Your own brain farts never stink.

At the edge of the orchard stood a row of tall granary towers, built from timber and thatch, where the whole settlement kept its grain dry through winter. Every year, a pig named Bramwell was given the task of deciding which builder would move into the fine new quarters beside the millhouse, and whi…

A strangely compelling if rather disjointed story of modern life for a young person in today’s China. The overwhelming impression I get is a strange mix of frenetic entrepreneurship and stifling bureaucracy, with periods of boredom and depression. Our hero has a lot of jobs in very different industries but doesn’t seem to be able to stick to any of them for too long, despite demonstrating quite a wide range of skills and talents (although not salesmanship or negotiating skills it seems). It is…

Earlier this week, after many months of being shelved, I set up my 32” curved gaming display in my man-cave closet. Then I took my Switch OLED out of a storage bin and connected it. Next, paired up my bluetooth speaker and controller. After a long while recharging and updating the console, I had to pick one of my unfinished games to play. So now I’m back into Tears of the Kingdom. I’d only completed about half the story; already I’ve found new places in Hyrule! Fun times.

September 2026 Although I am still writing up my walks around the coast of Britain I have completed my walk around mainland Britain (although I am also now walking some of the islands of Scotland). I’ve also walked the coastlines of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man as well as most islands of England and Wales and Gibraltar. As I am still very much enjoying coastal walking I’ve also started walking the coast line of other countries. I have started to walk the coast of France, but as well as…

At a lake today all was quiet, then suddenly two herons took off and everything else panicked and it went from idyllic to chaos in seconds - ducks, pigeons, herons, crows - no doubt squirrels dived for cover too but they were drowned out. An encounter table should have a cascade effect - something like roll 2d4 more times and have them all happen at once - the dragon woke up, got the goblins running around, they let out the zombies, the bats are fleeing - general chaos throughout the dungeon.…

I got to play magic last night with a friend. My partner is off work today, and baking cupcakes for an event they're attending. I had a big breakfast of eggs, sausage, mushrooms, and zucchini. I have cozy music going while I watch Jerma. The windows are open, and it's gently raining outside. My medicine has got me feeling much less uncomfortable. I'm in my favorite robe, under my favorite blanket. We have the string lights on in the hallway. I feel heavenly. I feel the calm all the way to my…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to prevent user generated content (UGC) from maliciously triggering HTMX 4 and Alpine.js behaviors in his ColdFusion output....

Get new posts by email Subscribe Enjoying the blog? Help with costs & future trips. Facebook Instagram Buy me a pint Historic Pubs and Hidden Gems in Digbeth A Friday evening exploring seven pubs around Digbeth, taking in everything from grand Victorian survivors to railway-arch bars and converted industrial buildings. I met up again with Neil from Neil’s Real Ale & Pub Page, starting at The Woodman before heading through Kilder, Nortons, The Anchor, The White Swan and The Spotted Dog, with The…

..and then we talk and for a moment I forget to hate myself

Hi everyone. How can it be October already? How can it not, you might say. I’m joining in wiht #WeekendCoffeeShare again. It’s nearly 10PM as I start typing this, so no more coffee or other drinks or food for me. Feel free to grab a cup of your favorite beverage though and let’s chat. If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. It’s unusually warm for October and that’s an understatement. On Tuesday and Wednesday, which I know were technically still September but oh well, the…

Good news — I finally have a scheduled surgery date on the calendar. It’s official. After switching gears last week from a traditional hospital to a surgery center, things have been clicking along steadily. I’ve been surprised by the quick and easy steps down this new path. Now I just have to…wait again. No worries. It’ll all be over soon. Right? I emailed the surgery center after business hours last Friday evening. The center replied early Monday morning. Then I sent over some of my medical…

Only took four images today, three of which you can see above. 👉 View 2 more images

A fairly nondescript day. Pottered around a bit and didn’t accidentally start a project, so that’s good. Conserving energy and resting properly. Bit bored though. Trying not to get wound up about the Zionism-is-racism stuff at the Green Party conference. I have no idea if Zionism is or isn’t racism but I’ve had a look at who’s pushing it and they seem to be exactly the sort of wankers who make progressive and community organising such a fucking ballache to be involved with. In my experience…

See the companion post with a play report here. I've been thinking a lot about procedural generation recently and trying out a few systems of my own design. I put out one example earlier this year using cards as the main driver, but I also have a much bigger project in the works that uses a more traditional series of many dice rolls. I also recently got into reading the Delicious in Dungeon manga, and I've been itching to run a proper big old dungeon. But, since my home group is happy in our…

An RSS reader was the key to breaking my Discover page addiction. The Redditification of writing needed to be nipped in the bud. I don’t want to be concerned with upvotes. Stormy weekend ahead. I’m an hour into the Elden Ring DLC. Respecced from mage to melee. Occult Nagakiba build goes hard. I also just got a handful of Dandadan manga. My wife wants me to wait for the next season of the anime, but I need to know what happens. I’m not much for meta-blogging, but I’m finally happy with this…

