Programming note: Based on the e-mails we've gotten, we are going to have politics questions tomorrow, and non-politics questions next weekend. We kind of thought that things would turn out that way. TrumpWatch 2026: The Rats Are Preparing to Flee the Titanic If you are a high-profile Trump insider, and in particular if you are a high-profile Trump insider who might have broken the law, now is a pretty good time to think about getting out. Congress is about to start investigating six ways to…

Internal strife in Venetia led to the murder of a patriarch, and a change of government.

Some time ago I drafted an essay on cutting words from essays, intended for a cheesy writing contest, and never submitted it. I was thinking about this essay, languishing on my hard drive, as I was packing out to move to a new city. It struck me: revising and de-cluttering are remarkably similar processes. And I solved them in the same way, without connecting either the problems or the solutions to each other. Deciding what to leave behind, and what to throw out, is psychologically painful. So…

I drink caffeine. Like, a lot of caffeine. I have for a long time. Every once in a while I go on a ten-day caffeine fast to prune back my adenosine receptors, and when I start drinking coffee and yerba mate again, a tablespoon at a time, I think, wow, this is strong stuff!, and it’s a whole experience. [ Skip to how to have whole experience without fasting. ] But most days, after the first few sips of my cup of {coffee, yerba mate, pu-erh}, I bring it to my desk. I no longer consciously drink…

I sometimes wonder if I've acquired all the Beatties stuff there is out there, but no, there's always something new. In this case, a Beatties special Scalextric catalogue. That name on the front is printed, not a sticker, indicating that the chain of shops was going to distribute enough catalogues to make a special print run viable. Did Scalextric put it on for a valued retailer, or did Beatties have to pay for the print run as an advert?Inside, it looks a bit basic. Modern cars are better…

>>> import collections >>> collections.Counter("abc") == collections.Counter("cab") True >>> collections.Counter("abc").most_common() [('a', 1), ('b', 1), ('c', 1)] >>> collections.Counter("cab").most_common() [('c', 1), ('a', 1), ('b', 1)] As demonstrated above, collections.Counter.most_common orders elements with equal counts in order of first appearance: “Elements with equal counts are ordered in the order first encountered”. But == looks at set equality. Handy for checking for palindromes…

The (another) is because I have actually already finished one, The Ferry, which started as a long short story then got turned into a novel one NaNoWriMo1 (2009, I believe). It really needed to a rewrite or two, but I never got around to it and I feel if I’m going to try completing another novel, I should pick one of my many unfinished ones that has more good stuff already in it, thus requiring less good stuff be added. And that novel is Road Closed, which I’ve talked about here before. A lot.…

making up etymologies

This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love it when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm here to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.1. The Beginning of the End for Trump«He no longer defines our time. A new era begins.» He still has two more years to cause damage, but the checks and balances are back in place.…

From David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years (p. 144): The Mac team would fill all of the leadership positions in the Mac+Lisa group. They’d no longer be an elite skunkworks; they’d be cogs in a corporate division with more than 300 people. To explain the reorganization, Jobs summoned the Lisa group to a meeting that would become legendary. “You’re a B team. B players,” he told them. “A players attract A players. B players attract C players.” It was one of his favorite lines. Top talent won’t…

A somewhat bitsy week as I'm trying to finish some tasks that would otherwise be left hanging in limbo, most of which involved sorting out photos before shipping them all off onto an external hard drive, probably to be forgotten as I sink into old age and then deleted when I finally kick the bucket. I'm determined that, now I'm over the half-way mark (I'm planning to stick around until the next

Just look at us. We blast rocketships into outer space, talk to people across the planet in seconds, and swallow little pills to take away our headaches. Yet despite these giant leaps forward one thing’s still pretty primal around the world. Ladies, it ain’t pretty, but most guys unzip and drip into a dirty wall toilet while standing next to a bunch of other dudes. Thankfully there’s some unspoken urinal etiquette to help answer the call of nature with class: 1. Respect The Buffer. The goal is…

Below please find the post I wrote before going to bed last night but didn't "publish" because I passed out with one Airpod in my ear playing the audio from an old Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode. At the bottom of this post you will see (and have likely already seen) that I am rebooting (sort of) DMail, an old email newsletter/publication thing of mine that a lot of people liked for a number of years. I say "sort of" because in the four (or whatever) years since I last published an issue of DMail,…

The Overdue Podcast, a podcast about books you should already have read, covered Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

My favorite time of year. 🍁

For a year during my master’s of social work program, I worked in the Johnson County Medical Examiner’s Department. It was a memorable, transformative, but traumatic, year. I participated in some active death investigations and also looked specifically at child and elder deaths during that year, coordinating an expert panel to review certain cases that might impact healthcare and the provision of services to the wider community. It’s interesting to see the names of several folks I worked with…

