Continuing on the subject of Forever Goals and Infinite Games, let’s compare them to habits. As a reminder, an Infinite Game is one you play so that you can play it. It is intrinsically fun. The goal, if there even is one, is to get better so that you can keep playing. A Forever Goal is something you will always want, but can’t really achieve. You approach a Forever Goal. Asymptotically. Over infinite time. I think there’s a connection. Since you can only approach a Forever Goal with constant…

I honestly don’t know what to make of this book, grim, funny, surreal, depressing, but engaging. I am a confused machine. I’m sure all the n-word stuff is satire but I don’t get it. Not a patch on Slaughterhouse 5. I did enjoy all his drawings, including this butthole

“Your best is what you can do without harming your physical or mental health, NOT what you can accomplish when you disregard it. - Sue BushHello friends! Our weather this week has been utterly, impossibly, stupendously perfect. Cool mornings, warm afternoons, not hot, not humid - ahhhhhhh. I love fall. I still had a hummingbird on Wednesday but I didn’t see one on Thursday. I did see a lot of butterflies in the field of goldenrod, and new migrants are showing up every day. More on that this…

The junior wanted to learn and the senior thought before typing. AI added a third character to the roster: the mediocre, who knows the words because a model explained them once.

I'm not a fan of waterslide decals, but they can make life a heck of a lot easier when it comes to adding markings to these little aeroplane models.I have hand-painted them in the past, and no doubt I will do so again, but getting everything clean and geometrically perfect with my sausage-fingers is a massive pain in the arse.The down-side to using decals is that you're pretty well stuck to whatever sizes you have on the sheet. These decals from miscmini.com are pretty easy to handle, though…

Some 60 years ago today, on 9 October 1966. A Douglas A-1 Skyraider piloted by 26-year-old LT(j.g.) William T. Patton from the “Thunderbolts” of Attack Squadron 176 (VA-176) off USS Intrepid (CVS 11) bagged an NVAF MiG-17 over Vietnam. It was at least the second victory scored by a propeller-driven Skyraider against a MiG, following a 1965 dogfight between MiGs and Spads from VA-25 off USS Midway. U.S. Navy Douglas A-1J Skyraider (BuNo 142028) of VA-176 “Thunderbolts” with the AK tail flash…

Drinks by the pool at Carneiros beach resort. We had caipirinha de cajá, caipiroska de cajú, and some insanely delicious deep fried tempura shrimps filled with cream cheese!

(affiliate link) Trouble! At Coal Creek is a historical fiction graphic novel that tells the story of the 1891 “Coal Creek War” through the eyes of a mining family. It follows in the tradition of books like Maus and They Called Us Enemy. At this point, I would almost classify this style of book as its own sub-genre, fairly distinct from both mainstream graphic novels and traditional historical fiction, with its own style and tropes. Weirdly, after decades of comics being snubbed by the…

GitHub used to be the place where developers would go to store their code and find new repositories. I have had a GitHub account for 11 years now, back then I had a lot less grey in my beard and the world was a lot simpler. For many, GitHub is still the only place where people store their code, but that is slowly changing. Thanks to AI, everyone and their gran, can now build software by simply prompting it. This has resulted in a massive amount of code being produced, mainly because some people…

The 5’th week of classes. Between term tests.

Wt Cult TV Blog, John introduces us to the 1960s science fiction series Undermind, with the unfortunately familiar premise of technology "being used to get inside people and undermine society. What's old is new again.Let's stay with the British flavor here, as the delightful Gill at RealWeegieMidget interviews Ian Ogilvy, star of The Return of the Saint, and with a list of credit so long that, well, it's best to just let Gill take over. Has there ever been a scifi series that didn't do…

red and green

Autumn is creeping in step by step. Colder starts to the day, now. The managed retreat begins. Played yesterday with Dirty Little Zine for making tiny photobooks to clip into notebooks. Dropped a frankly absurd amount of money on a shipment of magazines from Magculture. TODAY: Firing squad execution to be livestreamed, Pentagon says The Real Danger May Be AI as Dumb as Us: “Some of the most concerning security risks from AI may come not from super intelligence but from what researchers…

A news report in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reckons direct trains to London will depart from Köln Hbf Gleis 5 (Platform 5).I have analysed this in much more depth in this separate article, but it strikes me that while the idea has some merit, it is still a hell of a long way from being achievable.

This #blocking conversation in the #oxfordboaters chat is a conflict between trying to manage the immediate problem and building the collective process needed to stop the same problems recurring. Through the needed #KISS lens, it is a cludge between reactive (stupid)individualism and the harder work of building community structures. The immediate conflict is a symptom, not the underlying problem The conversation is filled with suspicion and frustration about people, conduct, and the proposed…

So Khosrow II had regained his throne and the usurper Bahram Chobin had fled and been killed. Order was restored in the Iranian Empire. Khosrow had originally be put on the throne when his two uncles on his mother's side, Vistahm and Vinduyih, who absolutely hated Khosrow's father, Hormizd IV (who had persecuted aristocratic clans to have more control himself and had killed their father), deposed Hormizd.During the approach of Bahram's army to Ctesiphon, when Khosrow fled to Azerbaijan,…

