Last month some foreign psyops operative blue checkmark on Twitter caused a kerfuffle by saying that Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zero's "Home" was the worst song ever made.Admittedly, I wouldn't normally do you dirty by talking about anything that's going on on 𝕏 (derogatory). However, I cannot let this besmirchment of Edward Sharpe go unanswered.I know, I know... nothing that happens on Twitter is of any consequence whatsoever. That's because Twitter is mostly populated with foreign psyops…

I’m on strike. Not here at Shadowplay, but at Edinburgh College of Art, which is part of the University of Edinburgh, which has decided to axe a bunch of courses nominally to save money. Unique courses like Scottish Literature and Performance Costume. The argument is that these will still be available as electives, but an […]

I don’t think I’ve used this picture before. When we say New York’s “Pennsylvania Station was demolished in the 1960s” we’re obviously lying/exaggerating/obscuring. Penn Station is there! It serves half a million passengers every work day! So, what do we mean by “Penn Station”? There are the platforms for the long-distance and commuter-rail trains coming from east and west (and, as of 1991, some from the north). Those are still there, as built between 1900 and 1910, and hardly changed in…

Fujifilm X-E5 with a Fujifilm 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 lens. In reality, a relatively small, lightweight camera that can do everything well. Can a case be made that this camera might be one of the best ‘compromise’ cameras for most of us? (click to enlarge)I have been thinking about cameras again. I know. I know. That can be dangerous to my wallet. But I've been thinking about them in a different way this time. Thinking about and using cameras is something I have been doing for most of the past five…

A Friday HodgepodgeI realized the other day that we've had our two long-haired Siamese cats, Lucinda and Seymour, for a couple of years now. Here's an update...1. Lucinda, who likes to sit on my desk during writing time, has taken to announcing her arrival by stretching up, propping herself on my chair, and tapping me on the shoulder.I then pick her up and place her on my lap, so she can hop up to her spot. 2. Seymour loves pets and belly rubs, but tends to roll over onto the ground quickly.…

OH: "Jim Al-Khalili, the thinking person's Professor Brian Cox"

Avoid merge conflicts with side-by-side changes. Tim Ottinger published a blog post titled Why redesign doesn't happen (enough). It's a good article that you can read in five minutes, and I recommend that you do. The gist of it is that larger redesigns in established code bases rarely happen because changing too much code in one go risks conflicting with parallel work being done by colleagues. Tim Ottinger argues that this often leads to merge conflicts, which again reflects poorly on the…

I spent much of yesterday attending to tasks that I often don't find time for during regular school days: a dermatologist appointment, some grocery shopping, and a hair cut. But I also did some fun activities. Last year, I went to Asheville Cotton, one of our local fabric stores, on the first day of Fall Break. This year, I continued the tradition.I don't really need fabric, but I wanted to buy a few small pieces to keep me feeling inspired, and I really wanted some fall or Halloween fabric. I…

This past Sunday, I arrived at Mass carrying more than I realized. Actually, we arrived six or seven minutes late, which isn’t exactly the peaceful beginning to Mass that every Catholic parent dreams about. But my stress had started before we even left home. My wife had given me some unexpected news about her student … Continue reading What Happened When I Brought My Worries to Mass The post What Happened When I Brought My Worries to Mass first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post What…

I woke up after 0700 this AM and I had slept like I was dead. I got up once for the toilet trot races and immediately fell asleep again. Me thinks I over did it yesterday in the shop. It was productive day but I'm paying the price for it now. I didn't want to do anything today except veg out in my chair. The only thing I got done from what I had planned for today was putting shellac on the tool tote. Maybe tomorrow I'll have a wee bit more energy.minor me steakThe wedge didn't expand the tenon…

Today’s TDC says Audrey Watters‏ said, “repetition of the word ‘masses’ in the first 2 lines of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs is the most disappointing failure of imagination in the history of rhyme.” So let’s give Geezer some help. What else could he have used for the second line? Rhyme on. Well, actually I don’t mind the repetition – as it reminds me that there is more than one meaning of ‘masses’, but here goes. I tried a couple of my own: Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches in…

I plan before I execute. A stronger model writes the plan, and a cheap model like deepseek-flash carries it out. That works better than I expected, because the plan spells out things cheap models tend to skip, like writing the tests. But a plan can’t cover everything, and an executor deep in a task still lets things slip. The obvious fix is a review pass after the work is done. That works, but it’s one more step to remember, and by then the problems are already in the code. I once had a task…

Friend Joe sends us this painting, “Back to Nature,” by Robert Storm Petersen or “Storm P.” Look at those anonymous grey trudgers! Petersen was a pipe-smoking Danish humorist whose writings and cartoons regularly portrayed vagabonds as philosophers. Our kind of guy. * Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

