Pukka prose by Patrick Syms. Love surrounds this second release from Oswego Music. The label was set up last year by Lovehandles. The first release included his masterful reworking of a love-themed 80s mega-hit. Now the label’s second release is the debut from an enigmatic knob twiddler sometimes known as Love From The Archipelago. That’s a whole lot of love. It’s also evident in the music itself. Edits have a long and storied history. Today, practitioners arguably fall into two broad…

30s on the clock, how well do my CSS answers stack up against Kevin's audience? Watch on YouTube

David’s One of my favourite bookshops. Above it is the apartment where Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova used to stay when they were in Cambridge. Quote of the Day ”Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” Bertrand Russell Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Gerry Mulligan | Night Lights A Link Long Read of the Day AI giants are trying to sell us the apocalypse. Don’t buy it My most recent Observer column: Three weeks ago, Jacob Coxon, a hitherto unknown AI researcher…

Multicolored artificial castle by Jeffry Surianto (Pexels)I grew up in the 90's. That means that I was growing up during the peak Disney princess era. From Aladdin, to Beauty and the Beast, to the Little Mermaid. The bad guys are Bad Guys and their evil schemes are Evil. Justice is always served and the good guys come out on top. That's the way the world works. Boy Wizard pulls the sword from the stone and the big bad fascists are defeated! Hooray! Then comes the bitter reality that the world…

Title: A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land Author: Adam Shoalts Publisher: Allen Lane Pages: 384 Every map tells a story, and every map has a purpose: inviting us to go somewhere we’ve never been. It is an account of what we know, but also a trace of what we long for. Like a story, a map is never completely objective. It records special interests and agendas. It leaves important things unsaid even as it purports to lay things out clearly and indisputably.…

For some reason, I spent most of my ambient chore time in the last week watching videos about people getting attacked by their pet snakes (and occasionally alligators). I'd stand around folding laundry and happily listening to interviews with YouTubers where they talked about getting bit. I watched a lot of them... and honestly they weren't even very good. Many of the presenters were also doing the Youtube Yelling Man voice, which was an additional layer of weirdness. Sometimes it's enjoyable…

If your site has companion Apple or Android apps, you probably want links to your site to open in those apps, when installed. Both platforms support this, with Apple calling the feature Universal Links and Android calling it App Links. But an app can’t just claim to handle your links, or any malicious app could hijack them. Instead, both platforms require two-way association: the app declares which domains it handles, and each domain confirms which apps may handle its links. The domain’s side…

This is a rough outline syllabus for the class I am teaching this semester at the University of Notre Dame on the philosophy and logic of games. University of Notre Dame … Continue reading →

We suffer when the mind turns events into stories about a permanent “me” that must be protected and defended. Buddhism teaches us to notice thoughts and feelings without identifying with them: “Anger is happening” rather than “I am angry.” Because there is no permanent “I” anyway. There’s no mini-you inside with levers controlling you. “You” […]

The following article in Harvard Business Review discusses using AI to expand the scope of people’s bounded rationality in decision making. For decades, the limits of time and brain capacity meant that teams could consider only so many strategic options before making decisions. Strategy tools—SWOT analyses, portfolio matrices—were simple because that’s what planning meetings needed. AI changes those dynamics. It can generate and evaluate thousands of strategic options and build rich,…

Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public. Government updates belong in an open feedBy Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS BlogRead original post → I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment. Government offices,…

Government public information should be published on public infrastructure first, then shared through open feeds to websites, social platforms, apps, and newsletters, ensuring open standards, wider access, and a more informed public. Government updates belong in an open feed By Mark Kennedy Founder · via Open RSS Blog Read original post → I saw this blog post from OpenRSS in my RSS reader, and it interested me in more than one way. I agree wholeheartedly with its sentiment. Government offices,…

Travesty Pizzeria Bianco didn't make it onto the 100 best Pizzerias in the world list.

Marques Brownlee published a video commenting on YouTube’s just announced A:B testing feature. In short, for some creators, it will be possible to publish a slightly different version of the video on launch to part of their audience, if that version is deemed “close enough” to the original. Brownlee digs into how confusing this feature might be in actual use for viewers, never sure whether they’re watching, commenting, or rewatching the same video as others see, or even as themselves earlier…

I don’t know if it’s just me but Spaces in macOS 27 is completely broken. My keyboard shortcuts stop working after a period of time and apps don’t stick to the space into which they’re assigned.

