D. H. REDDALL “Dark Matter.” PI Charles Stubblefield. Published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November 2004. Not known to have been either reprinted or collected. Only the most dedicated reader of AHMM will recognize the author’s name. He (or she) wrote a couple dozen stories for the magazine, at least five others of which feature the adventures of a young PI by the name of Charles Stubblefield. There may be more. Using the online Crime Fiction Index as a guide, this is not (yet) known…

Electronic Arts, perhaps eager to make up for shooting beloved RPG studio BioWare in the head last week, have dropped no less than 25 classic video games on Steam, GoG and their own EA App. A bunch of these game have also been remastered, with FMV sequences redone from scratch thanks to the discovery of the original source files.Once again, Mark Hamill will fight against a bunch of big space cats.Whilst we already knew about Wing Commander III getting the remaster treatment from a few weeks…

Databases are for storing global variables. We usually call them “rows” or “records” instead, but they’re definitionally global variables: any part of your program can read or write them. Isn’t this kind of weird? It’s common programming advice that global variables are bad, and yet many elegant programs rely on databases. Either the common advice is wrong, or there’s something special about databases that makes them the exception to the rule. What’s so bad about global variables? Here’s the…

last updated 0 minutes ago i struggle a lot with feeling like i am too small and/or powerless to make any difference to anything that bothers me. i also struggle a lot with feeling like i have a make a huge and lasting change to the world for my life to have been worth living at all. maybe ONE of those in a lifetime would be bearable? together it's two unruly apex predators in an enclosure too small even for one. there's a tiny (and mercifully shrinking!) part of me that is still attracted to…

In Your Face is one of my favorite apps for making sure my ADHD brain shows up to meetings and events on time.

I was asked to write a letter for a friend. It’s his birthday or something. It’s a good example of what listening means to an artist or musician. Here it is: ⸻ I don’t remember the exact time frame or what year it was. I’m guessing it was about 2018 when I was in the group. I was going through a lot. The company was tumultuous, but we’d figured out a way to sell it and kind of move that down the road. Myself as well. I had really started searching for what to do next and was talking a lot in…

Disclaimer Previously… Shadowplay Conclusions The Good The Bad Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and…

When Mark and I moved from the east coast to the midwest via U-Haul with two kids and a turtle, the first thing we did was open an account with a local bank near the townhouse we were renting. Within months, though, we had found a home to buy and moved everything to another bank that was within walking distance of our new neighborhood. Not long after that the bank got sold, another much larger one took its place a short distance away, and we continued to bank with them. We had a checking and…

My day was interesting. It started out pretty bad, with a lot of doubt, insecurity, and doing research. I slept for most of the afternoon, because I did not know what to do, and also because I simply did not want to be awake. My mom and I went to the movies though, Wildwood, and it is the second time I have seen it. Throughout the movie I was having a lot of anxiety about all sorts of things. Thinking back on my relationship and things that happened, feeling sad about it, confused, questioning…

I was able to obtain additional information about this historic Black Folk Art environment, or yard show from the users at Vintage Michigan Postcards page on facebook. Thanks. Real Photo Postcar collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

In his autobiography 'Bless me father' (2025), Kevin Rowland talks about Birmingham club Romulus in the mid 1970s, which like similar scenes elsewhere saw people anticipating the future while refashioning the style of the past. Puts me in mind of the famous Marx quote from 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' (1852):'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things,…

Last Friday I mentioned what I called the “stupid, childish, and deceptive” tactic of “ballot stacking,” which is when a campaign recruits another candidate to run for the same office because that person’s name is confusingly similar to the opponent’s. See “Assorted Stupidity #176” (Oct. 30, 2026). As you likely know, there were two “Dan Sullivans” running for the open Senate seat in Alaska, and some cynics accused the Democrats of arranging this merely because the first Dan Sullivan was a…

Over the past month of October, I’ve collected 11 links for my link journal. 2026-10-03 Destroy Any Website destroy.spritefusion.com Fun Type an address, break everything. Any website becomes a destructible pixel-art level, solo or with friends. 2026-10-03 Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend dbushell.com JavaScript The one where I go crawling back. GitHub - Schniz/fnm: 🚀 Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust 🚀 Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in…

I have to be honest, right from the start. I look and feel sixty years old. Gray beard, dad-bod, wrinkles, some age spots becoming noticeable, and vision that is not what it used to be. Add to that a counter full of medications, naps being a requirement, and a serious GenX attitude, I am probably the poster-child for a sixty year old man. I am not the healthy, fit, sexy older and refined sixty year old that gets a lot attention. My hat's off to those fellas. Good on you mate! I envy those guys.…

in my dream I walk through my neighbourhood water keeps gathering in large puddles on the street, slowing me down but I won't stop, can't stop I'm heading home and home is you

Kyoto is crowded and Tokyo is sprawling. Osaka sits in between, small enough to get around easily, and full of surprises if you look closely.

