Read: Ashland & Vine by John Burnside ★★★★ 📚 Now I was beginning to wonder if she had just been bluffing. Maybe there wasn't even a Wes, though I'm not sure about that. She'd had a look in her eye, a mix of apprehension and pride, like you see in certain types of pit-bull owners, and I really didn't want to test her story. Film student Kate, bit of a mess, starts listing to an older woman Jean's stories of her family and life. American history, WW2, Vietnam, culture & counter culture is only a…

OK Go is a band famous for their music videos, often shot in a single continuous frame, featuring tricks, illusions, and seemingly impossible transformations. You may have seen their epics, like Needing/Getting in which they drive a rally car, I Won’t Let You Down with an incredible choreography at a parking lot, or Upside Down & Inside Out shot in a reduced-gravity aircraft. But how do they bring these huge projects into life? Well, they have a plan. And in this short video their frontman…

One of SoCal’s worst late-season heatwaves on record finally breaking (after breaking records) I am writing this quick post rapidly from my hotel room, so it’ll rely more heavily on embedded social media threads than usual. But I would be remiss if I didn’t write something up regarding the remarkable weather weekend coming up in […] The post Remarkable weather weekend ahead as Tropical Storm Rachel approaches San Diego and early-season trough ends record-breaking autumn heatwave first appeared…

The poison of #stupidindividualism is everywhere over the last ten years of social tech, the first thing that needs composting is treating structural criticism as only personal criticism, so instead of discussing the problem, they block the person raising the issues we need to change and challenge. The result of avoiding shoveling this mess is the same problem, repeated across different platforms, communities and generations. We need to compost these habits, not just churn out more platforms…

Busy week(end)! Other Mommy stars Jessica Chastain as both a young mother and what seems to start out as her daughter's imaginary friend before becoming far more sinister. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street (including XL), the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), and Causeway Street. Aaron

These days, when people ask me about PowerPoint, I describe it as The Third American Art Form. JazzHipHopPowerPointAnd I've just realised what's made me think that. It's the privilege, beginning about 20 years ago, of seeing Kevin Slavin doing presentations. He's the Charles Mingus.And there's a new one you can see on YouTube.

The narrator of My Dreadful Body (a version of Egana Djabbarova herself) grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia. In chapters structured around different parts of the body, she describes what is expected of a woman in her family. Mouths are for tasting food or singing children to sleep, not for speaking one’s mind. Legs are not to be displayed. Eyebrows are only to be plucked when the woman is married. Egana’s relationship with tradition is complicated by several factors, including that she…

TL;DR - This is a great tent for two or three people. Its freestanding nature makes it much more flexible than a semi-freestanding tent. The perfect 2-3 person tent. When we first picked up an ultra-light backpacking tent, we let a good deal get the better of us. We found the Marmot Superalloy 3P (eBay) on sale - for less than half price of the Big Agnes Copper Spur UL3 - in the REI outlet, and didn't really know the difference between freestanding and semi-freestanding tents. After one trip,…

This article tells part of the story of John Romero. At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?” — John Romero Romero is chaos and Carmack is order. Together they make the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left? — id Software…

Ah heck, has it really been since June that I last posted about my Finnish chart adventures? Going through 2003 sure took a lot of time - but I guess it also highlights how busy my life has been. In any case, my archeological dig-through of my cultural heritage and its chart successes has finally advanced a full year, and I'm happy to post another summary of the year's best (and the worst). >> If you want to read all the thoughts on the full year's #1 charts, check the list out on RYM << 2003…

Wednesday’s post sent me down a rabbit hole of tribute compilations that The Blog That Celebrates Itself had assembled over their lifespan and it’s quite impressive – very much the American Laundromat business model. And while most of the releases had rosters of bands I’d never heard of, every once in a while a familiar […] The post Blankenberge – “Pictures Of You” appeared first on Space Echo.

A quick post to mark the passing of a Chicago legend, Mike Ditka who passed away today, October 9, 2026 at the age of 86. Ditka, the only coach to lead the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl victory in 1985, epitomized the Chicago Bears’ style of football, and also in many ways the toughness of Chicago itself. As a player he’s credited with basically reinventing the position of tight end. He carried his rough and tumble approach to the game into his coaching days. As a youngster who lived no where…

Well it was pretty to look at, always good to see where all that money has been spent. As for what was actually going on I’m not sure that I could really summarise it. There were quite a few different strands here, each of them with a lot of happenings and developments that sometimes (but not often) came together so it was rather like watching several over-lapping shows set in the same universe. To make things even less satisfactory, although many of the story threads incorporated huge changes…

The cover blurb tries to make out that this is some sort of indictment of capitalism and a story of moral failure of a trader that we should see as a hate figure, but that is not how it comes across. Yes, it is the story of a foreign exchange trader, but not a braying, Eton educated twat, but an East End boy who happened to be a maths prodigy and leverage that into a trading job. In fact, I couldn’t help really rather liking him. The tale of his rise to a top trading position was interesting,…

If your brain feels completely cooked by modern life, you need to time travel. Read old books. Watch old movies. Look at old art. Listen to old music. Do this not because art was necessarily better in the past. That’s not it—that’s false nostalgia. Do it because when you are stuck in the relentless barrage of the present moment, visiting the past is a great way to escape that trap and find fresh perspective from the humans who came before us, who thought differently and created differently,…

