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Today we went for a 10K/6.2mi hike through rolling hills. My wife wore a weight vest. I carried a 40lb backpack. My legs are quite angry with me right now and are whining incessantly. I’m punishing them by acquiring another 10lb weight to add to the pack. “Oh, you want something to cry about?”

Today I'm excited to check out a figure I've had since May that just feels like the perfect figure for this year's 31 Days of Toy Terror countdown: Young Michael Myers from Plastic Meatball's John Carpenter's Halloween toyline. We've had a few figures of adult Michael Myers in the line, but a young Michael? That's a first in the faux retro style this line imitates so well! I missed out on NECA's Halloween: The Evolution of Evil 2-pack from 2006 and I've really wanted a young Michael Myers from…

Ok, this weekend is a complete cheat. Of sorts. I have watched these movies over the last week or so but have not talked about them because I want to get them all together to talk about them today. I saved the only "new" one for tonight and will talk about it last. But the others are all rewatches. This mini-theme here is all about people from our world and time going to another place and time of sorts. These movies are the horror versions of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Though with some,…

If your body starts getting used to that hot water it’s time to crank up the heat to keep the steam coming. Or if you’re in a race against the tank just turn that dial without mercy and get ready to lean back, relax, and sweat it all out. AWESOME! Each day I write a brand-new awesome thing just for my newsletter. Join here: Photo from: here The post #574 Nudging the shower faucet a little bit hotter then a little bit hotter appeared first on 1000 Awesome Things.

This is a small part 2 of sharing my experience at TOBE 2026 (Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo). Part 1 is here. This is a photo dump. Throughout my three days exhibiting at the fair, I had very little time to visit other booths or try other designers' games. I basically demoed my games at my own booth 8 hours straight for three full days. I had a little time in the mornings before

Gothicized italics took over 2025. , I saw how to do a spiral on youtube and had to try it! , I spent some time playing with watercolors, in this case adding some shading to sneaker. , This Thanksgiving came out really nice. I often wonder if I could ever repeat a nice piece. As a hobbyist, you never cross the same river twice. , Trying a squished script with Sagittarius , Watercolor led to gouache, and the opacity let me play with this Gator on construction paper. Unfortunately, the wrinkles…

(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death) About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among…

Sheets.works: People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we…

The Spector Club Show was held today, with a sizeable and excited crowd! I was there bright and early, with Clarkson accompanying me. He's been quite enjoying going with me to comic shows lately! We spent a good chunk of time there, chatting with a bunch of awesome folks, browsing comics, and having fun. It was held at 4690 Lansdowne, here in Saint Louis. A lot of great folks I always enjoy seeing at comic conventions were there, and the main topics of discussion were the various announcements…

If you're lucky, you live in an area where you don't have to dig up your dahlia tubers. For the rest of us we must dig, divide and conquer. The first year I grew dahlias I left the tubers in the ground to rot; I had no idea you could save them. The next year...Read More

I have a friend who aspires to have his own startup. He intended to do it alone so used AI to prepare all his business, marketing and operation plans. AI helped him to write a fantastic business plan. When he shared the plans to our group of friends. We all told him that we are not sure about his idea because he has not tested his ideas. He has not fully explored how users feel about using his solutions. Through vibecoding, he created a prototype. Our group of friends used the app and gave some…

Scene from SoHo – New York, New York I usually don’t do much deep analysis before taking a photograph. Often, something visually interesting is enough for me to consider a shot. That’s especially true with street photography, where you don’t have much time to think. I liked this corner in SoHo, and a woman in a bright outfit without much visual clutter around her gave me a clear subject. It was only afterward, looking through my library a year later, that I noticed this woman appears to be the…

Let’s run large language models locally, without too much time spent fiddling with it versus time spent building. I touched on this a tiny bit earlier in the year in “You didn’t miss the boat on AI in Cybersecurity”, as I run a few LLMs locally to save on cloud costs and maintain control of my data. These skills came from prior roles and continue to be useful. I don’t have a ton of time to s...

This is a French two-seater light bomber and reconnaissance aeroplane, the SPAD S-XI (S-11). It came from the same designer as that of the SPAD VII and SPAD XIII scouts, and the design relationship between them is very clear.This is a 1:144 scale model, printed on my Mars 5 resin printer.

