The woman whose name keeps showing up in the last few posts was the wife of three powerful men in 6th-century Iran, one of whom was her brother.Born to one of the Seven Great Houses of Iran, Gordiya's father was a military officer under Emperor Khosrow I (531 - 579). She had three brothers, one of whom was Bahram Chobin, who later started a civil war against Khosrow's son (Hormizd IV) and then grandson, Khosrow II. She was married to Bahram; it is not known for certain, but they may have been…

Disclaimer: if you can't handle bathroom pictures, click away. They are a bit dank, but nothing too horrifying.Where does bad taste come from?I see what I consider bad taste everywhere around me. Most of it is boringly bad. A random wardrobe that belongs in a cheap 2BHK rental right outside the washroom of a Third Wave Coffee outlet (which, in another turn of bad taste, serves second-wave coffee). I am in fact sitting in this outlet as I write this. The table is too tall, and the cappuccino's…

A ceremonial game of Kemari, a game from the 7th Century similar to hacky sack, played in Heian era robes at Kyoto's Imperial Palace. 京都御所で、平安時代の装束を身にまとって行われる、7世紀に起源を持つハッキーサックに似た遊び「蹴鞠」の儀式。

“Finally, it is worth cultivating moments in life in which we feel immense satisfaction and happiness divorced from our own success or achievements. This happens commonly when we find ourselves in a beautiful landscape—the mountains, the sea, a forest. We do not feel the prying, comparing eyes of others, the need to have more attention or to assert ourselves. We are simply in awe of what we see, and it is intensely therapeutic. This can also occur when we contemplate the immensity of the…

Not much happened this week. I mostly focused on my side project (Field Notes). I shipped the first version of the site and published a case study for it on my portfolio. Today, I worked a little bit and refined the Field Notes case study. I like the visuals and storytelling, and am quite happy with it. I’ve not reviewed it with anybody yet. I might bring this approach to the work projects on my folio. Beyond that, it was pretty uneventful. I read a few pages of The Secret History.

People have complained for years about buggy software. To be honest I think the internet and the ability to update software quickly is partly to blame. When I first started my career in software engineering, part of my job was to create releases. This involved putting together installers for new versions and burning them onto CDs ready to be sent out to customers. There was no download mechanism to get updates for the software. The software had to be bug free first time round. The company also…

The east side of Broadway, just above Houston Street: On the right, an obviously modern building. On the left, a cast-iron facade well within the norms on the late nineteenth century. In between, a surprisingly good ashlar stone facade, painted a bit peculiarly…nope. That’s a cast iron facade from 1859, designed by John Snook and developed by (and presumably cast by) Daniel Badger. That early on, the cast-iron designers and builders were still directly imitating stone. In the black and white of…

Sunday Asides #116 I got a new job! A new part-time job, that is. One of my peoples introduced me to the head of an agency on Monday. I talked with the agency head Tuesday, talked with her business partner Friday, and by the end of the conversation they made an offer and I accepted it. It's still part-time — not what I want — but they'll pay me a little over 2.5x what my current lowest paying part-time job does, and I've been wanting to get out of that place for months. I'll put in my…

The pull request assumes a human wrote the diff. gittifacts is my attempt at a git platform for when agents write most of it.

I was feeling under the weather for most of the week. It’s crazy that the majority of the people I know, even those who live on different continents, have been sick lately. Thanks to ibuprofen, I was borderline functional despite feeling unwell. We started watching True Detective Season 1. I heard that the first season was phenomenal but the later seasons were underwhelming, so we’re treating it as a miniseries. The show definitely hooked us from the first episode. With three episodes left in…

I am sitting at a desk in the Drury Hotel in Carmel, Indiana, on the northern edge of Indianapolis. I'm here for an onground intensive for the TEEM program, my current route to ordination. If you've been following along all week, you know that I'm here a day early.It's a long trip, which I make by car. I like being able to arrive with all my stuff, and I really like not dealing with the hassles of airline travel. For this trip, I was really happy to be able to change my travel plans with…

Available in English (I think?) as The Giving Chair by Yoshiko Kouyama & Kozo Kakimoto, but it appears to be rare and out of print. This is a children's book with a story about a bunny who builds a chair with a little sign: please go ahead (and use it). Because a different animal places a basket of food on the chair while taking a nap, the next animal that passes by thinks it's okay to eat it. Then that animal, feeling sorry for the next, replaces the eaten food with new food, and the chain of…

Corpus Parisinum 171 (tr. Denis Searby): It is quite easy to deceive oneself, and, puffed up by vainglory, to imagine oneself to be important while being worthless. Ῥᾷστον ἑαυτὸν ἀπατᾶν καὶ οἴεσθαι εἶναί τι οὐδὲν ὄντα ὑπὸ τῆς κενῆς δόξης φυσώµενον.

12:34 - Back to making pancakes! I'm getting better and faster.

