So Hormizd IV was dealing with a civil war when a successful military leader decided he was destined to lead the Iranian Empire. Hormizd asked his general Farrukhan to leave the army and put down the rebllion. Before setting out, Farrukhan requested that Hormizd release a political prisoner, Zadspram, a military leader whom Farrukhan considered important to success. Zadspram was released.The armies of Hormizd under Farrukhan faced the army of Bahram Chobin across the River Zab. Neither wanted…

Last time, the agents were escaping sandboxes and frightening everyone with visions of runaway AI. Now they’ve come home, put on the butler uniform and started keeping notes on Brenda. If you missed the first episode, start with https://thecynicalnerd.bearblog.dev/please-consider-using-bartholmew-to-defend-your-systems/ Well, apparently having an AI agent book flights, answer email and rescue us from the administrative sewage of modern life was too normal. We have now reached the stage of…

If you're a writer trying to write more, you could do a lot worse than the AC/DC method. Which is basically writing the same (kind of) song over and over again. To the naked or untrained ear, it sounds more different than you think, with more variety than you may imagine. Also, I'm guessing if you're reading this blog, you are, like me, pretty unpopular. But I think there's an inverse relationship to popularity vs. support. So if you're unpopular, you probably have a heavy percentage of support…

Will voice kill the keyboard. No. Will the way we interact with Emacs, and computers in general, change drastically? No. Star Trek has a mythical AI/computer that responds to voice commands and interacts with you to clarify or note other work that may pertain to what you wanted. Evidently the interface is so ubiquitous that Scotty talks to a mouse noting it's "quaint" to need to push it and type on a keyboard to interact with a computer. But if we watch the bridge of any Star Trek show people…

• 4-star hike • 9 mile out-and-back • Easy | Gain 490 feet • Durham & Newmarket, NH | Seacoast Region . Colby Marsh viewed from the blue spur trail. The Sweet Trail strings together a trail through a patchwork of marshland and forest as it heads towards the brackish waters and expansive views over the Great Bay. It runs one way, from Longmarsh Road in Durham to the shore of the bay in Newmarket, so it is not a loop - a fact that trail signs along the route repeatedly like to remind you. In the…

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20261006-00/?p=112757/ It shouldn’t execute, but for different reasons.

by locheilDuring the editing of The Guest Stars, I hosted a short playtest to help me get my bearings on my first third twenty-seventh draft of the map. The results were very helpful and also very funny, so I figured I'd share.This will technically be my second play report, but the format will be more traditional this time around, because I'm stealing it from Ro and Falcon. (everyone say thank you!)SetupBecause 91 - BEAUTIFUL GROTTO was submitted so early, the three wise men were actually the…

https://blog.pkh.me/p/49-float-and-integer-arithmetic-follow-two-different-paradigms.html

I'm learning to DJ. For now, I'm calling myself DJ Mart. These are my newbie notes.DJ BasicsThere are lots of good resources online to figure out DJing and I won't do better here. I will just say that DJ controllers have a few basic elements that are core to the practice, everything else is basically fancy flourishes on top.This is my DJ controller:There's a left side and a right side, with symmetric controls. The whole art of DJing can be reductively summed up as transitioning the song on the…

As of the the last piece (“An UNEARTHLY Stowaway”), I’ve posted all the Stuart Palmer Ghost Stories writing that I could find online. But I’m not done! There are a few other significant pieces that I’ve requested from various libraries around the country; so far, I’ve gotten scans of two of the articles I’ve requested. I’m waiting on a couple more. There are also a couple that I managed to find in some published collections of Ghost Stories material, but those pieces were published in 1931, so…

Do you ever take the train eastbound? Do you ever take the train, get stuck riding in circles in a fog surrounded by giant mushrooms that turns out to be a time loop? Do you ever take the train that turns out to be the reaper of death called Charon? Welcome to Eastward, a pixelated laid back 2D adventure game with a surprisingly dark undertone from Pixpil. Let’s see what happens when we ride this train all the way to the Edge of Time… This game flew under my radar until so1o highly recommended…

whenever i read, i feel something close to what i feel when i meditate. the noise around me fades, and i’m just there with the book and my own thoughts. as i follow the words, i notice what they bring up in me. i’m not thinking about what i need to do next. i’m simply there, slowing down and coming back to myself.

Dear readers, I’ve been thinking about writing a new book about ECM. Before deciding what shape it might take, I’d like to hear from those of you who have made Between Sound and Space part of your listening lives. My main concern is finding something new to say. There are already books that approach ECM from various perspectives, including my own, and I don’t want to repeat myself or revisit familiar ground without a compelling reason. I’d like a new project to fill a gap by exploring something…

Episode Five- Lights Out This episode is the best yet at balancing the series’ more thoughtful scenes with it’s action ones. As the town comes under threat from the aliens searching for the Manhunter and Hal leaves John for dead, emotions are running high. The 2007 opening flashback depicts Kerry’s arrival in town, pursued by killers and shows how Zoe helped her- for a price. It’s a fitting beginning to an episode where several characters have to make an important choice as to what to do. If…