The trawl from last month has resulted in 16 new history books: 16 being a pleasing square number, pleasing because it means the covers stack up nicely for the socials. Even more important than the covers though are the books. In general there is a theme of culture running through them. The three that I will pick out are: Napoleon and his Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal, by Andrew Roberts. Never known to write a book under 700 pages long, this latest epic from the pro biographer Roberts…

At Brighton Astro tonight, Tahani Baldwin took us through the psychology of space flight.She spoke about the Shackleton Antarctic expedition (1914), which became stranded, with their ship trapped in the ice and eventually sinking.She blew my mind noting it was just 56 years later, in 1970, that the Apollo 13 crew also faced disaster far from home. Endurance, by Frank Hurley (Wikipedia) Apollo 13, by NASA (Wikipedia) It feels like it should be a century between those events, at least.Jane…

We are about to witness something quite different from the typical gridlock of modern Washington. Following the historic midterm results that handed both chambers of Congress to the Democrats, the conventional wisdom suggests the standard script: legislative standstill, mutual recriminations, and a slow crawl toward 2028. But that script assumes an institutional framework that no longer exists. During the first Trump administration, the friction of divided government was heavily muted by an…

19 November marks the release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most eagerly-awaited entertainment product in history. This will be the eighth mainline entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, the first new game in the series in thirteen years, the first to launch on current hardware and the first to feature a named female protagonist (alongside a male one). With Grand Theft Auto V having sold over 230 million copies and made over $10 billion in lifetime revenue, expectations are…

The plate section planned for Spite Work As a freelancer, you typically do your own photo research. My books about the poet Weldon Kees and the daughter of Walter Gropius, Alma Mahler, and Franz Werfel, Manon Gropius, have balanced and informative plate sections that illustrate the various stages of their lives and milieus. A book that incorporates the life of Virginia Rappe and presents both her victimology and Roscoe Arbuckle’s offers some challenges. She was a model and an actress—and all of…

Revisiting a bandwagon from 2023 courtesy of Maique and Canion (which still sounds like a 70s cop show). I still use an Android phone so here's what I use on Google Pixel, not Apple. Mail Client: Fastmail Mail Server: Fastmail Notes: Obsidian To-Do: Google Tasks iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app Photo Management: Photos.app Calendar: Fastmail Cloud file storage: pCloud RSS: InoReader Contacts: Contacts.app Browser: IceRaven Chat: WhatsApp Bookmarks: Raindrop Read It Later: InoReader Word…

Given I talk about Alpine being my Linux server distro of choice, I feel it important to relay this: If you run sshd on Alpine Linux, update openssh now and restart sshd. Upgrading the package alone does not replace the running daemon. If you cannot update yet, at least disable password logins: set PasswordAuthentication no in your sshd configuration and restart sshd. Either one closes the hole. The OpenSSH team were also quick to issue a workaround with 10.6p1: This release contains a critical…

"bir devle savaşıyordum ben hep bu hayatta, ölmeyi isterdim oysa kollarında"

Robert Birming wants us to get to know each other, this November. Here's my hat in that particular ring. Learn more about "Knowvember" on Robert's blog: Knowember, get to know your blogger. A photo This was taken at a house party many years ago by my friend, Ade. I had recently dyed my hair, like Gerard Way, as an homage to those carefree college days when we were discovering things and rebelling against things and refusing to blend into a crowd. Name or nickname I've written before about where…

Robert Birming wants us to get to know each other, this November. Here's my hat in that particular ring. Learn more about "Knowember1" on Robert's blog: Knowember, get to know your blogger. A photo This was taken at a house party many years ago by my friend, Ade. I had recently dyed my hair, like Gerard Way, as an homage to those carefree college days when we were discovering things and rebelling against things and refusing to blend into a crowd. Name or nickname I've written before about where…

Rick Hess and I discussed the election results in Education Week. Huge night for Democrats, and some signals embedded in the results worth paying attention to. On Tuesday I wrote about what to watch for in the election and previewed new Dem education star Pia Dandiya. Yesterday at AEI, Heather Harding, Ginny Gentiles, Rick Hess, and I talked about the education implications with America’s Education Dad: Nat Malkus. Watch for a new WonkyFolk early next week and some other election reax content.…

I just discovered LostinthePond, self-described thus: In 2008, Laurence Brown was swept to America by the fickle hand of fate (and marriage), which means he’s now lived in the U.S. longer than O.J. Simpson has served jail time. And so, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, he figured I’d document the whole thing on social media (not the O.J. part), which is where Lost in the Pond comes in. The title “Lost in the Pond” refers to those things that were lost in translation between…

When we moved here 7 months ago, we didn’t see any other cats around. However, around July/August time, we started seeing a little black cat and a larger ginger one passing through our garden or crossing the lane. In late September, husband took a walk with eldest and returned with some exciting news. He’d seen a little fluffy ginger kitten peeking out from under a stack of hay bales. He snapped a photo, from quite some distance as it shot back under the pallet as soon as he approached Hello…

For as long as I’ve been involved with nREPL, the question I’ve heard most often from people building servers and clients has been some variation of “Will this work with CIDER?”. And for just as long the honest answer was “Try it and see”. Today I have a better answer for you - proof, a compatibility suite for nREPL servers (and clients). I’ve been working on it since the end of September and proof 0.2 came out a couple of days ago, so I guess it’s high time I told you a bit about it. Try It…