⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 Stars - A speculative fiction page turner that was right up my street! The post The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey appeared first on The Wallflower Digest.

It should be noted, for the record, that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. He did implement a series of programmes that saw some of the trains - principally the ones foreign journalists and tourists might use - run on a far more efficient basis, but in the main, Italian Railways were chaotic before fascism and remained chaotic throughout. Similarly, though Mussolini liked to claim the credit for Milano Centrale, it was actually a building that had been planned for a couple of…

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like! This week’s prompt is about fears: As a book lover, what’s your biggest fear? On the personal level, that my house will burn down. So many books, and I don’t know if they can all be reasonably replaced, including ones with…

The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing! The snail mail project is going well. I keep track of the amount of outbound letters: the grand total for the last two months is 20 handwritten letters. If you’d like to chime in, please let me…

Not a normal debate. The debate about whether AI is a “normal technology” has been spun into overdrive with AI-generated musicals defending each side. (AI-musical is becoming a thing.) A Normal Debate?

If you're the kind of knockabout person who likes to dress up their abode with some politically tinged artwork, then the people (?) at Wefail Art are right up your unloved and potholed street. It's not cheap, it's not free, but it is art after all, and more fun than a rogue "Ring" front door security system. Click on this rather sardonic but effective "Scotland Travel" poster to find out more. What better way to remember the messed up summer of '26?

What do markets reveal about American cultural preferences and priorities? Revealed Preferences How can we know what people really think? It’s a hard problem. People will sometimes refuse to answer. Sometimes they’ll engage in varying degrees of lying, by telling you what they think you want to know or what will make them look good. This is one of the banes of political scientists designing polls, sociologists designing experiments, and psychologists pleading with therapy clients to be…

Some links for your Friday buttondown.com/things/ar…

Since I last addressed it fifteen years ago, I feel that “bin”–what Americans would wordily call “garbage can,” “trash can,” “wastepaper basket,” or (less wordily) “garbage”–has been making progress here. Most recent evidence is this Facebook ad from an American leather company: Still no sign of “bin” as a verb.

i have to use google at work (technically, i could use my dear kagi as well, but i try not to mix up my work accounts with the personal ones) and let me tell you, the search results are awful! you cannot easily get the image source if you are trying to look for a picture, clicking on it will take you to the website that hosts the picture (often a vibecoded one with flashy pictures). if you google anything, the AI answer takes up half the page, and the top results are all from big corporations…

Financial literacy is meant to be basic stuff. For an example of how basic, here are eight questions from what is called the GFLEC Personal Finance Index. More on the index and the results in a moment, but take a moment to read the eight questions and look at the share of correct answers. These eight questions are the public face of a longer 28-question survey, which has now been given to large groups for a decade. Paul J. Yakoboski, Annamaria Lusardi, Andrea Sticha, and Fran Mastry provide and…

I’ve had a little VPS chugging away for a bit more than a year now. It runs this site, it runs calibre-web, miniflux, wireguard and a bunch of other stuff. This is a very much a “pets not cattle” machine, to reverse the common trope about treating servers as cattle rather than pets. I log into it directly. I administer to it by typing commands out and manually editing a bunch of files in /etc. I do have a couple docker containers on there but generally I try to avoid running things through…

Founded in 1880 by Paul-Émile Carnal, Le Rosey is a private boarding school with campuses in Rolle and Gstaad, Switzerland. Centred around the medieval Rosey castle near the shore of Lake Geneva, the Rolle campus also includes several classroom and residence pavilions dating from the postwar period. Despite its futuristic shape, the building fits well within the folds of the college grounds. Contrasting with the cold aluminium cladding on the outside, many interiors are clad in raw OSB panels.…

"Of course, they'll try and heap the blame on me." When an oil company causes a massive iceberg to drift towards Europe, its CEO (Tom Cruise) tries to fight fire with fire while dealing the pending crisis. It’s probably a spoiler to even suggest that there are spoilers here, but this is a very different film to what is implied in its trailer — so I guess don’t read this if you are worried about spoilers. I liked the play-within-a-play structure. It’s a film about people making a play about a…

Been trying various browsers the past month. I have been really trying to get away from anything Google related, which eliminates quite a few browser options (Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, and obviously Chrome) and while I am not a huge fan of Gecko (Firefox) I decided to give a browser based on that a shot. It’s called LibreWolf. It uses Gecko rather than Chromium and removes/changes a lot of Mozilla telemetry and integration. The install on Debian 13 was simple, it is clean, familiar and so far,…

A CSS-only solution to the problem of having sticky headers in a table with horizontal scroll approaches!

