I have been falling behind in listing and reviewing the books that have come in to the AAUGH.com Reference Library. This is in part because I’m busy making several books (including one Peanuts-related one), in part because there are a bunch of board books that came in at roughly the same time, and my buying board books is more a sign that I’m a completist than that I have passion for the individual item. (That’s not a complaint. These books are not aimed at me. They should not be aimed at me.…

> LINK · The Katamari Object Library A wonderfully put together index of every item available to collect/absorb/become in both Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari, presented in a Windows XPish interface. A lot of the roll-up items throughout the world of Katamari were made by students on a games design course run by Keita Takahashi. The aim was to create items with a consistent art style and with as few polygons as possible so it would be easy for a PlayStation 2 to render them properly when…

Anthropic IPO leak is insane : r/stocks I always thought the purpose of a business was to make more money than they spend. Not in the AI age!

When you need to parse data for downstream processing, the enthusiasm to get the processing outcome quickly might induce you to overlook one interesting nuance of the cost of how it’s parsed. See this “parse me a u64” function for example: fn parse_id(bytes: &[u8]) -> Result<u64, ParserError> { if bytes.len() < 8 { return Err(ParserError::InputTooShortForU64); } let owned = bytes[..8].to_vec(); Ok(u64::from_le_bytes(owned.try_into().map_err(ParserError::InvalidU64)?)) } It checks the length,…

I suspect that if Sándor Reisenbüchler had been French, say, rather than Hungarian his animated films might be better known today. Panic (1979), like Moon Flight (1975), is another of his short exercises in Pop-art science fiction, a rush through a series of vivid and hyperactive scenes where everything is flattened and stylised, often to a point of abstraction. Panic, as its title suggests, is an especially frenzied piece in which three of the humanoid creatures living on a small island are…

I recently bought a bed setup from Nectar. (This is not an ad; I just prefer linking to things.) I needed a quick setup for a guest room, and an online ad showing the no-hardware bamboo bed frame caught my attention. The pieces just slide together! Which means they’ll just slide apart! Advertising works. The mattress and bedding came fairly quickly (3 days?) but I noticed on the box the size of the bedding was not what I ordered, which made me think the mattress was wrong too. The bed frame was…

> LINK · "Mark - A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire" by Jeremy Stern This is really lovely prose that I enjoyed reading but boy is it a lousy argument. Goodness me, he seems to frown, doesn't Mark really have it tough and isn't he trying so very hard? There's a moment when Mark's mother says: "I mean, you can’t change what people do with the tools you give them. It doesn’t make the maker a bad person just because people do bad things with what you offer, right?"…

Zhenyi Tan, writing about the inspiration for Catsup, his grocery list app, on his personal blog: I think a grocery app should be designed differently from a todo list app. Forever ago, I saw this physical grocery list on Reddit, supposedly from the 1950s. And I was like, that’s it. That’s how a grocery list should work. I bought Catsup as quickly as I possibly could.

On the anniversary of the final day of chosting - some thoughts about where we've been (and maybe what's next?) ["COHOST MENTIONED" ALARM SOUNDS] My Eggbug mug is starting to chip and I fear for its safety every day It's September 30th, 2026 which means it's been exactly two years since the final day1 that anyone could post to social media platform Cohost.org before it went read-only as part of its shutdown, and I cannot stress enough how much the need that platform served in social media has…

The superior japanese sunscreen that the FDA doesn’t allow for no reason (per Aaron Bergman) explore the entire US with 1-meter 3D LiDAR data H.G. Wells makes predictions from 1903 about the “house of the future”: Within, plumbing, new means of lighting, new means of communication between one part of a building and another, lifts and the like have revolutionized all the conditions of convenient arrangement ; while without, a building which had formerly to be beautiful only when lit from above…

Berlin, January 1933: Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor marks the beginning of the darkest chapter in German history. Charlotte Ritter investigates a series of murders targeting former frontline soldiers. Connections and motives trace back to 1918. Almost ten years after its debut, the fifth Season of Babylon Berlin tells the tragic story of the 1930s and the rapid descent of Germany into chaos. The cinematography is just as good as the previous seasons and in these days it’s not only a good…

The farce that unfolded in Washington DC yesterday regarding Artificial Intelligence wasn’t comedy. Yet it was super hilarious. At some point you have to understand that the wool is being pulled over all of our eyes, including those of the president. And you have to laugh. In an election year that sees American’s distaste for anything approaching the topic of AI growing like kudzu, the folks running the AI show keep rapidly alternating back and forth between requests that the government step in…

People think of product reviewers as influencers, and I can understand why. Many are. But there is another category of reviewer out there as well, and I want to draw your attention to one today. Keyana Sapp is the writer behind a publication/public accountability ledger called Worse on Purpose. I’m a fan of this kind of reviewing. It’s the product of investigative journalism, not affiliate relationships. It’s motivated by the most honest force we know of: care. Someone gives a shit about the…

As I said, “Scoring lots of runs is entertaining but preventing lots of runs wins championships.” The Chicago Cubs got blown at last night in San Diego, 0-8, and tonight is likely their last game of the 2026 season.

