Looking southeast from Langer Eugen on the UN campus in Bonn, past the Post Tower (DHL headquarters) and the Rhine, toward the Siebengebirge rising above morning fog. Autumn mornings along the Rhine often trap mist in the valley while the hills stay clear. Looking out from Langer Eugen just before eight with a low fog across the Rheinaue and the river and the peaks of the Siebengebirge rising out of the mist. It's worth getting in early.

Elizabeth Jolley is not an author I’ve ever come across before, but when I saw The Well on NetGalley I decided to give it a try. It sounded intriguing and suitably dark for the RIP XXI challenge. Originally published in 1986, the book has recently been reissued by Virago with a new introduction by Alice Slater. I saved the introduction until the end in case of spoilers, but it’s definitely worth going back and reading it. The novel opens late at night with two women driving home from a party.…

River pirates, sneak thieves, pickpockets, confidence men—New York City in 1896 was grappling with rising rates of relatively new crimes that threatened the safety of Gilded Age Gotham. But tthe city’s police force, led by robust crimefighter Theodore Roosevelt, decided to crack down on another troubling offense: discarded banana peels on public roadways. No, it wasn’t a gag invented by vaudeville theater and silent films. People in the turn of the century city really did used to slip on banana…

And so, the 2026 holiday season begins. Stores have had Halloween decorations up since July. Christmas decorations started appearing in late July and early August and are in full swing now.I’m the holiday decorator in our household… big surprise! And because I do the decorating (and no one else much cares), I’ve established a set of rules for decorating. Of course, I’m the only one who has to follow them, so they can be altered or modified at will. For instance, Halloween decorations cannot go…

What Trades Told: Paramounts on Parade, Frank Wants Back In, and Adults Only PleaseRe Broadway's legendary Paramount Theatre (interior above), how’s addressing sheer vast of the place, a closest millions came to entering a king’s palace, let alone as welcome guests, not sweeping ash but treated like royals manor born. I personally never stood in a so-called “movie palace,” crumbled remnants of a few, yes, a more sad than satisfying experience. Ever visit such ruins? They're like Pompeii after…

Barbara Cartland is the gift that keeps giving.Last week I did a post on Matthew Sweet's wonderful new book, a biography of Barbara, The Great Dictator.Barbara Cartland: Give Pink a ChanceI was going to do another post about her anyway, specifically on her books, but then an equally important aspect took centre stage.The author liked my review, and also asked about Barbara's fashion sense. And then.... blogfriend Daniel Milford Cottam, staunch supporter of Clothes in Books and remarkable…

A quiet-ish week between 28 September and 4 October, bookended by a Cardboctober anniversary and an Enigma machine rabbit hole. All first shared on social.omgmog.net.

Ample stability implies rigidity for quiver moduli (with Gianni Petrella) is a new paper that gets rid of an annoying technical condition in our earlier paper Rigidity and Schofield's partial tilting conjecture for quiver moduli (and subsequent papers building on the vanising results in this paper). Recall that, for a dimension vector $\mathbf{d}$ and a stability parameter $\theta$ with $\theta(\mathbf{d})=0$, we have the following three properties: Ample stability means that the complement of…

I've been playing The Incident at Galley House recently with some of the family and it's been really good. The nonlinear structure and how it easily gives you plenty of leads to pursue. We've been using a mix of the in-game note system and our own personal notes to keep track of everything, because while the in-game options are swell, having an additional set of notes helps keep things sorted. Still relatively early in the overall mystery, I think, but it's been very compelling so far. Playing…

2026 fantasy anthology, stories in Roberts' Teacup Magic setting.

I recently wrapped up my play-by-post (PbP) Mutant Future campaign on rpol.net. I had mixed feelings about its ending: on one hand it was nice to see the adventure come to a satisfactory ending. On the other hand it was a bit sad too, as it was a fun game and I will miss playing in it with some very cool players. PbP is inherently slow, so this game took us almost three years to get through. Like most games that go for a while, I will miss the other players the most. There were some really good…

The old classroom model simply doesn’t fit our changing needs….It’s a fundamentally passive way of learning, while the world requires more and more active processing of information.(Salman Khan, The One World Classroom (2012) From Francis Parker to John Dewey to Ella Flagg Young, to Vito Perrone to Deborah Meier to Theodore Sizer, complaints about the “old classroom model” have echoed through university lecture halls, academic monographs, conference papers, and in education blogs. Criticism of…

There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust. Thomas Bernhard I spend a considerable amount of time every week walking the same routes, leaving my mind free to think, wander, and wonder. I value that time greatly because it’s where so much creative problem solving happens for me. Bernhard, Thomas. Walking. University…

I’m super excited to introduce you to RocketTrace: a Mac app that analyzes your Xcode Instruments recordings and turns them into ranked findings that your AI agent can act on. Instead of asking Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to dig through a raw performance trace, you give it a compact summary with the evidence it … → The post Introducing RocketTrace: Using Xcode Instruments with AI Agents appeared first on SwiftLee.

