Today’s bridge game had the following: two grand slams (we bid one and the other was a hand that was one of the two sets we didn’t get to play, so didn’t get the chance), a 50/50 small slam bid against us, making (the only table to bid it, sigh) … and then there was the following: S: KQ H: AKQJT7x D: Kx C: Qx 20 HCP, but is it really? The solid suit is worth more than ten points, but the honors in short suits …. ugh. (To my surprise, KNR counts it as 22! But the DK count is 20-, which strikes…

Book 34 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. Ramsey Campbell has been a prolific and influential fixture of horror fiction for decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this year, I received a complimentary copy of his reprinted novel Incarnate from Flame Tree Press and also was given the opportunity to interview Campbell for my blog. This latter…

Someone asked me why I still have to study for professional certification? She has some valid points: Most clients do not understand the significance of my certification No one sees my certificates as nobody visits my office I just need to demonstrate my knowledge to my clients and publish on social media I will use amateur sports players and professional sport players to explain my justification. A good amateur players might be able to beat 80% of other amateur players. This person may not…

Over the past week, we have been luck enough to go out to three outstanding meals (yes, we're trying to lean into empty nest).1. Forepaugh'sForepaugh's was celebrating 50 years in business with a menu throwback to 1976, and we managed to get a coveted reservation on Tuesday night after my board meeting.That meant that we could get a whisky smash, a brandy alexander, oysters rockefeller, roast chicken, and bread pudding ... all for $20.79. For reference, a single cocktail in the bar is usually…

Three years ago, I bought an Asus laptop, specifically the Zenbook Pro 17. It's a powerful machine and works just fine for my needs, but it had one problem that made me want to either return it or throw it out the window. I would work on projects for hours on end and close the lid when I was done. I haven't manually shut down a computer in more than 10 years. I only do so after a forced update or during a debugging session. So I would close the lid, and a couple of hours later I would open it…

We went to BRKTHROUGH tonight and tried out their various games. We’ve been to Activate many times. BRKTHROUGH seems like a good place for a larger group and adds food and beer options. We found Activate’s games better though.

Valgeir & 2 Hands – Sexy Time First up tonight is great cut of sensuous, tongue-in-cheek g-tech from Icelandic producers Valgeir (Valgeir Snær Ísleifsson Waage) and 2 Hands (Sigurður Jónsson). I love coquettish tracks like this — that can give you something that sounds sincerely alluring, but also pepper fun and flirtatiousness throughout (see, among other things, that “brroing” sound that appears intermittently). Nothing less sexy than someone without a sense of humor. No bandcamp for this,…

I need a mildly dressy outfit for an upcoming restaurant situation, and I hate clothes-shopping. I was shopping online at Old Navy for other things (I need longer sweatpants—the ones I’ve been wearing are capri-length, and my full-length ones are too small), and saw a bunch of new arrivals that looked really good to me AND they were on sale. I bought this outfit: (image from OldNavy.com) The reviews for the pants were so good! After I placed the order, I realized that several of the reviews had…

This album was 10 years before its time. If it had come out in the early 00s it would fit in with the post-punk revival, garage rock, indie sound that was common then. Instead, it came out the same year as Nevermind, Ten, Badmotorfinger, Temple of the Dog. Every Boy Deserves Fudge, and Pretty on the Inside. I remember hearing it sometime around 1995, and it didn’t stick. I probably wanted something harder, faster, and more direct. But that’s the taste we often have when we’re young. Nuance is…

As I’ve been ahem digging into Gopherspace this past month, I of course wanted to see how I could get there from my phone. I already had Lagrange for the Gemini protocol, and Lagrange handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser. But there had to be some dedicated Gopher clients for Android, right? As it turns out, there are some…but not many. Worse: most of what I found was incomplete, awkward to use, or no longer compatible with modern Android…or some…

The Tallis ScholarsLive in Venice The Tallis ScholarsPeter Phillips directorRecorded in concert July 14, 2017Basilica di San Marco, VeniceProduction: Controcampo Produzioni srl, VeneziaDirector: Pierandrea GagliardiCameramen: Paolo Bassi, Claudio Panighel,Beniamino Fenzi, Pierre GirardiVideo/Audio recording: Flavio Piva,Antonio Loriga (Waterloo SAS, Milano)Lighting: Antonio LorigaColor grading and video editing: Stefano CodinAudio editing and mastering: Diego BergaminiProject idea and…

When I came to visit my relatives in Minnesota, I made sure they knew I was a complete bike freak and that one of the reasons we were going to Minneapolis was to enjoy its Biking Infrastructure. We did bike in Minneapolis (which I will write about later). We were also told to visit Lanesboro, on the Root River bike trail system. Damn, Lanesboro is good!! I should have come here with an actually good bike! I would come back, I think! We rented pretty-mid bikes from a local shop and headed out on…

Hōkio Rosemary saga…

Miscellaneous bits of news and fun stuff from around the Internet......Kino Lorber Studio Classics has announced the very welcome French Noir Collection III, featuring THE LAST ONE OF SIX (1941), THE MOMENT OF TRUTH (1952), THE STRANGE MR. STEVE (1957), and PARIS PICK-UP (1962). The set, set to be "coming soon," features favorite names like Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura. Can't wait!...Kino Lorber has also firmed up the release date for the previously announced Dark Side of Cinema XXVIII…

