This week, I was sent a few VHS tapes dating back to the early 1990s. Usually, I'm only fussed about old recordings dating from the early to mid-1980s. But these tapes all had something interesting on, so I couldn't resist. And first up, we have a complete episode of Saint & Greavsie dating back to December 1991.This, of course, was the final season before the behemoth that is the Premier League was born. As such, it's a very different era of both football and the way it's broadcast. Here, we…

Inspired by Widdershins' Everyone's Packing Up and Gordon's Re: Everyone's Packing Up. I wouldn't say that everyone is packing up from platforms, let alone leaving the web entirely. That said, all the power to those that enjoy the new virtual spaces they migrate to better than their old gathering spots. My experience is that multiple platforms that people have posted about leaving are places that I joined recently or wish to join soon. Yet, I'm still chugging away at this dainty blog on a…

This is a pretty unusual zombie story. It’s not about the outbreak, or a handful of survivors. It’s about a woman named Kesta, a biomedical scientist living in the aftermath of a zombie plague. There have been no attacks for three months, it is generally under control, and things are very slowly returning to normal.

As of my last update, I was at 11 of 26 of my 2026 mini-quests done. Here’s what changed: Make a meal with soy curls: Butler Soy Curls are amazing and everyone should try them (especially vegans) Find a place locally where I can get Fermented Bean Curd: Also amazing. Available in asian markets (for me it was a Vietnamese market) Go to a live musical: I have tickets to Oh! Mary in NYC, so this should happen. Go for a weekend away to a new place in Florida: Not Done, but I have booked a vegan…

Louis Menand’s NYkr review essay “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (archived) deals with what sound like stupid books and has some stupid things to say about them and the subject of language in general (compare Menand on the Dictionary), and I don’t feel like dealing with all the stupidity, so I’ll let you read it for yourselves if you so desire and simply reproduce the opening passage, which I found eye-opening: Do you know the first sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”? You probably think you…

With Ina’s 14th cookbook, Simply Ina, coming out in just 16 days, I figured it was probably time to reintroduce myself! I’m Trent, and I spent six years, five months and three days cooking, rating and reviewing every recipe Ina Garten published across her cookbooks and TV show. All 1,353 of them. What started as a ridiculous Julie & Julia-inspired idea turned into a project that taught me how to cook and somehow ended in the most unbelievable way possible: making Ina’s Boston Cream Pie live…

Above: From our TA clan representative in Skopje. Macduff and that other national drink "Moray Cup" are now celebrated in a pub light fitting. Below: One of the better bits of poetic lyric writing forming a fitba chant. Balamory v Pocognoli. Genius. Sound clip omitted but you can imagine.

That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech. That very same evening, I randomly got this text from a family member. I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech. “Nothing works.” “Everything is hard to use.” “I can’t make sense of this.” And to them I am a…

Now sitting in the hotel restaurant. It’s Sunday and I’m miles from the nearest Pizzeria, or any other type of food esablishment. So I’m at the mercy of the hotel restaurant. They serve authentic food from Normandie - so the vegetarian options are limited - but to give them credit - they are provided. I’m going the entree and the main course and this will probably be the most expensive dinner I’ve had while touring. But whatever. I’m 46 years old and it’s Sunday and I’ve burnt 4000 calories and…

It’s been a busy week here at IdiotCentral; there’s some news I’m not ready to share yet which has been taking up most of my free time preparing for. In the meantime, I’ve been taking care of some small tasks around the house that have been nagging me for years. There’s been a spot in the tile up in the master bathroom that has been missing its grout for years. Way back when I was working on the sinks, one of the cats knocked over a jar of purple PVC primer, which stained the brand-new epoxy…

hey guys! i am doing good. it feels scary to say, since that feels like inviting something bad to happen - like you cannot feel ok, it has to balance itself out, if you say that you feel ok with yourself something shitty will happen... i'm not sure where i got it from. i got a job!!!! it feels nice to have some stability in my life. i would not have gotten it without the support of my husband. he has believed in me every step of the way, had no doubt in me for a second. i had never thought i…

You know it's a good website when it: Uses subdomains (except for username.platform.com)... especially multiple levels Has a non-standard port number in URL Is served over a plaintext connection Uses very nearly default styles All tag names are written in SCREAMING CASE The path ends in .html The URL has meaningful directories and names The HTML has typos Has commented out draft work Of course, these are all just indicators of age. 1. The use of subdomains fell out of favor due to IP address…

Week of Sep 28, 2026 Another week where I was mostly heads down at work so didn’t do much to write about. Update on cat The cat who is living outside across the street from our house is still there. One of our neighbors calls him Smokey so that’s the name we’re gonna go with for now. Multiple neighbors have been helping by feeding him, checking in whenever they’re around, and a few have started to attempt at getting him to adopt him. No luck yet but I’m hoping it’s figured out soon. Here’s a…

[ in progress ]

October 4, 2026 I've posted about AI five times in a row now. I know opinions on the subject vary a lot, so I wanted to explain why. I use AI every day. Lately I've been thinking about how much access I want give it, and what could go wrong if things don't work the way I expect. Writing is how I work through that, so these posts are me sorting out my own concerns. I'd like to use it with some caution and a clear idea of what I'm allowing it to do. If these posts help anyone else do the same,…

