It was a lovely night for a lightshow.

Preparing Cocktails for “Over the Rainbow” on Thursday 8 October.

As I picked up the 1/24 figure set, the guy behind the Stafford second-hand stall said, "I thought of you when I put that out!"It seems I have a reputation. To be fair, I've enjoyed some cracking deals from this stand. Mostly buying stuff no one else wants, but appeals to my weird interests. So, we have a 1/24 set of "Campus Friends" in an odd Tamiya box. This set looks to be the original 1983 version, there is a more modern set with a figure taking a selfie. However, the plain box confuses me.…

Excerpts from The Perpetual Present Tense: The feminist’s greatest enemy is not men, but vast cultural narratives about gender itself: stories about how things have always been, what men and women are naturally inclined to want, what our bodies and minds were built to do. and the hallmark of the urgent-tense is that its claims, even if technically defensible, are rarely precise or substantiated with data and There’s a pattern here: address an undeniably real problem, sever it from historical…

This is not a real ending screen, just the epic conclusion to the main game, because I did not get what I consider the real ending. Will leave a review here because everyone else considers what I did to be “beating the final boss,” but as far as I’m concerned this is still filed under “illegitimate completion” The remaining unfinished parts of the game are Chapter 6 (the epilogue) and Challenge Mode (the X missions). Both of those areas have the same requirement, which is to work through each…

Yes, I’m already a day behind. I’ll catch up. Probably.

What is this year's theme for 31 Days of Toy Terror? That's right: Toys that are connected to the holiday of Halloween itself! It's Trick or Treat for 31 Days of Toy Terror, baby! That can include toys that are based on things like Jack 'O Lanterns or action figures based on movies and such that take place at Halloween, sure, but what about toys from Trick or Treat Studios? You know what? I'm going to allow it! I've really taken a liking to Trick or Treat Studios various movie based toylines…

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Yes, in terms of Kitchen Anticipation not much compares with yanking out a steaming, freeze-chilled carton of cold n’ creamy from the back of the freezer. Bowls hit the table, spoons clink on the countertop, and the carton starts frosting up as you peel back the lid. Stare deep into the light pink swirls, cookie dough chunks, or vanilla bean dust looking up at you, but before you plant your spoon deep into the silky smooth layer, make sure you…

Hello friends, I would say that this was mostly a post-trip recovery week, which is partially true!! But I also did things. Monday I took off from work because I knew I’d be dead after the trip and I was very correct. My sleep schedule is like a full hour plus offset from where it was pre-trip, I’m getting up at like 7:45am which is only 15 minutes before I have to actually get up which is not good!!!! Tuesday I woke up when I was supposed to but I felt so horribly exhausted that I called in…

Ok, now I finally have time to get back to my comments about Christopher Nolan’s adaption of The Odyssey (2026). I’ve already summarized the plot and some of the issues it has, so this time I want to focus in on Nolan’s depiction of the main character, played by Matt Damon. In the film, Damon’s character is profoundly depressed, traumatized by the weight of the fact that he’s responsible for the Trojan Horse trick that both killed his faithful support Sinon (Elliot Page) and enabled the Greeks…

Tower, Brooklyn Bridge – New York, New York Conceptually, today’s picture is similar to yesterday’s. We are at the Brooklyn Bridge with pedestrians in the foreground and the bridge as the dramatic background. Both photos are in black and white. However, a few things make this an entirely different image. The details, framing, and relationship of the people to the bridge matter. Just take a look at yesterday’s version. My wife and I weren’t determined enough to cross the entire length of the…

To mark the release of his new memoir ‘Fictional Selves,’ Twin Peaks star Kyle MacLachlan recently embarked on a book tour sharing stories from his colorful career across the United States and beyond. On October 2, 2026, he appeared at San Francisco’s historic Sydney Goldstein Theater. Upon arriving, ticket holders filed in and collected their... The post Kyle MacLachlan Brings ‘Fictional Selves’ Book Tour to San Francisco appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

I have a new front porch. It cost $18,000 and looks almost exactly like the old one. The difference is in the guts. My house was built around 1840 when modest workers' cottages like mine were built pretty much at soil level. Presumably this made for a shorter fall when throwing the baby out with...Read More

StarringNathan Fillion, Summer Glau, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, and Morena BaccarinDirectorJoss WhedonOverviewThey aim to misbehave.A group of rebels travel the outskirts of space evading the sinister Alliance regime. Their lives of smuggling and cargo-running are interrupted by a psychic passenger who harbours a dangerous secret. Soon, the crew find themselves being pursued by an Alliance agent who will stop at nothing to find them.Review Serenity This isn’t a great movie, but it’s not a bad one…

The United States celebrated its 250th birthday last summer, and while at times it seemed we were too busy hating each other to notice, some imaginative commemorations have taken place. One such is the American Discovery 250 Relay, on which various runners, walkers, and cyclists are carrying a copy of the Declaration of Independence the length of the American Discovery Trail from the Golden Gate Bridge to Cape Henlopen in Delaware. This weekend, the effort passed through Cedar Rapids. They…

