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)

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 Mike’s Pen Fun Traditional Casein fountain pen, fitted with a two-tone Steel Jowo #6 nib in Fine, tuned by Kirk Speer of Pen Realm. Thanks so much to Mike’s Pen Fun for donating this pen!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…

If this comic diary sticks around for more than a year, you’ll eventually notice that I become full of self-pity every time summer comes to an end. I find it hard to accept that we’re in for half a year of cold and wet weather. I hate being cold. I’m also not particularly fond of the accompanying darkness. Fortunately, we’ve learned from past winters and are currently planning to spend some time somewhere with better weather this time around.

Floodwater conduits under the road just below the visitor information center on Mauna Kea. I wouldn’t be standing there if it was raining hard.

The Dallas Pen Show was a great experience this year. Despite an extra day and a half of show which was tiring, the attendees, vendors and organizers were all a delight. Not only did people share their love of pens and stationery with us but also with each other. I’m always tickled to watch one attendee help another by recommending their favorite ink, helping someone find something on the ink racks or just make new friends simply flipping through the ink swatch books and ooh-ing and ahh-ing…

It has been a busy couple of months in the lab. We made a robot vacuum our own, improved the speed and quality of Home Assistant’s voice interface, and started planning the next projects based on feedback from our real users: our families. That feedback matters. As developers, we often stick with what works for us. Ubuntu with Gedit and Brave or Mullvad Browser is a great setup in our hands. It is not the best fit for everyone else. That is what led us to Zorin OS, which feels more approachable…

New this year, the just-released iPhone Pro has a variable aperture, as well as Face ID under the display. And iFixIt's teardown report provides us with a bit more information on how Apple accomplished these features. ~ Link: Inside the Tiny Unfixable Eye: iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Teardown, by Elizabeth Chamberlain with Carsten Frauenheim, iFixIt

The Squamish welcome figure at Sw?aywi (Ambleside Beach) in West Vancouver Once a month I fill in to lead worship at our little Bowen Island United Church. I love the chance to do so, because I get to sit with a piece of scripture and reflect on it. Over the years here I’ve shared a few of my sermons and today, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, I’m sharing last Sunday’s sermon. The reading was suggested by the Lectionary, without reference to the September 30. But the reading lined…

I need to declare browser bankruptcy so to mark the end of September here is bundle of links I haven’t read in full but think might be of interest to what passes for my readership demographic. Click with caution and trepidation! Britain’s far-right violence comes to us direct from the 1970s. But so does the solution | Taj Ali Museum of time-based art - Celebrating artists who commit to long-duration and daily creative practices Authoritarian nationalism in the UK’s second city: Birmingham and…

Hi everyone. It’s the end of the month already, so I’m writing a monthly recap. September, overall, was a pretty good month. Weather-wise, it was and honestly still is summerlike. This probably contributes to my better than usual mood. Not much happened in the way of actual progress on the moving and other care-related fronts. This is frustrating, particularly because it means I have little to fall back on should my mood and behavior deteriorate again. I mean, my support coordinator said last…

<h1>San Francisco Mindset</h1> <p>I’m now in London after a 6 weeks trip to New York and San Francisco.</p> <p>It’s been almost 7 months since I started my sabbatical and I wanted to reflect a bit on technology, mindset, building products.</p> <p>I want to write about San Francisco a bit and what makes it different. I will use San Francisco as the label for a specific mindset. That mindset can exist (and exists!) everywhere else, just with a different density.</p> <p>I lived and worked in the…

Hindu scriptures say that the world is a temporary place. All your feelings, accomplishments, failures, connections, and desires are an illusion. These things cease to matter the moment you die. The only thing that matters is the connection of your soul to the Brahman. This analogy doesn’t sit well with people, but it will hit home once you bring it down to individual environments. Think about your corporate office. The politics, the friendships, the work, the affairs, the desires, the…

sometimes, you need to redesign your space to inspire a bit more writing. so, i redesigned things a little. the idea was to take the design from a neovim inspired space to a more brutalist text document inspired space. just playing around really. perhaps it will help me write a bit more here on blog? or have i lost the spark? nah, i love bear, but just have much less time to invest here. wish i had all the time in the world, but other things to prioritize. from the state of my feedo feed, it…

… learned on TUCKER today that he claims to go camping every week. Going this Thursday – alone, just him and his dogs. big HMMMMMMM

England swings like a pendulum doBobbies on bicycles, two by twoWestminster Abbey, the Tower, and Big BenThe rosy red cheeks of the little children. If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser. OK that fourth line rhyme leaves a little to be desired in Roger Miller’s 1965 song, but anyway I want to substitute “Publishing” for the first word. Because it’s true: publishing swings like a pendulum do. Maybe I need other vocabulary…

