Since Daniel and I started The Rocker Step —— subscribe if you love me, btw —— I've levelled up my live-clipping game. In all honesty, yesterday's clips are less spectacular (and less plentiful) than Monday's, but there's still good stuff in there. 🏀 Warriors rook Yaxel Lendeborg with a strong take (and the harm). 🏀 My son/Nets second-year guard Nolan Traore gets to the rack with the quickness. 🏀 Nets second-year guard Drake Powell with a pretty layup. Powell had been blocked immediately before…

🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch back to 🌳 grass LVA/GSV 🌷 now Be good to yourself. If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.

Via Marcin Wichary's excellent blog, Unsung, where he riffs off Marques Brownlee (aka MKBHD)'s video talking about YouTube's new "feature" of letting creators A/B test their videos:On top of all that, we can add what Brownlee started with in his video: overeager A:B tests feel like software’s version of gaslighting. How can you trust an app if it feels like it’s changing without rhyme and reason seemingly on a weekly basis, whose changes are not announced or documented anywhere (small A:B tests…

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! Context When Apple unveiled Liquid Glass and showed the new floating URL bar for iOS 26, a sense of dread set over me: what is the browser going to do with the space behind the URL bar? So many websites rely on the URL bar being an opaque (or nearly opaque) part of the UI, and therefore anchor important elements to the bottom of the screen. The web is built on many things, but one of them has always been the most important: backwards compatibility. A…

West Norwood Cemetery is one of the famous ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries in London. Others I have written about previously include Highgate, here and Abney Park here. They are all fascinating, sombre, atmospheric places to wander around, bursting with stories but also spaces of peace, solitude and nature. West Norwood is the resting place for a […] The post From Doulton To Mrs Beeton: Exploring The Amazing West Norwood Cemetery appeared first on Living London History.

Every so often I suffer from what I call "Emacs Fatigue". It's closely related to "Text File Fatigue". Using Emacs tends to pull one toward using it for everything, which is what I'd done. Then, I simply grow tired of staring at the same thing every day. When this happens, I "decide" to uproot my life and move my notes into something else. This time, that something else was Bear. Bear is great. It's solid, beautiful, and refreshingly simple. It syncs flawlessly (for free) and runs on macOS and…

CALL ALIEN: RESURRECTION (KENNER) The Alien movies are neat on a number of different levels, and one of the more interesting aspects of the franchise is that it didn’t really have much in the way of a cohesive vision. Each subsequent entry in the story being helmed by a different crew of creators made something patchwork, with each entry unique to itself, for better or for worse. There are, however, through lines on the movies, some obvious ones, having to do with narratives, timelines, and…

Art by Rusty Epstein

It was something utterly different Historian James Holland made a strong and elegant case for the P-51 Mustang being “the most decisive aircraft in history”, but let me offer an alternative: the Douglas SBD Dauntless. Thanks for reading Hush-Kit Aviation Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share If ‘decisive’ means […]

Found photo No one looks particularly happy in this photo. I’ve made up a story in which the wealthy maiden aunt on the left, who organized the outing, has just told her relatives that she is leaving her fortune to a women’s college rather than to them. That cuts everyone else out of their dreams of riches. It was a big disappointment to the rakish uncle with a cigar on the right. What fascinates me here is the difference between the two older women’s figures. The oldest woman in the lightest…

Michael Pryce goes deep into the strange untold stories behind the Harrier From intuition machines to Mach 3 jump-jets, via illicit liaisons in Paris, the story of the Harrier is as bizarre and exciting as the machine itself. We spoke to Michael Pryce, author of Jump Jet: The Secret History of the Harrier, to find […]

RICHARD SLATER “PROPHET” JENNINGS – Full-blown post-humous exhibition of paintings by artist and jazz scenester Richard “Prophet” Jennings, currently in New York, is long-awaited. One of the nicest things about running Flophouse Magazine is collecting cherised memories. Certainly one of my fondest experiences was making an overview of the life and career of painter, journalist and jazz buff Richard “Prophet” Jennings in cooperation with his daughter Dominique, nicknamed “Pistol” by her dad.…

A few days ago, we got a notification on our smartphone that our garage door app—the one that opens and closes our garage door—had begun using two-factor authentication, or 2FA. Yup - the garage door is closed Unless you’re one of the very few people left on Earth who doesn’t have a credit card, bank account, or car insurance, you’re probably familiar with 2FA. Once you sign in with your email address and password, the bank, credit card company, or, apparently in this case, our garage door,…

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 1): The first and most rudimentary test of the historian’s competence is that he should be able to read his sources. This is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script. [....] I was told that I should study the original documents, which meant British documents, French…

