Danmei Web Novel Review: The Tyrant's Beloved Empress by Xiu ShengThe StoryThey say that hindsight is 20/20. An Changqing has to reach the end of his life before he realizes that he had misjudged his husband. The story opens with him dying from poison but no miracle cure appears. He dies and his spirit lingers for years afterwards watching his husband. The son of a concubine An Changqing was married off to Xiao Zhige, the general of the Northern army when he was 18 years old. Believing the…

Need more Silver. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize Horace Silver is criminally underrepresented in my collection. Same goes for Art Blakey. Aiming to remedy that. I’ve never really focused on those two cats’ records as leaders through the years. For one reason or another. I figured this album is a wonderful way to start building the Silver collection a bit, as…

[Content warning: suicide] This will be a morbid post; forgive me. It will be hard to write this well. I will write it badly. You are young or middle aged -- healthy you think. You get a fatal diagnosis out of the blue, let's suppose. You have a few months to live and no cure. You will seek whatever pleasure, peace, and companionship feels right in those last months. You will complete a few important projects maybe, and prepare your loved ones as best you can for a world without you. But you…

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries". Does your back sometimes "go out"? Here's something incredibly easy and painless to try which can 1. prevent such crises (if you do it a few times a day while feeling ok), and 2. help relieve the crisis. The things I normally need to do to fix my back when it's out are so agonizing, expensive, and annoying that it's almost…

This week’s arrivals feature an entirely new product segment from Japanese maker Anterique: a set of three-color low-viscosity multi pens in both standard and mini sizes! The Anterique “Mach Ball” refill is an excellent low-viscosity ballpoint that flows smoothly in the .5mm size, and until the release of the multi pen you were limited to black. We also recently restocked on standard Anterique ballpoint pens. Carl Pencil Sharpeners make excellent long points. We’ve also had a ton of new pencils…

Unfortunately, monitoring for adversarial data access turns out to be one of the hardest problems you could imagine. The volume of data that agents produce is so high that no human being could possibly read it, and we probably wouldn’t recognize obfuscated malicious data even if we were looking directly at it. This means any attempt to monitor the inflow/outflow will have to be handled by other models. Thus, the future of agent sandboxing is (1) build a sandbox, (2) install an agent/model into…

8708/21627I don't feel so bad for stealing a bag from Sainsburys now. Yesterday I popped in and bought a few things. Yes I stole another bag, what of it? One of the things was a four pack of tinned tomatoes. I checked out on the self-service machines, but when I put the tomatoes down on the weighing bit it wouldn't let me carry on as it wanted the correct item in the bagging area. But I had put the correct item in. You stupid idiot machine.

I tried to fix a problem of forced obsolecence with a claimed new technology. Outcome: the DOLCE Decision Diagram D3 as a tool is operational again, yay! – but it comes with buts, grmpfs, and more, so depending on what you prioritise, it’s a good or a bad thing. I’d be interested in your verdict. From the beginning to the ‘outdated’ software of a modelling solution We developed the Foundational Ontology and Reasoner-enhanced axiomatiZAtion (FORZA) method about 14 years ago [KKG13], which…

Had a J. Lee Thompson double feature a few weeks back, but was too busy to write it up. How much have I retained? First up was one of the Brit director’s more respectable outings, YIELD TO THE NIGHT (1956), rightly celebrated for Diana Dors’ striking performance as a death row inmate, loosely based on […]

I was supposed to continue with my playthrough of my Warcraft aventures on the Alterac Private server. Sadly something came up and the server is no more.

Once again, I have to acknowledge how unfair it was of me to write off Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros as cheap attempts to squeeze more juice out of Wizards of the Coast’s already existing intellectual property. I mean, I still think WotC does that way too much, but nevertheless, a […] The post Krasis and Skyswimmer Tactics appeared first on The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.

During my extended Summer break I was able to spend more time with friends in the village in Spain. We spent a lot of time together, laughing, eating and drinking, and going on a few trips. One evening, at the village bar, we were sitting outside talking nonsense as usual, and generally having a good time. We decided we should take a trip to the beach. Living inland in Spain, this meant a 120 minute trip to the coast in the South East of the Country. We settled on the beach location in a quiet…

Why your company works better than its structure explains, and why every reorg breaks the part nobody can see The rotation problemIn the 1970s, Vera Rubin pointed a spectrograph at spiral galaxies and discovered something rude. The stars out at the rim were moving far too fast. If you weigh a galaxy by counting the light coming out of it, the outer stars should behave like children on a carousel that is spinning too quickly - flung outward, gone. Instead they orbit serenely, held in place by…