Here's my latest piece in Literary Review – a round-up of recent books about death and longevity [the wording differs very slightly from the printed version]...End of the Line‘It is the strangest of all truths. We will all die. We all know we will die. But few of us truly believe we will die, few of us can imagine we will die.’ So begins Richard Coker’s Timor Mortis: How We Live With Death (New Modern Arcade 296pp £20). It’s a promising start to a wide-ranging study of the many dimensions of…

It’s not the (Super) Intelligence, Stupid! Artificial intelligence means different things to different people, ranging from neural networks used for image recognition to algorithms that generate an image, a video or a text when given a prompt describing the desired output. Text generating algorithms are commonly known as Large Language Models, LLMs for short. And this blog [post] mostly concerns this type of AI... [Wouter « bbbhltz]

A short video by Justin Jackson on ambition, motivation, and the question of how much you really want something. It looks like a thoughtful prompt for anyone building or creating over the long term.

I recently watched the talk by Scott Jenson titled "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0&t=445s. He's a great presenter, really articulate and concise. The kind of speaker that you'd gladly listen to for 3+ hours if given the chance. Which for a talk about window management is quite the compliment. The overall point of the talk was "Apple and Microsoft aren't going to innovate anymore in the desktop OS space, so it is up to us all…

A new Rangers of Shadow Deep supplements lands today! Pay in Blood takes the Rangers into the storm drains beneath Portrerik to face the undead. You wanted vampires? You get many, many vampires! The book includes 3-scenarios of battling against the blood-suckers. Pay in Blood … Continue reading →

Rough night. Couldn't get to sleep. Felt weird muscle tension and anxiety. Finally took half over an OTC sleeping pill at a little past midnight and now I'm waking up at noon. Ho ve. I thought the sleep was getting better. At least I was able to stay in bed until I feel like the pill had mostly worn off, but the next day is always a little.... wonky.

New month, why not dump a list of posts that I enjoyed, but that didn't get much traction. I only grabbed the posts with 1-2 upvotes, since I want to avoid linking posts you've already read. I'm Guilty of Bad Titles Too. Are You? My two cents about the bucket post opinion is that you can always use a good title for them. In a curated RSS feed, it's no biggie, but if I'm just scrolling past in bubbles new page, I have no idea what to expect from "This week", "links" nor "September". “This also…

Trees encroach on the historic Carpenters Bluff Bridge, a former railroad bridge built in 1910 that crosses the Red River on the Texas/Oklahoma border east of Denison, Texas. The post Overgrown Bridge appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I use to DJ a lot. I mostly played what would be called "deep house" which was quite broad. Today there are countless micro-genres in music, and I've discovered "lofi house" is one of them. It sounds like deep house to me, but a bit more muffled. Still, I really like it and I'm really digging this album.https://open.spotify.com/album/0LE9cnyJGQr0yWT5IekjY7?si=0F4ret-iSJOss8RYogBIFw

Some art forms can be used to tell a documentation or a story of the process of something rather than of an individual thing. For example blogging or videography which can be litteral documentaries of events or other processes. And events and proccesses can be ones that create art forms that tell a story of a process. This can be used to create a feedback loop. I see two layers of a feedback loop, that being metablogging or meta-video where it is a blog post about blogging or a video about…

Stand By For Action - it's the story of the Supermarionation-powered adventures of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, Stingray!

Drinking tea while watching ChatGPT do my job for me.

Real-Time Stratember is drawing to a close, I realise it’s October so don’t bother pointing that out, now it’s time to address the easiest part: the cuts. There’s still one game to go before I fully wrap up and damn, it’s a banger. But what didn’t make the cut this Stratember? There’s a couple unreal titles on here that I’m not happy about, especially when there were a couple that I could have… Source

More links! Who knew the internet was going to be so busy? Roel Nieskens, who writes at Pixel Ambacht, has taken a look at what it takes to render every character in the Unicode standard and what we can learn if we do that. I won’t steal Roel’s thunder, but the headlines are, essentially, that there is no one font to rule them all; that Chinese script contains a lot of characters; and that Unicode is full of oddities which have accrued over the thirty-odd years of its existence. Roel goes into…

As attentive readers of this website will know, I’m happily using micro.blog as the site’s hosting platform. Micro.blog has a surprisingly wide range of features and it comes with several associated mini-apps, which provide easy access to those features. One of the apps is called Wavelength, and it has just been updated. This has inspired me, finally, to actually make use of it. Wavelength makes it easy to edit and publish voice recordings and now with Wavelength I’ve been recording my voice,…

In light of recent events I've canceled my 1Password yearly subscription, after 10 years as a loyal user. This was not a decision I made lightly, I’ve got everything in my password manager and the muscle memory for using it is deeply ingrained in me. After much procrastination I finally took the plunge a month ago and it turns out, it was actually pretty easy to switch. And it came with some upsides too, Bitwarden is almost half the price of 1Password on the yearly plan. Migration guide There…