This is a free racing game from 2008 that is entirely based around time trials. Each track is set in a stadium, there is only a single car, and each have bronze, silver, and gold times that you must beat to get a medal. Each track is categorised into one of five different difficulties using a colour scheme, from white to black. The first four have fifteen tracks, and the final one has five. The fact that there is a single car means that your time is entirely based on your skills, there are no…

By Scott_MFirst Era AdventuresOSRICLevels 1-2 Clinging to a rugged mountainside, this once-magnificent palace of a self-styled empress stands burned-out and abandoned, though its dire ivory tower yet stands, unblemished. Beneath the toppled estate sprawls a maze of chambers dedicated to the mad Empress Helene’s perverse delectations. Within may be found wondrous treasures and terrible dangers alike. Only the foolhardy dare venture there now. The few brave explorers who tested it did return with…

it is easy to believe in a big conspiracy and hard to accept that the world is complex and we just don’t know we notice patterns and relationships, trying to make sense of them but without careful scientific methods, the conclusions we draw are often wrong the conspiracy you told me is possible, sure — but it’s more likely not true get comfortable with the unknown

A simple way to make the most of unpleasant experiences: train yourself to respond with “Maybe life is trying to teach me something.” That idea alone opens the door to what the experience might actually be teaching you. Almost every unpleasant experience has a lot to offer, if you’re willing to ask.

This week, I’m trying to wrap up our paper, “The Heritage of Hope in a North American Small Town during the Cold War,” which we’ll deliver at the end of the month. Since I’m co-writing it with my wife, Susie, I’d love to get a draft of it done for her to review and critique by the end of the week? Right now, I have two substantive chunks done and I think I’m going to go for a walk this morning to think about the conclusion. These chunks are rough, overlap a bit, and are clearly not…

I’m in the final twenty pages of Corbin’s Alone with the Alone. I estimate I’ve understood a third, kinda understood a third, and not at all understood a third; it has, nevertheless, been worth it. There’s so much here to think about. Reading it took me back to those first few years after leaving the Holiness churches when I was reading academic theology that was way over my head. It pushed me in important ways, and sent me on so many side quests. What led me to this book was a desire to have a…

Retro handhelds have a funny habit of becoming inseparable from their software. Buy one little Linux machine and, before long, the firmware becomes almost as much a part of its personality as the plastic shell, buttons or screen. Onion became synonymous with the Miyoo Mini, MinUI has followed Shaun Inman across a small army of devices, and for a long time spruce felt similarly tied to the Miyoo A30 it originally grew around.That relationship has changed quite dramatically. spruceOS 4.5.0…

The New York Times, like every newspaper in the city founded before 1900, started downtown. After renting space for its first few years, the paper built the old 41 Park Row in 1858, then reconfigured and expanded that building (to the point where it was effective rebuilt) at the same site and address in 1889. The rebuilt 41 Park Row is still there and is now landmarked, but the Times was only there for a few years. After a few years, the paper was again looking for more space, and ended up at…

Why? Because I’m getting a colonoscopy today, that’s why. That’s gonna take up some time, and then afterward I am likely to be in a semi-dazed state afterwards thanks to the lingering effects of sedation, which will also very likely mess up my judgement. Me online without judgement skills would probably be a very very very very bad thing. So we’re gonna skip that entirely (I am, mind you, writing this two days early and scheduling it to go up Wednesday morning). I asked Krissy to hide my phone…

By the time I reached the age of thirteen, I had horror fever. I was renting every film I could get my hands on and had even begun buying VHS tapes. I knew the classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was familiar with some of the more popular box art, like Dead Alive, Ghost Story, and Evil Dead 2, and I was beginning to learn about even more classic titles thanks to the now defunct website House of Horrors. It was at House of Horrors that I learned Night of…

I enjoyed reading I, Claudius and Claudius, the God by Robert Graves so much, I decided to read Graves’s memoirs. He fought for the British during all 4 years of World War I, and the experience provides most of the fodder for his memoirs, but he also discusses his childhood. During summers he would visit his German grandfather and uncles. One of his uncles lived in Aufsess Castle, and I discovered a fascinating tidbit of natural history from these memoirs. There was a water-filled cavern in the…

We started the week with a train journey to Rugby, an hour’s travel for the improbably cheap price of £5.95 each. That was an advance ticket with a Two Together Railcard, which gives a ⅓ discount, but even accounting for that it was so cheap that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made a mistake. The sad thing is that if I’d seen a flight to a random city in central Europe for the same price I’d probably think it was completely normal. I’m just so completely accustomed to British trains costing a lot…

Our final long weekend of the year made this week a short week, but a packed and delightful weekend.On Tuesday Clare and I went and saw a film as part of the Italian Film Festival at Palace Electric "Life is Life". A film about a big business trying to relocate a man from his generational home in Sardinia. It was fun to be able to recognise a handful of words and 1 or 2 phrases! Though, part way through, I definitely found myself questioning my beliefs as I was siding with the big business for…

doneNo tackiness on the tote or the tray. I'll bring this up to the living room and let the shellac fully cure out.router sled railsI couldn't double these up due to the 90° lip on it. These are stiff enough I think that it will be ok with one.rails doneI thought of moving this outside bearer to the outside edge of the back wall but I didn't want to drill any new holes in the rails. Four #12 screws hold each rail to the bearers.ready to try itI wanted the router to be 90° so the flats on the…