…aren’t a thing. At least not as far as people are concerned. Yes, this is an absolutist take, but sometimes it’s necessary to take the absolutist position to force someone to justify their own reasoning. Make them argue for something they’ve not considered. Revisit their own decision-making process. Broadly, I’m talking about images in narrative content that are not also iconography nor used as part of interactive controls. Adding an image to a design, email, document, page, app, etc. is done…

My final dive into a brood box of the season is for the removal of the Apivar strips at end of the late-summer miticide treatment. Typically, this occurs in early- to mid-October, and I'll choose early afternoon on a warm day when the bees are still likely to be foraging.That wasn't a problem this year as the weather is still unusually warm, and the bees remain preoccupied with the Himalayan balsam in the valley bottom. Every third or fourth returning bee bore the characteristic broad pale…

Jo Malone is a fragrance entrepreneur. She launched Jo Malone London in a retail shop in London in 1994. The company was bought by Estee Lauder in 1999. Jo launched her next company, Jo Loves, in 2011 after a five year hiatus from the fragrance industry. Jo is the author of Jo Malone: My Story. Jo speaks with Jessica Harris about how she launched her fragrance businesses, from scratch. Listen to the interview

SPACE GLIDER MICRONAUTS (MEGO) Hey, ho, it’s Friday, you guys! That means it’s time for another Flashback Friday Figure Addendum! This week, we’re taking a jump back to a line I haven’t jumped back to before, Micronauts, with the guy what glides through space, Space Glider! One line that I am surprised I haven’t talked about more on this site is Micronauts. Before I was firmly on the Minimates train, there were few lines that filled me with as much joy as Micronauts. For those of you that don’t…

The 2026 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded this week, going to Francis Halzen for the work that led to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Does that image look weird, like something is missing? It should. This is the first time in over thirty years that the physics Nobel was awarded to just a single person. Most years, it goes to three people, even if they have to awkwardly jam loosely related achievements together to make it work. Some years, it goes to two. The last time one person received the…

Not to confuse beknight and benighted. Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep Canada Postcraft International (developer and publisher) Released in 1989 for Macintosh Date Started: 1 July 2018 Date Ended: 3 August 2018 (Chet); 19 June 2026 (Quirkz) Total Hours: 8 for Chet (not won); 24 for Quirkz Difficulty: Hard (4/5) Final Rating: 30 Original Ranking: 174/305 (57%)Current Ranking: 356/588 (61%) Summary: Citadel: the Adventure of Crystal Keep is a single-dungeon, rescue-the-princess blobber in…

I believe these sprue belong to a Con-Core kit in HO, 1/87 scale. There are some usable parts here, like the ladder and turn wheels. I recently dug these out from my door and window stock for a project I am working on. I don't remember the maker of these windows, but they do like industrial windows of some sort,

Today I had my first lecture for my MPhil, Digital Signals Processing, and the lecturer ended with a small puzzle: a graph of pressure over time, with a mean value of approximately 775 hPa and a sharp impulse. What physical event is this waveform a measurement of? Well, pressure at sea level is approximately 1000 hPa, so the air must be thinner here. After some nudging we discover that we’re in an aircraft! Aeroplanes have pressurised cabins to prevent a bunch of physiological issues. The…

From the perspective of an immigrant from a Muslim-majority country, this story sends a troubling message: the message is that simply escaping war should be enough reason to be grateful. I am still not sure how to tell this story, but I guess it makes sense to start with what I found problematic in the first place, which I believe I explained quite well in my letter to the publisher of the book. So, everything here is like the original email I sent them, except for the parts in bold. Subject:…

OpenAI’s October 6 release of hundreds of mathematical results has produced another round of headlines: AI Solved One Math Problem and Everyone Freaked Out. It Just Cracked Hundreds More. — The Wall Street Journal OpenAI drops another batch of mathematical breakthroughs — The Verge OpenAI’s math breakthrough points beyond math — Axios [Note: The initial release contained 722 manuscripts grouped into 372 families of related results, which explains the different numbers being circulated. These…

And a few more from Old Quebec by Place Royale and, of course, looking up at the Chateau. the Chateau Frontenac the funicular

Portrait of a Mystery I did that Amazon shopping preferences thing. I wear clothes, buy cables, and read books I'm told. Am I even real to you? Can you really be abandoned if corporations are always watching? Can we really be seen if we don't shop on black Friday, xmas, prime day, prime deal days, and whatever the fuck consumerist holiday will appear this quarter? I'll check in with the tracking pixel what they are planing. Me, I'm afraid of being left. It's a deep-set fear from being a 5th…

Phoenix Command work enters year eight, with an unofficial and unapproved system for the Foundry VTT. Rejected from the official Foundry index because we can’t get ahold of Barry Nakazono, it can be installed from the GitHub repo. Includes all of the guns from the core book, the WWII supplement, civilian supplement, and the Western supplement. Also incorporates the full hand-to-hand system with weapons. https://github.com/mbutler/foundryvtt-phoenix-command Choose your weapon. Select from over…

My go-to place when I’m bored or trying out a new camera is the Botanical Garden here in Sheffield. Here are a few shots from this Yashica-Mat TLR I have had for a while and am still trying to get used to. It’s weird shooting looking down but I do love seeing the world like it’s in a movie. I think because everything is mirrored, you get this other-wordly sense when you are looking in there. Everything looks beautiful somehow. The reality of course when you get the pictures back is never quite…

Next week should be fun.