After enjoying Dutch writer Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier (translated by David McKay) last year, a lengthy novel which made it into my top five books of 2025, I was eager to try more of her work, and fortunately Scribe Publications were on the case. Today sees the ANZ release of her latest novel in English, with McKay again on translation duties, and if the previous book was a fairly hefty tome, this one will put even more strain on your upper body. However, long books just mean there’s…

To the alarm of Republicans running for office, President Trump actually said something I agree with when he told their “convention” that he wanted them to “pretend I’m on the ballot because, in a way, I am”.1 For as long as I can remember, Congress has done a masterful, bipartisan job of dodging responsibility. This congressional abdication is most evident in its ceding war powers to the President, but it extends far beyond military action. For members of the President’s party, this is…

Two weeks ago, Amodei (Anthropic) published We Must Pace the Frontier, and Altman (OpenAI), Hassabis (Google), and Musk (SpaceXAIZWQ5r) all agreed. But Huang (Nvidia) didn’t. I wonder what Zaphod Beeblebrox thinks. Last week, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 - its first release since the pacing essay - and a few hours later OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna into a price war under Astra. Pacing the frontier is a serious idea that no one seems to be taking seriously. Or is it? Or are they? Then…

Earlier this year, ocean conservation advocates celebrated what seemed like a major milestone: 10 percent of the Earth’s oceans had been officially designated as marine protected areas. In theory, this meant that world leaders had successfully implemented varying degrees of fishing restrictions and regulations across a tenth of the oceans’ surface area in an attempt to reduce pressures on ecosystems and help them thrive. It also signaled progress toward a United Nations goal, known as 30×30, to…

A very different environment for Cleric Chih, but no less about stories than the other entries in the series. We even learn a bit more about Signing Hills and the neixin. A great story that has got me extra hard this year due to some family stuff, but I don’t want to spoil the story.Full post

Ridgeline subscribers — Norway has small beds. So small. The smallest beds I’ve ever seen. How can a country with such big people have such small beds? One night I slept inside what I think was a bench. I slept well, but: inside a bench. The lid was held up by a chain. Oddly, I had no odd dreams. Aside from the tiny beds, the miniature beds, Norway was a dream or dream-like. It met expectations — it was clean and efficient and sane and the countryside felt coiffed.

Another multi-week Week Notes! 🏅 I ran the 10K for the Army Run! I was consistent with last year's time, with my usual 65 minutes. To be more exact, this year I was 17 seconds slower, but I am still happy that I kept my pace for the full 10Km. It was a gorgeous day, not too cold, not too hot, perfect for running. 📘 I got a new cover for my Kobo, since my original one was falling apart. I had to get a knock-off copy, since Kobo stopped selling the original ones for the Kobo Libra H2O 2019. But…

Why the hell are things the way they are.

About 4 years ago I spent too much money on a PiBox from KubeSail so I could have a single enclosure with a Pi and an SSD. It didn’t really work out for me initially, but I’m happy to report I finally got it working how I originally wanted, if only a few years late. The PiBox is actually a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module with a couple component boards for SSD, USB, Ethernet, and a mini LCD in a cute little package: Pi CMs come with eMMC storage, which is slow and prone to wear over time. When I…

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. Tomas Moniz is the rare writer whose books are charming in the best of ways. The King of Aloe Vera, his third novel, brings together a septuagenarian widower and 21-year-old queer woman in a…

Having a nice time at Rocky Mountain Ruby. Boulder is a beautiful city. 🏔️

I was last over at Brown’s Piece in January, and today Glorious Grasslands returned to help with raking the meadow prior to seeding. This community owned asset was purchased in September 2025, and they had flailed the entire meadow, getting rid of the thatch prior to the seeding. There was a mountain of raking to do, and also cutting some banked areas which couldn’t be reached by the machinery. Chris and I had the brush cutters and the first job was to make scallops in the scrub where the grass…

🪙 It was Silver Week last week, like Golden Week, but in September instead of April, and not every year, only every 4 - 6-ish years. I bridged the gap with holiday and had, including weekends, 10 days off in a row. I needed that.🎂 I turned 41. We went for separate cakes rather than whole this year because a whole cake is too much cake for 3 people. I went for a Mont Blanc and while it was really good, it was so unbelievabely rich. I only needed half.🎮 Growing up and in college I owned a few…