Subscribe and Listen: https://youtu.be/-vw12zGnEMI🎙️ The “Agents Everywhere But Not Always So Good So Far” EditionWelcome to What The Fudge for Sunday, October 04, 2026. This week is another attempt at formatting changes from autonomous agent environments to new frontier model cyber disclosures & regulation, and where the market edge is changing.📍 Field Report: Persistent Agent Workspaces and Security ChallengesWhile Cybersecurity incident disclosures from frontier labs increase, we are also…

Cady Noland, Untitled, 1991, screenprint in artist’s frame, 40 x 32 1/8 in., selling at Native, BRU How is it that the estimates on the Pannier Collection in Brussels are all so freaking low? Don’t they know that might attract extra attention and interest in the extremely on point Cady Noland screenprint with the perfect juxtaposition of Patricia Hearst images that the Panniers bought at FIAC from Paula Cooper? Lot 69: Cady Noland, Patricia Hearst [sic], 1991, est. €10 – 15,000 [native-auctions]

I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans. Consider the following slogans as placeholders for better worded versions.1. Adaptation Needs Variation, Selection, & a Stable WorldHumanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. Such Darwinian evolution fails without sufficient variation or selection pressures, or if the context changes too fast. A few centuries ago we were fine; the world had 100Ks of peasant cultures, most facing frequent wars,…

Introduction heyyy im back it’s been 3-4 months(?? wtf) since i decided to main nixos, and yeah it’s been an Experience to say the least, i really didn’t expect this to last that long asdfhj. To revive this section again im just gonna explain what im running rn, here’s a link to my flake and dotfiles if you care about those, and i’m also gonna talk about stuff i had to “fight”. Setup So, I’m currently running: ly as my display manager, it’s comfy and that way i skip a display mode change so i…

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Rebecca Solnit is one of those drop-everything writers for me, and it's because her pieces have staying power. I find myself coming back to this post from The Guardian she wrote at the beginning of 2026. You see a lot of discussion about how AI replaces people at work, but not as much discussion about how the same thing happens outside the office. Have you noticed it, too? It seems to happen when we feel the pangs of loneliness, confusion, or, especially, insecurity. It's tempting to reach for…

Secret Passages, spearheaded by James Hoare, is a magazine that bills itself as “A celebration of classic tabletop gaming”. It defines its scope fairly broadly – in fact, it’s had at least one article on LARP, so strictly speaking it doesn’t even confine itself to tabletop games – though the centre of gravity lies towards RPGs and wargames, with some boardgame and gamebook coverage. The particular lens it views gaming through is based part on subcultural history, part on personal reminiscence,…

A pickup truck crashed into an electric pole just down the road yesterday. The pole fell partway over, held aloft by the power cables. The electrical mains power dropped abruptly. My Dell R530 and Qotom fanless server are powered through an uninterruptible power supply, but only the R530 has the USB connection and runs apcupsd to get notifications that the UPS is running out of energy.

Would you look at that face? In the second picture, you can see him enjoying pets. Midnight still has a mark on his nose. For most of the summer, he had an odd wound there that would get bigger, burst, start going away, then get bigger again. Which was rather gross because he kept trying … Continue reading A very productive day – but I’ll start with the cuteness

Recently, I found On Bots, an interesting project from 2006-05-03. Someone constructed 2 billion numbered web pages, arranged as a binary search tree via hyperlinks. They tracked accesses of the web pages for a year. It looks like they were interested in how much of their binary trees got explored, and in what order more than anything else.

StarringBilly West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille, and Maurice LaMarcheOverviewNew season on the horizon.The adventures of a late-20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who, after being unwittingly cryogenically frozen for one thousand years, finds employment at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company in the retro-futuristic 31st century.Review Futurama This show has ended and returned so many times, I don’t know if this is truly the end or not.…

After the relentless Tetsuo movies this one is going for an Obayashi contrast: demonic possession and rushing camera blur and bodily explosions amidst a medium-paced, brightly colored daytime plot with upbeat made-for-TV music. A few good stop-motion and matte painting shots, then after the initial goblin attacks the movie has lost its juice, and they’re just spraying flying spiders with a can of wd-40. Feels like a studio with a bland cursed-high-school story hired an edgy young filmmaker to…

Perfume PosseOddities: Erno Laszlo After Shave Now, we all know that good old Erno was and is a skin-care legend with the black soap and many splashes of water. It was a mainstay on the dressing tables of well-heeled (and dressed, and moisturized) ladies and quite… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseOddities: Erno Laszlo After Shave

Media Film/TV Not really any movies lately! My partner cajoled me into watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which I had initially dismissed while it was airing because I was burnt out on the world of ASOIAF and a show about a normal knight didn’t sound terribly interesting. As it turns out, everyone is right: it is excellent all the way through. Five stars, no notes. I binge-watched season 19 of Jet Lag: The Game this past week so I could watch the finale in theatres. Dare I say this is the…

This is a long-form written guide for the fight AAC Heavyweight M1 (Savage) in the game Final Fantasy 14, where the challenger and their seven friends fight the Elezen succubus Vamp Fatale. You may call this the XeBin guide in party finder listings. If you want to experience this fight, don't read this guide. This guide is based off of the Toxic Friends raidplan, the Hector Lectures strategies used by North America Party Finder raiding culture, and insights I have gained from running this fight…

Margaret Rutherford made four wonderful Miss Marple mysteries in the 1960s and, of them all, Murder at the Gallop (1963) is the best. This one takes place at a riding establishment and features a delightfully eccentric lot of suspects including Robert Morley, Flora Robson, and Katya Douglas. In this scene from a UK lobby card, Miss Marple is conversing in a whisper with police inspector Craddock, played by Charles Tingwell.From the Archives is our latest series of posts where we share photos…