Welcome to Little Italy – New York, New York We didn’t plan to visit Little Italy, but we happened upon it as we walked north from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a nice day. Too nice to just take a subway back to the hotel, so we started walking. First, backtracking through Chinatown, then to this noteworthy ethnic neighborhood. Over the years, Chinatown has expanded and now pretty much abuts Little Italy. The architecture looks the same, and the changeover from one ethnic area to another was…

Maybe the band I’ve seen play the most times, certainly the band with the biggest time gap between the first time I saw them and the latest (December 1989 to September 2026.) I saw them sometime in the last ten years but I may not have recorded it here; here’s a brief report on the 2009 show, which, like this one, was at the Barrymore, and which, like this one, featured a snippet of “The Famous Polka” (“When the phone inside your ribcage rings, it’s not for me”) as part of another song. They…

We are well on our way to place a copy of my favorite test site, The-Internet, onto its new home on Render.com, a place where developers can deploy web apps using their free tier, much like Heroku in its heyday. Sure, web apps that live on the free tier of Render takes a minute or so to spin up, but, hey, you get what you pay for!With our last blog post, we: Examined using Google AI the Gemfile of the original The-Internet, a Ruby project at https://github.com/saucelabs/the-internet, hosting on…

Off the southern coast of California is a rugged string of islands known as the Channel Islands. On one of these - Anacapa Island - stood a lighthouse built in 1932 that shone its light to warn passing ships of the jagged rocks surrounding the island. This island was manned by the not-so-lonely lighthouse keeper Captain Moses Haskell (portrayed by Clarence Hastings but voiced by actor Roy Barcroft) and his wife Miranda (Ingrid Niemela). Whether this couple really did tend to this lighthouse or…

The lgs I like (but haven't been to in forever) is holding a $12 draft night on friday and I'm so excited! I've wanted to draft more, and that's super cheap forba draft! I just hope enough people show up!

At the time of this writing, we are just over a week into the month of October. Similar to the last five or six Octobers, I don't feel the Halloween spirit pulsating through me. While others are a fourth of the way through a thirty-one day horror movie challenge I'm thinking, "Eh... I'd rather watch an old episode of The Flash." This bothers me and its bothered me for years now. Each year, I seem to have less and less holiday spirit. It's not just Halloween, it's Thanksgiving, and Christmas…

Imagine taking a big group of elites from the year 1700, giving them the tech, wealth, and economic options of today, also teaching them new facts that we have learned since then, but without putting them in contact with the people of today. If they held their values constant, and only adapted their behavior to these ways to achieve constant values, they would change many of their behaviors to adapt to this new context. However, it seems to me that their behaviors would be quite different from…

Summer is over for the most part in Tucson. We still get temps into the low 90's, but mornings dip down into the upper 60's, and the temperatures drop quickly as the sun sets. Our bedroom window is open again for sleeping, and I open up the back yard sliding glass doors when I get up early in the m morning. It's starting to be the best weather in the country again, and we are taking the opportunity to hit the trails. We recently revisited Sabino National Recreation Area and hiked to Seven…

Monte Carlo simulations (or methods) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1]. In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of by throwing darts. Estimating pi Suppose we take a…

Today turned out to be a rather nice day, that none of us really got to take advantage of. I found myself awake at 4am and wasn’t able to get back to sleep, so I did the morning cat feeding. Which turned out to be greatly appreciated, as both my daughters were feeling quite sick … Continue reading Our 2026 Garden: survivors and a little October harvest

You can’t predict if a post, book, or any sort of creation will be a hit. Once you have one, the temptation is trying to replicate it. Same post format. Same book outline. Same type of visuals. That seldom works. Some of my social media posts have gone viral, bringing book sales. But when I’ve tried to write anything viral by copying a hit, the copies pass unnoticed. No shame or glory. All art is theft. But as Picasso said copying oneself is pathetic—and doesn’t work.

Sometimes it’s all a bit much. The pervasive fear of living on the knife’s edge. Destitution on one side, mere survival on the other. In an at-will state, your fate could be decided on a whim. Then there’s the inexorable march of time. Who said it heals all wounds? Pink Floyd had it right: With each day we’re shorter of breath and one day closer to death. I feel it in my bones, the inevitability. And as if that wasn’t enough, we shoulder the banal injustices of daily life. The insufferable…

I’ve been looking forward to this. I knew Bill Frisell was due to play with Big Thief at Red Rocks on October 6th. And so last night, after when I assumed the show would have ended, I was already checking YouTube for the great gift that the internet keeps giving, which is snippets and sometimes even full-length footage of concerts from far away. There may not have been a better time in human history to be an armchair concertgoer. (Not that I only witness concerts via video. I’m literally going…

Survivor 51 episode 4 was a wild ride of hilarity, stupidity, and surprises—an accidental mutiny!!—and just a freakin' great episode. My takes and takeaways are inside!

Book 35 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – almost done! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. Dungeon Crawler Carl continues to captivate me. I recently finished the 6th book in the Matt Dinniman series, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (2025). The book continues the tale of Carl and Princess Donut’s descent into the deeper levels of the dungeon, playing in an intergalactic game show for the…

https://youtu.be/BRcz1Z--MY4?feature=sharedI don’t travel much as I’d like and I fly less than that. When I do fly, I always try to get a window seat and a window seat ahead of the wing is always a bonus.Long ago I started collecting timelapse videos of takeoffs and landings. This particular one is my favorite. We taxied and turned right as the sun crested the mountains east of Las Vegas. A rare occasion being in the right spot at the right time AND I was shooting video. Rare.

