Perfume PosseA Little Bit More Lush Well, we’ve crossed over into ‘proper’ autumn. Colder, damp, though sun here and there. First time lighting the woodstove this past Saturday. Gathering up the eucalyptus tree’s shedded bark which makes good fire starter. I am slowly cutting back the… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseA Little Bit More Lush

My quest through deadpan photography and New Topographics has led me to discovering a photographer that kind of lives at the intersection: Lars Tunbjörk. I’ve spent a worrying fraction of my life inside offices. When you work as a university researcher or as a software developer, that’s pretty much all you know. Fluorescent tubes, carpet tiles, the smell of someone else’s lunch reheated in a shared microwave (ewww! I remember particularly nasty fishy leftovers). You rarely photograph your own…

Nothing says autumn quite like pumpkin baking and this Pumpkin Streusel Bundt Cake is a true seasonal favourite. Made with real pumpkin, warm autumn spices, and filled with a buttery brown sugar streusel, this moist and tender cake is perfect for cozy mornings, afternoon coffee breaks or festive gatherings. Elegant enough for special occasions, yet simple enough for everyday baking, every slice is filled with the comforting flavours of the season. I have a beautiful pumpkin cake recipe to share…

My symptoms had been getting steadily worse for almost a year by the time I was brought in for questioning. I’d been in denial for at least eighteen months at that point. It was easy to hide from other people because my profession is an extremely solitary one. The very few people that I do meet invariably don’t have the chance to even see my face — and if they do, and I do my job right, it’s the last thing they ever see. My reputation precedes me, you might say. My clients all come via word of…

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! Offer three choices at several points in your games to give your players agency over the campaign they play. Selecting from three meaningful choices gives your campaign a clear direction, focuses where you need to prep, and ensures you're not railroading the characters down a single predetermined path. Whenever your adventure or campaign reaches a moment of decision, offer three reasonable choices to the players. Whenever the characters complete a quest or…

While lying back in the bath recently, luxuriating, I wondered "I wonder how many more of these I'll have". b = bathnumber b = number of baths yet to come We all have a bathnumber. We don't know what it is, nor can we measure it with any degree of certainty, but it is a precisely defined value. The number of baths you'll have in the future is not yet a set value but one day will be, thus it's possible to muse on what that final total might be. Your bathnumber could be 2, 863 or 9701, indeed it…

Everyone Is Furious about the Diesel Deal Congress put sanctions on Russia to block its sale of oil, which finances its war in Ukraine. Now, all of a sudden, Donald Trump wants to buy diesel fuel from Russia to help Republicans avert disaster in the midterms. Of course, this completely undermines the sanctions, making Democrats hopping mad. Click here for full story

A settembre ho scritto questa breve riflessione su che cosa possa significare un primo incontro. L'ho inviata a Telmo Pievani, filosofo della scienza, che intervisterò a gennaio per The Blue Hour. Ho esplorato un altro tipo di inizio in un testo precedente intitolato Inception. di FARHA GUERRERO Mi interessa il primo incontro. Il primo incontro con un’altra mente, una nuova coscienza. Direi che un primo incontro di questo genere non è ordinario, né banale, né prevedibile, anche quando nasce dal…

In September, I wrote this short reflection on what a first encounter might mean. I sent it to Telmo Pievani, a philosopher of science whom I'll be speaking with on The Blue Hour in the new year. I explored another kind of beginning in an earlier piece titled Inception. By FARHA GUERRERO I’m interested in the first encounter. The first meeting with another mind, a new consciousness. I would suggest that a first encounter of this kind is not ordinary, trivial, or predictable, even if it begins…

Femme has a long and storied history as Edmond Roudnitska's breakthrough chypre. According to legend, it was created in a dusty old warehouse that doubled as a lab in war-torn Paris, 1943. One imagines perfumer's alcohol being stored in used bottles of Vichy water, but I digress—one spray, and my first thought was, Mitsouko!Except it's Mitsouko with warmth and carnality. Instead of Guerlain's

Because I separated from my wife in June, and left the family home at that point early in the summer, the roof garden I had tended for the past four years ran to seed. I did get one good batch of beetroot and a crop of potatoes from it. After returning to the empty property, last Wednesday I completed a grueling five-day stint clearing Mitchell Street and moving my things into storage. The house needed to be ready for vacant possession that day ready for its new owner. Sometimes pictures can…

Hope you had blessed Sunday! ✝️🙏 Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 246 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 246 appeared first on The Simple Catholic.

This cycle ran one idea at three sizes, and I didn't plan it that way. It started small. The ghost keeps a mustache in every form, and the one time I saw my own double, it had none. I kept the mustache anyway, with a condition attached, I expect it to be gone when I see the double again. A belief held with its exit named stays ready to act on and ready to drop. That was Wednesday, and it was about a detail on a drawing.

