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…

In the Washington, DC, of 1880, the past has rented a room upstairs. It descends into the parlor bearing the countenance of a former Confederate soldier, and Charlotte Worthington must decide how much of its troubled eloquence she will admit into her life. Christina Rauh Fishburne’s The Bridge That Would Not Burn makes historical fiction an intimate predicament: preservation acquires a voice, then addresses a woman whose own words rarely survive her hearth. Between them, the distance separating…

I am quite comfortable asking questions in public, and usually they seem to land pretty well. I know that mostly because people often come up afterward to tell me they appreciated the question or were wondering the same thing.Recently, I had the opposite experience. It was unusual enough that I found myself thinking about what I could have done differently, and it reminded me of two things about asking questions in public.The first is simple: read the room. Sometimes it’s better to just skip…

Random thoughts too long for a Mastodon post, but not long enough for a full-blown post. 🍁 September is just about over, and I am looking forward to putting the hot weather behind me. Today’s high of 91 is likely the last I’ll see of that number for the remainder of the year, unless I travel to a warm locale. 🏥 My friend A. had his 54th birthday yesterday, and to celebrate, he was discharged from the hospital and sent home. He’s bounced back and forth over the last two months between the…

A quiet day, although I did finally receive a couple of widgets I’d accidentally ordered from China on eBay (hate it when that happens, not so much for the shipping time as for the wrongness feeling of getting something so cheaply from the other side of the fucking world) so I could finish the second stage of the shed water conservation system, connecting the rear butt to the three side butts so all the butts flow into each other. Now I just need a few days of heavy rain… We watched Once Upon a…

live as if each day is your last. forget about the future and have as much fun as you can today. tomorrow’s never promised and you don’t want be an old person filled with regret. so make the most of everyday—don’t work or study or grind away at any task ever. only do things that are fun in that moment such as scrolling on your phone and vaping and eating out and watching stuff and chilling and partying. anything not fun is not worth doing. (skip laundry.) anything that’s not the best is not…

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YouTube is an amazing place. Where else can you watch someone replace the batteries in an electric mower, go in-depth on a decades-old adventure game, or just experience a low-poly rat spinning forever? YouTube is also the absolutely worst place for watching these videos. The apps have gotten more and more aggressive about pushing its users towards a kind of passive consumption that revolves around its algorithms, to the detriment of anybody wanting to curate their experience. And I absolutely…

September 2026

I've written at length about my scrobbling implementation on my site. Until now I'd managed the metadata for my music manually, editing it on macOS before adding it to Navidrome. That gave me direct control, ate time and came with quite a bit of tedium. I'd seen beets mentioned a few times as a tool to programmatically manage and apply metadata. I've wanted to use it, but cutting over a collection with nearly 800 artists and over 5,000 albums was a lot. But, as with most bad ideas I have, this…

I've been doing this blog for nearly two decades now and yet I can still remember places and experiences from it with real clarity years later. I had one of those experiences today. The BF and I were out for a drive in the wilds of Cheshire and we spotted a sign for the "Lewis Carroll Centre". This is a small, lottery-funded addition to the back of All Saints' Church in Daresbury to celebrate their local hero. The father of Lewis Carroll - real name Charles Dodgson - was the pastor here and…

An absolutely perfectly pitched country house drama parody. Yes it’s all very silly but it made gentle fun of the genre not meanness or nastiness and it was clear that everyone involved was having a great time. The Butler and Housekeeper played their parts to perfection and had some great lines (“I don’t sleep, I find it interferes with my duties”) and every scene was packed with detail — as well as the obvious centre stage farce there was a great deal of quite subtle background humour that…

The Russian Review has posted a list, with descriptions, of what looks like a great set of articles from past issues: Since its founding in 1941 by scholars critical of the Soviet Union, The Russian Review has seen emigre editors and authors play an important role in the journal’s direction and research agenda. Articles by emigres from the former Russian Empire in The Russian Review have explored historical questions, artistic critique, political discourse, and have speculated about the future…

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run: A bit cooler, but still sunny and calm. Note: I missed Monday’s run due to waiting all day for a delivery that did not show up. Fun! Today’s run was a bit weird. It is a stat holiday (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation), so I expected the trail to be busier than normal, especially since the weather was also sunny. And it was! But more than I expected. There were a lot of people out, walking, jogging, walking with dogs, jogging with dogs. All the dogs were…

