has it. In fact, in the name of the language, the first l is normal, but the second l is retroflex (मलयाळम) Even Vedic Sanskrit recognizes this sound. So, how come it is missing from modern Hindi? Well,…
Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump” — the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, memes, and even videos — I found over the past week. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Phrasing! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, August 8 appeared first…
I finally graduated from college! Surviving my degree was the main motivation behind starting this blog: I've always been one to write about my experiences, but I needed somewhere to put it, where I could pick it back up any time I wanted. I didn't want to be hyperaware of any potential audience, but I appreciated the assurance that there were people out there, an email away, in case I ever wanted to reach out to them. At the end of the day, this blog is just another glorified diary on the…
I've got a milestone coming up and I'm low key excited about it for reasons including but not limited to that I like knowing the specific date something happened, or, as it pertains to the thing I am specifically talking about, the specific date I did something/something happened in my life. For example: I received notice I got into McGill on June 11, 1997 I (kinda) moved to Copenhagen on September 17, 2014 I moved away from Montreal (the second time) on December 22, 2009 I decided to quit…
Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Collections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check it out if you’re interested how sometimes weird physics considerations influence design in the real world: In the video, the host also talks about the more natural order that…
A huge thank you goes out to contributor Daniel, who emailed to notify me of this Facebook post from about a year ago. The unusual thing about the car in the photo is that I took it off the PNAERC list two years ago because I assumed it had been scrapped. Whoops!This is Toronto Transportation Commission 4524, a class A-8 PCC car built by St. Louis in 1951. I'm not sure exactly when it went out of service, but by 1991 it was evidently one of four cars of this type being held for possible…
look at mom reaching for that fig! (right side) she decided it wasn’t ripe enough Highlight of the week: we were eating lunch when this family of raccoons — one adult and two little kits — came to look for figs (none looked ripe to me but they found a few they deemed edible) Looking forward to: the wildfire smoke is supposed to clear out this weekend after a long smoky week, will be happy to have clean air again! Stuff I did: 0.75 hours consulting admin — project officially on hold 4.25 hours…
Watched on Friday August 7, 2026.
Several weeks ago I missed my 25 year high school reunion. Actually, missed is the wrong word. I skipped it. I avoided it. The event was held less than ten miles from my house, and I went out of my way not to go. To be honest, this was the closest I've come to going to one of these reunions. A few weeks prior, I had pulled out my old senior yearbook and spent an afternoon looking through it. I read the messages that were written in the interior cover pages, looked through the team, club, and…
Gareth Heyes, CSS: the bomb inside your inbox: "It's quite common for webmail clients to render untrusted CSS in a trusted UI. They attempt to make this safe using CSS sanitization. In this paper I'm going to show you how to break out of trust boundaries, exfiltrate tokens, compromise 3rd party websites and even steal passwords." Previously: 2001: Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea 2002: 7 reasons why HTML e-mail is EVIL 2004: HTML email considered harmful | use plain text email 2006: Force Apple…
I have previously discussed several of the anti-drugs and alcohol posters found on the set of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department. These include the “Mom and Dad, I Use Drugs” poster along with several Reader’s Digest Foundation Drunk Driving posters. There is one additional poster opposite the “Mom and Dad” poster in the hallway just... The post Twin Peaks Set Decoration – “The Odds Are That Marijuana…” Poster at the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.
My favorite battle I've run in the campaign has been the boss encounter at the end of the second arc of my campaign. Arc Two, which had run about fifteen sessions, investigated why sahuagin were attacking coastal villages. They discovered the sahuagin were worshipping a forgotten being from the depths, and had taken on its madness. The players eventually sought out the protector spirit of the ocean - a nature spirit in the shape of a massive whale, who turned out to be the mother of the…
Pega Um! mini music player widget (2026/08/08) As I'm working on the site for the local fanzine project Pega Um!, I want to welcome with music the people who pick up the zine and find it interesting enough to visit the site. The playlist is made up of songs by local artists they won't hear on the radio, and is an homage to old alternative events called Junta Tribo (Tribal Gathering) that would have rock, hip-hop, punk, reggae, metal and ska groups all in the same line-up. Check it out here.