Police disperse anti-fascist protestors at the Battle of Cable St, 4th October 1936 Commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Cable St, Solidarity on the Streets an exhibition documenting East Enders’ enduring resistance to racism and fascism opens today at Four Corners in Bethnal Green and runs until 31st October, Wednesday-Saturday 11am-6pm. Policemen arrest a protestor at the Battle of Cable St, 4th October 1936. Courtesy Topical Press Agency/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images…

noticed these cranes...if you’ve been reading our blog you know that the beige brown building in the photo took most of our view of Mount Fuji when it was built.crossing my fingers that whatever they are building will not block my only view left of Mount Fuji from our apartment...yakiimo ice cream from Family Mart...so ono!love that there is sweet potato paste plus sweet potato ice cream in

Made in May of 1952. 74 years and still running! It was a rainy kind of day today, which was the perfect occasion to defrost the old fridge! I'd been falling behind in this particular task which I should be doing every two weeks or at least a month. But I can't recall the last time I defrosted the fridge, so it's probably been around a year, and it's quite evident given the amount of ice buildup around the ice box. The extra build up of ice is really not ideal because it can actually cause the…

Element of Time starts as a mad scientist strip and fairly quickly becomes a “thug of the week” strip. Just as Professor Corda completes his life’s work to condense time into a physical form–in this case, a liquid–Tommy Moran decides to plug Nick Ennis for snitching. Moran’s got a girlfriend who wants him to reconsider and think about their future together, but toxic masculinity; no one snitches on Tommy Moran. Tommy and the Professor happen across one another in a park, and Tommy can’t turn…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Chital Mehta’s debut novel Have You Seen Romit? is a searing portrait of family and identity. R. O. Kwon wrote of the book: “A gripping, intensely moving portrayal of a woman whose ferocious…

lingthusiasm:Narratives about smaller languages often focus on the death and endangerment sides of the story. There’s generally less on the social and political reasons why some languages are favoured at the expense of others, and how community members are working on reconnecting with their languages.In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic with Sophia Smith Galer about her new book, How to Kill a Language. We talk about Sophia’s personal experience with Italian dialect…

You know what I find super exciting about all this agentic stuff? Authors being able to publish a request for payment right on their content, along with an interface for submitting micropayments.I've wanted this for a long time. I wrote about it in 2015 in Social Micropayments, and then again in 2016, when I described a Digital Assistant that watches what you enjoy and pays the creators out of a monthly budget. I'd say my thinking on it is about the same as it was back then. What's new is that…

%% this post references sexual violence and its effects extensively. %% / a lot of men seem to perceive rape, and the threat of it, like getting punched in the face. just as every woman i know has a story of sexual violence being done to her, every man i know has a story about a fist fight with a bully or a stepfather or a stranger in a bar. and i think they see these things as comparable: a gendered rite of passage that, while memorably terrible, is rarely deadly, and, well, there are plenty…

I'd planned to spend my first months in Portugal renting a room from two of my dearest, oldest friends, but they turned out to be late-stage alcoholics who flipped between two modes: 1. "We hate that you're here and hope you drop dead", and 2. "Why are you so skittish around us? What's wrong with you? We're your friends and we love you!" I found every excuse to get away: travel, chowhounding (familiarizing myself with every restaurant south of Lisbon and north of Alentejo), park visits and cafe…

We had a rather long day today, and it’s not even 5pm yet. My younger daughter had her doctor’s appointment in the city, which meant we had to be on the road by 8:30am to get there, with extra time to be delayed by construction or whatever else came up. We had time enough to … Continue reading City trip done, and more haskap transplants, with frost on the way

— I’ve shared this quotation by Adam Zagajewski before from his book Eternal Enemies, and don’t we all have a few of those by now? “hey, friends, courage,life is beautiful”— I wrote Courage, life is beautiful, on a mirror in red lipstick, thinking I’d said something original before rummaging around in my memory banks for the AZ reference. The trouble with often quoting a line by someone else, it starts to feel like your own. I’d like to think I had his blessing for the use here. He’d probably…

Happy October! This week we had a couple of rainy days and even a brief thunderstorm… but now the city is back to clear, sunny skies and temperatures of (92°F / 33°C). I’m looking forward to cooler days and for the season to feel more like fall 🍂 I’ve been watching Vampire Diaries lately and it’s such a fun show I’m suprised I hadn’t come across it before! It’s so funny how much I’ve changed my mind on which characters I like and trying to guess the next plotlines. I saw this post online about…

My late grandad Jim had a Commodore PET, which he delighted in showing me around when we’d come back to Australia to visit relatives in the 1990s. I’d consider the PET another of my grail retrocomputers, but I also acknowledge I’ll never have the space for such a large machine… even assuming I could afford one in working condition thesedays. But I’m a step closer to the real thing now, thanks to this machine! This is my beloved PAL VC-20, the uncommon version of the Commodore VIC-20 released in…