Mārama is currently a Shudder exclusive, which I’m hoping will do a lot to bring it to a wider audience. It’s the debut feature from writer and director Taratoa Stappard, and it has the feeling of a very earnest and opinionated production that is doing a lot with a modest budget. The story centers on Mary, a young Māori woman who’s been summoned to Yorkshire from her home in Wellington, by a mysterious letter from a man who claimed to know about her birth parents. She soon finds herself inside…

Hugh Holman, until last Christmas, was an author I had not come across before. He was a South Carolinian author and today’s read was one of the two winners in the last readers’ poll. Holman studied at Presbyterian College in Clinton as well as at New York University. He went back to his first college to work as the director of publicity and Holman also went on to write and direct educational radio plays. During his working life he also worked as an English instructor and became an academic…

I had Claude crunch the numbers from my time tracking system for this one - here is September 2026 in numbers. September at a glance Metric September August Change Reading 17h 18m 16h 50m +28m Gaming 15h 17m 10h 56m +4h 20m Steps/day 5,899 5,732 +167 Mood 5.3 6.2 -0.9 Sleep 7h 33m 7h 07m +26m Week by week Week Reading Gaming Driving Steps/day Mood Sleep 1–6 Sep 4h 26m 2h 22m 1h 55m (31.3mi) 6,685 5.7 7h 26m 7–13 Sep 4h 33m 2h 23m 4h 07m (69.6mi) 6,132 4.8 7h 27m 14–20 Sep 3h 21m 2h 31m 2h 14m…

I wrote two blog post in August, and zero in September. How bad am I?! For those who follow along, I extended my Summer hiatus into September. I had the opportunity for more "me" time, so I jetted back to Spain for a few weeks and then returned late September to get my head down and work on a few projects which were ready to go live. It meant I worked a few weekends in a row, and busy week-days. I spoke at a few events, and also sojourned several hotels. However, I was happy as I was doing what…

my drawing from last night’s intro to drawing class at the Toronto School of Art.

The reality of independent research into online platforms, per Article 40 of the Digital Services Act continues to be challenging. This is a rapidly evolving field, with technological advancements consistently outpacing regulation, making it essential that frameworks adapt swiftly and proactively. […] As the role of online platforms grows in importance, the successful implementation of the DSA is even more urgent now than at the time when it was developed. If the implementation of Article 40 is…

To John Rhys-Davies life | Published 2026-10 You asked what I was reading. My mind went completely blank.

This is now officially the third highest yearly output for Newsonaut, having surpassed my 64 posts in 2014. The only years when I did better were 2012 with 135 and 2011 with 169. Yes, this is my 66th post of 2026. There has been a resurgence lately in the indie web, and I’m happy to be a part of it. I was a little bit sad, though, to read Bryce Wray’s last post. He basically doesn’t feel like he has anything left to say that would be of interest to readers. It hits close to home because it…

× link.philippdubach.com is where I keep articles worth returning to and papers I haven’t had time to read. I can open the list from anywhere or send it to friends and colleagues so we have something to discuss. An iOS Shortcut in the share sheet sends the URL and a short description to a Cloudflare Worker. It stores them in D1 and serves a plain page with the newest links first. Saving a URL again moves it back to the top. × Read across the links I choose a date range and let sub-agents divide…

I’m reminded of a funny quip I saw on television. A journalist was interviewing an AI expert, and the man said to the interviewer, “If you want to know what living with superintelligence will be like, ask a chicken.” I fear we might cede intellectual activity to AIs. I recently read How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. It’s about Baker’s first year at Stanford University. You’d think students getting into Stanford would be anxious to learn, yet, according to Baker’s book, many are there to hook…

I just shared the September 2026 Behind the Scenes update for VerseNotes Commons members. September was a huge month. It’s always helpful for me to look back on the month and see how far we’ve come, and I like having a group of invested people to share it with.

A personal update here wrt the /now section of this little blog. Some earnest and shameless self-promotion, just like Tim Berners-Lee intended. About 18 months ago, in a fit of passion, I left my job to pursue something I care a lot about: software that streamlines parent-led early literacy instruction, while minimizing active screen time. The app is LettersPractice.com. It has a pretty generous non-expiring free tier, and then a $20 one-time purchase. Very roughly speaking, the phonetic rules…

looking forward to a normal Indiana Fever season where we can, I dunno, talk about Kelsey Mitchell breaking the single season scoring record, instead of reactionary bullshit from a washed-up bench player 🏀

We released Matilda today after almost 3 weeks in our spare bedroom. She has only one foot now but she’s managing well. The antibiotics have cleared any signs of infection and her remaining foot which was also swollen from the previous entanglement looks much better too. It will be tough for her with just one foot but probably no harder than life had already become with the entanglement she’d been living with. It must have been very painful for some time. At least that source of pain is gone…