A melancholy anniversary today – one that seems to get worse each year as it triggers ever more naked displays of Jew-hate. However – a big, welcome 'However' – today is also the centenary of the first radio broadcast of Choral Evensong, the world's longest-running outdoor broadcast. Radio 3 is marking the occasion with a live broadcast from Westminster Abbey – where the first Choral Evensong was recorded back in 1926 – at 3 this afternoon. Choral Evensong is one of the great British…

At Spatie we build SaaS apps with Laravel on the backend and Inertia with React on the frontend. That split means two type systems have to agree about every payload that crosses between them. Laravel data going out, TypeScript picking it up. There There, the helpdesk we're building, is built exactly like that. Tickets, messages, members, custom sidebar sections, all of it crosses the bridge. We'd go insane maintaining those types by hand. So we don't. There There is in private beta right now,…

Utah’s Stansbury Island rises over the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake. The post Salt Lake Island appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Selfies of Yuna, my 9.5 years old cat <3

Aerial view of Pico de Orizaba = Citlaltépetl volcano at western border of Veracruz state (photo from Wikimedia) 7 October 2026 Today I leave Veracruz and Mexico to fly home to Pittsburgh. I first became hooked on the River of Raptors when I saw this video (below) in 2013 but I did not act on it until this year. 100,000 raptors(!), tropical birds, and so much more! video embedded from Aplomadoson on YouTube Did I see what this video promised? I’m glad I came. Birds in order of appearance in the…

There are many things that are uncertain in our industry right now, but one thing I am certain about, and have been for almost 13 years, is that Nix is a terrible programming language. I remember when I first learned it, it felt like pushing shit uphill. The learning cliff is ferocious, and it took me a couple of years to master it because there was no AI back then, but I stuck with it. There's some magic here, and in this post, I'm going to show you why Nix should be your primary choice for…

I don’t have the passionfor things I love.a piece of me hasbroken off and slid intothe great unknown. I do not possess the energyto chase after it.I am okay with what’snot okay. Is that scary orjust normal? Is it common orunheard of? nothing is newunder the sun, though…right?

If you watch enough innocent people closely enough, criminals will fall out. – Josh Windham The Punitive Mindset (#1303) One of the primary goals of US prisons is ensuring that people condemned to their dungeons can never have a normal life ever again: …the Connecticut Department of [Torturing People Locked in Cages] charge[s] a fee for every day a person spends in prison and then [robs them whenever possible to] collect on that debt…If [one of the state’s] former…[victims] wins the…

The veil over Astarion Acunin’s life is partially lifted, and glimpses of what could have been, and what actually was are revealed. This didn’t really illuminate much of the parts of Astarion’s life, his years studying and then corrupting the law, that I was hoping to read about. Instead, it alternates between his childhood, and some decades before the events of Baldur’s Gate 3 take place (a guess). It’s a fast, fun read, and if one shaved off a few serial numbers, it could be almost adjacent…

by Hugo Duprez This is absolutely incredible! Pick any website you want and control a stick figure while you destroy absolutely everything on it. A good way of getting revenge on the bad websites that have failed you in the past.

11:41 - Had breakfast at 11 while playing Tomodachi Life. Now I'm back in bed contemplating a nap, despite sleeping 8 hrs. Not off to a great start but the day is young?

I joined my parents and their friend for a couple of days over on the Yorkshire coast, they very kindly invited me for the last couple of days of their holiday. These are all from Filey and Bempton cliffs. I don’t shoot much colour and much less Portra, but I was there to photograph birds on the cliffs so I thought I’d give it a go. Bempton is known for its wide variety of birds, and when we were there it was gannet season. Turns out my favourites were not of birds but rather the surrounding…

On Substack, an essay on György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and its (semi-)staging at this year’s Musikfest Berlin. The link is here.Also in the essay (among others), an operatic cast of: Boulez, Berio, Ghelderode, Henze, Schönberg, Oliveros, Nono, Monk, Pousseur, Zimmermann.Subscribers of all kinds—but especially paying!—are welcomed. Here’s a quick preview: If love, even in its triumph, is sad rather than happy, what of the laughter that—far more than love—characterises this opera? Does…

Today’s TDC says What do you think would happen if the earth was flat? Tell us, or show us. Be original! I immediately thought of what a cat would do … so here’s a pic of a cat, sitting on the earth, having pushed all the countries off onto the floor. Flat earth, with cat flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

I am probably going to regret this, but nonetheless I want to put this thing out there myself rather than leaving it to some reactionary troll from the fringes to make it all about them. Perhaps a veteran who fought on the winning side of the Blog Wars (in however minor and likely ineffectual a role) might actually merit a hearing on this point—always assuming, of course, that anyone in fandom and/or the sff biz still reads this shabby old blog. So, here goes: Jonathan Strahan’s new Le Guin…

I just realized that I don't know what hypertext actually is. Like I know HTML and I build HTTP APIs for a living, both of which have hypertext in their names, but what is actually hypertext? What is the definition of hypertext? A quick visit to wikipedia later tells me that for text to be considered hypertext, it needs to: Be text On a monitor (or just any electric form I guess) With links to other documents Which can be accessed immediately The prefix hyper isn't just a marketing gimmick…