I’ve mentioned my companion, The Imp of the Perverse from time to time. The Imp sometimes cajoles me, trying to replace good judgement with what he considers “fun.” Often the Imp is quiet; but when we’re playing Bridge he is quite chatty. Luckily, my particular Imp listens to Reason. He won’t consider an obviously bad decision fun. But if it isn’t obvious … or he can come up with a plausible argument … Sometimes it is tough to distinguish The Imp’s blandishments from stylistic differences. For…

Hello everyone 👋 Confession time: in 10+ years of writing software, I have never kept documentation up to date. Not once. And I’ve tried! Confluence spaces, GitHub wikis, a docs/ folder, READMEs that start strong and stop being true three sprints later. It always goes the same way. Someone writes a nice page, the code moves, nobody touches the page, and six months later a new person reads it, believes it, and loses an afternoon. Updating docs always felt like a chore I owed someone, and I pay…

Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable. Florence Hazrat introduces us to the uncontested early modern king of brackets and to his romance Arcadia, which abruptly ends, like its author’s life, hanging on a parenthesis.

Choice excerpts from Leaves of Grass that speak to Whitman’s conception of immortality.

The New York Times Connections game had a Bond theme today.Here is the solution:Starting with Month Abbreviations Decent, Novelty, Octopussy, SeptumSecurities Bond, Future, Option, StockGangster Movies Bugsy, Casino, Donnie Brasco, ScarfaceThings That Are Shaken (Not Stirred) Etch A Sketch, Martini, Spray Paint, Tambourine

A few weeks ago I realized in mid-act that I hadn't gotten around to writing something I'd intended to some years ago - how to upgrade Huginn if you're running it in a reasonably pedestrian (read: not using Docker) way. Additionally, I realized when I upgraded my exocortex at the time the process I had in my notes didn't work because some of the underlying assumptions had changed. So I'd better let folks know about that. First off, newer releases of Huginn require newer versions of Ruby. Thanks…

I knew I was different from most of my male classmates way back in 2nd or 3rd grade, though I was accused of not being able to stay on my own mat during nap time in kindergarten, as I used to make my way to the mat of my male classmate napping adjacent to my rug. However, it was junior high school when I figured out the different meant that I enjoyed those of the same sex. I spotted one of my very first crushes while watching MTV via Grandpa Country’s satellite dish in 1983. He’s only seen for…

The best time to buy something is, usually, when you don’t need it. For example, a fashion brand will sell the past season’s knit sweaters and winter coats at a discount during the summer. It’s alluring to know you might be buying something at 60% off. Deciding whether you actually need the item, or if you’re just caving in to a shiny price tag, is an entirely different matter. When it’s not always so clear, it’s useful to zoom out and see if this is a recurring pattern. If you find yourself…

A sub-series within Big Tech's War on Users OpenAI won't go public until it can make confident safety decisions. That's the pitch. Sam Altman told reporters at DevDay on Tuesday that the company isn't going to "barrel all guns blazing towards an IPO" while capabilities are moving this fast. I read the whole article. Then I read it again, because the article keeps undercutting its own headline, one paragraph at a time. Here's the week, in order. Monday. OpenAI publishes an apology to Australia.…

I woke up this morning and the first thing I saw on my phone was an email from the mighty Iron Maiden, one of my all time favourite bands, and they had a proposition. Out on December 11th but available now for preorder, is a new vinyl box set of the first 9 studio albums on different coloured variants. Now of these 9 albums I actually only own 3 on vinyl. These being Seventh Son, Powerslave and Piece of Mind. 3 of the remaining 6 I intend to get at some stage, Iron Maiden, Killers and Somewhere…

Six months ago, I was diagnosed with prediabetic glucose levels, and I adjusted my diet and started exercising more to try to bring my levels back down to normal. Since then, I’ve lost 10-12 pounds and shed nearly 2 inches off my waistline. I had my followup visit on Monday, and according to the test results, my glucose levels are back to normal. It worked! Which, according to my doctor, means I can resume eating some of the more sugary or carbohydrate-rich foods I’ve been avoiding, at least in…

On macOS, the most popular web browsers, and the ones I use most frequently, are Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. My tool of choice to test these browsers is Little Snitch. The quietest of the three web browsers appears to be Safari. It’s important to note, however, that Chrome and Firefox are self-contained, whereas Safari is part of macOS and can delegate some of its functionality such as iCloud sync to other macOS processes, many of which phone home to Apple. I personally don’t use sync or…

Who are you?I’m Alex Sanchez, an author of books for young people, living in gorgeous upstate New York.What do you write?Like a lot of writers for young people, I write the stories I wish I could’ve read when I was growing up. Stories that would’ve shown me: “See? You’re not so weird. There are other people like you.” For me, a big part of feeling different and lonely was being a boy wanting to love and be loved by another boy. At the time there were no books about a kid like that. The greatest…

The lead image, credited to Jeremy Brooks (Flickr/CC BY), for Sheila Liming’s “In Praise of Not Not Reading” at The Point (4 April 2017) features books hung together by string. ▲ Sheila Liming, “In Praise of Not Not Reading,” The Point (4 April 2017), image credit to Jeremy Brooks (Flickr/CC BY)