Whereas a public notice distributes information to interested or alert citizens, a poster reaches out to grab those who might otherwise pass it by. Posters are aggressive because they appear in the context of other posters. […] The form of the poster depends on the fact that many posters exist — competing with (and sometimes reinforcing) each other. Thus posters also presuppose the modern concept of public space — as a theater of persuasion. Susan Sontag And perhaps also as a slightly…

Anna’s 88 (Diaethria anna), ventral view (from Wikimedia) 3 October 2026, WINGS Veracruz: Migration is a Moving Experience: Day 5, the highlands near Xalapa “88” is not the count of butterflies we’ve seen on our birding tour. It’s the common name of Diaethria sp. butterflies whose wings have an “88” or “89” pattern on them. There are 12 species of Diaetheria butterflies, some of which are found in Veracruz including the Anna’s Eight-Eight (Diaethria anna). The adults feed on rotting fruit, tree…

Week notes, week 1339 / 2026-09-20 I really need to get into habit of writing weeknotes on Saturday night or Sunday... it's already Thursday Saturday (It's almost time to write my next week's notes, what am I doing aaaaa), and I've nearly forgotten what I did last week! But lets see.... I cleared out a bit of my inbox! ✨ I took a nice, long walk on Saturday morning—about 2 hours to a further-away park, then about as much back. It all culminated in a fancy crafts/hobby store, where I bought…

02 Relic | INDEX | 04 Cactus 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

Welcome to this week’s roundup of juicy ttrpg morsels. This week on the blog the most popular posts were Running Red Dragon’s Tale, Dungeon, Inc: A First Review, Dolmenwood Resources for You, Writing Interesting Encounters and Origins 5.5e. As always, feel free to share this newsletter and please subscribe if you want to get it in your inbox every Saturday! Discord DiscussionsBlog PostsProjectsPlay ReportsPaladin ProjectsPoem Discord Discussions On Discord this week, we discussed the importance…

This animated map shows a year's worth of lightning strikes across the United States. The animation reveals the clear seasonal patterns of lightning storms across the U.S. As you watch the animation, you can see the country's lightning season move northwards with the changing seasons.During winter, lightning is largely confined to the Gulf Coast before activity spreads north in spring. By summer, thunderstorms are lighting up much of the country, with particularly intense activity across…

“So, Daddy, what’s the plan then?”“Well, Sam, the plan is to don the waders, find the best peg on the stretch, as Keiran put it, and drown these five pints of maggots. We’ll fish the way he won the match, and hopefully persuade a decent chub or barbel to make an appearance.”“Okay, a chance of a barbel, you say?”“Yup, apparently so.”And there we had it, a father-and-son fishing expedition armed with a bucketful of optimism, enough maggots to sustain a small village through a famine, and a plan…

When the Panama Canal was created, so was an island. The island of Barro Colorado sprang into being when the surrounding mountainous terrain was turned into a lake thanks to the canal. Since then, the island has become on of the most studied on the planet, because its isolation allows scientists to see what is happening to our flora and fauna when they are not still being impacted by constant human intervention. And, oh dear, we do have a problem. Many of the islands giant trees seem to be…

Dave is doing important work here, holding Cadbury Heroes to account. MacOS 27 broke the drivers for my thermal printer but thankfully someone made a new driver. I'm on board with Spymarks, not watermarks. The winners of the street photography awards are fantastic (obviously). Side-eyeing projects like Una to try and get away from my Apple Watch at some point. Hannah Fry's favourite fountain pens. Love this. There's no world in which I can watch this documentary about Elon Musk but I'm glad it…

Not much! The White Bear, by Henrik Pontoppidan. Two novellas in a nice little nyrb edition. I liked both of them a lot, especially the first one. I don't really know why, but I love reading about the clergy. Particularly when it's small-time, rather pathetic. Also I haven't gone wrong so far with nyrb editions. On the Calculation of Volume IV, by Solvej Balle. I think this series is suffering its own slowness. I liked the first book very much, but I've liked every book since less than the…

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain. This month we’re starting with Life of M by Rachel Cusk. I haven’t read this book, but here’s…

Took the dogs out on the field this morning. All the dewey spider webs were beautiful in the morning sun. I'm no Jack Baty, but they're good enough. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

I found myself with a sudden vision of a Roger who might have been…

For a long time, “self-hosted AI” meant one of two things to me. Either a small model on a laptop, slow enough to make coffee between answers, or a lot of money spent on a GPU that then spends most of its life idling under my desk. Somewhere in the last few months, that changed. Open-weight models got good. Not “good for an open model”. Good. My current setup: Qwen 3.8 27B on a rented NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell at RunPod, started with one command, answering at around 150 tokens per second,…

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start with the same book, add six more, and see where it ends up. This month, Kate suggested Life of M by Rachel Cusk, which sounds like a fictionalized character assassination of actress Natalie Portman, although it does not mention her name. I have not read it but feel I should stick up for my fellow alumna. I suspect my father would have used one of his favorite words, “Gratuitous!”Read more »

Saturday it rained, Sunday it rained, and Monday it rained, all thanks to a strange September nor’easter that hit many places much harder than it did here. All we saw was light to moderate rain, but it seemed that it would never end and I was grateful that it wasn’t December snow falling. Anyhow, on one of those days I stood beside the car in the rain on an old road and took this shot with my phone. There was lots of yellow here from black birch, cinnamon ferns and wild sarsaparilla but the sky…