I wrote the post below last week. That was a quaint and quiet time. Last night OpenAI released a treasure trove of 722 manuscripts solving 372 major open problems in mathematics including from theoretical computer science:A proof of the unique games conjecture (formalized in Lean)A full derandomization of randomized log spaceMatrix multiplication in \(n^{2.25+\epsilon}\) time (formalized in Lean)And many many more. I had Claude put together a webpage to make it easier to explore the TCS-related…

Ecclesiasticus 39:26 (KJV): The principal things for the whole use of man's life are water, fire, iron, and salt, flour of wheat, honey, milk, and the blood of the grape, and oil, and clothing. Alexander A. Di Lella ad loc.: In 39:26 are listed ten indispensable items for human life in ancient Palestine; the list in 29:21 includes only water, bread, clothing, and a house. Several of the items in the longer list are traditional: for grain ("the heart of the wheat," 39:26c; cf. NOTE), wine ("the…

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. Matthew 7:26–27 This was originally going to be called something like, “How slopcoded is your programming language?” But as I gathered the data, I found something else – something worse. Almost every popular language is…

Spend any time writing online, and you’ll inevitably run into people, at times, who seem to have an odd understanding of what you published. Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text and react to what they assume you wrote. Sometimes it’s an actual misunderstanding that’s either down to bad writing on your part or poor reading on theirs. But more and more I’ve had to face the possibility that my thought processes are just substantively different from the way the majority…

Unicorn Overlord’s premise will be incredibly familiar to those who know the story of the original Fire Emblem. A blue-haired boy is exiled from his kingdom, coming of age on a sheltered island under the protection of a wizened and skilled knight. Once back on the main continent, he gathers allies to retake his kingdom ...Unicorn Overlord was first posted on October 7, 2026 at 10:34 am.©2017-2025 "Hardcore Gaming 101". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not…

Sounds. August 17 1974 - standing in for John Peel, the regular reviewerGood lord, what on earth is he wearing? Further proof of the secret thesis re. glamIt's rather a bedraggled and arse-end-of-the-70s selection of singles Eno's dealing with here. Well, August is always a very slow month on the music front.Other occasions when Brian Eno reviewed the singles for Soundshttps://musicpresspantheon.blogspot.com/2026/08/brian-does-singles-including-one-by.htmlhttps://musicpresspantheon.blogspot.com/…

Presenting my latest cover illustration for Swan River Press, and another story collection edited by Robert Lloyd Parry: Ghosts on the Cam is the third in a series of linked anthologies. Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020) collected supernatural tales by members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club, of which MR James was a leading light. Friends and Spectres (2024) looked more widely at works by MRJ’s friends outside the club. In the present volume the authors’ personal connections with MRJ…

image CC0 from pexels.com from back in the days before AI Each year, a number of surveys are carried out in Europe and North America to assess what today’s youths (defined as those in their late teens and early twenties) see as the major issues facing them, and our world. The “top ten” issues don’t change much over time. You won’t be surprised that I’m more interested in why they say these issues are important, than in an arbitrary ‘ranking’. So I read what I could find about them, focusing…

Tall, spotty, and just a little bit absurd—let’s talk about the giraffe, nature’s own high-rise browser with a flair for the dramatic.Meet Giraffa camelopardalis, the tallest land animal striding the planet today, reaching a lofty 5–5.5 metres. That impossibly long neck? Not a vertebral free-for-all, but the same tidy set of seven cervical vertebrae you and I carry—each one simply stretched

A four mile trail run got me to 10 miles, but I wanted 12. I was literally in bed, but I got up, put on some shorts, and set off into the night. It’s not hard, but it’s hard to do. I wanted to be able to write down that I did 12 miles, two days in a row. Walking isn’t hard. But getting started is hard. Getting out the door. Remembering the gloves. All the tiny details, the decisions that need to be made – they all add up. It ain’t hard, but it’s hard to do. Today is day 135 of walking 10+ miles…

On January 12, 2024, I published an article about then-ongoing renovations at the Carroll Gardens branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. You can read my original report for the project details. For our instant purposes, it suffices to say that the library – one of the beautiful original Carnegie libraries – had been closed for renovations on July 21, 2023, and the Brooklyn Public Library system projected that the project would take 18-24 months to complete. 18 months came and went on January…

Euripides in the Vatican It was the development of print which enabled us to start to think about the possibility of there being genuine and fake books, and to wish for accurate rather than inaccurate ones. Before that any hand-written book was just a hand-written book: it made no claim to authority over and above any other hand-written copy. Indeed many a manuscript volume contains parts of several works. People must have assumed copying error when they encountered discrepancies, and been…