2000 Psygnosis Platform: Sony PlayStation Tricks ‘N’ Treasures was a colourful third-person action/platform game in development at Hammerhead for Psygnosis around 1999-2000. The name seems to have changed slightly depending on where it appeared, with magazine coverage referring to it as TnT: Tricks and Treasures, TNT: Tricks and Treasure, Trick n Treasure and Tricks ‘N’ Treasures. Very little seems to have survived publicly from the game, although it received a reasonable amount of magazine…

Game developer and YouTuber Bofner has a snazzy look at how Konami created the scrolling spike walls in their Game boy Castlevania games. Thanks to Marcin Wichary of Unsung for sharing this one. "Konami saw something much more dynamic than just a HUD with the Window Layer. Konami looked at its restrictions and designed an entire level based around it, where the Window Layer becomes your enemy." The secret was using the Window layer as an enemy not a HUD like everyone else. They then used a…

Real-Time Stratember: that’s a wrap. Eleven campaigns across some of the best, with a couple of the roughest, real-time strategy games ever made. Westwood classics, Blizzard staples, an Australian curveball and even a trip to a galaxy far, far away. There’s been some genuine highs, a few lows and some properly challenging moments throughout the whole month. I pushed hard to keep the momentum going… Source

Some AI + mathematics things I read recently and am mulling below. I’ve been struggling to pull these and various threads on the topic into a cogent whole, even if only for myself, because the developments have been coming fast and thick, with no indications they will slow in the near future. There are also discussions starting in physics, for example see here, here, and here. I appreciated Rohini Subrahmanyam’s deeply reported feature for The Hindu (paywalled), published on September 21, on…

A Northern Cardinal has a morning bathe at Mahukona.

Ah, those days...for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young. If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief…

OverviewThe dangerous systems this week are the ones expected to make other work safer or easier: a backup console, remote-access gateways, collaboration platforms, data-center switches, AI services, WordPress plugins, source repositories, DNS registries, and inexpensive phones. Several stories moved from disclosure to exploitation or mass scanning almost immediately, while AhsayCBS defenders learned that the version first treated as safe was still vulnerable.That makes version inventory only…

One evening, I had scheduled a personal training session and a phone call starting an hour later. How would I find the time to eat between these commitments? I didn’t know. An hour didn’t seem like enough. However, I figured I would just try it and see what happened. As I left the gym, with an hour to go, it became very obvious to me where I could pick up dinner and even what to order. An hour was plenty, it turns out. It reminds me of a lesson that Claire Butler had written, “When you’re…

Hey, folks, no post this week as my work schedule has been pretty heavily disrupted and other tasks had to come first. Patrons will already know this background, but over the summer, we had a water leak issue in our basement (where my home office is), which wasn’t too bad but required pulling up a bunch of flooring and we are now at long last at the point of being able to put down new flooring. But that means I have had to essentially move everything in my office space and a ton of other things…

Every month, on the 9th of the month, I write him a letter. Sometimes it’s only a few paragraphs, sometimes I find myself realising something about his character that I recognise in me and write about how that played out through my life. Mostly I just write about what has happened in the previous month, and how well he’s developing, growing, and learning. Today’s letters brings the total up to ~37,000 words (so far). I have no idea if he’ll ever read them, although I am starting to compile them…

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 4.0); if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version includes links by TillmanR to the wikipedia articles explaining each bias. The adjective provenance refers to the source of something, where it came…

A classic investigation wall is assembled in Being Human s03e07 (BBC Three, 2011). ▲ Being Human s03e07 (BBC Three, 2011) ▲ Being Human s03e07 (BBC Three, 2011) ▲ Being Human s03e07 (BBC Three, 2011)

This was a lot of fun! I wouldn’t say I’m particularly happy with the perfume I ended up with, but I understand the process much better now and already have a hunch about what I should have done differently. The instructor was incredibly helpful and clearly knew what she was doing. She had worked for the EU on making perfume ingredients safer and could sniff out even the slightest changes in our mixtures. The nice thing is that we can come back with our recipe, tweak it, and see whether we like…

New job starting up, as is winter depression. There's been more TV, Pentiment (video game), and back to Japanese mystery fiction. So good news, I got a new job and did all the onboarding shit. Bad news, the farewell party for Old Job that I have been looking forward to is at the exact same date and time as Mandatory Orientation for New Job. So I'm bummed out about that, and have no idea how both employers decided that was the only good evening to schedule anything. I was hoping to see some…

After too many pen shows and a long bout of flu/bronchitis, I finally got enough time to finish some stamps that I’ve been wanting to make for ages. I hope you are as excited about them as I am. The new stamp sets are: Media Tracker (like the Book Tracker but for.. you know… everything else) Game On! (DND, Gamers and Dice Goblins, I got you!) Astrologica (our astrology and planetary set) Spill the Tea (like our Java Junkies but for tea lovers) There are also two new sticker sheets: Happy Hour…

Offline-first nice interest groups.