The first reaction I had when I downloaded and installed Visual Studio Code on my Mac, at some point during 2015, wasn’t really positive: in my mind I was expecting to see “Visual Studio” itself, and not a simple text editor; the name was, as far as I was concerned, misleading, or worse, just plain wrong. I was expecting a full-blown IDE, with all the bells and whistles, and instead I saw a rather clunky, simple text editor without much interest. I did use Visual Studio since around version…

Get out of my way. I have wood to move. Twice a year I get a mountain of wood delivered. I get 3 face cords (which is 1 bush cord) in November and again in February. If you can't picture that, just imagine a comically large time-eating monster. Gardening has pretty much wrapped up, which...Read More

I was reading this very interesting history of the preservation and restoration of Public Service Coordinated Transport 2651, published recently by the North Jersey Electric Railway Historical Society, when I noticed a throwaway reference on page 22. The article mentioned that Philadelphia snow sweeper C122, the 1923 double-truck Brill shown above in 2018, was finally demolished this past spring. It had been used for 45 years or so as a bunkhouse in Ringoes, New Jersey, first by the NJERHS…

I'm comfy right now. This week was a bit rough, I'm still working on recovering. Still nervous that somehow this medicine won't be enough, but I just need to be patient and have hope. Some exciting things are going on though. Starting a new remote job on the 30th. I dunno if I've written about it on here yet but it's exciting! Pays better than what I currently make, full time, 1 hour breaks, and weekly pay. The only scary thing is it's a temp position that I'm hoping will become permanent. I…

In the night we made it to double digits. We kept changing between broad reach and wing-on-wing depending on where the wind was coming. Morning brought no difference to the sail setup. Nature on the other hand was giving it all. Henri saw a fin of a orca and an albatross! Later in the afternoon, Suski heard thunder rolling in the distance. It was time to put modern technology to good use as we once more are in the reach of a weather radar. So internet got turned on, location of the thunder…

“Haunt Me × 3” by Teen Suicide

Times Square Blur – New York, New York I have two layers of motion blur for your viewing pleasure. We have the blur of the subway, which I’ve often showcased on the blog. But the passenger walking through the station adds that extra dimension. What makes these motion blur photos effective is having a certain proportion of the picture rock steady. That anchors the scene and makes it look like the parts that are moving were explicitly selected. Here, much of the station and indeed much of the…

Jenny Holzer, Untitled, 1986, bronze, ed. 2/15, 4 x 8 in., selling at Christie’s to benefit the Gund Art Fndn Sometimes it can feel like artists are just clearing stuff out when they donate to a benefit auction, and sometimes Jenny Holzer sends ed. 2/15 of a bronze PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT plaque to the Creative Time gala in 1986, and Agnes Gund buys it. This thing is worth five PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT sushi platters if it’s worth a dollar. Lot 19, 23 Nov 2026, Jenny Holzer, Untitled,…

Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, November 9 through Sunday, November 15! This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes: When the event will take place What the event is Where the event will take place Who is holding the event This week’s events Monday, November 9 Tuesday, November 10 Wednesday, November 11 Thursday, November 12 Friday, November 13 Saturday, November 14…

Please don’t ruin another site. Who am I kidding? Of course they will. The post New York Times Company in Advanced Talks to Acquire Letterboxd appeared first on @Kevuhnn / 📸 / 📚 / 🇨🇦.

Soda Smugglers is a game by Reiner Knizia. It is arguably a cleaner version of Sheriff of Nottingham. Saying this sounds a little disrespectful to both games. However you can't deny the similarity. The core idea is the same, just that the execution is a little different. The box opens this way. Every round, one player is the customs

Marc Prud’hommeaux left the Swift Android workgroup to work on Rust. He helped create Skip, which lets you write Swift and SwiftUI for iOS and Android. His new project, Day, uses Rust to share app logic and UI across mobile and desktop platforms. His argument is largely about portability and getting beyond Apple’s tools. AI makes a language’s friendliness to human programmers less important to him. I agree with that part. But for mobile apps, it takes me somewhere else: I’d rather write Swift…

My father is a poetry translator, so perhaps my obsession with prose runs in the family. This started before Markdown: I wrote rubocop-exception_messages after noticing inconsistent exception messages in Grape. After I replaced this blog’s Python spell checker with a RuboCop plugin I still had a Node installation to check Markdown. Since it’s a Jekyll blog, and the build is Ruby, the spelling checker is Ruby, and my default set of code examples are also Ruby, why was formatting the README…

A few months ago, Unilever announced that it had heard the clamor and would finally deliver. For decades, women around the world have pined for a perfume version of Dove's original beauty bar, a creamy alternative to traditional soap that cleans mainly through synthetic detergents blended into a super-dense cream rather than through saponification. Unilever long ignored the pleas, choosing