The problems with the furry fandom today are not as simple as,“Furries need to touch grass!” Unfortunately, whatever you’re seeing that makes you want to say such a thing is probably a structural problem with multiple compounding factors. I will elaborate. But first, for anyone who feels lost, I need to explain where we are and how we got here. One of the downsides of furries continuing to use Twitter in 2026 is that they’re being boiling-frogged into the worst versions of themselves. If this…

the Apollo-Soyuz docking system is “androgynous”, because neither the American nor the Russian wanted to be the “female” side. #space #patriarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgynous_Peripheral_Attach_System

On October 1, 2026, I (being N.A. Ferrell) published a new article on The New Leaf Journal titled 86 Days Until Christmas: Seen in Carroll Gardens. On September 29, I had come across an inflatable Christmas countdown clock on the Carroll Gardens side of Degraw Street (Degraw is the border between Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens). The clock correctly indicated that there were 86 days until Christmas. As I photographed it, I recalled that I had published an “early” Christmas countdown clock…

Erroll Louis Garner (June 15, 1921 – January 2, 1977) was an American jazz pianist and composer known for his swing playing and ballads. I recall seeing the album ‘Concert By The Sea (live from Carmel, California)’, 1955, in nearly every Black household when I was growing up. As I’m cleaning up my messy music files, I decided to give this cultural milestone and marker a listen. Looking at the photo of the original album cover, I was pleasantly surprised.”Hey! I got some ‘By The Sea’…

Book report – Melancology: black metal theory and ecology Dominik Irtenkauf: [black metal theory] seems to be more about speculative interpretations of a musical sub-culture than developing a coherent system of theory. Is that perception correct? Nicola Masciandaro: Yes. I recently had the misfortune of stumbling onto a debate raging across Substack between continental and analytic philosophers. The main contentions being that the former lack clarity in their writing, and the latter disguise…

It’s Bandcamp Friday, the first Friday of every month, where 100% of sales on Bandcamp go to the artist. Today I pre-ordered the new album from Martyn Joseph (The Bruce Cockburn of Wales) “Revolved and Evolved” and picked up the new release from Bowen Island’s own Le Ren “Don’t Be Funny Without Me.” which is getting some good press and good play here in Canada. It’s a really good album and the quality of production is OUTSTANDING. Go buy something and make a musician happy that you supported…

The Season of Scenery painting challenge finished on 30th September and I just managed to scrape in with my last two items – a small railway station completed on the 29th and a railway water tower finished on the 30th (with the assistance of my wife’s hairdryer to get the base sorted)! I’ve just managed to get a few photos taken this afternoon before it got too dull outside. I’d slowed down a bit with painting after finishing my last railway bits but put on a last minute spurt to get these two…

I was surprised to see a courtesy notice from the SFPL that The Infinity Machine (subtitle: "Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the quest for superintelligence") which I had only recently borrowed, could not be renewed. It wasn't a so-called "Lucky Day" book, which can be borrowed for only a couple of weeks or so after which it needs returning for circulation, or to send to the next reader in line for it. [ in progress... ]

Around three and a half thousand years ago, at a place now known as Mosley Height, a group of Bronze Age people came together to build a funeral monument. This was a large circular burial cairn, standing on the western facing edge of the Burnley moorland. The structure they created consisted of a central circular […]

For Your GRAMMY® Consideration: We’ve submitted our album “Oxygen” for Contemporary Folk Album and Immersive Audio Album, and the track “Hoedown” for Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. We'll be celebrating the music and the team behind it in a couple of weeks and you're invited! You can explore the studio that we recorded most of the album in, listen to it in its full immersive glory, and hear a special live performance of selections from the album. When: Tuesday, October 13, 2026 Time:…

This post was inspired by James. I read his Sticker Memories article earlier this week and started recalling several of my own sticker memories. Sports stickers Most of my earliest memories about stickers are related to sports. I remember collecting stickers for baseball teams. I used a lot of those stickers to decorate the dugout or the field of the baseball games I use to play with plastic baseball players. My dad built fences and dugouts for my field out of wood. Originally, I had set up…

The book is a quick read if you are familiar with Doctorow’s other writings, and/or have listened to a few of his interviews. He is nothing if not consistent and, in the case of AI, consistently correct. Style You may, if you feel particularly carmudgeonly, argue that this is a book that could have been a blog post. You would be off by only a degree: each chapter does in fact resemble a piece or three from Pluralistic, his decades-old blog. You may notice that each daily article there starts…

I am in a very weird place right now when it comes to design. I still very much appreciate the craft, if anything I think it's more important than ever. But when it comes to ingesting news and information about the craft of digital design and tools for creation, I just can't help but feel… flat. Not interested in the slightest. I am closing in on a realization that all my life I wanted to be able to make good software. Since I couldn't program my software, I shifted my effort—and my depth—to…

Someone targeted me in an attempt to gain access or credentials because of my Open Source and/or consulting roles