There's a possibility of me attending a Mordheim campaign weekend later in the autumn, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to have a break from sci-fi minis and do something fantasy (it must be at least a decade since I last played a game of Mordheim, and I think that might have just been a one-off game).It was a toss-up between skaven and possessed, but in the end I went for a Nurgle-themed possessed warband (they will also do double duty as a Frostgrave warband). These guys are primarily…

Paradise is not lost, the world is not ending, and most material metrics of humanity have never been better. Yet the endless, incessant dooming about the climate, the inequality, and AI is everywhere. We may have killed God, but we clearly didn't bury the devil's anxieties with him.Yes, we're born with a negativity bias to keep us safe from starvation, saber-toothed tigers, and rival tribes. Good! But you don't have to let your caveman instincts run your whole life. The gift of fear — when the…

Marvel Comics: Comic book fans will soon have a new way to discover, read, and follow the stories they love: the new Marvel Comics app. Attendees at New York Comic Con this week will be the first to preview the new app in a booth experience on the show floor (Booth #2435). Officially launching November 16, the new Marvel Comics app will make it easier than ever for fans to find and read the stories they love with a single convenient subscription. This will be replacing Marvel Unlimited, the…

Orson Welles is probably lauded more as a director than actor, though he started out

This is a sequel to the well loved piece, Stars, Tentacles, and Healing Embrace. It is recommended to read the first installment prior to this one.I have been struggling latelywith my own sense of connection, and with aspects of my own humanity, and with how these things relate.When I was a child, I awoke one night wrapped in my blanket and sheet. I had tossed and turned and was wrapped so tightly I thought I would never escape.I enjoy the wholeness of a long embrace.I yearn for affection of…

Elizabeth auditioned for the Aberdeen Gilbert and Sullivan Society last week and not only did she get in, but she also landed the part of Melissa in Princess Ida, which they’ll be performing at the Tivoli Theatre next March. To say she’s excited would be an understatement. Melissa has a number of singing parts and quite a bit of dialogue, so Elizabeth is absolutely overjoyed. Aberdeen’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society was founded in 1976 by and for students at the University of Aberdeen but…

Yesterday morning, my friend and I went and visited Val’s Bakery, which you may remember I featured in a post earlier last year. It was her first time there, so I was glad to introduce her to such a nice spot. We bought a few pastries each to take home with us, got some coffee, and sat and talked for about an hour, at which point they were closing up shop. We were packing up our things to leave when one of the workers asked us if we wanted any pastries for free, otherwise they were all going to…

The main purpose of my collection of notes, organised according to the Zettelkasten principle, is to help me complete writing projects, mainly small but sometimes large too. I’m always jotting down thoughts and ideas to use in my ever-expanding blog empire. For example, for some time I’ve been making notes on ideas about data structures. Soon these notes will see the light of day as an article or two. And I’m constantly working on larger projects which inch very slowly towards fruition. At the…

Act 2: Scene 1 A new phase of life. October 1989 . . .Late autumn, just before winter takes place.Enter my time in the Upstate, New York mountainsEnter my moments of subtle awareness that became too painful and obvious to avoid.Enter my moments of truth and enter the awakening that I had lived, believed, and that I surrendered and subscribed to a series of lies, deceptions, and internal dishhonesties.Enter all of this Enter my time which was elsewhere, aside from where I deserved to be, which…

We were joined this week by J.B. Branch, the Director of Federal AI Governance and Technology Policy for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division: Apple Spotify YouTube

While researching the formats to support I’ve finally encountered an animation format for CGA, from the times when H.261 was ratified (i.e. 1988) but a bit simpler than that format. Essentially it’s RLE-compressed CGA memory buffers either in 640×400 monochrome or 320×200 eye-gouging 2-bit colour mode. RLE has a twist as instead of the usual mode switch or symbol repeating it sends the list of symbols that have run lengths after them. The hardest part was to actually render the resulting frame.…

As a habitual early adopter, I couldn't help but install my own instance of littleFedi and kick the tires. It didn't take long before I decided to move there. I liked the software immediately. It was fast, simple (considering all the features), and easy to install. I put up a poll on Mastodon asking if I should just go for it and migrate to littleFedi or should I post something on Mastodon pointing to the new handle. Within just a few minutes I had enough votes (13 to 0) in favor of fully…

Heckuva week. Hanami Minitest had started failing its scheduled builds due to our ongoing work on Hanami’s reloading support. I fixed it here and here. (Why do I mention such small things here in my weeknotes? Because these are just as important aspects of maintenance as everything else—fixing broken windows—and it all takes time.) Adam merged Alexander’s transient attribute support into Rom Factory, a very handy improvement!Adam also finished updating Rom Factory for our repo-sync, and I…

I’ve been thinking recently about the beautiful parallel structures that allow simple procedures in D&D to represent the dungeon, the wilderness and in the city. I think of the grammar of the game as being the same regardless of the terrain or situation. When I say grammar, I mean the rules about the way the actions in a game are put together, regardless of what kind of environment is present, in the same way that the grammar of a language governs the way a sentence is put together, regardless…

Before the Hamptons dinner parties became iconic, there was The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook: Ina’s first book, full of the generous, crowd-pleasing food that made people fall in love with her in the first place. I cooked all 1,300+ Ina Garten recipes in no particular order over the six years of the project, but I did decide to complete each cookbook in the order it was released starting with The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook which I finished just in time for the 20th anniversary of its release. Now…

