This diagram was shared recently over a pint (or two) with a senior editor at a university press. Such authoritative instruction obviously deserves to be shared. (I have added the letters to label the diagram.) Legend:A + B: the universe of academics in a particular subjectB: the part of that universe of academics with viable research projects*: the few projects which are any goodC: the publishing house, awaiting feedingD: potential customers for the book (some of whom will have accessed the…

Talking Heads - State Theatre, Sydney, Australia, June 8 / June 9, 1979This ain’t no foolin’ around! There’s a Fear of Music deluxe set on the way in the upcoming months — and if it’s as good as the previous deluxe Talking Heads sets of recent years, it’ll be well worth owning. While we wait, let’s dig into a pair of sweet Sydney SBDs from the band’s first tour down under, during which they debuted several FoM tunes. I guess they were kind of opening way, way off-Broadway. David, Tina, Chris…

“South Africans can register blocks against direct marketers on the government’s new National Opt-Out Registry now – not from May 2027, as the National Consumer Commission’s (NCC’s) own launch statement indicated – the commission has told TechCentral. But a block won’t stop the calls straight away.” Is it a good sign that this actually went live earlier than expected for consumers? I hope so, and I’ve already registered today. There was a previous opt-out register, but that was never really…

Marques Brownlee uploaded a video breaking down the Googlebook. He uses a Pixel as one of his two phones, so I was curious if I missed anything in my original assessment of the new laptop line. I don't think I did. One angle I did not consider was that the only way to get applications on these machines is the Google Play Store. That means you are at the whims of mobile apps and Android's tablet efforts if there is not a newly dedicated desktop version. The experience is so splintered, Google…

A lot has been said about how AI killed Stack Overflow’s traffic, but that graph’s been falling since 2016. Here’s the real reason: This is a screenshot of its “newest questions” page, zoomed in on the “votes” column. Although almost no one asks questions there anymore, its gatekeepers still have the energy to tell new users that their questions suck and aren’t worth bothering with. Even though the site’s nearly dead, the trollmods keep diligently telling new users to get lost. There’s a large…

I finally submitted my visa extension application and was a bit miffed to discover that apparently my ‘application to make an application’ (as I derisively called it last week) finished processing on Wednesday 29 September. I hadn’t realised because I’d been expecting an e-mail saying that this occurred. Would I have been able to submit my application before the fees went up otherwise? I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think that I may well have. Hopefully the processing itself doesn’t take too…

Coming up on the anniversary of being laid off, I’m thinking about what I’d like to do differently in year 2: Find people in the east end of Toronto who want to play some jazz once a week. I’m currently commuting to the west end to do that: I enjoy playing, but the travel time is wearying. If you’re interested, I’m easy to reach. Find a small F&SF writers’ group, also in the east end, to swap crits with. I’m currently getting great feedback from a friend, but would like more perspectives and an…

TitleDisillusionment CreatorThomas Mann Year1896 Kindshort story Read2026-10-09 FormatHardback (Wydawnictwo Czytelnik, 1956) SourceLittle Library LanguagePolish NoteTranslation by Leopold Staff VerdictA brief, depressing dialogue, and a pleasant one at this length. Any longer, and it would become dull.

📷 255/365 - X marks the exit.

>> It’s the Grand Old Movies Photo Caption Contest! Suggest one for the image below!: The above pic comes from the 1941 film The Devil Commands, a Columbia Pictures cheapie starring Boris Karloff (one of six he made at the studio over a seven-year period) as Dr. Blair, a Mad, if Mild-Mannered Scientist experimenting with electrified brain-wave transmissions in an attempt to contact the dead. That brief plot summary—of which the above image (in which Karloff, having shoved several dead bodies…

✏️ #inktober day 9. Happy to be out running again after a week of sickness and feeling up and often down. #inktober2026

The biggest social event of our preschool year was always our annual all-school Halloween party, a typically raucous affair attended by most of our 65 or so students, their parents, siblings, and often grandparents. All three classes "practice" our Halloween songs at circle time, which are mostly variations on songs we've been singing together for as long as I've been at Woodland Park.Easily the most popular, for all ages, are a pair of ditties that involve holding up jack-o-lantern faces to…

After rocking San Jose with our World Congress, WeAreDevelopers’ next port of call is Bengaluru in India. See you there on the 25th of November for two days of excellent talks and workshops !

i want to love him,like how i know to write my name.simple, isn’t it?but i can’t remember…if knowing my name was evermore difficult than writing it.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI); Science: Manisha Caleb (SIfA) Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were able to study the host galaxy of the most distant known fast radio burst (FRB). Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are notoriously difficult to study. They are bright radio chirps that only last just milliseconds. When FRBs were first observed, it was difficult to distinguish them from terrestrial noise sources. As we learned out to distinguish real FRBs from noise, it became…

