Sponsored: This article is made possible by The Last Weapon, supporting quality and engaging Catholic content. In the cosmic battle between good and evil that rages both in the heavens and in human hearts, Catholics have long recognized that we are not defenseless. We have been given powerful spiritual weapons. Chief among our protectors stands … Continue reading Why Mary is Our Surefire Protector in Spiritual Battle The post Why Mary is Our Surefire Protector in Spiritual Battle first appeared…

There's something wonderfully comforting about a good tea loaf, and this Banana, Rum, Date & Walnut Loaf is one of those bakes that feels like a little treasure. Simple ingredients, big flavour, and the perfect way to use up those over-ripe bananas we all seem to have hanging around. This recipe brings together mashed, freckled bananas, a splash of dark rum, sticky dates and plenty of toasted walnuts for a deep nutty crunch. The result is a moist, rich loaf with layers of flavour - fruity,…

It's now 15 years since the Olympic neighbourhood of Pudding Mill got its name and 14 years since the Games skedaddled. And yet the number of homes in this new residential neighbourhood remains zero, indeed not a single foundation has yet been dug. Who says there's a housing shortage? What Pudding Mill does have is a world-class tourist attraction in the form of the Abba Arena, supposedly temporary but still doing great business which makes it hard to remove. The Voyage show was initially only…

Donald Trump Is Getting Desperate, Part I: Policy Maybe there will be a blue wave/tsunami on November 3, and maybe not. You can't be sure, of course, until the ballots are counted. What you can be sure of, however, is that everyone thinks a blue wave/tsunami is coming. That includes the media, the pollsters, the psephologists (including us), the Democratic pooh-bahs and the Republican pooh-bahs. In the past 48 hours or so, Donald Trump has shown that he is absolutely scared witless. And part of…

Does anyone know of a reputable package forwarding company that ships to Norway from Germany, Denmark, or the UK? I need to get my plushtodons somehow #Plushtodon #AskFedi

Tuesday 6th October 2026 London’s Ash Grove bus garage in Hackney marked its 45th anniversary this year (yes, just a spring chicken in age terms) by holding an Open Day on Saturday in association with another of the London Bus Museum’s ever popular running days – this one involving route 106 between Finsbury Park and Limehouse, which coincidentally runs past Ash Grove garage. Due to other commitments on many weekends I’m rarely free to attend such events, but last weekend was an exception so I…

[1980]Power pop party time people!Pop-rock perfection from one and done Milwaukee group The Orbits. A brief little burst of exuberant hook laden power pop. Choice!

Krolok: Hričov – Súľov – LietavaOut 25th September on Osmose Productions Slovakia’s Krolok continue to grow into their skin with this third offering. A finely balanced ingredients list drawn from central European black metal, from Graveland, to early Root, Cult des Ghoules, and ethereal folk elements lifted from Romanian acts like Negura Bunget. But ‘Hričov – Súľov – Lietava’ emerges as an entity all its own within this broad tradition, one that knits together the primal darkness of the deep…

The light is fading, trust to let go, not to latch on.

Colombia, Vanilla’s New Production Hub in the WorldA speech given during the Barcelona Perfumery Congress last year by Ricardo Ramos, Independent Perfumer of Colombian Origin based in Granada/Spain."With an estimation of more than 4300 species of orchids, Colombia is a country with a major diversity of this beautiful botanical species in the world, having more than its 35% native from

I started GUIdebook in 2003, and last updated it exactly twenty years ago. It’s an interesting time capsule itself now, incompatible with mobile reading and sporting an aged design. I have kept it up because it’s apparently used as a reference in various user interface courses, and if you haven’t seen it, it could be a fun browse. I walked away from it by accident, distracted by a new job, but I always wanted to evolve it into something better as my storytelling skills and my interactive skills…

Did live visuals for a concert in a large church

I now have a /photo slash page, inspired by Robert Birming. This month we have the suburb marker for Asquith in northern Sydney: This is not to be confused with WHAM’s Edge of Heaven, though the spring weather was quite lovely. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-06.

There’s a game I really love called Signalis; in fact, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. In it, you follow the odyssey of Elster, a synthetic android with feminine characteristics who is searching for her ship’s pilot, who disappeared after a crash. Yes, there’s a lot of Yuri in this story, and the lesbian relationship between its protagonists is explicit. However, it’s also so many other things. It’s a story about loss. About the fall of totalitarian regimes. It talks about fascism.…

When the Free Ship Edgar’s Folly abandons John on the alien world of Scythia, he needs to find a way to not only survive, but thrive. Chock-full of ideas, this was an interesting read that nevertheless failed to grab me like The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For did. The world-building is good with Scythia feeling very cohesively and comprehensively alien. There is a diverse cast of characters, but I struggled to care about any of them. They felt distant, always seeming at a slight remove,…

A recurring bit in *BoJack Horseman*, one of my favorite shows ever, is that much of the world is run by "AOL-Time-Warner-PepsiCo-Viacom-Halliburton-Skynet-Toyota-Trader Joe's." The dystopian conglomerate gets larger as the show goes on. Over the past few months, as I've been thinking about how to position my next startup, I’ve been asking myself what its moat will be against the labs, which keep absorbing features from apps built on them. In the olden days, the advice was not to fear Google.…

First the LLMs claimed my use of em-dashes, and the Claude took “load-bearing” from me. Go emulate someone else, FFS.

