I've already been faffing today- did I choose the right banjo take? Would the clawhammer be better, scratching away? I tried it, and it isn't- but I'll do just a vocal and clawhammer mix for fun later on.I've been running through the songs: my smashed fingers rip still a bit dicey but it'll do for the gig next Sunday.I'm also within sneezing distance of finishing the pilot community radio show I'm doing. I've interviewed Molly Tie and Johny Brown ( postcard from Newcastle and postcard to…

Trollhättan is the 23rd-largest city in Sweden, the seat of Trollhättan Municipality, Västra Götaland County. It is situated by Göta älv, near the lake Vänern, and has a population of approximately 50,000 in the city proper. It is located 75 km (46 mi) north of Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg. Spring Johnny! which means Run Johnny! in Swedish, hailed from that town, Trollhättan, the 23rd largest of the country. What does Trollhättan means? Yes, it means troll’s hat. Great name for a…

Last edited 0 minutes ago. I socialized so much recently. Nothing like getting back to my roots I guess. And my kitty is with me in the move back home. I got my two cats now living with me under the same roof, and it feels good. Also I voted yesterday, despite the outcomes… You can reply via email or leave a message on my guestbook.

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 800. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

Nicholas Grossman is definitely onto something...: There have always been humans who thought: 1) The world will end soon 2) It will happen in a cool, exciting way 3) It’ll happen to me personally 4) I’ll be a martyred prophet, or a warlord, or otherwise special 5) People who don’t see this are lesser “Sexy apocalypse” is a great phrase for that[image or embed]— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 6:17 AMGrossman was commenting on this Techdirt piece by Mike…

“That is why you must freely and recklessly make new mistakes - in writing or in life - and do not fret about them but pass on and write more. Active evil is so much better than passive good, which is just docility, feebleness, timidity. And do not try to be consistent, for what is true to you today may not be true at all tomorrow, because you see a better truth. “For when you begin to plan such a huge edifice of words, your heart fails you. It is too hard, it will never get done, it is too…

Fifty-odd years later, the original version of Tony Williams’ Lifetime remains the most exciting band I ever saw. At Ungano’s in New York in the autumn of 1970, the three-piece Lifetime, with Larry Young on Hammond organ and John McLaughlin on guitar, produced a howling noise that seemed to take music into the next dimension. It was jazz, it was rock, it was somehow psychedelic, it was all of those things and none of them, with the burners turned right up. In that time and place, made by a trio…

I don't expect anything good to happen, and I'm positive everything will get worse, yet, somehow I'm not pessimistic enough for my expectations to meet reality.

Her People had need of weapons and ways, defense for forest city. Lady of Rain caused city’s trees to dig down deeply into the earth. The roots dug out rooms and formed into walls, creating homes safe and dry. The People gathered their household items and moved in under the ground. Beneath the soil the roots hollowed roads connecting all of the homes. People could do work and visit others. There too were plazas and parks. The forest swallowed all of the buildings except for the Child God’s…

Maximilian Pirner, "Funeral of a Fairy"The following tale comes from Dermot MacManus’ 1973 book, “The Middle Kingdom: The Faerie World of Ireland.” Whether the narrator encountered ghosts, fairies, or, well, something else, it is certainly one of the more unusual alleged encounters with supernatural beings.The next account I have is of a very different kind of being. One might be tempted to classify it as a ghost rather than an elemental, but taking everything into consideration I feel that it…

Time for some updates, isn’t it? So for the last few months I’ve taken mostly off of work for personal reasons (no worries, I’m doing well!). I’m ramping back up now. During that time I’ve not maintained full radio silence, but I’ve not done much more work other than basic maintenance, some wrapping up of projects, and a little post here or there — in other words, nothing major, and it’s been good. I’m very happy I had the opportunity to do that, I needed a bit of a mental reset. –x– As you…

The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram on the Moon, imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISROOn August 23, 2023 at 12:33 UTC, India’s robotic Chandrayaan 3 robotic lander completed the 19 minutes of its nerve-wracking autonomous descent to the Moon. In one piece and upright, it now lay near the lunar south pole at the coordinates 69.37°S, 32.32°E. The triumphant touchdown made India only the fourth nation to achieve the feat of a soft lunar landing, following the former…

Following the cancellation of his Spectrum 10K project, Simon Baron-Cohen has a new research project for which the University of Cambridge has received $34.5m from the philanthropist Lisa Yang. I made a couple of freedom of information requests to the University of Cambridge to get its grant agreement, as again, it was not published. (See my page Shining some light on large controversial autism research projects for the grant agreements of Spectrum 10K and AIMS-2-Trials as well as some…

By Howard ShirleyParzoval GamesOSRLevel 1 A beautiful bride, a handsome groom, a starlit wedding… and GOBLINS! At least you have a wedding present for the young couple— a promise to rescue the kidnapped groom! This 26 page adventure uses about six pages to describe ten rooms in a small goblin lair. Lots of read-aloud. Lots of stabbin. Lots of text, in general. Oh, also, your level ones get to save the world. *YAWN* You’re at a wedding. You’ve haven’t brought your weapons and you’re not wearing…

A decade ago, we celebrated the story of a guy who sued his workplace for boring him half to death. I found myself wondering what came of him. Did he win his case? Did he find another job? Did he take his winnings and live on a yacht? The myth-busting website Snopes has part of the answer: a court in Paris ruled that Frédéric Desnard’s employer had subjected him to “moral harassment” and bullying, including deliberately subjecting him to “bore-out” at work. And: Mere boredom was far from the…

That’s the working title of an academic essay I’ve been drafting. Most of the material comes from comics featuring the KKK-inspired supervillians Hate-Monger or Sons of the Serpent, stories I’ve been exploring off-and-on here for the past few years. The 1990 comic I’m looking at right now instead features the one-off “Xenophobic Man,” who is less a supervillain and more a direct reference to real-world vigilante murderers working within the Border Patrol in the 1970s and 80s. I’ll start by…