Occult Detective is a newer game to me. In fact, I didn't even know about it until the author posted about it in his #RPGaDAY2026 posts on Bluesky. Sadly, you will not find the game on DriveThruRPG, and I got my copy via Amazon. Doing a bit of research on the game before I bought it, I saw it had been in development for while, with some evidence of an early version going back nearly 10 years. They took their time to get exactly the way they wanted it and I can respect that.The Occult…

Walk along any rocky beach on the Pacific coast after a storm, and you’ll likely find a treasure trove of kelp washed ashore—long ribbons of glossy brown seaweed, glistening in the sunlight like strands of mermaid hair. Some pieces stretch for meters, still tangled with small shells and bits of driftwood, while others hold tight, bulbous floats that once kept them buoyant in the underwater

Just a quick one today, WumpaGem’s list of decomps that aren’t Clauded or anything, hosted on Backloggd. There’s a lot of them, of varying degrees of completeness: some are done, some are in alpha, some are only planned. Interesting, Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask are playable, but Ocarina of Time is only planned, probably because Ship of Harkinian stole a lot of its energy but turned out to have been made with AI coding. Particularly, Mario 64 has five different recomps.

Smoky is a loaded concept, because so often it falls into one of either styles: the incense-y smoke that recalls woody and resinous scents of piety and zen like Avignon, or the dense feel of the campfire like Lonestar Memories or the fragrances by Beaufort. These both lend themselves to autumn, of course, but we aim to provide a middle-ground between seasons, for which Alba di Seoul feels

We’ve building a few things over at Semi Serious Labs. Until recently our LLMs of choice for software development was agy-cli with Gemini because of our Google Pro plans and gpt-5.6/6 with codex as a result of Teams plans. Until now, Claude didn’t allow for 2 people Teams plans so now that it’s allowed, H and I signed up for it. After over a week of Claude usage and a couple years of chatgpt and gemini usage, noting some early impressions. Claude as a chatbot service is m’eh. It’s finicky, and…

A roundup of links (linkdump) from the optimistically last week but more likely last month.Best in showDo You Know What VAD Is?Thoughts and commentary on VADThis was rough, but a very good read.Small web findsI’m Tired of Being on the NetworkYou can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the…

In the Newsletter this weekBullshit Meter: Direct Köln - London trains will depart Gleis 5 at Köln HbfGood week: Finally Poland sees sense with platform numbersBad week: DSB slammed by the Danish audit officeAlso a bad week: End of the line for Škoda's modern locomotivesFinger pointing this week: LEO Express blames DB InfraGo for their night train fiasco, when perhaps they ought to look in the mirrorA lot of fuss this week: Nothing concrete (yet) about cross border commuter services San…

“Are those the—” Jordan Wolfson, 13 (L), 2026, hand-polished aluminum, aluminum spikes, digital UV substrate print on aluminum of a f’ing Renoir he credited in the ingredients even tho it’s public domain, automotive clearcoat, 53 x 88 x 11 1/8 in., ed. 1+1AP, : Owen Conway for Gagosian, obv “— the Chanel punk jacket spikes Virginie Viard wore in the photo Karl Lagerfeld took in 2011 for his and Caroline Roitfeld’s The Little Black Jacket Book, which was used in most of the stories this week…

Recently, Patchwork Paladin published her criteria for judging adventures, including what is required for an adventure to qualify as "good" or "great" in her estimations. I think it's a good post, offering both a neat set of criteria, and some insight into what she values in adventures. More importantly, to me, the post prompted me to think about how I evaluate adventures (and RPG books in general), and the usefulness of such criteria. Ultimately, I think a judging rubric is a necessity if…

We like making camera apps. Each year new phones are released and even though tech companies like to wow you with all their new features, it feels like we plateaued a long time ago with functionality (for most people). The device you had 5 years ago is just as capable of surfing the web, playing podcasts and videos as the top-of-the-line device today. There is one thing that has noticeably improved and that’s the camera. Maybe not between years, but certainly the sensor quality between an…

A few years ago, Trystan wrote her top 5 biopics list, and she recently suggested

tag(s): #politics #random-thoughts Over an email exchange with a friend, he brought up a conversation he had with a colleague (what follows is an edited quote): A colleague scolded me after I confronted him for paying Anthropic. He proceeded to lecture me on Apple's child labour abuse and the proprietary OS. His conclusion was that if you care about these things you shouldn't be in IT. Getting into those conversations is an interesting exercise in frustration. The colleague's reply strikes me…