We see loads in the news about oil prices, the potential shortages caused by wars involving Iran and Russia and whether the UK should licence further oil extraction from existing oil fields in the North Sea. I wondered whether there was a mappy project opportunity around oil production and consumption. I started out with this prompt: “I want to make a map based dashboard about oil production, consumption, refining and the flows between countries. before we start can you research what data is…

the dark matter itself begins to suggest theories of chance; last night i climbed a dream•cliff, bare-handed, single-voiced, the redoubt casting its baleful glare on my efforts. shrieks & caws of the shrikes, kestrels, ravens badgering the lemurs and assorted small mammals all around me, a veritable panoply of gaia herself, self-satisfied self-assured, anomalous. i paused to ask questions, aware of the 2- or 3- or 5-degrees of separation between this and that, me & them, awed at how small the…

Link: Election Night 2026, by Graze SocialThis prototype from Graze is remarkable.Graze, of course, allows you to create new Bluesky feeds. People have created feeds for news, sports, politics — anything you like. But they’ve mostly been consumed within the Bluesky experience itself.Its midterms dashboard is something different. Here, you can view discussion of candidate races based on the races you care about, determined by who you’re already following. Because newsrooms, pundits, and…

As the three of us, Sassenachs all, walked the first two stages of the Rob Roy Way, we read Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy (well, two of us did). It’s a fine combination that I recommend to all: the legs, the brain, and the soul are exercised at once. We were walking the Way because one of us had been given a book on the Rob Roy Way and told that it is an easy walk for the old or feeble, divided into ten-mile stretches and with no difficult climbs. (Between us we are aged 230.) We weren’t sure…

On Git Refs Oct 7, 2026 I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands: $ git fetch origin master $ git switch -c my-feature origin/master Do you understand why is it origin master in one command, and origin/master in the other? I didn’t, until a few weeks ago! My understanding was that git is a content-addressable database. Git stores commits, a commit is identified by the hash of its content, and the content of a commit is, primarily: a memory-less snapshot…

Curious if this UI animation for multi-page views has always been around? I’ve only seen it deployed in the Craft app on macOS, but it’s great.

Yesterday’s post included this plot: I figured it was worth a quick post to show how I made it. I had already done most of the work back in 2022 in a Mathematica notebook I made to support my original orbital curvature post. So I copied the pertinent calculations from that notebook, pasted them into a new one, and made the adjustments necessary to produce the plot. Here’s the new notebook: The bottom half of the notebook is where the plotting commands are. The key items are: The definitions of…

"It's just that your turn signal has been on this whole time." (the joke: a sailboat captain says "hard alee" to say the boat's about to turn (and that the crew should be careful because the boat's about to tilt, sails+heavy pieces of wood are going to shift over, etc))

This January, I wrote a hypothetical story about how to keep newsrooms safe from raids the day before federal agents raided Washington Post engagement reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. More than one industry person called me prescient, but I wasn’t. It was completely obvious this was going to happen.The environment for newsrooms during the second Trump administration is unprecedented: an increase in secret subpoenas, raids on journalists and newsrooms, ratcheted-up surveillance, new…

Leaden MenBy mystical means, they’ve condensed certain purities in their body into a lump of force. With a Turn of focus, they can send it into a body part— their hand, their teeth, their liver— to transcend human frailty in that section. A leaden hand can catch blades well— treat it like a shield. Leaden men have little to fear from needle traps and devil rings. Teeth to bite, liver to shirk poison, eyes to shirk the evil eye.They level and gain HP like fighters, fight and have proficiencies…

If you've followed my blog for a while, you know of my love-hate relationship with technology. Video games, in particular, are a good example of this. I go through stretches where I enjoy video games, and longer stretches where I say I've sworn off them forever. But maybe it doesn't have to be all or nothing for me when it comes to video games. I have a friend with several adult children who have become addicted to video games, despite his and his wife's best efforts to prevent this as their…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1177/malicious-compliance

[Minor SPOILERS for Marvel’s Midnight comics ahead] And so, the day has come. Marvel’s new Midnight imprint has been unleashed upon the world, and a lot of what I’ve been considering is about to pass. From the retailer perspective, I am curious if this will succeed in achieving at least a smidgen of the traction that DC’s Absoluteline of books has. From the reader perspective…are these any good? Let’s take that first question first, even though I don’t quite have the data necessary based on the…

Consider a business owner being asked to approve $15,000 a year for better recovery capability. The proposal lists backup storage, protected copies, and scheduled restore testing. It explains the service well enough to price it. It says much less about what would happen if the company’s order-processing system were unavailable for three days.That is a hypothetical example, but it exposes a weakness in a security budget request. The provider has described the purchase. The owner still has to…

I've read over a hundred writing craft books. Writing craft is "how to write good". All the way from sentences to structure, marketing to reading. These are some of them. If you don't care, that's fine. If you don't want to, that's fine. If you think structure is bullshit, that's fine. If you are happy with how you write, that's great! This isn't for you. This is a genre for people figuring it out. Like me. Like a lot of people. It is extremely possible, reading a lot of this sort of book, to…

there’s a difference between being constantly present on a screen and being present with someone in real life. i love spending time with friends and family, and i love meeting new people, too. but when online conversations never seem to end, i get so drained. i like sharing something funny now and then or checking in with someone i care about. i just have a limited amount of energy for it. if i use it all up chatting with one person in a day, i might not be available online for the next couple…