Download Now Intro In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all…

I was back on Mastodon for less than a week before I’d seen a few Takes™ linked to that were so banal, so contemptuous, and so absurd, I felt the need to write about them. I’d know, because I’m looking at my drafts folder now. Hundreds of words. I didn’t like writing them. You wouldn’t have liked reading them. I left my lunch break feeling deflated not accomplished. fsck(8). The answer here isn’t sticking my head in the sand. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… letting…

Bæjarnins beztu pylsur: This world-famous hotdog stand in Reykjavík was once open to the skies, open to the harbour and open to a view of Esja: vistas that added a special garnish to these tasty comestibles. Then the ground was covered in Icelandic lava bricks, now it is sheathed in imported(?) designer brick. Formerly bordered by humble and historic shop buildings, recent development has

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in order of frequency, are Dante, Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. I have much English and American poetry safely stored in memory – one of many reasons I am almost never bored -- but only scraps of the Italians and the Pole. Rough outlines, fragments, incomplete lines, yes. This is shameful, I know. One of the tests of great writing, especially poetry, is…

Rating: Rating: 5 out of 5. The Art of Street Photography by Joshua K. Jackson and Sean Tucker was only released a couple of months ago. I have been waiting to pick up a copy on Amazon but it is has been consistantly out of stock. Today I found a copy in my local indie book shop. I should have looked there first I guess…and I was happy to pay the few dollars extra just to flip a middle finger to Amazon. Sean Tucker is a photographer who produces one of my favorite YouTube channels on the topic…

Sunday afternoon, and nine members turned out to play trains. The usual suspects and the usual variety. Ran in my TINGS impulse bargain. It ran very well…. Brian returned from Bristol….. Just in time to record today’s fun!

Hey friend. It's great to see you, a big welcome to new readers this week. I have something exciting to share today - a new site that I hope you'll find useful. Let me know what you think, MattStuff I've WrittenThe Values Finder. An exercise I use with coaching clients, rebuilt as a free tool. If you give it a try, save the results, because the next few posts are about what you do with the report.From the Archive: Stop Overthinking Career Decisions. Use this Test. A quick test for when you are…

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On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all. ▰ I really love the zone where jazz and chamber music overlap, and I followed bassist partner, Thomas Morgan, to this ensemble set in which the quartet Fnussjen teams with him and trumpeter Arve Henriksen, another personal favorite: ▰ Suss Müsik has described his new release, Fallow, as…

It feels like a major life turn after 35, even though I thought 35 was like half-life. I haven’t crossed the second half-life yet. I think there are a couple more years until the second half-life, but it still feels like a big turn after 35. I didn’t think much about 45, but this one feels big. I am making some small changes to these yearly posts. From now on, I will stop publishing the chart that I used to publish. I don’t think it makes sense to me anymore. Anyway, this year has been good, I…

Last week I started a new way of doing weeknotes and I love it. I also still updated my now page, which is a bonus good thing for this past week 😀 Here are my 5 good things for week 41. 🎬 my husband and I watched John Wick 1 and 2, and what I loved the most is us alternating exclamations of “what???” “How???” and “I’m so lost right now!” ✍️ #inktober continues to be a constant delight. I just love being back to regular doodling. I do miss doodling with pencil though. 👩‍💻 There was lots of…

It’s time again! The 1949 Club is kicking off today – join in with your 1949 reads. As always, any format or language is welcome – the only criterion is publication in 1949. Pop a link to your review in the comments, or over at Karen’s blog, and if you don’t have anywhere to link to, feel free to put your review in the comments. Happy reading!

Born into wealth and privilege on a New Jersey estate in 1864, Louis Eilshemius wasn’t your typical New York City painter. The income his father made from an importing business gave him the means to travel through Europe, study at the Art Students League, and ultimately settle down and spend the bulk of his reclusive life in his family’s brownstone at 118 East 57th Street. Inside this gaslit anachronism of a house, Eilshemius (below, in a 1915 self-portrait) raged at an art establishment that…

What I didn't buy - a signal head for £400. Too heavy to bring back on the train. Likewise a chunk of masonry from a Leslie Green station. LT railwayana isn't cheap. Numerous "Lift" direction signs for £100. Tiny squares of moquette for £20. Even the tube line stickers used in trains were pricey, and they didn't have a Bakerloo line one. Obviously, this didn't entirely stop me. A tote bag and guidebook (an excellent 100 page read with lovely photos) for £8 and 10 postcards (am I the only person…

The Upper West Side is an area of architectural splendor—with Beaux-Arts beauties, romantic brownstone rows, and Art Deco masterpieces. But before that, there was this simple wood-frame building on the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street. Constructed not long after the end of the Civil War, the Italianate-style building predates Broadway (then known as the Boulevard), the elevated train that once ran along Columbus Avenue, and an 1882 mandate outlawing wood structures below 155th Street,…

I posted elements of an experiment I ran last night for the second time, so as to get cleaner results than my even more hodge-podge first run. I’m thinking about it as Narrative Rehydration, and you can see more at the Github repo linked. Briefly, in my own language, Narrative Rehydration focuses on whether you can take a sort of loosely encoded version of an underlying story structure, and with some other elements that we will get into, plop the whole package into a gen AI system, and have it…

This 1912 postcard captures a picturesque and fashionable scene: four separate riders on horseback cantering along an unpaved bridle path in Central Park. Looking at the postcard, as well as the more vigorous Edward Hopper painting from 1939 below, made me wonder. Whatever happened to the bridle path, and are visitors still allowed to saddle up and ride a horse in Central Park? Bridle paths were an original feature of the Greensward Plan, the 1858 design for Central Park whose contours still…