For months now I have been writing the phrase "when we get to quantum mechanics..." Well, today we finally get to quantum mechanics (QM). QM is a big topic. I will not be able to cover it all, or even put a significant dent in it, in one blog post. The goal of this post is just to give you an overview of the lay of the land, a clean-sheet introduction to the topic for

The White House issued an executive order last week: The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term “Super Intelligence” more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive…

Brennan Kenneth Brown: The Internet isn’t a story. It isn’t a detached, real-life plot device for us to have discourse over. It’s far less than that. It’s a place where the story happens. Features, trend pieces, and documentaries treat the Internet as a subject with its own character, motives, and plot, then report on what the Internet is doing to us. As though the Internet is somehow a separate entity from us. The Internet has no plot. It is a place, and what happens there is what has always…

Cory Dransfeldt: Tech companies and their executives have, broadly, moved to align themselves with investors and adopted a posture of, often, disdain or outright hostility towards their users and employees. If tech companies don’t value you, why provide value to them? If they back political positions hostile to your interests, why not return that hostility? I’m not arguing for boycotts, I know that people are bound to different platforms for different, compelling reasons. What I am arguing for…

It has been a hot minute, but I'm mostly unpacked now and my new game room is looking more or less assembled. I had to put gaming on the backburner for a while as we acquired a small, 4 week old abandoned kitten back in June and he was quarantined in the gaming room for a while. He's now an absolute menace and his name is Bruce Wayne. He's fully integrated with our other cats, so I mostly have my solo space back! I've spent some time playing Mork Borg solo, using Solitary Defilement and some…

By way of the excellent AbeBooks, I have acquired a copy of Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse, Betjeman's first commercially published collection (1937) – not the prohibitively expensive first edition, but a beautifully made facsimile from 1977, complete with gold fore-edge and India-paper insert. It's pleasingly illustrated too, with an arresting cover by E. McKnight Kauffer, and embellishments by Osbert Lancaster, Hubert de Cronin Hastings and others. I was surprised to discover…

Lots of fun and cool links from the fun and cool internet. I'd like to think all my link posts are like that but obviously I'm feeling extra optimistic today. Tell the speakers that you liked their talks at Oh Hello Ana. Tell everyone you liked their thing! I was chatting to a fun group of people and one of them mentioned how someone else in the group really wanted to ask something to one of the speakers from this year but they were feeling shy and intimidated. I immediately encouraged the…

Dark machines print.Fourth thousand trimmed.Script reborn. Autumn window chills.Slime glows on screen. That Time I Took A BreakThat Time I Got Reincarnated as a SlimeOn The BlogLink BloggingPhoto 365Terminal AccessDipping the StacksReadingMusicRemember Kids: That Time I Took A Break Usually, when I take a break from my weeknotes, it’s because I’m on holiday. But this time around, it was just because I needed a break, and felt like I didn’t have all that much to say. I could have course always…

Visited exhibition at the location.

While American Truck Simulator is certainly not the first video game to try mapping out the entire United States of America in digital form, it's the first where racing isn't the intent behind the game. Games like The Crew and Test Drive Unlimited have tackled the task of making a shockingly huge map of all or part of the United States and letting you race through it at high speeds with performance vehicles. However, ATS is seeking to map out the entire USA (and soon, parts of Canada) from the…

Just when it feels safe to step back into the water, something sparks the gods' anger; they immediately respond by unleashing havoc, delivering yet another unhinged and surreal week.On Monday night, a major thunderstorm brought local flooding and a severe explosion at the electrical substation at Waltloo. Half the city was left without electricity. Over here, the continuing storms and unyielding dark skies rendered the solar backup system more or less obsolete, and we had power for exactly six…

Well, after writing about gratitude every day for a month, and writing over sixteen thousand words on the subject, you'd think I've become a very grateful person as a result. Well... I guess I can say that I'm still working on my narrative. This morning, I was driving to church and playing music on shuffle from my personal collection. The song that came on before I got to my destination was from an album I bought fifteen years ago, from a small local band that only ever produced a single album.…

This has been the most-asked-for feature for NEO, and I’ve been working on it in secret for a while now. It’s rough, and it’s going to be a kinda-hidden feature until it’s been stress-tested, but if you want to write a screenplay in NEO, now you can! To start one, right click the “new document” icon on any shelf and choose “New Script.” Type in your title and hit enter. NEO will give you a scene heading, and it tries to autocomplete entries just like Final Draft and other industry standard…

Note: This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters.Second Note: Ben Petersen, the designer of the knife and owner of Knafs, is a friend of mine and all around good dude. It doesn’t effect my score, but I want you to know. In the knife world the combination of OD green scales and red liners means something. It is a…

It is time to give my personal AI access to more of my data, so it can start answering questions with context and in a more relevant way. As part of this I wanted to address something I have been thinking about for a long time, funneling most of my data into a searchable PostgreSQL database. Obviously this will not be your typical data warehouse, I do t expect more than a few gigabyte of data to accumulate over a year. The stack will be Python and PostgreSQL. I could certainly make…