And just like that we're in October. On a personal level, week 24 started in the middle of the week. In 9 days my wife will have been pregnant for half a year! My mind is blown...there is so much we have yet to do. There's also a lot going on in our lives that we can't control that is interfering with our planning, but I don't want to get into that. It was a good week though, with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in the middle to break up the work week. I'll be honest, I didn't do…

ATTENTION MINIONS:Just a PSA to let you know your friendly neighborhood wreckerators have been MOST productive this week.Check out what's "Coming Soooooon." (It's actually supposed to read "Boooo," but my version is way scarier when you throw sperm into the mix, am I right?) (Granted, almost EVERYTHING edible is scarier when you... sorry. I'll stop now.) Yeah. My thoughts exactly, little guys.(Look at their little arm floaties! D'awwwww. So adorable.) Of course, as we ladies know, it only takes…

It has been another epic fundraising year for Relay’s September campaign for Childhood Cancer Awareness. I am just back from Memphis, where we hosted our 12-hour Podcastathon, live from the studio at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which was amazing.This week is a busy one, so stay tuned to a likely ever-changing status on what I’m getting up to.Thank you to everyone who followed, shared, and donated to our campaign. I’ll have more on the wrap-up in the coming days, so stay tuned.…

2026-10-05Hello!I've messed with two parts of the exposure triangle before: the shutter speed and the aperture. I can make motion go by in a blur and shorelines as clear as glass. I can make the sun peek through in starry spokes, and create that fancy depth look that smartphone cameras are trying to replicate.Now, I'm messing around with the final leg: the ISO. This is a digital process rather than the mechanical timings of a shutter or the calibrated screws of an aperture blade. Changing the…

[It’s not actually supposed to be pronounced “Shh-wheeee-bee-baa-nn”, but I’m not letting that stop me.] Kathryn Xu rode the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, and she loved it. Before my trip to Germany, I declared this desire to ride the Wuppertal Schwebebahn to many of my close friends, and also several strangers. Some people thought it sounded pretty cool. Others said they were happy for me. More than once I was accused of making up words. Should I ever find myself in or near Wuppertal, Germany, I will…

✏️ Day 5 of #inktober. Feeling better and supporting my son during his basketball game.

Finally booked a trip. Off to San Francisco at the end of the month. The plan is to split time pretty evenly between the city and nature. We’ll base in Pacific Heights, check off the big city tourist spots, and then grab a rental to cross the bridge and hit Muir Woods and the Marin Headlands. I recently got the “Gold Star & Veteran” America the Beautiful pass, so national park access and parking are free for life. My wife jokingly said that I spent thousands on a trip just so I can use a pass…

Provided that the City of London remains as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop. Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914)

Among the first games we play with our babies is some version of give-and-take. We show an object to them and they take it from us wth their little fingers. As they get a little older, they often enjoy a more advanced version of the game in which they hand the item back to us, then take it again, then give, then take, delighting in the pattern, the cooperation, the interaction. Over time, we stop recognizing it as a game, it's just part of how we interact as we play with our kids. If they…

It’s amazing the scale of what has happened at Kilauea volcano over a little more than a year and a half. Since the current eruption started in December 2024, the caldera has been filled with 0.31 km3 of new lava. A very respectable amount. In a series of 54 fountain episodes, the eruption has raised…

Sometimes, I ask myself, do I really need another Mini PC? But more recently, because of the RAMpocalypse, I’ve found myself looking at the price and thinking “Okay, why not?” Today’s review candidate comes from ACEMAGIC, the sister company of the (slightly more well-known) Kamrui and part of Minipc Union. The Kron Mini K1 comes with an AMD Ryzen Embedded R2544 SoC, in eseence an upgraded version of what is in the HP t640 thin-clients, paired with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 256GB SSD, with GbE, Wi-Fi 5…

More clouds than sun, with walnut trees undressing in the wind, and the leaves on the porch turning over like restless sleepers. The periodic bang of a walnut landing on the back roof is loud as a gunshot.

Ten Gallon Hat(Elsie Wilks, Wilks Music BMI) What Do I Want(Gene Dunlap, Wilks Music BMI)Hitt Records 11191964Baytown, Texas* Elsie Wilks, the boss-lady of the Texas firm, Hitt Records, wrote "Ten Gallon Hat" a song inspired by President Johnson's presenting ten-galllon hats to his visiting celebrities. The song "just released will be introduced in Baytown at a teen dance at the Firemen's Hall" (Baytown Sun, August 9, 1964, Sandy Fontaine, from Houston, performed the song several times in and…

October sort of arrived without warning, so I don’t have much to post this time around. Life, as always, has been busy and I’ve been slacking on saving good links. But at least I’ve got a handful of good ones for you to enjoy!Time is Running OutThis is your reminder that your time is limited. Do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Make the things you’ve always wanted to make. Put yourself first every once in a while. Stop wasting your finite amount of time on people and things that make you…

Pretty nice day today. Did my walk and then did the 70-pound farmer's carry. Oof. Did three trips down and back, got my heart rate over 150 bpm at the end of each one. Felt a lot like when I started out with the 60-pound effort, so it's not too discouraging. Put a few pics up at Flickr. Fall foliage isn't anywhere near peak yet, but it's looking pretty good for some reds this year. The beat goes on... ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:35 Monday, 5 October 2026