For years I've been jealous of astronomers and biologists with their fun space-themed and animal-themed clothes (some of which I've worn!). Recently I finally had a chance to something I've always wanted to do, and I designed some laser-themed clothes. Hoodies that say LASERS on them! Button-down shirts with laser beam patterns! Scarves with fun little lenses on them! Who's fabulous now, astronomers?Not to keep the joy of laser-themed clothes entirely to myself, I made an online store to sell…

Please enjoy this selections of times when my cats photobombed my laser merch

Permutation City, 10 February 2026

For far too long, AI has been used by big tech to the detriment of its users. At best, that means shoehorning in features that nobody asked for and slowing down the experience, but at worst, using our data to train yet more models. Adobe says they won’t, but you’ll forgive me for not believing them. Now, I always take anything done by AI proponents with a pinch of salt because anything positive tends to come served with far more hype than it deserves, but this might well be an exception. Enter…

This month I'll be reviewing a small batch of supernatural mysteries and thrillers in honor of the Halloween season. Usually I do one single post tagged Halloween Special (sometimes two) but I pulled a bunch of books to sell, read them prior to listing them, and coincidentally they all had Halloween themes of sorts. To start this Fright Fest off I've chosen what I think is the epitome of the weird menace mystery novel."Was there to be no end to the fantastic horror of this thing? Like those of…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about having multiple blogs: Do you run more than one blog? If so, how do you manage your time? Not really. I have in the past had this blog and a science blog, but it was indeed very time-consuming to try to…

There’s a video going around on the Internet indicating that Walmart and other retail outlets are selling “lab grown eggs”. The eggs are then displayed as looking like regular eggs. I’m not sure if it’s the MAHA nuts or some other fringe group, but they’re urging consumers to go into the stores to smash these eggs because they’re fake eggs. I’m not linking to this propaganda video because I don’t want this blog to be a source of this disinformation when it’s scraped into the AIs of the world.…

I was nerdsniped! On the HF discussion page for one of the models I created for my previous post, AndrewThompson1233 asked if I'd considered trying out factorised embeddings -- something he's using for his model, Maba, and which was previously used in some other models, like ALBERT. It's a really nifty idea; you use a similar trick to LoRA as a way of reducing the number of parameters used for your embeddings and your output head. And for small models, those can be a disproportionate number of…

Severing ties with someone is easy. Ensuring those ties remain broken is hard. Initially, your anger fuels the momentum. You make decisions. You do what is required to burn the bridges. Then, a few days later, you can no longer feel the same rage toward the person. Anger fades away. It is natural. This is why most people get back together with the same person they were tired of. Being with them feels more comfortable than being without them, unless there is a specific trigger that forces you to…

Dominic Lieven relates Russia’s war in Ukraine to the histories of imperial collapse and nation state making in 30 minutes: youtu.be/nkXTdRgTv… (Monterey Summer Symposium 2026 via @CivilNetTV).

Philemon, fragment 37 Kassel and Austin (tr. S. Douglas Olson): One can find anything, unless one tries to avoid hard work, which is the property of those who seek. πάντ’ ἔστιν ἐξευρεῖν, ἐὰν μὴ τὸν πόνον φεύγῃ τις ὃς πρόσεστι τοῖς ζητουμένοις. Related post: Seek and Ye Shall Find.

Sophie McEvoy at GamesIndustry.biz: Sony has agreed to transfer 419 global VR patents to Meta, with 180 patents filed in the US under an agreement signed in December 2025... ...Between June and September this year, Sony moved more than 40 of these patents to Meta, which covered virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and head-mounted display systems. I think Sony is not going to make anymore games for the PlayStation VR2. While I am a big believer in the technology, I definitely…

Ben Yagoda wrote at Facebook: The discovery of the day comes from the indefatigable quote investigator Garson O’Toole, acting on a tip from Nigel Rees and Peter Cogman. As some of my former students will recall, one of my favorite quotes about writing has always been from French author Blaise Pascal, who wrote to a friend in 1656 or 1657 (sources differ), “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” On the American Dialect Society listserv, Garson has shared a rendition…