It feels nostalgic to look at clouds. I remember laying in the grass as a boy and staring at them. It doesn’t take long to look, so I wonder why I stopped? The clouds were particularly beautiful yesterday, around sunset, just outside my bedroom window.

Our fourth novelette is live! Snag a copy directly from us now or anywhere books are sold. In a world... ravaged by global warming and wars, Banana Brian is forced to take a job as a supervillain's henchman to pay off his student loans. In order to survive, Brian must find a way to pay off his giant debt, avoid kleptomaniac henchmen, find shortcuts to freedom, and avoid getting killed by rampaging amoral superheroes, the supervillain's brutal enforcers, and a nasty infection he got from a…

Whis week, Ed Asner and Mason Adams, the stars of Lou Grant, are on the cover, and with a name like Lou Grant it has to be good, right?**Bonus points to anyone who gets that joke. If you're not sure, here's a clue.Seriously, I digress from this TV Guide for a moment to take a look at the issue of April 23, 1977. In the TV Teletype, we read a story about how Asner's going to be doing a new CBS series this fall about the newspaper business. Asner describes the show, to be set in Los Angeles, as a…

The winches on your sailboat are the workhorses of its rig. They do the heavy lifting and make your job as skipper easier so you can enjoy the ride. They’re also the most expensive hardware aboard so it only makes …

A driving lesson about test anxiety and a bit of tablet weaving.

Lumpin What Works Well? What Works…Less Well? Opportunities What’s Adaptable? Six Years Hence: Where Are the Joneses? part 2 Coming Attractions This week, our Free Culture Book Club listens to Lumpin. To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context. For Clarity : You can best think of these posts like their titles suggest, as the seed of a discussion group (“book club”) to spark conversation about a Free Culture work. Thinking of it…

Every week, I share something I learned in the previous seven days. I usually find these while I'm putting my weekly newsletter together but somehow, they don't quite fit! This week I learned why people are ticklish, and how ticklishness is the same across cultures. The experience of tickling and ticklishness is the same across cultures: new researchMore than 98% of people have been tickled. But scientists still don’t understand why we do it. Get better at work. Every Week. One Email. Practical…

I wrote this post for a prompt given during our local Indieweb club meeting My impossible bucket list, things I would want to do/be if the realities of the world and my life did not constrain me. Here it goes: Write a journal entry every day. Write a bestseller book about physics. Watch the Sun die. Take a transcontinental train. Swim across a river. Spend a day in the International Space Station. Solve integration problems in my head. Solve a Millennium Prize Problem. Run an ultra marathon.…

Almost as soon as we moved back to Denmark in February, we booked a trip to Frankfurt in September. Because a) we suspected that we'd need a break from our daily life, b) I'd need my dose of airplane photography in EDDF and c) food. More to the point, Lufthansa announced yet again that they'll be phasing out the Airbus A340-600 by the end of October. So I wanted to have a chance to say goodbye to my all-time favorite airplane and photograph it one last time.

Welcome back to another round of Simple Sudoku Solvers! If you are unfamiliar with the series, I suggest you start with the first post or by perusing the…

× This past week, on 1 October, I had the privilege of attending Mario Draghi’s Karl Brunner Distinguished Lecture. I will write about that at a later time. While looking for the recording, I came across John Cochrane’s inflation lecture in the same series. Cochrane starts with inflation and ends up asking how governments finance their promises. That is a useful route into a subject usually discussed through the next central bank meeting. We spend a great deal of time debating whether interest…

Let's begin with a couple books. When Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This and Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts came out in 2021, critics called them "Internet novels." Sally Olds, in her essay United States v. The Internet, counted six reviews covering the two books together, five of those reviews using "internet" or "online" in the headline. She noted that one Washington Post review used six of the same stock, boring keywords in its first six sentences. Olds argued that neither book…

A friend shared a story about a conversation with someone who was many steps ahead of him in his career. He’d gone to this person with a career decision where he was deciding between two very different paths. It was late on a Friday evening but this person committed to figuring this out. As their conversation progressed, his wife called as he was supposed to be at a party. He explained he had to skip it. Then his boss called, and he again said he was in the middle of something and he’d call…

