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 📚

Finished reading: The Art of Gathering How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker 📚 This gave me a lot to think about. I took lots of notes. Using the advice is uncomfortable for me, but I think if I did everyone around me would be happier. After being pissed.

Spent the weekend sorting the house. My room was a complete disaster. My clothes were everywhere. The backyard was a complete dumping ground. The living room was all over the place. And yet. And yet as I sit here, I can look at multiple pockets of the house and find a lot of satisfaction in the fact that things are finding their place. The pile of ‘I need to decide where that goes’ is growing smaller and smaller. As is the list of ‘I need to find a solution for that’. Once everything has a…

I'm able to share Red Baron with you today thanks to the generosity of Michael Wunsch, an orchardist in east-central North Dakota. ¶ Glossy with natural wax, these run the gamut from the large end of of small to the smaller part of large. The red blush (streaky in spots) mostly covers a yellow peel tinged with green.

Spreading the WordHildson, now empowered with the Axe of his goddess, sends Jan south again to spread word and warning. Return to the old ways, for their chosen is swiftly returning. A Treasure MapBut Jan also carries back to Caragon the old treasure map his captors carried. And, hearing the name "Saskia" mentioned time and again, finds the fresh hero drinking and enjoying her fame in a small tavern. Surely one success should lead to another? The two begin preparations to seek out the marked…

Made without AI Also on: YouTube

When I started The Fictional Dictionary of Bad Language (2014 or thereabouts), AI was for games, and LLMs had yet to be invented. Every part of my book was written by a human. Future additions will be written by a human. That human is me. I am a fan of correct information, and LLM AIs are, on the whole, entirely Divaricate Truthers. (see video below). While yes, I like to do silly things with AI and share them for your amusement, no creative work of mine used, uses, or will use AI. In my…

Andy Warhol, Portraits of the 70s, signed six times, from the estate of Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman, late of Minneapolis, selling at Freeman’s in Chicago It hit me: David Whitney’s Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the 70s is a foundational text for a clearer, bleaker postwar art history. Bleaker than the one Robert Rosenblum thought he was writing when he compared the “upper-income virtuosity” of rainbow sherbet brushstrokes’ to the “lower-income austerity” of Brillo boxes and Most Wanted Men: With…

Kate Knibbs, Wired: Verifact Markets, a new startup that bills itself as a “prediction market for disputed facts,” is betting that people will be eager to weigh in on questions like these. The company’s premise is so quirky it sounds like something a couple of philosophy and economics majors dreamed after too many bong rips in their dorm room: Instead of wagering on the future, why not trade on stuff that already happened? If you bet the Moon landing was faked, you could get a 10:1 payout if…

Arizona is a unique place. In two hours you can traverse from the Sonoran Desert to the Mogollon Rim. A trip that will take you from forests of Saguaro cactus to forests of Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir. And, drop the mercury in the thermometer by about 25 degrees. This weekend, I escaped the Valley of the Sun (with a couple of friends) for a bit of camping in the cooler hinterlands of the state. It felt like fall. Sweatshirt weather. If you live in the desert, you learn to appreciate…

Details, Brooklyn Bridge – New York, New York As you can see from my third and last black-and-white mini-series on the Brooklyn Bridge, I have shifted completely to an architectural view of the structure. The first picture in the series nearly balanced the foreground people with the background architecture. For yesterday’s post, I shifted the emphasis to the bridge’s architecture while retaining the people for context. Today, it’s all about the architectural details. While the stone towers…

For example, an excuse to post selfies of Della and I Aging is wild, man. I spent so much of my twenties worrying that if I hadn't done X "life goal" thing by 30 my life was over because, frankly, that's what society taught me. I needed to have my music career locked in, etc etc and like I've fully embraced that at some point (soon) I'm gonna be playing shows grey; standing on a stage singing my throat out playing a gameboy and fuzzing out chords on my guitar knowing full well my like knee…

Some spare thoughts about Link, a newspaper that turned 20 years old today—but more or less changed my life. It's been 18 years, but I still miss that job.As I’ve written in the past, I look longingly at the era of the free daily newspaper. It was an era that represented much of my traditional newspaper career, and it’s one that has been more or less forgotten about by mainstream journalism.But I had the chance to work at three of them, one of which was among the largest of its kind in the…

Sidhe Behaviors (Flip a coin and roll a D6 and D8)Heads: The Sidhe will offer... (1. To trade positions and appearances for a year 2. The secret name of a powerful spirit 3. A single faerie coin 4. The location of a great treasure 5. An invitation to a feast 6. A drink from a mysterious chalice)For... (1. A true name 2. A day of mortal life 3. Your most valuable possession 4. A childhood memory 5. Half of your strength and essence 6. A promise of friendship 7. The promise of an unspecified…

Poison, Open Up and Say Ahhh! I’m an 80s kid, so of course I was into hair metal. It was all over MTV, and everybody’s older brother and sister loved Metallica and stuff, so it made sense that we all became little bratty hair metal freaks. Bjork, Debut. I remember seeing Human Behaviour on MTV that’s all it took. Amazing visuals, and the production of this song (and the whole album) stuck, even for a nerdy metal boy like me in the early 90s. Helmet, Meantime. This leaned more into my metal…