Daily Drawing 1009

A week of links spotted on the internet. For even more, try last weeks set found here or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival. Bloggie-nominated. Originally inspired by weaver.skepti.ch, delinked by request. gamemastereno hosts Torquetober! baktegon hosts Norman Mailer Mail-in Game Jam Shigure hosts The Queer Medieval Jam portals and pegasi gives us The Goblin Market (Dolmenwood) Roles, Rules, and Rolls shares Midkemia's Matrix: Rationality Unbound I Cast Light! posts SAVE…

What am I doing? Not a Masters (NaM) Unit 1: The Stories I Tell Myself The Assignment Legitimacy Manifesto — Write a manifesto stating why my art is legitimate. How to Write a Manifesto Step 1: Roll your eyes Another manifesto? Really? Don’t we have more than enough “manifestos” on the Internet? Can we call it something else, would that help? Or does procrastinating the assignment by scrolling through a thesaurus mean the professor was right about making us write these legitimacy manifestos?…

Going to an Oxford event tonight where the #mainstreaming people will be idealistic about cynical politics – while I’m going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My mission is to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build bridges across that gap. There is a useful conversation between idealism and cynicism: keep the ideals, but be realistic about how power actually works. To get beyond people feeling lost and political debate becoming pointless, it helps to…

The AI Doc on Netflix, subtitled ‘How I became an Apocaloptimist’, was a little disappointing Wikipedia. It mainly tried to showcase ‘both sides’ of the argument about AI heralding the end of civilisation. It was interesting to see how uncomfortable everyone seemed to be when addressing existential questions about AI’s future development. But I’m not convinced the main question is whether or not we should have children – even though the interviewer, Daniel Roher, seemed to think it was. Along…

Recently, I made a big career change by moving from being an Engineering Manager (EM) back to being an Individual Contributor (IC). Although not a decision that I made lightly, this post won't go into too much depth about the various contributing factors. Instead, I intend to write about the positives because the change already seems to be helping. The purpose of this post is partly to mark the improvements that I'm seeing, partly to document how I'm reinforcing the change and partly to help…

Yann Cleary and Neus It’s Only Fiction Following five years in Japan, culminating in his 2016 mini-album Tokyo, Cleary now resides in France, and the impact of his surroundings is evidence in the sound here on It’s Only Fiction. Having worked as a protégé to the legendary Laurent Garnier, French-Irish artist Yann Cleary is focused on creating a crisp take on electronic pop, channeling the straight lines and understated production of Phoenix and french indie. Clear vocals, gentle organs and…

A really lovely day, warm and sunny. Got 6 pints of juice. Washed T and Doc’s cars. Cleared the silage lab out and the workshop. A calf in to burn. Did the office and T.

October 5, 2026 Let’s drop in our landscape designer, and on her favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting: At the end of September, as the weather began to turn grey and misty, our heroine had this 40-piece wardrobe: and these accessories: Our heroine has decided that she needs to go visit a couple of ongoing work sites; heretofore, she’s only met with clients in the company offices. But she’s been asked, and she will go! And she really wants to get into the mood of the season – grey mist and fog…

To Urban Brewing, where strictly speaking there were more beers than I had time for. I had to deploy the seldom-used flight protocol: just wee glasses, thanks.The first was Czech Pale Lager. The description wasn't more forthcoming, but it's 5% ABV, so I guess it's a 12° ležák, in Czech terms. It's properly clear and golden, and well able to hold a head, even in the taster glass. I guess the brewer has studied how Pilsner Urquell is loaded up with diacetyl but gets away with it, and decided that…

In my mind's eye, I always picture Disneyland on sunny days with blue skies - maybe a tad warm, but nothing that we can't handle. AND YET... I have so many photos of the park taken on gray, overcast days. California has "weather", it's not interesting weather. Today's April 1963 pictures feel like rain is on the way. They do say that "April showers bring May flowers", after all.I wonder why the cheerful Surreys were eliminated from the fleet of various Main Street vehicles? They carry as many…

Happiness Is A Warm Blanket Charlie Brown (2011)

I was still feeling in the mood for something substantial after finishing “A Happy Death”, and the stacks of Instagram-inspired titles I’d put together included a number of books by Dostoevsky. He’s an old favourite of mine, and although I’ve read all of the major titles, there are one or two still unread. I contemplated “Despised and Humiliated” and “An Accidental Family”, two longer fictions which are less well-known, and even dug out a mass of short stories. However, I was reminded that I…

I don't know which are weirder, the Brainrot characters or these Skibidi Toilet's? Five and Below carries these, as do other retailers. The Skibidi figures are cast from PVC and stand approximately 6 inches tall. There are others in this series and from what I heard there are more than just this series.