Refusing to spend another weekend in suburban purgatory, I booked us for the opening slot at Meow Wolf – Radio Tave. Whatever my expectations, they were exceeded. Immersive, surreal art that encourages you to touch, read, and explore. Passwords and secret passageways, computers and radio frequencies, and secrets hidden in plain sight. I’m certain we missed so much this first time through. After blowing some cash in the gift shop, we went across the street to Saint Arnold, Texas’ oldest craft…

Leeds – Briggate Beer & History WalkAnother Saturday exploring Leeds with Simon Jenkins and Nicky Massen from It’s The Beer Talking, discovering the stories behind old streets, landmarks and traditional pubs. Simon and Nicky – It’s The Beer WalkingA huge part of the day was down to Simon and Nicky, who put these brilliant Leeds walks together. Simon brings years of experience writing about beer and pubs, while Nicky worked in public relations at Tetley Brewery. Together they share the people,…

We get spam articles submitted to the journal: obviously out of scope, and with many LMM "tells". I have noticed an increase in prestigious-sounding second authors, but whose emails bounce. I have always assumed the first author is trying to look more legitimate without letting the alleged second author be aware of the submission. We don't usually worry about this, since we are desk-rejecting these papers anyway.However, lately, there has been a rash of submissions where the submitting author's…

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The comment system has received a major overhaul here. It offers greater ability to format your comments. But the biggest addition is for those of you who comment with your email and name every time: you can now elect to save that info so you don’t have to keep entering it. First you type your comment and then click the “Add your name” link. Then click “Continue as a guest.” Then enter your info — and be sure to turn on “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I…

The Green Party is officially over. Zack Polanski is yesterday's chip wrappings. They, like Reform, are done and we can go back to politics as usual. Such as being captivated by the attempted putsch against Ed Davey. Such is the verdict of a swathe of the political establishment following Labour's handy victory over the Greens in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Needless to say, this is just not a credible position. Looking at the vote, Labour's share more or less stood still - declining…

Every organisation has an escalation path. Most of them have never seen it, cannot describe it, and would be horrified by it if someone drew the diagram. You already have one. You simply did not design it.Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic. Problems have energy. Energy travels. If you do not give it a conduit, it will find one, and the conduit it finds will be whatever offers the least resistance and the most reaction. In practice that means problems travel toward three kinds of people. The…

WebcamSydney provides a live stream of the Sydney harbour. WebcamSydney 1 Live Stream of Harbour 24/7 (~4K) (via) Thanks for reading this post via RSS. You're awesome ♥️

A good thing happened this week; I started seeing my new primary care physician — so thankful. She was highly recommended by friends and a surgeon I talked to recently. So I signed up and had my first visit with her. One thing that impressed me was the emphasis on basic diet and exercise for healthy living. Sitting in the medical room it hit me: I should be using my Apple Watch. Earlier this year, I bought a bike and started cycling often. I also walked a lot. My 2020 Apple Watch SE had just…

For inexplicably read inextricably. Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Last night I visited Meaford with my mom and her partners to hear The Irish Descendants, an iconic Newfoundland band. They are touring a new album of Stan Rogers covers, and between those pieces and the Irish Descendants’ own repertoire, I think I sang along with just about every tune they played. Afterwards we headed across the street to The Dam Pub. This whisky bar is one of my favourite pubs in the world. It has over 1000 whiskies in the collection, a supremely knowledgeable staff and a…

Journal Friday we had a visit from a couple of 11 year old girls and their mum to see the rabbits. I realised I haven’t been in the company of 11 year old girls for quite a while and they’re quite odd, giggling and whispering to each other. But they were also lovely and kind to the rabbits and that’s what counts. Hopefully I impressed on them that rabbits are not easy pets so they won’t be straight down the breeding centre (aka pet shop). After that I went to destroy an arm chair that Fi’s…

Part 1 stopped mid-thought on purpose. That's how software is going to feel: you depend on it, then the signal stops.

Hi, my RSS friend! I was wondering why I'm not building anything in Minecraft lately and crafted a self-reflection post about that. Kind of philosophic, I know.

Yet another entertaining speedrunning video from Karl Jobst – this one about a recent new discovery in Quake: What was really fun about this one was the fact that the design of the level puts a splinter in player’s head – you see a bridge above on the left, and you just have to wonder: is it at all possible to, somehow, concoct a jump to get there, and skip a lot of the normal level progression? Turns out, it is – it just takes a lot of imagination, practice, and determination. Which is another…

eyes closed mind wandering suddenly a draft cool air caressing skin and then gone just as fast you join me under the blanket and I wonder how long until you notice a layer of fabric missing

Back in the mid-80s, I would see the VHS cover for The Osterman Weekend and it seemed very exotic. It had a mysterious name and a woman with a crossbow on the cover.Forty years later, I finally watched it.And it was awful.It was Sam Peckinpaw’s final film, and it has a cast of recognizable names: Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, John Hurt, Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson (who was kind of unknown at the time), and Meg Foster (that actress with the crazy pale-blue eyes).Unfortunately, the movie…

