"A kind of liberation", and other longreads for you: The Secret Lives of Men who Read Romance Books: ‘My Life is Full of Love, so I’m Drawn to Them’, by Amandas Ong, The Guardian Literacy Is Another Casualty of the Decline of Democracy, by John Livesey, Jacobin The “Mutually Confounding” Relationship Between Librarian and Researcher, by Matthew J. Prigge, Literary Hub The Gaping Asshole in My Parents’ Front Yard, flash fiction by Amy X. Wang Also, Q4! Where did all the previous Qs gone to?

It looks like progress, but numbers can and do deceive! Let’s take a look. First, the trends for the month: First week: Going down, to a low of 170.3 pounds. Second and third week: Going up, with a sudden 2 pound increase overnight that put me at 173.5 pounds. Yikes! Fourth week: Going down again, ending just under where I started for the month. The worst stat is body fat, which, if accurate, is up by 0.5%. It tends to bounce up and down a lot. I also started the month with a larger-than-normal…

A walk in the park. The neighborhood park.

I can't go a day without unwillingly engaging with ai in some form. Yesterday, I left a meeting at work because we were being presented with ai generated pictures and being asked to come up with witty work-related captions for each one. Most tellingly, the guy who'd put it together had included the prompts he'd used on each slide. What a waste of time and resources! I had to leave. I read a thread about the use of ai in novel writing and that it could be a great tool if used correctly. I hear…

A bit ago, Elite Hoops hit $10k MRR. That’s a mark I would’ve been on the edge of my seat, eagerly waiting for, not even a year ago. In reality, the milestone passed me by. I didn’t happen to notice it until I was triaging a customer issue earlier this week. Make no mistake, I’m proud! It’s super awesome! But, here’s what I’ve learned: You hit the fabled #TenKMRRClub before you actually hit the revenue mark. Because, if you’re somewhat close, then you’ve probably already figured out the hard…

When a security researcher finds a vulnerability in your site, they need a way to tell you about it. Without a clear contact, they may resort to guessing at addresses like security@<yourdomain>, messaging random folks on social media, or give up. And of course, in the worst case, they might just publish the details, leaving you to find out when attackers do. security.txt is a web standard to fix this problem. It’s a small text file, served at the reserved path /.well-known/security.txt, that…

It's the first of October, one of the less consequential starts to a new month. April 1st means foolishness and financial beginnings. May 1st means dancing, witchcraft and socialism. December 1st means Advent, chocolate and red ribbons. But October 1st means nothing much because the September/October interface is mostly meaningless. I tried researching reasons why October 1st might be of importance. • It's Lincolnshire Day, Nigerian Independence Day and the National Day of the People's Republic…

I did it! I drew a picture in my "new" sketchbook. The first one! 🥳 Last week, I wrote a post entitled fear of the empty page where I discussed how extremely difficult it is for me to conquer blank spaces (especially in new notebooks). I shared a quote from artist, Felix Scheinberger, that captured my reticence to begin...drawing...writing...etc. How should you begin? More important, how should you begin without ruining your beautiful new book with an initial mistake? If you read that post (no…

★★½☆☆ Another basic gopher client, similar to DeBurrow, but with different quirks. Bookmarks and history are supported, you can set your home page, it’s visually clean-looking with icons for folders, text docs, web links, etc. (but no dark mode), and supports downloading files. DiggieDog accepts gopher links from other apps, and sends non-gopher links out to the system, so you can jump between your web browser, gopher and Gemini clients seamlessly. But the interface is awkward. You go to a new…

Yesterday, Outkast put a cryptic teaser on all their social media accounts. As can be seen above, it features an image of a, "Waffle House," sign and a quote from the song, "So Fresh, So Clean." Above that was a date, 10/2/206, along with an emoji of a waffle and a space alien. Seeing this set off the conspiracy theorist in me, with few even noticing this strange teaser (?) besides some folks on social media and All Hip-Hop. As of today, some more news entities have made note of this hint of a…

Getting close to full length now!One thing I wanted to get from this project was to get more consistent with my stitches. As you can see it started off quite shaky (and made a really interesting pattern!), but eventually I found a groove and managed to maintain a mostly consistent ribbing! There are points on the other side that are not as consistent on the same rows, but I was also able to recognise this and add a stitch where I had dropped one to try and correct that for future rows.One thing…

I am proud to publish these excerpts from THE OXFORD SAUSAGE by a graduate of my writing course. The author set out to write a spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker. Follow THE OXFORD SAUSAGE I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and…

We are super close to hitting our goal for St. Jude this month, so it’s time to UNLOAD ALL THE GIVEAWAYS to push us across the finish line!This giveaway is for a Maverick Pens Marauder Fountain Pen in their Dragon’s Den material, and is fitted with a Medium Jowo #6 Steel nib. Big thanks to the Maverick Pens team for sending this pen to help with our fundraising this month!One note: this, and all other St. Jude Milestone Giveaways will run until October 2nd, officially closing at 11:59 p.m.…

I love red cabbage.In Japanese it is called murasaki cabbage (purple cabbage)Anyway, I am always looking for a good salad/pickle recipe for red cabbage and already have several on this blogTried a new (to me) recipeThis one uses just a little sweetener (honey), so it is more on the salty sideServes: 2 : @yu_salad_recipe1/4 red cabbage, thinly sliced1/2 teaspoon salt2 tablespoon vinegar1