Mercado Little Spain – New York, New York I heard about Mercado Little Spain, a food hall with Spanish Restaurants, and thought it would be a great place for dinner. My wife agreed. When we trekked up the High Line, we planned an early dinner here, located in the basement of the shopping mall at Hudson Yards. They have a few sit-down restaurants and multiple bars and kiosks. As you can see, it’s very festive with ample details. Perfect for some interior photography. I’ve included multiple…
Has anyone else noticed random guys writing “correct” under other people’s web comments? They are responding to something that makes sense to them or that they agree with, but to me it comes off as a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and social ineptitude. Is this usage of “correct” a weird side effect of judgy social media rhetoric? Or do I need to recalibrate what I think I’m hearing? Perhaps it is shorthand for “you speak the truth”? In this age of epistemological uncertainty, such…
A little report on the state of contemporary LLM-based tools. Yesterday, I decided to try to use Claude to automate a workflow I do a ton in my composing: Export the mockup audio from my notation software as a WAV file Import it into an audio editor and bump the gain a bit. Export it as an MP3. Add the relevant ID3 tags. Import it into Apple Music. Fix one thing that the ID3 tag editor I use doesn’t handle: setting the track to use “work name” rather than “title” as the primary field — pretty…
Now that we have installed bun, Anthropic's package manager, and scaffolded a Playwright framework and closely examined the results, we are going to explore with our Bun-Create-Playwright project ways to check if our code is correct. The first method we will be exploring is typechecking. Why Typechecking? As the Playwright.dev / Node.js Introduction mentions:"[...] Playwright does not check the types and will run tests even if there are non-critical TypeScript compilation errors. We recommend…
Between bad apps that try to scam customers, and good apps that are rejected for seemingly wrong reasons, shouldn't Apple deploy more and better reviewers to their App Store to justify their high margins? ~ Links: Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment, by Terry Godier App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball
As part of my quest to optimise my energy bills, I’ve been looking into power stations and building up my arsenal of energy storage. Whenever I spot a reasonably priced power station (and budget permits), I decide to grab them for my own needs and run them through tests along the way. When it comes to big-brands in the charging world, Anker is definitely well-recognised and their products usually carry a premium price-tag, up with the likes of Bluetti and Ecoflow. But just before the financial…
This is one of the most infamous computer games from Japan ever made. You can mostly blame the 1967 film The Graduate. I’ll explain along the way– From the first issue of Genma Taisen, the original manga. Genma Taisen, the manga, was first serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in 1967, with writing by Kazumasa Hirai and art by Shotaro Ishinomori. By then both men had established careers, with Hirai writing the 8 Man series (1963 – 1966) and Ishinomori launching Cyborg 009 in 1964; both…
Dave and I went for an early Saturday morning walk. Afterward, we went back to the hotel to meet with Dave’s family and then to the konbini (convenience store) for breakfast. Though still early in the day, it was already getting quite hot, so I quite enjoyed the frozen mango slices I picked up there. We squeezed our way onto a bus and headed over to Nijo Castle. A bit of history about this world heritage UNESCO site from Wikipedia: In 1601, Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa…
First, there was the issue with Hide My Email exposing your actual email. Now, we discover that Apple's iCloud Private Relay may not be private sometimes. Not a good couple of months if you are relying on Apple to protect your anonymity. ~ Link: Apple's iCloud Private Relay Isn't Really That Private by CybersecKyle.
This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular exploring the principle that armies cannot help but recreate their civilian social structures on the battlefield. Last time we looked at the importance of generating cohesion in these armies and the ways cohesion could come either organically from the underlying society or be manufactured as part of…
POSSE, in the IndieWeb world, stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It’s the idea that you post content to your own site first and then post copies or share links on other sites (for example, social media). I like that as a concept, but sometimes I want my site to be the only place for the content, and I don’t necessarily want to share it everywhere. One, I don’t want to feel like I have to broadcast everything I post here. Two, there are lots of times I’m tired of social…
Bit of eye candy for the lovers of low-brow, low shelf kaka from the former colonies of the Far East, and these are out there now, with Peter Evans having provided some, while I found the others locally. We've seen Red Deer before, but these are further branded, or ascribed to an OTL of Leeds . . . and Poland?! Hing Fat Japanese Infantry clones (and that's funny in itself!), in pink, with a
JACQUES MESRINE – The Death Instinct. Originally published in French as L’Instinct de Mort. Filmed as L’instinct de mort (released in English as Mesrine: Killer Instinct) is the first part of a 2008 French biographical crime film about Jacques Mesrine, a notorious real-life French gangster. Directed by Jean-François Richet and starring Vincent Cassel. Autobiography of a French bank robber. Mesrine lives for thrills. His favorite is the double bank robbery. You rob one bank, and when the cops…
Truly has become unbearable. Losing efficiency and my patience with it. Perhaps it’s time to try Codex. _ Reply via email
ECM Autumn Highlights is a sampler curated by Manfred Eicher and released in collaboration with the Italian magazine Musica Jazz. Drawing from ECM’s late-2017 catalogue, it covers a broad expressive range while retaining the sense of a single, carefully plotted journey. The Vijay Iyer Sextet opens with “Poles,” also the first track on Far From Over (ECM 2581). Saxophonist Steve Lehman enters with fierce momentum, pushing against a rhythm section that never settles into mere support. Stephan…