Today’s TDC says A suggestion linked by Austin Kleon in his newsletter “Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.” (Or, in the words of Wendell Berry, “Every day do something that won’t compute.”) What trivial law will you break today? Well, this is a tricky one. For one thing, in #DS106 we think that rules about…

Most personal goals die of vagueness. We write down things like "get in shape", "read more classics", or "write consistently". They sound noble on New Year's Eve, but they leave us empty-handed on an ordinary Tuesday evening. When a goal has no shape, your brain treats it as an open question: What should I do? How much is enough? When am I finished? Facing all those choices after a long day is exhausting, so we end up scrolling through our phones instead. The cure is not more willpower. The…

Eat what the chefs eatWear what fashion designers wear (and not what they design)Dance to the sets that DJs listen toRead the books that writers revisitWatch the movies that filmmakers watchTake the treatment that doctors takeFollow the eye of the photographer and the digital habits of the software engineerand thenignore them all, to become a person's person

Last night, as advertised, we held our Space Week Event at Maynooth University. This has been running for a few years now but last night was the first time we have included planetarium shows in our inflatable dome shows alongside the usual short lectures. That resulted in much greater organizational challenges, as the space in the dome is quite limited so we had to split those wanting to attend a show into manageable groups, and that in turn meant quite a few people moving in and out of the…

London's musical entertainment scene has something for everyone - from long-running blockbuster shows to no-name bands in dingy basements. Somewhere in the middle is monophonic plainchant versions of the Halo theme sung in a church. The acoustics at St Martin in the Field are echoey. That makes it rather hard to hear the amplified announcement to turn off our phones, but makes an a cappella chorus absolutely soar. The choir of London Voices have sung on just about every movie you've watched and…

I can't remember the last time I didn't go to the shop during the day and made sawdust. I had gone to the shop in the AM to get my ear muffs. At that time I had fully intended to haul the lunchbox planer outside. That didn't happen boys and girls. I spent 99% of the day seated at my desk watching You Tube listening to pod casts.I had a terrible night sleeping and woke up for the final time a little after 0300. Every time I moved or rolled over I would have a coughing fit. I must have drifted…

This is Joseph.It has been a while since we heard from Dean Dad. In his latest column he writes about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her concern about how sending her daughter to a school with educational challenges worked out less well then she'd hoped. As expected, his solution is quite pragmatic:We wound up balancing an egalitarian sensibility with wanting our kids to get good educations by ruling out the bottom but ignoring fine-grained distinctions at the top. My sense of it was that the kids…

It is a curiosity of the moment that American poetry seems to largely occupy the inner world, is obsessed with the self and its perceptions and feelings and ruminations, writing what it knows more than what it imagines or wants to find out or what other people know. I abandoned the first person, since I never thought I was that interesting of a person anyway, and let the subject guide the form. Some of my essays look like poems, some are more like narratives, many of them have the simultaneity…

Ruby-throated hummingbird hovering (photo from Wikimedia) 9 October 2026 One of the easiest hummingbirds to see on our birding tour in Veracruz, Mexico were our own ruby-throats. Right now they are still moving south but in only five months they’ll be on their way north again. Most of them are in the Mexican highlands right now but there’s a hotspot in the lowlands at the coast where we saw many. (Blue arrow on this eBird occurrence map for week of 4 Oct.) Weekly abundance of ruby-throated…

Walking from Windermere to Penrith via High Street at the weekend I encountered the evolution of a warm front crossing the Lake District. After a stunning day on Saturday darkness fell and revealed a night sky with countless stars. I fell asleep in my bivvy at 500m wondering just how impossible it must be that our Sun is the only star in the galaxy supporting human life. Wispy clouds appeared at 2am and a heavy dew had already formed with the faintest of breezes starting to develop. First light…

I play for two reasons: to avoid social media apps (for my mental health), and for when I'm bored and just want to veg out on something offline. I never cheat (i.e. use real money to buy tokens that make levels easier).

Once again we are entering the heart of Halloween season, which is a time of innocent carefree fun, as well as a time when we run an increasing risk of being killed by giant decorative yard skeletons (more on this later).But mainly Halloween is about fun. And nothing says “fun” like a clever and topical Halloween costume based on current events that are threatening the world economy. I came up with an idea for just such a costume, which I have illustrated below using ChatGPT and a photograph of…

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!And you're just in time for afternoon tea!A flying horse in Staffordshire.A mysterious murder-suicide.New York's war against banana peels.The houseplant that can count.Fun and games in medieval London.Hitler's dress rehearsal for war.A coded letter from Napoleon has finally been deciphered.A woman is cleared of being a witch. Three hundred years after she died. All together now: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.So maybe we've been reading the Voynich Manuscript…

Axminster—my graphical software design tool for the AI coding age—is still in beta, and it’s already been through three different technologies for inter-process communication (IPC). What gives? The reason the app needs IPC at all is to support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is how your LLM coding assistant reads and manipulates your diagrammatic model. I’ll start by showing you how it works now, which is that there are two components in Axminster—the app itself, and a small MCP helper…