Power Cat 2026-10-02

I never realized I hate apples. Done in Procreate on a crusty old iPad Pro. With more time I’d fix up the leaf. Or swear off apples. One or the other. Thirty more to go!

Hi Crowd! Christian nationalists are dumb. No really. A new study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion finds that “Americans with lower scores on a vocabulary test commonly used to measure cognitive ability are more likely to endorse Christian nationalist beliefs, even when accounting for their overall level of education.” This builds on previous research showing significant knowledge gaps in Christian nationalist adults which is most often explained by “motivated…

So this week I was nominated for an award and on the one hand, I intend to milk this incredibly from now until December 2, which is when there’s a gala awards dinner and I’ll need to use my “oh, very well done, you deserved it” face talking to the winner. But that’s one hand and this is the other. Alan Plater once said about awards for writers that if you buy enough tickets, eventually you win the raffle. Mind you, he also said “don’t let the BAFTAs get you down.” I realise with a truly…

With this narra/Sitka spruce 00 and East Indian rosewood/sinker redwood OM about to enter the ugly stage as I install bindings, I thought it was an opportune time to photograph them. With ebony bindings in place, I'm sure they'll emerge from this process looking very smart!Cheers, Pete

I was part of two conversations recently that covered two extremes of what we are talking about when we discuss AI and schooling. The first was an episode of the AIR|GPT podcast where we discussed the disaster that is Alpha School. We had actually talked about the Alpha School model in a previous episode but […] Source

I brought my C=TAR to Bergen for an hour of live SID music. Enjoy game soundtracks by the old masters along with some of my own tunes from recent years.

Penitent Saint Peter by Jusepe de Ribera, 16321Back to my childhood fear of mannequins, how I couldn't enter a department store without bursting into tears. My mortified parents would scoop me up and cover my eyes, encouraging me to be brave. Today I stand in museums and happily marvel at ancient statues, awed by fleshy marble. Why are mannequins scary but sculptures are sublime? Maybe because mannequins have wigs. There's also the uncanny valley aspect, the sinister feeling of something…

I’d been use Chezmoi to manage config files for quite a while. A couple years ago I started use mise as a task runner, then adopted it for tool management. And now I’ve started using it for file management. It’s so good. I still think Chezmoi’s great, but mise watches for changes and automatically git commits them, which is the part I always forgot to do myself until the files had drifted beyond repair.

I confess this is at least 80% a test.

After being made redundant from my job, I express my gratitude for the industry I worked in for over a decade, and have done some reflection on what I want to spend my time doing next.

I knew a computer science professor who now works, I think, for Google. He was an interesting fellow who defied many CS stereotypes. He read books outside his field, for instance, and spoke in complete sentences. Ten or twelve years ago as I was walking across the engineering quadrangle toward the parking lot, I noticed him kneeling on the sidewalk outside the mechanical engineering building. He seemed to be looking at something in the grass. As I approached, I saw he was studying a fire-ant…

It just had some downtime... With some luck I've gotten it to autostart correctly next time. Thanks Antonio for reminding me :)

We’ll finish off the Folkstone show with another batch of layout photos. Five Mile House (OO) models the East Coast main line in 1935. Trains in the landscape, and a pleasant watch. (The layout is a lot longer than my photos suggest!) Lovely detail in the workshops of the Abbey Light Railway (O-14). Addleford Green (OO). Staple & Ash (OO) a busy station on the East Kent Railway. Holmeshurst (O). Rookery Lane (OO). Oakbourne (OO). Tinkers Hill (O). Oakley Lane (O). Halden Lane (OO). Clayton West…

When you read a book, or you hear someone speak, and it affects you deeply, where does it go? I finished a book a couple days ago. And the ending was amazing. And I really can’t recall it right now. As a matter of fact, when I’m reading a book, I never skip a word, and I read parts over and over if I lose attention. But from one page to the next, I can’t really tell you what’s… I can’t remember what was what. But if I go back and read it, I remember it. I don’t know how that works. But it…

Walking up against the wind, feel heavy. But dancing, you shift weight inbetween the gusts, swirling around.

