Well, this was a day! Thanks to my SIL offering to drop us off at the hospital the cancer clinic is in, we didn’t have to leave as early as originally planned, but it was still early enough to see this. It’s a bit shaky, since I put my phone’s camera on the night setting … Continue reading The longest half hour, ever…

Normally I reserve my vitriol for the slopbros for my personal blog, but this has become extremely DNA Lounge-related of late, as I shall explain. (This counts as plumbing-related, the internet being a series of tubes, full of toxic slop.) As you may be aware, our web site is being constantly, relentlessly hammered by AI scrapers. I am spending an absurd number of hours just trying to keep things barely functional under this brutal onslaught. It's not only us, obviously; this toxic blight…

Things that brought me delight in September:S. M. Hallow, The Halls of the DeadS. M. Hallow's The Halls of the Dead was an absolute delight. In a medium-sized novel we've got heretic Victorian-esque necromancers trying to rebuild a repository of occult knowledge, dealing with bites being taken out of their souls, abusive ghosts, and coming back from the dead with a newfound ravenous hunger for flesh. And that's just the broad outline--there's a lot going on here. The Halls of the Dead…

These cute Japanese sweet potato cookies are inspired by satsumaimo, the Japanese sweet potatoes I absolutely love. Each cookie looks like a tiny slice of sweet potato, with a golden yellow center, a thin purple-red edge that resembles the skin, and a few black sesame seeds to complete the look. They are buttery and subtly ... The post Satsumaimo Cookies (Japanese Sweet Potato Cookies) appeared first on Chopstick Chronicles.

I wanted a way to tell whether AI was making work better. I ended up arguing with ticket counts, cost accounting and my own assumptions. This is the method I would test, and the long list of reasons to be careful with it.

I wanted a way to tell whether AI was making work better. I ended up arguing with ticket counts, cost accounting and my own assumptions. This is the method I would test, and the long list of reasons to be careful with it.

I was unprepared for how cool Blacula is.

[1979]The power pop party continues...More tunes that are toppermost of the power-poppermost.How was this not a numero uno smasho hito???A gloriously upbeat and infectious burst of rockin' pop. Contains hand claps!

WechiniOne of the original sorcerers exiled from Ancient Terra settled on Wippletree in an age forgotten. The ammonia seas proved a fertile ground for the studies of new, profound sorceries melding majick and science. The forefathers of th Wechini made them adapt to the planet, limbs lengthened, immune systems hardened, and taught to wield spears dipped in ichors that would rot even the most armored knight from the inside out. The forefathers left, in search of a missing piece of knowledge to…

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW. RKO Radio Pictures, 1944. Edward 6. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, Dan Duryea. Based on a novel by J. H. Wallis. Director: Fritz Lang What could possibly happen to a middle-aged professor left alone for the summer when his wife and family go on vacation without him? Would you believe a chance meeting with a beautiful woman, a few drinks, an enraged lover, then murder — strictly self-defense? Moving the body is not a great idea. As the noose slowly tightens,…

Inspired by the inimitable Abhinav Sarkar in Bengaluru. This list in non-exhaustive, though it might be to read: Visit every subnational jurisdiction. Every prefecture, province, state, territory, county, dependency, and country in free association. Then maybe every local government area if I run out of those. Have a picture taken at every Japanese train station. Bonus points if I pose next to the station sign with someone dressed as the station or line’s mascot. Forget useless stuff. Not…

Reclaim your night. Daylight hours are occupied by the struggle to stay alive, but when the moon is high (and so am I), the time is mine. Sadly, we seem to have lost the plot these days. We melt into the couch cushions and scroll brainrot until our eyes are too heavy. Then we make terrible diet decisions and pass out. Midnight dumplings hit the spot, though. We should make more of our nightly ritual. We used to play games together (you cheat at backgammon; no one rolls double six so often) and…

In the age of generative models, the developer must be able to recognize the shape of the problem and pick the correct way to express it. What becomes important today is understanding algorithms and data structures and data flows within the system. Imperative programming is quickly becoming akin to writing assembly because these models are quite competent at writing code in the small, while they stumble at high level design and architecture. So it is good to learn a language that operates at a…

I have been using daily for my own streaming and gaming setup for a few weeks now, and I wanted to show what it actually does instead of how it was built. Here is my current workflow and a tour of a few of the audio tools: width="100%" height="500" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3--AnDZZXzA" fr…

06 Ogre | INDEX | 08 Stinky What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you can’t answer that question confidently (and numerically), you won’t be able to put a Dent in the meaning behind today’s drawing. Good luck! Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper

But, also: And, furthermore: 🌲 gonna 🌼 go 🌱 touch 🌳 grass 🌷 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.

Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order1, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on the last page. That’s how you read a newspaper article, or a poem, or an email. Why would reading code be any different? Why code is different English text is designed to be read in order. In fact, there are almost no constraints on the order of a text aside from how you want the reader to consume it. In writing this post, I could put…

The IFComp2026 is well underway, with dozens of interactive fiction games of various forms available to play. I don't have an entry but I did help out with one in a minor way. Play Wild Ride to Earth in your browserWild Ride to Earth is a sprawling and lighthearted scifi adventure where you are trying to find your way back to Earth after being abducted by aliens and dumped on a far distant space port. There is a huge amount of content tucked away in the corners of the game - several planets to…

If only I'd known this years ago.

To fix buffering (see https://tube.jeena.net/w/uXZN52xsH75LbHWNt8dsLY) I put my PeerTube videos into a Vultr object storage on the west coast of the US. In the beginning it was cheap, $6 a month for my 150 GB and almost no traffic. Then they changed to $18 per month and I wanted to move it but didn't have the time. Today I started investigating and saw that in April I had a bill of $54, while the only thing using Vultr is my PeerTube instance. I checked the logs and there was nothing happening…

Find one, two, or three friends and go for a Big Walk around sound-light-scapes to talk about life while solving light puzzles. Hypertexthero Big Walk video list: 1. First steps

I was skimming through David Well’s book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry and was surprised by this entry: Lissajous figures or Bowditch curves First discussed by Nathaniel Bowditch in 1815, and later by Jules Antoine Lissajous in 1857 … I wrote a couple posts about Lissajous curves years ago, and recently I wrote a couple posts about Nathan Bowditch, but I didn’t realize there was a connection between them. I asked Claude to pin down Bowditch’s publication to see…

Perfume PosseSerge Lutens L’Innommable Hey friends – this is March, we moved things around this week. Quick write-up today. I got my decant of Serge Lutens El Attarine and I … am still deciding how I feel about it, but I can’t say I’m… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseSerge Lutens L’Innommable

To recap my series of blog posts on Ronald Coase, I have been tracing the intellectual origins of what I like to call “Coase’s axiom”: the counter-intuitive idea that harms are a reciprocal problem. Did this idea or axiom originate with with Frank Knight’s critique of A. C. Pigou? [1] With Arnold Plant’s courses on industrial law while Coase was a student at the London School of Economics (LSE), [2] or more generally, with the opportunity-cost approach to economics that was developed at the…

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got my Apple Watch Ultra 4. I’ve written about some upcoming features that I’m not psyched about, but I’ve otherwise been very happy with the upgrade. There’s just one issue: the new walking distance estimation is completely busted for me. I’ve previously used an Apple Watch Series 3, Series 5, Series 7, and Ultra 1. In each of those cases, the watch tracked my steps well and translated them into a reasonable approximation of my outdoor walking distance. When…

This afternoon, I went to Auntie M’s house while the Furnace Guy serviced the furnace, making sure everything looked good for winter. I escorted the Furnace Guy to the basement stairs and watched him head down… swatting cobwebs out of his face with every step. Auntie M has always been known for catching wayward spiders with her bare hands and tossing them into her basement - rather than squishing them. It looks like her spider collection grew and decorated for Halloween 🕸️🎃 As the Furnace Guy…

The first recording today starts with the end of The Story of Tracy Beaker. Then it’s What’s New Scooby-Doo? – Diamonds Are a Ghoul’s Best Friend. An ice monster disrupts an Ice Hockey game being played in Russia to steal a diamond encrusted trophy. Velma really likes Hockey, apparently. At the game, a figure skater is brought on before the game, but just gets stuff thrown at her, which seems rude. Fred joins in with some supporters. The Russians think the captain of the US team is behind the…

“Running Around (83)” finds Valya Ying-Li Hooi once again working with long-time collaborator, Tarquin Manek, who himself caused quite a stir as Static Cleaner Lost Reward and the recently repressed “Breathing Under Honey”. The new single takes that album’s experimental dub direction, and, if anything, dives even deeper. The main body of the track is an immersive vapour. A slow, slow steady, tech skanking, with rolling bass rumbling and percussion hitting in short, sharp delayed snaps and…

The Steam Autumn Sale is here and uh, someone has ambushed my wallet. As usual, I went in with no plan and a magnetic pull toward the ‘add to cart’ button. I added eight new games and I think it’s safe to say my backlog is more of a small country at this point, it has its own economy and clearly no border control. Did I need any of these? No. Did I need any of these this week? Also no. Source

As a newsletter hawker who uses Buttondown, I appreciate that Buttondown has controls to manage how newsletter archives get crawled – by search engines, LLM tools, etc: Crawling settings. And I was chatting with James the other day and he had a clever page which uses checkboxes to create some interesting, game-like effects. I went deep on it: it was so fun to experiment with Pug and Sass: I am working on some Weird Web October submissions too: The other day the puzzle on CSS Battle was…