I’ll admit that the first thing I looked into regarding yesterday’s “Super Intelligence” meeting at the White House was whether Tim Cook was there. He wasn’t, which was probably a relief to Tim, even though it’s also an admission that Apple isn’t considered a player in AI. By anyone, not even the idiots in the Trump administration. You’ve probably seen the stupid misspelling above Trump’s signature on the “morally binding” agreement that came out of the meeting. Yes, he signed it as the…

Dan CoxonClash BooksI have a confession for you, I don't buy many books by modern authors. My reading material is mostly provided by authors long departed from this world - Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, etc - and beyond a few favourites - Mark Valentine (and the wider circle orbiting Tartarus Press), Alan Moore, Michael Andrew Hurley - I read very few but I am aware of others ... well, some ... one or two.A name I have been aware of for a while now but mostly in his…

Adelaide Hills, South Australia, based author Pip Williams‘ third novel, The German Ward, was published recently. Her debut, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and second, The Bookbinder of Jericho, were set in Oxford, England, prior to, and during World War I, and share a few characters. While The German Ward is a separate work, some events also occur during World War I: France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love…

Twenty years ago, I started this website because I wanted a place to share recipes I was excited about, as it’s practically coded into my DNA to be an unfettered yap about the things I love. [This is me.] The larger context was that upon reaching so-called adulthood, I’d found that while I knew how to cook, there were still so many things I hadn’t figured out, such as: how to turn a can of tomatoes into not just an okay pasta sauce, but a spectacular one; how to make really good meatballs;…

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 River City Pen Co. Mini Nib Holder in Pink and Yellow, and also included a Colorverse Shuttle Dip Nib. Thanks so much to Rich at River City Pen Co. for donating this nib holder!One note: this, and all other St. Jude Milestone Giveaways will run until October 2nd, officially closing at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.There are more giveaway…

Dave Arneson Day special About a year ago, one of the adventuring parties in my ongoing Mystara campaign went thousands of years back in time to the legendary Blackmoor. Here's a brief guide on how to set up a Blackmoor campaign on your own, be it in Mystara's past or as a standalone affair. Contents DA Series Adventures in Blackmoor Temple of the Frog City of Gods The Duchy of Ten Additional Materials DA Series ↩These four adventure modules by Dave Arneson and David Ritchie are written for…

it's not the end goal it's the journey, someone said and I try to remember when I want to skip to the end breathe, I tell myself fuck the end goal, enjoy the journey

Nothing beats being able to stand in between several active runways to take photos Every year in the late summer, SEA invites a group of local AvGeeks to what it calls “SEA Airport AV Geeks Airfield Day.” And, what a day it was. There were roughly a dozen of us, and after a safety briefing in the airport’s offices, we were assigned to our escorts and headed out to a couple of vans. Even in the van, the views were great The day started out quite overcast, but by the time we got out on the field…

RIPSS 🪦

What have you recently finished? I actually finished a book this morning, since I was giving myself a lie-in after working extra hard earlier in the week. I’d started on Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time last night, and was fascinated to see where she took it exactly. I can see why it’s such a classic. Obviously she’s very much on the Ricardian side of the mystery (which centres on whether Richard III killed the princes in the Tower, if you don’t know the book — an injured policeman finds…

After a popular short run a few years ago which I wasn't able to make, writer/performer Rob Madge's My Son's a Queer Comma Open Brackets But what can you do Question Mark Close Brackets gets a second West End run for someone who, it's probably fair to say, felt like they belonged there from a very early age. Madge performs a tribute to their own childhood, particularly the parts of it spent at home, putting on DisneyTM parades in their parents' living room, in an increasingly large collection…

I'm in Dingwall so figured that I'd join HighLife and can get in the pool every day, while being excited about seeing the Stages at the weekend. £30pm for as much swim and gym as you can fit in across 25 leisure centres in the Highlands is phenomenal value.

In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Gilbert Ryle that he once was challenged by a woman to say whether he ever read a novel. Ryle replied that he read all six, every year. I was interested to see that early in Ryle's The Concept of Mind, in the chapter "Knowing How and Knowing That", he refers to one of the six:Now the higher-grade dispositions of people with which this inquiry is largely concerned are, in general, not single-track dispositions, but…

We can give Texas back for all I care. Let Mexico and the Native Americans pick their parcels. This place is a fundamentalist shithole. The Texas Senate race has everyone all hot and bothered. The core of the debate? The candidates’ preferred version of Jesus. Talarico is leaning into hippie Jesus, while Paxton is all about that supply-side Christ. Am I the only one who thinks this is fucking madness? We have very real and imminent issues to address, but instead my lawmakers want to argue about…

Let’s see if we can help out eBay and get some items sold https://listings.vandragt.com/