Mainstreaming “colonizes” what works, absorbing popular, fringe, and grassroots ideas, stripping them of their radical core, and adapting them to serve the common sense #deathcult paths. Let’s look at an example of this sewage pipeline: Organic success, a movement, phrase, or subculture gains organic traction because it effectively speaks to real-world anxieties, desires, or truths (e.g., environmentalism, civil rights language, or anti-establishment rhetoric). The “invasion” of language,…

I came across this book inside the quaint establishment of Söderbokhandeln Hansson & Bruce in Stockholm. The cover reminded me of a womans…

I picked this up in Paris at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Originally, I was drawn to the idea of an author capturing a radical…

By M. Allen HallSelf PublishedOSELevels 2-3 The disappearance of Old Ilfen has left the wizard’s tower at the center of a power struggle. Lord Cargan wants to tear the tower down and replace it with a lighthouse. Skaarn and his pixie war band want to raid the dungeon below the tower and recover a magic item Ilfen once stole from them. Ilfen wants someone to help him get his body back. And at the bottom of the dungeon, the Green Ooze King wants to be left alone so it can seed other worlds with…

I read the Dutch version, translated from Danish by Edith Koenders and Adriaan van der Hoeven, called Over de berekening van ruimte VI. The English translation (On the Calculation of Volume VI) probably won't be available until somewhere in 2027. There isn't much I can say without spoiling. Just like with several of the previous books, I was hesitant in the first half and fully on board for the second half. Once certain knowledge and plans came to light, my curiosity was piqued. For most of…

I had a podiatry appointment this AM and that is about the only thing that went well for me today. I rolled out of the rack around 0630 feeling blah, Not nauseous but an unwell feeling that sucked pond scum. That really never went away but rose up for a while and then gradually subsided, off and on.I'm taking that as the side effects from my last chemo cocktail party. On the flip side of the coin, I had my worse day for being short of breath. Just waking from my desk to the kitchen for a coffee…

📷 249/365 - Say cheese.

I can't remember the last time I got to the end of a book and thought "that was a masterpiece". I feel pretty comfortable saying it about The Rouse, though. It's certainly a landmark work, and it's China Miéville's magnum opus. Everything he's been doing since King Rat and Perdido Street Station has been pointing towards this book. It wraps up the thematic threads from all of his previous work and bundles them together into one surprisingly digestible slab of a novel. I'm going to try to write…

Multiple people have reached out with the request to make Uppercase more competitive. I hear you.I have wanted to make the game more competitive since before I even made it public! But how exactly can we do this?There were many suggestions. One of them was to add an "I'd like to solve the puzzle" button. I get it. This would be pretty neat. And if you could solve the puzzle with just five letters on the board, your share text would indeed look pretty damn impressive.Can you beat my score in…

A chunk of what is now called east Midtown, in 1867: This was officially part of the city, but the opening of the numbered street grid had created more buildable lots than were needed, so development was, as can be readily seen, patchy. There is very little on this map that is recognizable or still present. I’ll flag those things that are, everything else is gone. Reservoir Square at the lower left, is still there and now called Bryant Park. The big distribution reservoir next to it is the site…

Back in April, I was invited to read this ARC and, as I was in a fairly good place and a few of the authors are known quantities, I accepted. (Little did I know what would soon come my way.) Bewares for the collection as a whole: Christmas as setting rather than religious holiday; explicit sex on page, including between same sex consenting adults; swearing; parents who were hoarders; parent with chronic illness (lupus); parent with Alzheimer’s; and so much first person, present tense narrative…

Every holiday season, I get nostalgic for ’90s television. I blame all those network programmers who spent years filling October with themed episodes, Halloween specials, and holiday programming blocks because they clearly got their hooks into me. Even now, it doesn’t really feel like Halloween until I’ve spent a few evenings revisiting some old sitcoms. My recaps are pretty simple. I provide a spoiler-free synopsis, talk about how well the episode actually embraces Halloween, and then give it…

This is a fun “Ask Hank Anything” episode with Aabria Iyengar (@aabria.bsky.social) and Hank Green (@hankgreen.bsky.social). Frenetic and lots of sci-fi ideas.

I read this post and found myself thinking: …and then what? Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the reasons people are leaving, and I think many of those reasons are entirely valid. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention here, you’ll know that I’m one of the people considering such a move myself and for similar reasons as stated —“Someone spent years somewhere, it changed under them, and now they’re packing up”— but I’m not sure the reason for just leaving a service/system is always…