At 7:15 in the morning, a student has exactly one question: does my first lesson take place, and in which room? Getting that answer shouldn’t take more than a glance. My daughter’s school uses beste.schule for pretty much everything: timetable, substitutions, grades, the Klassenbuch (the digital class register) and announcements from the school. All the information is there. But every time we opened the app, we had the same feeling. It works. It just wasn’t built for us. So I built a better one…

I've been circling around a post about names in games, as a (by now extremely belated) addition to Zeph Siebler's bandwagon on this topic at Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings. It's so belated because I feel like I have something to say that has something to do with what the MCDM team say on page 23 of Draw Steel Heroes, and also has something to do with Michael's post "The Importance of Being Earnest" at 1999 A.D., and also also has something to do with names in Jake Eldritch's Mutannany…

My first dream was to be a writer. Before I could write for myself, I made up little stories and my parents obligingly wrote them down for me.1 Eventually I learned to write and did it myself, with increasing sophistication. This fell out sometime around college. Since then, every few years I love the shit out of the experience of writing half a story, then put it down and never look at it again. My writing now is non-fiction on this blog, and I considered myself fantastically lucky for getting…

Last month, I participated as a speaker at the Commit Your Code conference in Plano, Texas. The talks, the organization, and the people who attended, made it a very special event that left me with a big smile on my face. This blog post tells how it went and how I lived it.

A friend of mine the other day mentioned something about the chickenpox vaccine and shingles. That led me down memory lane. The chickenpox vaccine was approved for use in the United States in 1995. That is how kids these days are given immunity. Not today, nurse! Modified from public domain image uploaded by Oksmith to Openclipart (source). While you can use my version, I would recommend modifying from the original instead. But some of us had to earn it the all natural old-fashioned way. Back…

Here’s a topic that feels like it comes up every single day: someone will ask something like: Am I forgetting how to code? Are LLMs making me lazy? Nope! …At least, with some qualification: The people that I know that are successful with using LLMs to generate code are the ones that are dictating the patterns for how that code should be generated; the shape and structure of that code. They’re intervening when the LLM inevitably generates code that is functional but takes the wrong shape for…

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – Catch Me, Kill Me. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1978. Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel from the MWA in 1978. A former creative director for a large New York ad agency. William Hallahan published his first novel, The Dead of Winter, in 1972. This chilling (in more ways than one) tale of vengeance and sudden death earned considerable praise and prompted Publishers Weekly to extol Hallahan as being…

For some reason, here, today, October 10, 2026, following another lulu of a bad, very bad, not good, no bueno, no fun week in which our favorite MLB team was 10,000 miles from a winning W-L record and the playoffs, we tip our hats to an all-time favorite performer, the one, the only Bert Lahr. . . yes, that inimitable stage and screen great, known for his derring-do as The Cowardly Lion, in Lay's Potato Chips ads and Waiting For Godot - THAT GUY!Wikipedia adds "Irving Lahrheim (August 13, 1895…

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter offers retrospectives on its 25-year history of reporting on cultural developments in Poland. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of its many articles. Join me in travelling back in time. It’s Poland, 2001, the first year of Culture.pl’s existence. These were the days of Poland’s first ever reality show, the Polish edition of Big Brother and the popularity of the cult TV series The Lousy World (Świat według Kiepskich), which followed the lives of a dysfunctional…

If you know what Nitter is and the situation around it, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't, feel free to check out either its Wikipedia page or my prior post on the matter, nitter needs support. If you're lazy, here's the gist: Nitter is a private, performant, third-party Twitter front-end that received cease and desist letters from X Corp. targeting its repository and all of its instances. I care about Nitter because I've happily used it for years and would like to continue doing so for…

A few days ago I wrote about a decade-old medical experience with parallels to modern tech. Today I have a recent story from home with parallels to medicine. We have an indor fountain in our fancy new home, ⊕ [Note: The story of how we ended up in a house some two levels of fancifullness above our needs and wants deserves a separate post, maybe a whole series of posts. ] a thin slab of rock over which water runs in a smooth sheeth. Problem one: when the water tank is full the fountain is nearly…

I found this site via Facebook; it’s based on research by James Burridge (seen here in 2022) and Bert Vaux (at LH in 2017), and the intro is as follows: Language moves. Patterns emerge. The words we use tell a story of where we come from. Statistical physics helps us understand how that story changes. Explore half a century of American English, from the geography of soda and pop to the forces that shape dialect boundaries. Why do some people say sneakers while others say tennis shoes? And why…

Black Friday/Cyber Monday approaches! What will this year hold in the way of deliverability challenges?When I surveyed readers last year about their biggest mailbox provider challenges during Q4, Microsoft Outlook.com took the top spot. Microsoft was clearly the biggest source of inbox pain last holiday season. They are likely to continue leading the pack for sender deliverability headaches this year, but I predirect that Google’s Gmail is going to be a very close second.The 2026 Landscape:…