Books and some interesting stuff I read in September 2026 Non-fiction The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) 704 pages 5 stars There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. How did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and…

no but I'm obsessed with the whole weird october idea!!! so far this one by 'a parenthetical departure' and any by furioursus are my faves - they all involve cats!

It's Bandcamp Friday, and I've got the Darkside Truth badges up on Bandcamp now:https://helenmccookerybook.bandcamp.com/merch/the-darkside-truth-badge

For a long time now I've been having issues with my Raspberry Pi randomly shutting down. I tried all different power adapters PPS non-PPS/Xiomi fast charge that doesnt adhere to any spec and even some 65 watt laptop adapters. I recently noticed that the issue only happens when I'm transferring big files to the hard drive. The current setup is a NVME via USB asthe boot drive and a 2.5 inch spinning drive as the data drive. After looking into it a little bit today I see that there's a 1.2 amp…

A genuine question for you, dear reader, have you been reading the daily music-based posts? The ones with a track and artist as the title, you do realise it’s not just me reviewing the track itself? In fact it’s almost NEVER a review of the track, it’s an exploration of me. I’m asking because I’m finding writing them hugely cathartic and wondered if that came across. In the past I’ve turned to various prompts and methods to cajole thoughts from the deeper recesses of my brain, with the School…

There is a temptation to see today’s hard right move as something new. Looking at this mess, the #deathcult is the name I use for the destructive logic of #neoliberal capitalism: a world where profit, growth and competition are the dominant measures of value, while human needs, shared resources and collective responsibility are pushed aside. If we want to understand the political crisis, we need to dig beneath its surface of how social crisis becomes authoritarian politics. The hard right…

Cascada de Texolo, Veracruz, Mexico (photo from Wikimedia) 2 October 2026, WINGS Veracruz: Migration is a Moving Experience: Day 4, Travel from Veracruz to the highlands at Xalapa After birding in the lowlands this morning we travel from Veracruz city to the highlands at Xalapa, a trip that takes just over an hour and a half. As you can see from the following maps we will be much closer to the place where the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt joins the Sierra Madre Oriental … Maps of Trans-Mexican…

More gaming with nearby friends.

I disable the cloud on every Shelly plug in my house. And that is exactly why I love Shelly. Stay with me, because that sounds backwards. A friend called me on a different version of it: “You’re the local-LAN guy, but you use Ubiquiti’s UniFi cloud API to run your networks. Pick a lane.” Fair hit. It looks inconsistent. It isn’t — I was just naming the principle wrong.

In the Grey (2026) • View trailer3.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for violence and profanityAvailable via: Amazon Prime and other VOD optionsBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.4.26British writer/director Guy Ritchie’s action thrillers always are clever, vicarious fun, in great part because of the snarky, deadpan dry wit with which his characters operate. This one is no exception. With bodyguards Sid (Henry Cavill, left) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) keeping a closewatch,…

9.28.2026 Getty Images/Drazen Zigic Emily Freitag is the Cofounder and CEO of Instruction Partners. This article appeared September 28, 2026 in Instruction Partners and can be found at: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/bans-arent-answer I have heard a number of leaders start discussions about AI with the question, “Are you for or against AI?” I suspect there are many points in history where similar questions have been posed: In 1889, “Are you for or against electricity?” In…

"The Fate of Nations" is a 2003 science fiction short story by James Morrow. It is about a fan who finally explains to his wife why sports are so important to the galaxy. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "The Fate of Nations" follows the wife of Dennis, a man who is growing more and more addicted to watching all kinds of sports. His wife starts out tolerant, but eventually demands that Dennis see a counselor to help battle his ever-increasing problem. While there, the counselor and Dennis…

My friend Laura provided me an instructive moment of delight yesterday when she confided that she’d just opened a jar of 2007 “Plum Yum,” a jammy concoction made of Italian prune plums from my orchard. She said she’d been trying to break her lifelong habit of saving special things for special occasions. “Trying to drink the fancy tea, use the fancy soaps, eat the meaningful jams and preserves,” she told me, while reporting that that the 2007 vintage is still delicious. Her dispatch made me…

Seeking a simpler mouse jiggler than WakeyWakey, move-mouse-macOS, or MoveMouse, queried Opus 5.5; it conjured up tinynudge in one shot, just 30 lines of Swift and 54k compiled: // tinynudge: Prevent sleep with 1px cursor nudges when idle and a caffeinate-style power assertion // Build: swiftc -O tinynudge.swift -o tinynudge && strip tinynudge Usage: tinynudge [seconds] (default 60, Ctrl-C to quit) import ApplicationServices import IOKit.pwr_mgt setbuf(stdout, nil) let interval = max(1,…

If you travel in the same circles I do, you probably know that my friend and colleague Mark Witton is working on a speculative biology book, Dinosaurs Evolved, that takes a fresh look at what life on Earth might be like now had the asteroid missed and the K-Pg extinction never happened. As a lifelong spec-bio fan, I’m stoked for that project. Speculative sauropods have given me a lot to think about, especially in the past few years, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some in this post.…

The writing has been on the wall for EWS in Exchange Online for ages, and Apple’s promised Graph support still hasn’t shipped; M365 can temporarily keep EWS enabled until April 2027, but right now some tenants may effectively kick out Apple Mail/Calendar, which is just stupid because it is definitely not Microsoft’s fault that EWS is being phased out in favor of a better, much more flexible approach. I have zero idea about why it’s taking Apple this long to get their act together, since EWS has…