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly caustic sensibility: “So many grateful and impetuous spirits have recently come forward to tell to an approving world how they have been benefited by their early reading and by their wisely chosen favorites in literature that the trustful listener begins to think, against his own rueful experience, that all books must be pleasant and profitable companions.”…

Saturday, and exhibition time again (avoiding cleaning my youngest’s new property.) Allan couldn’t think of a suitable breakfast near Fareham, so we diverted to the Station Yard Cafe in Alton – for the usual excellent breakfast. We then trundled down to Fareham on a completely new road to me – the A32. An old-style ‘A’ road, single lane winding through pretty countryside and the occasional village. The show was excellent and well worth the visit. I’ll start with two familiar layouts that are…

Back to writing Korean progress reportTable of contentsIntroductionGoalsJourney so farWhat I'm doing right nowChange of paceAnkiLanguage exchange groupsSo this is how they get meNavel gazingArtifactingConclusion Introduction (§) This is a bit of a journal entry, a bit of a progress report, a bit of a snapshot of my Korean learning progress. I've never given a progress report on my Korean study despite making passing mention of it as far back as 2020 in other articles. There are reasons for…

This was a very crazy week I have to say, full of unexpected surprises and the like, as such, the things that happened kind of have to be more than listicles this time around, we will resume the usual style for future weeknotes, probably, or not! In any case, here are some events of note that happened from September 29 to October 5, 2026. 🎩 I fell on a Fool Us rabbit hole. It’s a show where magicians all over the world try to fool Penn & Teller—one of the best magicians with a long history and…

The "padding" on the beds and sofa in the barge is made from pieces of pre-cut MDF, to be covered by the builder. I raided my mum's material scraps for something suitable. These aren't big cushions, but it's a modelling job I've never done before. Each piece was wrapped, and glued along one side with PVA, held with a couple of small bulldog clips. Then I was distracted, and left them for a couple of weeks. Coming back to the task, the material had stuck, but I needed to work around curved…

OK, so while most figures this year will tie into the Trick or Treat Through 31 Days of Toy Terror theme of figures related to Halloween in some way, the Wolf Man is just one of my cheats. I mean, is there ever a real reason to not review one of the Universal Monsters? The Wolf Man is my favorite and I was really excited to see him pop up in Series 2 of Just Play's Tiny Nightmares minifigures. I reviewed the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein last year (from series 1)…

I play an idle tower-defense game called The Tower. A run at my tier takes 19 to 30 minutes and pays out about 30 million coins. Then a GAME STATS dialog pops up and waits for me to click RETRY. If I’m asleep, the game sits on that dialog and earns nothing. Ten hours of that is somewhere between 20 and 30 runs, or 600 to 900 million coins, left on the table. So I wrote a bot to click the button. One Python file, about 150 lines, one small PNG. The Bet Auto-upgrade and auto-perks are already…

I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. I got up and just felt miserable, didn't get nearly enough sleep. Had horrible nightmares. I got to work and a bunch of people called out sick, and some people who were clearly also sick were still there. My tooth was hurting, which happens once in a while. My partner tried to cheer me up with ribs, and I just ended up chewing on a bunch of cartilage. I had random bouts of nausea throughout the day. And I ended the night bored and unhappy.…

Everybody loves cartoons. Ain’t it fun cuddling up under the blanket or plopping down on the plushy seats and getting absorbed in the tall tales about lost clown fish, tough-talking great white sharks, or Parisian sewer rats with dreams of becoming five-star chefs? Yes, after the movie starts rolling and you fall into the cartoon fantasy, there’s always that moment where a new character enters the story and starts stealing the scene. And everyone recognizes the voice and everyone knows the…

Pan Am is a 2020 game by Peter Lee and Prospero Hall. One thing I find interesting about Prospero Hall is they are a whole team of people designing games together. They have been involved in many games, including several big titles. I think they work on not only the game mechanisms, but also the whole product design. The box cover of Pan Am certainly caught my eye

I attended a Celebration of Life on the weekend. My partner's friend's friend L passed away far too young and L's family and friends put together an event. It was lovely, and moving, and judging by the sheer number of people that attended (and mourned), the whimsy of the event (guests were encouraged to take little bags of candy, because L loved candy, and little envelopes of seeds, because L loved plants and nature), the amount of work that went into the event, and the content of the speeches,…

Started reading: Joyful Recollections of Trauma by Paul Scheer 📚