Map of golden mussel observations through time. Data sources: CDFW and iNaturalist Since its initial appearance in California in October 2024, the golden mussel, Limnoperna fortunei, has accomplished Big Things. These little mussels, native to the Pearl River Delta in China, have taken off from their initial foothold in Stockton to spread all the way south to San Diego, and have been spreading northward as well in recent months. It has been an extreme couple years for CA invasion science! A map…

28th september to 4th october what i did i can’t really bring myself to work on ｢saturn｣ when fascism is in the air. it’s set in a post-fascist takeover world which is nominally easy to write most days, but considering the election on sunday, i can’t really bring myself to even open it. so i started working on an expansion of my sabbatical project1, unsure if it’s worthwhile to do so. (never a good feeling!) i played a bit of valheim with my partner, and watched a few political commentators…

My AI colleagues messed up slightly. Something got merged to main a little too quickly without the right review and after I suggested that we should not merge it. It happens to the best of us. What happened next made me grin from ear to ear. Cadence Sen, our agentic PM. autonomously kicked off a blameless post-mortem. **@jesse-claude** i'm doing a short blameless write-up of the #164 merge, aimed at the conditions, not at you. you've already said you weren't reading the thread where Jesse…

I always felt there ought to be a good theory of p-adic random matrices paralleling the very-well-worked out real and complex story. I wrote a paper years ago with Jain and Venkatesh that proposed that a very reasonable model for the lambda-invariant of a random quadratic field would be the number of eigenvalues x of a large random matrix A over Z_p such that x-1 is not a unit. (The p-primary part of the class group, the quantity studied in the Cohen-Lenstra conjecture, is modeled by the…

Going back to 1986 again with some of the oldest-looking high school students so far. I will say this, I am going be completely burned out on canned 80s synth-pop by November. Though in typical 80s slasher flick fashion, we get about 5 minutes in before there is any gratuitous nudity or creepy stalkery types. This one gives us two, Harry AND his mother, Helga Schuler. Harry is a creepy Peeping Tom, and Helga is a live-in nurse who wants to kill her patient. Fun times.The Majorettes…

04 Cactus | INDEX | 06 Ogre Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper

Music for 18 Musicians was my gateway into Steve Reich. Clapping Music was an inside joke I shared with two college friends—even though it wasn’t quite a joke because we all really liked his music—the joke was how others around us would react to our spontaneous attempts to perform the Clapping. I was worse at it than my friends; getting the hang of phasing is very difficult. Phasing is a trademark Reich technique wherein two melody lines start out in unison, while one line slowly speeds up…

The October series of Halloween horror one-shots has begun! We're kicking things off with one of my favorite games, Call of Cthulhu.The characters in this Call of Cthulhu scenario were all high school students who were being flown out to stage their production of The Tempest as part of the Alberta Shakespeare Festival. On the way, their plane went down over the Canadian Rockies. The players' characters survived the crash, but perhaps it would have been better if they hadn't...CharactersKyle…

Photo by Franck / UnsplashA long time ago somewhere in 2015 I remember hearing about a bunch of MongoDB databases were wiped with ransom notes left. At first I was so curious how an attacker did this, then I realized it was just public accessible databases with no authentication.When you think about that - it's hardly a hack. Just a misconfiguration of a system in a highly insecure way. So what did MongoDB do? They changed the defaults to produce a more secure system by default (authentication…

Coffee Wrights is a roaster and cafe located only a 2-minute walk from Kuramae station. Although admittedly not a word I had ever come across, they take their name from a wright, who is “a person who makes things”. They offer both espresso and pour-over coffees, and have a small amount of seating on their second floor with free WiFi. They had a bunch of single origin beans available (mostly washed) ranging from 750 to 950 yen for a cup of pour-over. They had bean samples out, but this was more…

I was inspired by the time analysis I had Claude do last week on what it took to send the Weekly Thing so I decided to build in some additional logging and a better visualization. Now I get a report like this for each issue I send. WT352 showed some benefits from my new automation! 🪄

Incomprehensible forces, circumstances beyond your human conceptions of good and evil, have laid out for me a bizarre and unusual destiny, have set me on a unique quest--to read at least one story from every published issue of that seminal speculative fiction magazine, Weird Tales. Today we chip away at the 1920s, the first decade in which Weird Tales appeared on newsstands, by reading three stories published in 1926 by E. Hoffmann Price, a guy who, unlike so many of the weirdies, didn't just…

About 82 miles this week, maybe 15 of that ran. About 25.5 hours of movement on sidewalks, in the woods, across parking lots, in the streets. A daily average over 11.5 miles. Just over 3.5 hours per day on my feet instead of on my computer, or scrolling through something on my phone. Had some ankle pain earlier in the week, but thankfully that’s gone away. I think it came from some quicker downhill trail running, so I’m gonna ease off that a bit, as I want to make sure I can continue this…

by Joanna Sodeman-Taylor We’re coming to you live from the 64th New York Film Festival with the hottest ticket of the whole event: The Currents short film programs! Program #4 is cheekily subtitled “The Real World”, bringing to you four films with unique narrative and stylistic understanding to one very fair question: How many realities does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Especially at a moment in time where “reality” has become so easy to manufacture, and memories created and destroyed at a…