A clip of me singing a funny song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore back in 2013

I took a quick trip to Las Vegas to do research for a nonfiction book I’m writing about the adult movie business. About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

I think fantasy political ideologies should be hard to map onto real world political ideologies. This is inspired by Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, both very very very good games about politics that nevertheless feel somewhat politically unimaginative. So have some new fantasy and sci fi ideologies."Besil is the only saint that cares about the poor, the hungry, the suffering. And we - his army - follow his legacy. The aristocrats, the Grand Duke and his bevy of whores, grow fat off the people,…

Fall in the high country is brief. We caught it just right: golden aspens, bugling elk, an old cabin, cold nights overlooking the desert, and pie to finish. Read More ... Continue reading Above Capitol Reef at PMags.com.

One of the original promises of a personal computer was that the computer would be personal. It's kind of strange to think that, now in 2026, it has taken circa 40 years for this to actually become true.You see, over the last 40 years, someone was either a software developer, also known as a programmer, and in that case they were able to make a computer personal. If you didn't have these skills, you were given an interface, and your ability to personalize the computer or software was limited to…

It's Mathober! This post that will get updated throughout this month as I work on prompts. I am doing a few things this month so I separated them by type (doodles, code, Desmos). DoodlesI am going with fungus this year.Day 1CodeDay 1DesmosDay 1

My hot take of the day: I never thought Ghost in the Shell was all that good. So, probably still no surprise that even with some pretty awesome animation in this remake, and much better pacing (at least in my vague recollection from decades ago), it’s just good but not great in my opinion. I think the main issues are, I’m not all that interested in the characters (especially Motoko) and the politics is overly cynical and underdeveloped. No one in this show has any fondness for democracy and the…

Sometimes, work means I have to do some odd things. A few weeks ago, there was an emergency run to buy pencil crayons. Yes, coloured pencils. For the station building project I was working on, I had to colour in some blue engineering bricks. Now, in the past, I'd been told "Prussian Blue" was the colour. I tried it, and it very much wasn't. Far too blue. That being the case, the project ground to a halt until I located the correct colour, hence a hurried trip to my local art shop, Picturesque,…

This is David, your web crawler living in an imperfect human body. 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. Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?This piece gave me a new perspective on the human body – and on cancer. The author describes how our bodies…

What’s a lyric that resonates deeply with you and why? "But there isn’t words yet for the comfort I get From the gentle lunette at the top of the nape of the neck that I wake to" Two songs in one, and a rich seam of lyrics to be mined. Guy Garvey is, without doubt, my favourite lyricist/song writer. This song was already known to me, but the person it belonged wasn’t. I met her a couple of years later, and luckily still feel that frission of wonder and love when I wake next to her. I can…

This is an FDM print of my 1:144 scale Fokker Triplane model, and it's a bit ropey. It's triplane-shaped enough to be usable as a gaming piece, but it's not great, and I'll re-print it in resin.The paint job doesn't please me either. The streaky green isn't streaky enough — I might have to go back and try adding some lighter streaks back in, and hope that doesn't just make things worse.

Let's get into this properly now. I am going to spend this year's October Horror Movie Challenge with a couple of themes in mind. The first is movies from 1985 to 1986 and movies featuring high schools and small towns. There is some overlap between these two themes, so I am going to start with those. I am actually a little surprised by how many I haven't seen. Slaughter High (1985) Pretty much in the center of my Venn diagram is 1985's Slaughter High. Now I was sure I saw this back then; I…

You would think that the longer you spend in a stable relationship, the easier the decision to get married becomes. I mean, maybe that’s how it is for a lot of people, but in my case, it was the complete opposite. It was right when I started thinking about proposing that I began asking myself the questions that actually matter. I realized we still had a lot to work on. On my end, there were a couple of things I needed to talk about and a few boundaries I needed to set before even thinking about…

At last! After trailing the publication of SEXTON BLAKE VOLUME 1 for the past two weeks, I can now say... contracts were signed yesterday and the book will be officially launched at the Colchester Swap Meet on Saturday, October 10th. In the meantime, the order page is up and running and if you want to take advantage of our early-bird discount, please go visit the page. You can pay