I was recovering some data off an old Windows hard drive, like a gentleman, when I found this image: This is an effect from Windows Movie Maker, presumably included to emulate the look of analogue static on a TV set. I wonder how many projects over the years included this exact static? And I wonder where it came from? Wait, as I was about to post this, I realised: it’s called DissolveNoise. This would have been used for dissolve transitions between clips, not white noise. I thought the static…

October 11, 2026 After using macOS 27's window tiling to put two windows side by side, Drafts stopped remembering its window size and position. Every time I opened it, the window appeared in the left half of the screen. Turning off window tiling in System Settings didn't help. With some help from ChatGPT, I tracked the problem down to two entries in the Drafts preferences file that still contained macOS tilingState information. The preferences file is located at:…

A clear walkthrough of Laravel's Context feature and how it lets execution-scoped information travel through your app. It also explains why that matters for logging, queued jobs, and keeping trace data available without threading it through every method call. Read more

Evelyn Beatrice Longman’s 1914 sculpture Spirit of Communication stands guard over Downtown Dallas’ AT&T Discovery District. The post Proceed With Caution appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Do you feel it in the air? That’s right, Spooky Month is upon us! Well it started last week but at the time there were no spooky games to feature yet. Now, let me offer you a great fucked-up looking game! Agreed the name “Stay Indoor” doesn’t make sense if you haven’t played the first entry, but each game is independent from one another. In this game, you are a kid looking for his dog in a strange well. The ZX-Spectrum style of platformer is great, and make for an uncomfortable experience. A…

"Small Prophets" (Apple TV) has exactly my kind of vibe. After 2 episodes it's my new favorite show. Probably because it was created by Mackenzie Crooke, who also did the great "Detectorists". ✍️ Reply by email

The problem Yesterday my Knuth check post spent some time on the Hacker News front page. The submitter left off the trailing slash, and no images were displayed. It took me a bit of time to fix the problem, and in the end I did two different things: The solution First, I tried doing a redirect from slashless to trailing slash using bunny.net’s Edge rules, but couldn’t get it to work. How do you express “has no trailing slash” when all you seem to have are wildcards? I abandoned that idea for…

It's crazy to me how many tech people don't understand the entirety of the software delivery landscape at all. Especially developers often suffer from having a very narrow lens through which they watch the (work) world around them. It's like they have blinders on, preventing them from seeing a bigger picture. As a tester, I do not have that luxury. And I'm tired of hearing the same language from developers, over and over. Let me give some examples. These are all comments sourced from one Ars…

Don't Cook That — New foodstuffs to inflict on my poor PCs, also an entertaining read. Free fashion flat templates! — Waffle Patterns has made their fashion flat templates freely available. nappy — Gorgeous free stock photos of Black people. Sadly being shut down in a few months. The Bayeux Tapestry online experience — I want to see the real thing so MUCH, but until I can manage to swing a trip to London (and score tickets), this will have to do. Steam Frame Hardware Reference — I won't be…

I can't believe September ended already. Did I fall asleep and no one woke me up? In all seriousness, perhaps sleep was what I did in September. I tried to go sleep at the correct time (which is still ~11 PM and that means at most 6.5 hours night sleep), but usually still delays 15-30 minutes. There's little progress on projects. I've finished a chapter on the new book. I think I will likely fail the target of reading a French book this year, but hopefully I'll still finish this one.

When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it. For instance, if you’re arguing with somebody about microservices1, you could say “well, you only like microservices because you want to polish your resume”, or “you only like…

There are cheaper theatre ticket options at the box office (Photo taken at the Young Vic) Theatre ticket prices for West End plays and musicals have gone up and up, but there is more to London’s theatre scene – and cheaper options for getting your stagey fix. I call them off-West End theatres. They aren’t far from the centre of London but deliver quality productions with ticket prices that are more affordable. And as these theatres are smaller than those in the West End, you get a much more…

I’m in Chile, walking through Santiago’s General Cemetery. Three days in, it’s Monday, quiet. Light pushing everything, stones over-exposed. I was cold when I got here but now I’m carrying my hoodie in my arms and rationing water because I’m not sure how to get back out. Two eyes with no brain behind them. It’s not culture shock but it’s something, like seeing your own face mirrored. I’ve only ever known cemeteries to exist below me. Bodies pressed down under huge skies. Headstones up to…

My very first job was in India during the late 90s. I joined a computer-aided design software company in Pune. I had just finished my Ph.D. My first computer at work was a state-of-the-art Sun Sparc workstation. It was bulky, but I loved the keyboard. The company handed those workstations off to us because the codebase was huge, computationally heavy, and required graphics-rendering power. It was a large proprietary codebase in C, C++, and PERL. Shortly after I joined, the company sent us to…

I’ve never seen [corruption] like this outside…of a TV show. – Mark Begnaud I recently remembered another favorite from Sesame Street, and it’s even seasonally appropriate! The links above the video were provided by Shiv Ramdas; Franklin Harris; Jesse Walker and Franklin Harris again; Mike Siegel; David Ley; T. Greg Doucette; and IncarcerNation, in that order. Impressively accurate for me. “Some believe” ≠ “100% confirmed”. R.I.P. Eva Marie Saint and Jim Bakker. “Smart” devices aren’t, part…

Mondrian flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Mondrian art is all geometry and color. What design can you make with Paint Mondrian Art? Mine’s at the top of the post.