"Scream Squad" is a term that Universal Studios has half-heartedly try to get people to use organically to describe the friends they attend Halloween Horror Nights with. They also frequently use the tagline "Never go alone." I get that it's playing into horror movie tropes but it also feels so desperate to me. It reminds me of this ad campaign for this scary/ridiculous movie I won't be seeing called Whalefall, which implores its audience to see it "on the biggest screen possible." Anyway I am…

Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1987-88, primer and alkyd on paper, 44 1/2 x 34 1/2 in., selling at Sotheby’s Paris I was gonna say this is buy one get one free, but with this estimate for a work on paper, it definitely feels like you’re paying for both a Richard Prince AND a Christopher Wool. Kinda cool, though, ngl. Lot 208, 23 Oct 2026, Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, est. €1.8-2.5m [sothebys]Related, and half the price: an early Richard Prince-only Joke Painting that’d…

These collages are from a visual/text series of work that is centered around a house made entirely of bones, told in documents and fragments. I am hoping to get back to working on it in 2027, but here are some of the collage pieces...

I was surprised last week to get a shipping notice for Stellar Ventures, and tonight played the first game. This is mostly in the Cube Rails genre, but with 18xx train rusting and some variable powers (that are mostly grabbed in the auction). I bought it figuring I’d get 10-ish plays out of it, and hopefully a few more converts into the 18xx genre. This definitely looks friendlier than the other games, but I think that look is rank deception. This is a brutal game. Like most cube rails, you…

The premise of this strange title from a group of Taito-affiliate developers is a spiritual successor to Elevator Action that didn’t quite make the cut; after developing a slew of DS Taito sequels in the years prior, Spy Games: Elevator Mission got published by shovelware purveyors UFO Interactive.1 However, the outcome is focused from back-to-front thanks to a limited, setpiece-less structure. It’s a rare post-fifth generation first-person shooter in the Metroid Prime / Resident Evil: The…

07 Panic | INDEX | 09 Ram Garlic is the best stinky herb in the world and a true gift from God. It is nature’s antibiotic. Try gently roasting an entire bulb of garlic in a medium oven for as long as it takes the cloves to become soft and creamy. Squeeze them from their papery shell and spread on bread or vegetables. Sprinkle with herb salt. Delicious! No one who partakes of this delicacy with you will be aware of any odour. Everyone else can have some too, or go sit elsewhere. Self-imposed…

Time for another break from those TIFF and NYFF reviews. Cláudio Alves and Eurocheese have appointed themselves juries to choose the best of the Toronto fest. From Casting to Picture, let's go! How many prizes can Eurocheese give to LA BOLA NEGRA? To quote a 22-year-old comedy classic, "the limits does not exist." CLÁUDIO: Hello again, my friend. I guess it's time for the second round of these. Or third, if we count that gargantuan Best Actress conversation that spanned from Oscar frontrunner…

The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner. It's a movie to which the Ocean's franchise obviously owes so much, which is a funny thing to say given that the Ocean's franchise is itself a remake. But much like Ocean's, this is a hedonistic, smooth, and perfectly executed act of escapism,…

In West Kowloon we lie on the grass and watch people make smoothies by bicycle. It’s an inefficient method, the loading of both human and fruit a bit slow. As food services at a grassy area go it’s good company. No diesel emissions, no power consumption, and low noise, plus the amusing faces and failures, the friends video’ing and the staff trying to explain pedaling to those with a limited set of experiences. With this distraction and the view on the other side, that of Hong Kong Island across…

Shahsuvaryan, M.L. (2026) Metformin as an Emerging Candidate for Diabetic Retinopathy, Age-Related Macular Degeneration and Glaucoma Pharmacotherapy: Evidence and Perspectives. Current Reviews in Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology. https://doi.org/10.2174/0127724328519947260917114932 This article caught my eye because I started taking metformin a few months ago. My a1c has been stubbornly at 5.8 for years, and my doctor and I decided it was time to do something. I was shocked at how cheap…

in september i moved across the wwworld to maui (where i grew up). feels like i've gone through a wormhole. the last 2 months have been busy with all the little things to recreate a life in a previous country. "documents" and "admin" literally take so much life <time>. i can see why people prefer to not move around too much things are finally slowing down a little and i'm feeling more grounded here (which was always the intention). the question of how to live life? is always on my mind. i guess…

5 minutes to 3 AM for some reason the gods of sleep have abandoned me with debt so big how could I be free the clock says 3:03 thoughts overwhelm dreamland appears elusive I am losing grip the body doesn’t forgive it’s 4:23 yawns are stronger yet control screams green my eyes are undecided a battle I cannot win 5:15, tick tock mercy on me need a break from this reverse spell the night looks bleak another one to settle sunshine knocks engines roaring signs of defeat I keep still

A couple of years ago, my partner got me a record player, and a vinyl record of Kind Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's "Quarters!" for Christmas. I was so excited to give it a spin, that morning I scrounged around for some speakers I could plug into the record player, and put down the record. The speakers weren't great, and it was just playing in the middle of our dining room table. Even so, I was so happy with the setup. I think my partner had to convince me to move it somewhere else.…

Mark Perry started a magazine on a children's typewriter. "I had a children's typewriter plus a felt-tip pen," he said later, as uDiscover Music reports, "so that's why the first issue is how it is." That was Sniffin' Glue, the British punk fanzine that hit the street in July 1976 and burned out a year and 12 issues later. Cheap, fast, and ugly on purpose.Fifty years on, somebody's selling a zinc-alloy music player with a scroll wheel and real buttons. The Surfans F20 plays the files you…