I mentioned David J. Ross’s work more abstractly before, but here’s a great example of a good font announcement: Slight Chance Stencil. It’s interesting, teaches you new things, clearly talks about and shows its inspirations, and is free of the sort of bloviating, pretentious, nutrition-free language that often accompanies typeface reveals. At first, I thought I was going to get creative with the positions and angles of the stencil “bridges” that traverse the letterforms. I tried fun diagonal…

When it comes to bonkers animated shorts, Pixar’s Fruit & Nut must come somewhere near the top of the list. It tells the story of a peanut, down on his luck and desperate for the love of a good strawberry. Things don’t seem to be going his way until one day, he picks up a hitchhiker and the connection is immediate. Unfortunately for him, his new fruity girlfriend is intent on leading himself astray in the pursuit of bread – and soon they become the Bonnie and Clyde of the snack world. With a…

I've been reading that YouTube has just released a feature that lets you A/B test videos. I have opinions on A/B testing, which I've mentioned before. The crux of the problem is that A/B testing presumes either A or B is the right answer, and it optimises for popularity. In YouTube's case, engagement is probably what you want, but it isn't necessarily the best outcome. The other issue is how much the variants can differ. A/B tests are usually used for something small, like the wording on a…

A friend wants to proofread your work-in-progress blog post, but its preview only runs on localhost:8080. Several tools can help. Some run as a commercial service, like ngrok or Cloudflare Quick Tunnels. Some are self-hostable but require a specific client, like frp or localtunnel. Some only require a plain SSH client but rely on a specific SSH server, like sish. Let’s implement a self-hosted solution with only OpenSSH and nginx! $ ssh -R 0:localhost:8080 http-over-ssh Allocated port 41535 for…

What’s the last song you discovered and loved instantly? I tend to find new songs and instantly gorge myself on them. From unheard to on heavy repeat, I’ve always enjoyed that journey from ‘hey that’s interesting’ to ‘man this is catchy’ to ‘I love this track’. This track first appeared a couple of weeks ago, and it reminds of many songs, with a hint of Joanna Newsom in there, Pinegrove, Wolf Alice, and a few others. The soothingly soft guitars, her voice is hypnotic, the quiet/loud(ish)…

Which painting best represents where I stand in 2026? The Empty Boat begins with Zhuangzi, ego and a rather unusual fish, while a second painting leads to a different question: what happens when a painter stops asking what a work still needs and begins asking what it wants to get rid of? The post The Empty Boat — 虚舟 (Xū Zhōu) appeared first on Friedrich Zettl Fine Arts.

രാവ് കഴിയാറായിരിക്കുന്നു, യാത്രകൾ അനന്തമായി നീളുകയും പുലർച്ച കാത്തിരിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. എങ്കിലുമീ നീണ്ട പ്രയാണങ്ങളിൽ നിന്ന് ഇടവേളയെടുക്കാൻ അയാൾക്ക് കഴിയുമായിരുന്നില്ല. നിൽക്കാത്ത യാത്രകളുടെ തുടർച്ചയാണ് ജീവിതമെന്ന് അയാൾ തിരിച്ചറിഞ്ഞിരുന്നു. തമ്പിലെ നാടോടിയുടെ കൂട്ടത്തിലോട്ട് ഒരാൾകൂടെ.

I remember Sarah Walton saying when she was still not sure her broken foot had completely healed the Royal Ballet management management made her get up and rehearse Little Red Riding Hood. 'And there was Big Dave as the wolf giving it huge, gangloid jumps and bowling about and I thought, "Fuck this idiot if he knocks me over". And I kept doing the relevés away from him, and they're shouting at me to do them nearer. At one point I yelled back, "I am not getting nearer to all his big lummoxy…

Adventurers Character Race Class Description Ainsley Human Ranger level 1 An older gentleman with a groomed moustache and a wooden pipe in his mouth, covered in dark green cloak. Ambros Human Cleric level 7 Follower of Aniu, Lord of Time. Balarus Human Fighter level 4 An ex-woodsman, quite a crack shot with his bow. Ivor Human Cleric level 1 A young, soft-spoken worshipper of Umannah with thick black beard. Tam o' Shanter Human Cleric level 4 A boisterous wine-lover of Losborst on a Great…

I have two slide scans of "unknown amusements" today... maybe you can help figure out the locations!First up is this l950s look down the very wide main street of a western town that appears to be some sort of movie ranch. I was aware of "Mortensen's Ranch" in New Mexico, and "Apacheland" in Arizona; but neither of those seem to match, based on photos I've seen online. I don't believe this town is in California, but I'm really not sure. Do you have any ideas?Next is this 1960s photo of some sort…

Ninja In The Killing Fields (1984)

I have noticed an uptick in the stupid EdgeSuite errors that I have been getting on the website. Major websites simply are not working for me. I first noticed it with Lowe’s and MLB earlier this year. Before that, there were sporadic CDN errors like that and the stupid Cloudflare ones, but things usually just worked. Now they are flat-out refusing to load. There is no explanation. As usual with this sort of thing, there is a link to a page about the error but no actual help or suggestions. I am…

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got expired beer, closed taprooms and anti-Kindle sentiment. First, news from Cornwall, where the 2011 takeover of Sharp’s by Molson Coors has reached its inevitable conclusion with the closure of the brewery at Rock and production of cask Doom Bar moving to Hartlepool in the North East of England. To be fair, 15 years is a good old time for a brewery to persist after being taken over. But now Doom Bar –…

For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the various…