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

It seems there's no lack of complicated things for me to contemplate lately, such is life sometimes. Fortunately some things I'm incredibly lucid about, and have spent decades of my life reasoning about and adhering to. This is one of those things. Despite that I still think it's difficult to write because it is deeply personal. I am a conscientious objector. Which I think to my friends is something that comes as no surprise. I have never been fond of war, or the economy that has been built…

5th october to 11th october what i did i am continuing to try to figure out how to fix my sabbatical project ｢mirror｣ into something bigger. at first i considered using photoshop, as i really can’t bear procreate’s stupid limitations when it comes to text.1 i ended up going with affinity, which was apparently bought by canva and enshittified. affinity is a photoshop clone2, and other than the fact that it crashes less frequently than photoshop now and again, it works well.3 but all is not well:…

When an heiress falls for a poor writer, her father tries to separate the pair. However, with the help of the newfangled “movies,” things soon take a turn for the better. Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of EYE Breaking the Fourth Wall 1910-1912 was a time of enormous change in the maturing film industry. Movie […]

Since 2018, I’ve shared details about the many film locations from Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Building on work first started by the now defunct InTwinPeaks.com website, I have visited and documented hundreds of locations in Washington, California and other destinations around the world. Twin Peaks is special as you can visit many of... The post ‘Into The Pines – An Unauthorized Guide to The Real Locations of Twin Peaks’ from Herb Lester Associates appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

I collected this quote and formed my guiding principle when I was let go at Twitter in 2015. I had to reach out to this after the similar incident where I was let go with layoffs at Uber in 2026.

When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions”. I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial…

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery / UnsplashI was cleaning up my Google Photos and saw a photo I took on November 29, 2014 in the middle of Overland Park, Kansas. It was a receipt from Smashburger that had a Classic Smash ($4.99) and a Classic Big Smash ($5.39) and it was a nice refresher to remember the prices of the past.Random Smashburger cropped receipt from 2014The Tampa location a decade later now has that Classic ($7.79) and Big ($10.29), which doesn't really reflect the past of sizes (small,…

Bryan Mamaril built an Oregon Trail style web game called The Job Trail: It is 2026. You have been laid off. Somewhere there is a job. I made it 12 weeks in before I ran out of money. Maybe a little too on the nose, a little too real.

It’s been nearly a week since the dump of the GitHub repository with over 700 documents and (far fewer) Lean formalisations of AI-generated proofs, but it’s felt a lot longer. My own views on use of AI are mixed. I use it for my day job, we formalise things (previously in Isabelle, now in Lean) that we are implementing, and which will never be made public. I have played around with AI to fill in my understanding of background material for a research paper I’m writing, and to try to hunt for…

Our series of Halloween one-shots over at the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord server continued with a session of my own AG3NTS OF CRVCIBLE game--an rpg about playing mystified secret agents who infiltrate dreams. Although these Halloween Month games are one-shots, the players realized that there were connections in this one to the prior week's Call of Cthulhu game.CharactersAgent Hammer, a slab of a woman with a broken noseAgent Darling, a dapper older gentleman with…

The early 1990s brought a new look to Russian streets as the country emerged from decades of Soviet rule and entered an uncertain new era. For young women, fashion became a visible expression of changing times, blending familiar Soviet-era clothing with Western styles that were suddenly becoming more accessible. Denim jackets, leather coats, colorful blouses, […]

Yesterday, I wrote a diary entry on Dreamwidth cataloguing the computers I own after my 2015 MacBook Pro died due to a swollen battery I couldn't afford to repair. While this was meant to be a simple inventory, writing it made me pause and realize that I really have so much, and that I've been under-utilizing both my time and what I own. And I think most of us underestimate what we can do, starting right now, with the things we already have. We tell ourselves that we need the better tool, the…

One dang time, we played For The Queen! THIS dang time, we invited Amy! ENOUGH PREAMBLE. Phase I: Constitutional Monarchy We’re offered three options for Queens by choose-a-number draw, and because Amy is the newest player and she uh, has a type, we have chosen the BATTLE QUEEN (Q19): Phase II: The Reading Of The Rules Phase III: FOR THE FRIGGIN’ QUEEN (Nota bene: for ease of reading, the answer to each question is recorded in the first person perspective of the person who drew the card) Amy:…