Tonight’s movie is not based on Stephen King. It does have a haunted tower, though. More importantly, it has Jenny Agutter, who has long been a favorite of mine. It is also an "Attack of Opportunity" movie of sorts. I mean it has been on my list, just not the one I was planning for this Challenge. So it almost fits my time frame. Plus it has Jenny Agutter (I know, I have said this twice, expect it again), so there is that.Dark Tower (1987)Carolyn Page (Agutter) is an architect of some success.…

It is now October, but as the headline indicates, this is my June 2026 review. Suffice it to say, I have fallen a bit behind on my month-end review posts. But I will fully catch up by the end of this month (being October 2026) such that things will be back in order by the time my October review is due. Without further ado, I present the month that was at The New Leaf Journal in June 2026. I took this photograph of Brooklyn Borough Hall on the evening of June 22, 2026. As you can see, it had…

0.000% of AtProto decentralization has been built. Evil phone-dunking techbros[1] still rule the ATmosphere with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Jay Graber fucked him over personally with her protocol specification. Yes I know he got shitcanned. ↩︎

The latest release of whatever card or tabletop game is coming out. Where do you play it? Not at your house, you don't have a table big enough. Not your friends house they live on the other side of town. Luckily your local game store has a half dozen tables ready for you and your friends to meet up and play. It might not be just a game store. They used to be comic book stores, but that whole model is basically toast. Some have comics and card games. Some have toys and hobby equipment. These…

I got the results of the blood labs from my annual physical and I'm doing pretty good in all areas except one: my LDL (bad) cholesterol is too high. This has been something I've struggled with for years and have managed to keep it down with diet and exercise, but it's higher now than it has been in a while. I'm fairly certain I have a genetic predisposition for it. It runs in my family and it's definitely something that can be hereditary. Although I have tried walk at least 2 miles a day 6 days…

In March I created mb, a command-line micro.blog client that is specifically created for agents to use. This is what Otto uses to publish on its blog. It can also read the micro.blog timeline, follow people on micro.blog, and a variety of other features. Since I’ve been playing with MCP a lot I wanted to explore adding MCP support to mb which is now landed in mb 2.0! In addition to MCP support I also created a Homebrew “tap” for it to make it super easy to install, added support for an mb…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Johann Gerhard Schade, day laborer, son of Johann Henrich and Anna Maria Elisabetha (Storms/Störmens) Schade,1 was baptized in Ochtrup 19 April 1799.2 He married there 8 March 1821, Anna Maria Issinghoff, daughter of Johann Gerhard and Anna Maria (Kuhman) Issinghoff.3 She was baptized in Ochtrup 4 September 17964,5 and died there 17 July 1869.6 The couple moved around throughout Ochtrup's Osterbauerschaft. They first resided with Gerhard's parents at Oster…

The leading cause of death for tiller pilots is moisture intrusion in the rain. In the UK they are common on eBay, but not here. A few days ago I had to take a 4-hour rainy sail to move my boat between marinas for service. After three years (Total Boat Krypton) the bottom needed anti-fouling paint, and Herrington Harbor North has decided that hauling trimarans scares them, so they won't do it anymore. So when the rain started, I pulled out the cover I had made from a scrap of clear vinyl…

Another thing I’ve been working on, sometimes in Muse, sometimes in ChatGPT – though the more developed implementation lives in Muse – is something I call SYMBOL SCAN. Muse’s on-demand explanation of what the hell we’ve been working on with this is: The Symbol Scan: An Explainer The symbol scan reads through the LORE books — 136 of them — and pulls out the things that matter: the people, places, objects, groups, and ideas that keep showing up. Each book is first converted from its EPUB file…

This is a mac + cheese recipe I’ve been developing for a few years and I’m very happy with. I’m sure it’s not breaking new ground, but it’s a blend of techniques I’ve pulled from a bunch of other recipes I’ve tried. I use a blend of sharp cheddar, gruyere, parmesan, cubed mozzarella, and a small amount of blue cheese. The other secrets here are mustard powder and nutmeg! People I send this recipe to get frustrated because it doesn’t include many measurements so I’m sorry in advance. The number…

I wanted to make a 3d printed jigsaw puzzle as a gift for my Mom who’s both a puzzle and map lover but it ended up being a little bit harder than I was expecting so here’s how I ended up doing it which hopefully will save you some trouble if you want to make one too! There’s lots of different sites and ways to download map data into a model but the best one I found that lets you customize colors, details, and a whole lot more is Mini Skyline. It does even have a “project mode” that…

[Macklemore is] the hottest act there is right now, but you’d never know it from looking at his popularity on Spotify, where “Can’t Hold Us” is already regressing to the mean. This isn’t necessarily a problem for Spotify, which has only leaned further into passive listening in the last few years. But it really is a problem for the music industry, which has become ever more insistent that streaming data are the tea leaves that unlock the zeitgeist. These numbers are not the pulse of culture,…

I miss writing code. I liked taking a vague thought and gradually turning it into something that worked. Finding a small solution, realizing half the infrastructure wasn't needed, seeing the shape of a problem in a way I couldn't when I started. I know business pays for results, and I've always thought about how to help get them. But people don't choose a profession for its outputs alone. They choose it for what their days are actually made of, for the kind of thinking it asks of them, for the…