Fuze (2025) • View trailer3.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for violence and considerable profanityAvailable via: HBO MAXBy Derrick BangThe devious twists in Ben Hopkins’ fiendishly clever script are ably matched by the multi-faceted, meticulously detailed shoot that brings it to life, under the guidance of director David Mackenzie. No surprise, given that Mackenzie also helmed 2016’s superlative Hell or High Water. After getting called to a London construction site that has uncovered an…

My correspondent P keeps up with general science much better than me. At the end of September, she flagged up a Nature press release about the latest submission from the Bat1k Project. Bats are important and diverse: 20% of all mammalian species are members of Order Chiroptera. Only rodents are more 'speciose' (25% of the ~5,000 known species). There is a whiff of marmite about both taxa: most people are squikked out by bats or rats or both but enthusiasts are really enthusiastic. Take Gdau.II,…

I use LLMs as much as I can for software development. Bug fixing, analysis, various automations. But there’s one thing no one should use AI for: writing texts to be read by humans. I learned it the hard way. No, I have never generated a full multipage blog post from a single prompt and posted it without reading. Would never do that. I just used a single phrase suggested by an AI agent. That was enough to trigger AI slop detector many of us now have. People considered the whole article…

Another wet day. Not fit for any gardening. Cleared up a bit after dinner so did all the mowing. Nell went to Dot’s on the 12.45 bus and came back at 5.30.

Casey Newton, writing at Platformer: Last week at his company’s developer conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg heavily promoted Muse, its own consumer-focused agent, which he positioned as a new peer to company pillars like Instagram and WhatsApp. But after admittedly limited testing — I only got access a couple hours ago — so far I have been most impressed with Dots, the new agent from OpenAI. It’s highly capable, focused on the work I actually do, and intuitive to use. Unlike Meta’s Muse, it…

October 2, 2026 OCTOBER! I don’t know why the very sound of the word fills me with relief – it’s not as if I absolutely hate hot weather… Our heroine this month is travelling to New York two weeks out of four, for the foreseeable future. And those New York types do a LOT of dining out, so she’s thinking about hitting the holiday clothes early this year! I’m almost nauseated by how much new clothing just hit the stores in the last two days; does EVERY store need to bring in literally hundreds of…

On April Fool’s Day 2015, a button was added to Google Maps which, when selected, turned the streets of the current map view into a fully functioning game of Pac-Man. Players could navigate the familiar streets, eating dots and avoiding ghosts just as they would in the classic arcade game.Pac-Man on Map is a tribute to that much-missed April Fool’s Day feature. The game similarly transforms real-world streets into a playable Pac-Man maze, using road data to generate a layout wherever you choose…

In my last post I mentioned that I keep forgetting the syntax for adding images here, so this is a note on how to create an editor snippet with YASnippet for Emacs. Markdown mode has a shortcut for inserting images, but for Jekyll I use the Liquid relative_url filter which prepends the site’s baseurl to an image’s URL. Not needed now since my site is not at a subdomain, but if it were to change, the filepaths could stay the same. Some time ago when I tested this on localhost the images weren’t…

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I’ve certainly brought it up on Bluesky that I now have about 92% of the Elementals comics from the ’80s and ’90s, missing only a couple of the issues from the mini-series, and the very last couple of Elementals minis spit out by a dying Comico. (I’m only bothering with the first Elementals Sex Special since it’s the one with actual work from the series creator Bill Willingham.) Anyway, I held off reading the Elementals Specials (not to be confused with…

Today's photos are especially-nice views of the Submarine Lagoon, completely drained of water for a refurb. Seeing that these are from October of 1972, I am pretty sure that I saw the lagoon in this state with my own peepers. October was typically the month for Navy Nite (though I could find no records of it for 1972). I do remember trying to take photos of the lagoon at night with my little Kodak Instamatic. Sure, the tiny flash cube will do a great job illuminating that large area! I wound up…

Crimson Peak (2015)

November isn’t far away, and you all know what that means – German Literature Month is just around the corner! For the 16th time, we’ll be reading German, Austrian, or Swiss books, enjoying a whole month of German-language literature. As usual, Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat will be hosting the event, and I’ll be helping out by co-hosting again this year. As many of you know, the other co-founder, Lizzy Siddal, of Lizzy’s Literary Life, sadly passed away during last year’s GLM, so the…

The move is available. You have run the numbers and they work. Your partner is supportive. There is even a version of the timing that is genuinely good.You are still not doing it.Every reason you give is a logistic. Not until the project ships. Not until the youngest starts school. Not with the market the way it is.Logistics can be argued withWhich is exactly why you reach for them.A practical objection can be discussed. Somebody can help you solve it, or agree that it is real, and either way…

The topic of posthumous releases of author’s works has been on my mind a little lately, no doubt because of the Kafka rabbit hole I disappeared down! However, as I mentioned in my end of September post, another distraction appeared lately when the Instagram algorithm discovered that I was interested in classics and philosophical novels… Needless to say, my feed has been flooded with books, many of which I already know about or own (but was happy to be reminded of); and a good number of which…