Sep 0108:03 PMMy Fediverse Digest for August 2026Source: https://fudge.org/archive/fediverse-digest-2026-08/SourceSep 0207:48 PMThe Cult - Love Removal Machine (1987)SourceSep 0509:57 PMI’m sure it has been said before but… you can’t spell bait without AI.SourceSep 0609:48 PMCharismatic Caribbean Cardisoma Crustacean Comes to CarolinasSource11:51 PMdocker run --rm -e NODE_OPTIONS=“–max-old-space-size=2560” -v /path/to/11ty-stuff:/app -w /app node:24.7.0-bookworm bash -c “apt-get update &&…

I received an email from a prospective client and want to share exactly what they’re struggling with, so you know you’re not the only one… Team Size: 7 people The Core Problem: The team spends more time fighting with software and chasing each other for information than talking to clients or growing the business. No time left for video marketing. Current Tech Stack & Friction Points: Internal Communication: Scattered across chaotic WhatsApp group chats and Microsoft Teams (which constantly…

Faces / Mott the Hoople - Medicine Ball Caravan, Charlton Park, Bishopsbourne, Kent, United Kingdom, August 31, 1970Yesterday, the Rolling Thunder Revue, today, the Medicine Ball Caravan! There have been a few excellent/previously uncirculated recordings from this 1970 “Woodstock on Wheels” event in Kent turning up in that Bob Matthews tape stash we mentioned a little while back. So let’s take a listen! First up, the Faces in their early days, right before they recorded their second long-player…

[Also, “Copywrongs” is a useful word.] The history of Tetris is a very interesting read, replete with poorly-decided court cases and duplicitous communists-turned-capitalists.Link: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bizarre-murky-history-of-soviet-born-tetris/

Charles Taylor, via the estimable Donny: We are deeply moved, but also puzzled and shaken. We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed, articulated, and hence let fully be. This is a needed articulation of an experience I’ve struggled to understand. Occasionally when writing something, especially when it’s deeply important to me, I have felt…

The leaves on the sugar maple tree are starting to turn in earnest.

So while the 15-minute City brand has been damaged by a lot of conspiratorial thinking, I do think the central idea that we should have easier, more consistent, and car-free access to the things that make life pleasant, easy, and livable remains a vital one.And while that applies for sure to things like groceries, jobs, schools, and the other things that we need to live a modern life, it also applies to the things that make life better without necessarily being required.So I want to talk about…

Here's an excerpt from Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Terence Tao that's stuck with me: Often, the ultimately correct theory initially is worse in many ways. Copernicus’s theory of the planets was less accurate than Ptolemy’s theory. Geocentrism had been developed for a millennium by that point, and they had made many tweaks and increasingly complicated ad hoc fixes to make it more and more accurate. [...] When you only get part of the solution, it looks worse than a theory which is incorrect…

Teemu kicked off the event, welcoming us, explaining what Azure and Friends is, and so on. Beyond No Return: Preparing Your Organization for Cyber War by Miska Kytö (Zure) To get a dashboard of victims hit by ransomware attacks, for example in Finland - ransomware.live/country/fin. Finland is not a major target because smaller economy. However, 50% of ransomware attacks in 20205 happened against small companies (<50 people). With AI both the velocity and nature (advanced techniques) of the…

Two nights ago I got a wild hair up my ass to play on my Original XBOX. I scrolled through some pre-installed games that I totally acquired legally from my friend Vimm. I came across this one game that I've kinda had on my radar for years at this point "Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse". I remember seeing the cover art for the game on Games on Demand back when the XBOX 360 still had a marketplace circa 2008. I never played it because back then I was a moron who never played "old"…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 13th March 2026 I’ll be honest, I’d kind of fallen off with New Wave of American Heavy Metal legends Lamb of God a number of years ago, and it was only when I heard good things about their 2022 record ‘Omens’ that it reminded me just how potent a band they are at their very best. So When ‘Into Oblivion’ was released back in March, I was in a better position to get back into them and see if their old appeal still burned inside here somewhere. ‘Into Oblivion’…

Over the last semester, I’ve had the good fortune to read some of my brilliant colleagues introductions to book length projects. Not only was their work thought provoking, but it was also inspiring. It got me thinking about how I write introductions to books and papers. As I pondered this, I realize that my ideal introduction has four main parts. First, it has a prelude. At their best, my prelude establish the relationship between me as author, my reader, and the topic. If the topic is…

My friend and fellow pedant, Eric Thomson, detected a howler on the very first page of a book on pedantry — Arnoud S. Q. Visser, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 1: Despite the warnings of those around her, Dorothea married him, thus embarking on a short-lived, unhappy wedded life in a gloomy parsonage filled with books and silence. Mr. Casaubon, however, didn't live in a parsonage. See George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 1,…