Nice moment in iOS: when you reduce the volume to zero, subtitles come up automatically – and they go away the moment you increase the volume again. This is from YouTube on the iPad, but it appears to be system-wide: (Feels extra meaningful in the face of so many people playing their media on speaker in public these days.)#details #ios

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867) was born in Wisconsin. His Welsh preacher grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones, crossed the Atlantic in 1844 with his wife and children, settling in a fertile part of the Midwest near Chicago, a landscape with a lasting influence on Wright's work. Wright's apprenticeship with prominent Chicago architects served him well. In 1889 at 22 he married, designed and built a house for himself and wife Catherine Kitty Tobin in Oak Park, a new outer suburb. It was fine example of…

Timothy Fuller is an author I have known of for a while but have never had the chance to try until now. He wrote a five-book series starring Edmund a.k.a. Jupiter Jones. The titles are: Harvard Has a Homicide (1936) a. k. a. J for Jupiter Reunion with Murder (1941) Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941) This is Murder, Mr. Jones (1943) Keep Cool, Mr. Jones (1950) I wasn’t sure what it would be like jumping into a series with the final book, but looking back on my reading experience, I don’t think I was…

These words are correct but they are not right. My bones feel them to be incorrect but the dictionary disagrees. The provocation for this post was recently seeing 'glided' and glitching out of the matrix temporarily. Why isn't it glid? I feel like I would naturally want to say glid, like when they try to get kids to conjugate fake verbs. Similar to what's happening with 'pleaded'. I feel sure I've said 'pled' before, like some sort of American. Now, I do know. I know why it's like that. Because…

Hello, hej, hallo, moin!

A quick video on my little notes app.

First time I noticed this in T3 (and it just happened twice in two different threads) -

I made it up. Sometimes this job is like raising a small drunk child.

The biggest hurdle to MCP adoption is authentication. It just sucks. At the most basic level, I want the connections I make to stay connected.I moved everything to @RhysSullivan’s excellent Executor (V2) so now I mostly only have to fight with one connection, but it is still silly.The AI apps should make it obvious where you are logged in and easy to log out, but this auth song and dance needs to end.

Mic check, one, two, one, two ... Is this thing on?

Genevieve Williams Under Review:The Sea-Glass Shore. Julie Salmon Kelleher. Forest Avenue Press, September 2026. The selkie legend is common knowledge: beings who shapeshift between human and seal, by doffing or donning their sealskin. Take the skin, the selkie-wife story goes, and the selkie is bound to land, and to the man (it’s always a man) who took it. But she will yearn for the sea, and if she finds her skin she will return to the water, abandoning her husband and any children they might…

Today I sat down to write this intro and thought what am I going to talk about? It then dawned on me, what about the evolution of this very blog series of how it all got started long before I thought of it. Before I knew what I was even doing. I find it interesting to think about these things to reflect upon why and what I’m getting out of all this. I first started off many years ago sharing the interesting things I’ve uncovered on the Internet through talking in person to people and email…

This week was good. I got back to my routine after two weeks of travel and a hectic schedule. Work is progressing well; I did two P.T. sessions, a game, and a run walk. I am still away from a five day active week. But I think I am consistently reaching three to four day active weeks, which isn’t bad. We are in the last quarter of the year (actual year?), I have lots of things to close before the year ends. I think it’s going to be a hectic but fruitful year end. Bumper wisdom I have been…

[This is a guest post by Thomas Hales. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Mathematicians have been weighing in on what they value about mathematics. For me, what matters is the consistency of math and its unparalleled reliability in support of science and civilization. Formalization of Math A formal proof is a mathematical proof that has been exhaustively checked at the level of the foundations of math and the fundamental rules of…

I saw this ad this morning for a re-creation of the Atari 800XL. The Atari 800XL is the first computer that I bought for myself and used while I was in college. Back when I was getting my computer science degree at Michigan Tech most of the programming I had to do was done on mainframes, so all I needed was a VT100 terminal emulator running on the 800XL to do a great deal of my school work from home. I can’t remember how much I paid for the 800XL back then in 1986, so I don’t know whether this…

Dystopian ad campaign idea: “We Asked Three World-Class Chefs Their Favorite Costco Items” but dynamically generated in real time based on your actual shopping history, so you think you’re a brilliant chef for shopping at Buy-N-Large. Bonus: add one item you didn’t buy. It’s on sale this week.

Dallas Arts Tower (formerly Chase Tower) and the Plaza of the Americas in the North Texas sky over Downtown Dallas. The post Opposable appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.