I have a new favorite analogy for when people ask how work is going. It’s been six months since I moved from a large company to a very small one, and the shift feels like moving from a container ship to a leaky boat. A large company is a container ship. You’re out on the same ocean as everyone else, but you barely feel the waves given the size of the thing. You have one specific job, the ship has a course, and it has enough telemetry and momentum that it mostly just keeps going where it’s…

Hauling service The Junkluggers announced a new luxury tier today called “Enlèvement d’encombrants,” designed specifically for downsizing baby boomers who refuse to admit that decades of accumulated solid oak furniture is just heavy trash.The service is functionally identical to the company’s standard operation. A few men in steel-toed boots still park a flatbed truck at the curb, carry massive items down the driveway, and dump them directly into a county landfill. However, crew members now…

Saturday, October 17, 2026 18:00–19:30 CEST / 12:00–13:30 EDT Online · 1.5 hours (recording will be available) Price: €60 Register here What has 2026 brought us in perfume? For this special 90-minute class, we will smell and discuss some of the year’s most interesting new releases, while looking at the larger trends shaping contemporary perfumery. We will explore new launches from Guerlain and Matière Première, discuss Dior’s reformulations of its classics, and smell a selection of recent niche…

WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE Could a Pill Replace Injections for Diabetic Retinopathy Treatment? CGM Use in the ICU Needs a Clear Plan All About C-Peptide Can Dexcom Regain Trust With G8? Gut Microbiome Maturation in Early Childhood May Help Predict Type 1 Diabetes Risk Compassion and Mindfulness Training for Adolescents With T1D and Their Caregivers NEWS FROM T1DTO100 T1Dto100’s FIRST OUTING!

Theft. That's the (accurate) way AI detractors frame the corrupt buildout of so-called "AI" training data.It's not just theft, though. As we covered a few weeks ago here on The Review, AI-adjacent companies are committing cultural genocide by destroying rare, precious books in the pursuit of more data to train Large Language Models on.The problem is, this isn't anything "AI" is asking for. No matter how the ketamine-fueled CEOs or their overpaid marketing stooges frame it, AI is not agentic. AI…

March 1902 saw the gradual completion of the mansard roof framing and the masonry facades of the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building.” The following three pairs of photos, from March 4, 18, and 26, show the Fifth Avenue (west) and 55th Street (north) sides. Note that the windows were being temporarily boarded in, presumably to allow interior construction to move ahead before the actual windows were available for installation. Also note the large boiler flue at the southeast…

I’m focusing on more care, compassion and kindness toward myself lately. It’s small things like just stopping and taking deep breaths and genuine breaks, letting go of arbitrary deadlines for myself that are not needed and stepping away from certain topics or blog posts for a while until I can handle them again. Muting some things, checking when I have the mood and time. I’m putting in effort to spend almost each morning on my balcony for a bit; a habit I had initially started quite a while ago…

Stewart Fails to Save the Universe Wow... so, I went into this with low expectations. I mean, I liked the cast and their characters from The Big Bang Theory, and I even appreciated the attempt to do soemthing different, but after this series ran its course, I really have no idea what the point was. It had one of the worse endings I've ever seen for a TV show, and I really felt like nothing was accomplished other than a few guest spots from the cast you'd rather see. This was a HUGE…

Todays TDC says “Imagine how you might feel about your writing if instead of typing it on a computer or writing it longhand you were dictating it to a baby elephant holding a stylus in his trunk.” This provocation comes from Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in life and art, p37-8. The suggestion is that inspiration comes straight from the heart, but sometimes needs to be explained or translated. Our Muse is the vehicle of that translation. What would you dictate to that baby…

Recent additions to the Heap of Links… How should we react to scary predictions about AI? “First: by asking questions” — “If you believe predictions uncritically, it amounts to obeying in advance,” says Carissa Véliz “I feel unbelievably lucky that I was able to make philosophy my profession” — Karen Ng reflects on her path into philosophy, at #first-genphilosophers The ordinary concept of knowledge “doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does” — a round-up of studies shows how weird…

For a few months now, I've had these words on my about page: My goal for this year is to fully embrace discomfort Today I want to talk about my journey with this. Uncomfortable Situations Feeling uneasy or worried tends to be unbearable for me. When I'm there, I usually can't focus on anything else, and I will ruminate endlessly on the situation that's affecting me. It can be something physical, like being in a plane without leg room and having a claustrophobia flare-up. In that case, there are…

Ben Thompson: what struck me about Gurman’s article is just how unenthused I am by an Apple smarthome product. Some of this is fatigue from a decade of Siri disappointment and skepticism about the company’s ability to deliver on a voice-centric product. More than that, however, I bristle at the idea of introducing Apple’s constraints to more parts of my life. I've been surprised that I feel much the same way. ✍️ Reply by email

Why is the far right winning in Europe? Germany’s AfD party has won two state elections in a month; nearly one in four Europeans now votes far right, and in three of the continent’s five biggest economies the far right either leads or governs. The way that we’re opposing it clearly isn’t working. So what should the left, and we as organisers, do now?To answer these questions I interviewed my colleague, Julijana Zita (who lives in a German village where many people vote AfD). And on Friday, I…

This is my entry for the RetroChallenge of 2026. While I skipped it last year, you can see the amazing things I’ve done with a Nokia Booklet 3G in the 2024 RetroChallenge err… Challenge. What is RetroChallenge you ask? Retro Challenge was setup to encourage people all across the globe to challenge themselves for a month and document their achievements in the process! The ACMS has been involved for many years, and this year they are stepping up to help make the challenge even more exciting.…