I've been jobhunting and it isn't exactly my first time. I have been unemployed a lot of times ever since I started my first summer job at age 15. That means I've jobhunted a lot of times. Specifically, I have job hunted in very bad economies where my chosen industry was constantly having its budget cut. Now, in customer service and front line retail type positions where I'm competing with every other "unskilled" worker -- teenagers, students, new immigrants, semi-retired people who can't…

I believe it was a reference in the Protocol Institute Discord, but someone made reference to a Michael Levin article. Not knowing which one it was, I decided to read Artificial Intelligences: A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity's Future. Extremely thought-provoking. Now I'm descending a rabbit hole on diverse intelligence, which asks what it means to be a mind at all and what we owe each kind. 🕳️ _ Reply via email

Music I’ve bought in September. I almost didn’t buy anything this month (after the bumper crop last month). Let’s see… The biggest news is, of course, that Team Dresch have a new album out! Almost 30 years after the previous one! And it’s good! And I finally got around to buying the new Charli XCX album. And… I love it? Yes. It’s both very funny and very touching at the same time. And it’s got a great flow — it just reminds me so much of the feeling (more than the music) of post punk albums…

A rocky mountainside in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The post Rocky in the Rockies appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Yup, that’s an actual Tweet from the official White House account. That’s another data point for the “Everyone is 12 now” theory. I’m just sayin’: if you’re trying to promote AI as a beneficial thing, maybe the whole Terminator 2 motif is something you might want to avoid. In the meantime, let’s enjoy the classic line from that film: The post How NOT to promote an AI initiative appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Gerrit Graham, who appeared in such cult classics as Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Used Cars (1980), died on September 15, 2026, at the age of 77. The cause was complications from lung disease.Gerrit Graham was born on November 27, 1948 in New York City. Growing up, he lived in St. Louis; Grosse Pointe, Michigan; and Chicago. He attended Columbia University in New York City, but did not graduate. While there he was a manager of the university’s theatre company, the Columbia Players.Gerrit…

Time flies 🪰 or is it ✈️, I don’t know, and I don’t have a proper intro this month, so let’s not get hung up on unnecessary things. From the blog since my last recently post: Goodbye SourceHut Kaizen #5: Backups (and a lot more)! 🍀 Life The whole family went on a trip to Bjerkvik, in the north! It was the first time we all traveled by plane. Family trip to Bjerkvik The three year old didn’t want to look out the window, sitting in the window-aisle, on either of the flights to Bjerkvik. But 15…

\There’s nothing wrong with good, trashy fun. That’s what I hoped to get from Verity, the fourth big-screen adaptation of a novel by the widely read Colleen Hoover. After some initial optimism, my hopes steadily dissolved. A cast composed of Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett seemed ready to deliver a story that makes room for sexual attraction, deception and blurred identity lines. In her fifth movie this year, Hathaway portrays Verity Crawford, a popular author whose stories are…

The Autobot-Decepticon War is now raging on two planets, their homeworld of Cybertron and the organic world of Earth, which the half-stranded Decepticons plan to loot for its energy resources. Both sides are battered the loss of their leaders. Decepticon fuel auditor Ratbat arrives to oversee operations, to the despair of the overly-logical Shockwave. Meanwhile, the Autobots elect Dinobot leader Grimlock as their new commander, praising his single-minded devotion to getting them off the planet…

All the good words for the book Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh has already been written all over the internet. What I just want to add here is I admire this book's ambitiousness, to give us a great and beautiful book that doesn't have a lot of likeableness, and that doesn't give much breathing room from all the darkness and evil. ~ Link: Eileen: A Novel, by Ottessa Moshfegh.

For the past couple of years, I’ve complained about GitHub’s pull request interface. It seems designed primarily for small changes with only a few comments. Large pull requests with many comments still load slowly and are nearly impossible to manage in the web interface. Although comments on diffs are organized into threads, there’s no easy way to track replies to top-level comments. On top of that, GitHub hides comments and threads in the Conversations tab once a pull request has enough…

Oh no — 100% of quota. 😬

I’m a Wikipedia editor, and have been since 2004. It’s fun! I don’t do it often enough. My niche is jazz and transit articles, though I spend as much time fixing templates, formatting, categories, and page formatting. Recently I’ve been getting email and DMs from a few people asking if I can help them or their clients “fix” Wikipedia articles. These invariably involve scrubbing references to contentious topics, actions, and/or positions. It’s telling how nobody ever pings me asking for…

Echo Wang, Reuters: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus. For comparison to another absurd initial public…

Some things I’ve been thinking about or doing this month: With the end of a major project in sight, I’m hoping that I’ll have a bit more time for posting here soon (or soonish… or eventually). I’ve been thinking about topics for posts and a few changes for this website, including adding these monthly updates. I’d like to catch up on some unfinished series of posts. Other ideas will be added to the Ideas page. Books I’ve been reading: The Devil’s Elixir by E. T. A. Hoffmann, What Works by Tara…

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. Erika Meitner’s poetry collection Assembled Audience lyrically distills our current troubled world to reveal its wonders and joy. Camille T. Dungy wrote of the book: “Assembled Audience is a…