나는 너무 오래 모국어 밖에서 살아왔다 내 언어는 낯설게 두 세계 사이에 끼어 있다 뿌리로 건너가는 불안정한 다리 어색한 소리가 되어 입 밖으로 굴러나온다 날카롭지도 온전하지도 않은 채 시옷은 새어 나가고 디귿은 어눌하다 나는 다른 생각들 속에서 헤엄쳐왔다 수년 동안 그 물에 잠겨 그 생각들이 내 입 안으로 스며 들어올 때까지 배신처럼 외치며 나는 더 이상 예전과 같이 생각하지 않는다 그러나 이 해어져 가는 연결은 끊어지지 않고 아직 남아 있다 부모와 조부모의 사랑과 희생과 고통의 이야기가 몇 번 되풀이되어 들려오면 묶여 있던 내 혀가 풀어지며 나는 다시 또한번 소리를 내어 본다 This is the Korean translation of Mother Tongue. I am performing both English and Korean poems this week during National Poetry Day. It will be the first time in my entire…

Walls Paper and Gordon Matta-Clark looking at printed matter, now at Printed Matter I’d planned to wait til I saw it IRL, but Shannon Mattern’s post made me want to hype Printed Matter’s Gordon Matta-Clark Walls Paper show beforehand, too. New Openings Against Old Surfaces focuses on Matta-Clark’s artist book practice, and its emergence from the 1972 exhibition at 112 Greene St where Walls Paper first incarnations appeared. Matta-Clark first showed his photos of exposed interior walls on…

In progress…

Unknown location (probably inside)

This quilt is one of a series of quilts I generated following Election Day 2024. There were so many changes to laws, funding, access – especially related to my discipline and my research – that I used my sewing machine for Processing the Policies from that time and to represent events and actions moving forward. Explore the collection. I belong to the Undercover Quilters guild in Brookhaven, PA. This dynamic community of amazing quilters are always coming up with a fun activity where we can…

Dan Sinker: I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast. I would like to believe we’re living in the late-stage social media age, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Does this shit actually work? Do people respond to this nonsense? While the quality of the copy in the spray-and-pray deluge has gotten somewhat better (it no longer looks like the Save As HTML output of Word 98) it remains alarmingly stupid for the most part. This one stood out a bit. I got this flood of absolutely stupid crawler activity from what looks like someone's cable modem. Their bots are a bit thick, continually ignoring the "permanently" part of the 301 Moved Permanently response…

What is this?A weekly note on what I've been up to. Last week's is here.tldrDublin for a belated anniversary meal and Saint Etienne. Freo lose the grand final, Town lose at Newport, Erol Alkan in Todmorden. Rehab plan written up.Health and runningTwo runs: 5.21km on Thursday and 4.34km on Saturday morning, the second squeezed in early in the second half of the grand final. 9.55km for the week.The view on Thursday morning's run along the canal.Year to date: 970.3km. 29.7km to 1,000km.The TFL…

a sense of security by something small I wasn't going to ask for given and I feel giddy maybe a tad silly but tiny lines draw big pictures and the artwork we're in is steadily more beautiful

Thanks to my geohashing expeditions over the last two months to a field between my house and Heathrow Airport while on my way to catch a flight, to a nature reserve near Woodstock where my crotch was attacked by a wasp, and this weekend to a field with a trigpoint in it near Tackley... I'm now officially in the "top hundred" geohashers worldwide whether measured either by number of expeditions or number of successful expeditions. Who knew that this smiley/drooly moment would be a milestone of…

Dear Editor, In June this year, your paper printed an opinion column with the words: “It is insanity to equate residential schools with the Holocaust”. On Sunday September 27th, a group of men dressed all in black with white masks over their faces, held a banner near the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School … Continue reading "Second Sons agrees with Terry Glavin and the National Post."

The market is flooded with so many accessibility overlays that it’s impossible to keep up. I’ve written about the biggest players (plus some also-rans) and provided enough technical details that most readers should know how to quickly evaluate their false claims and poor technology. Never mind their ethical failures as business models. So today is a two-fer, with no more free consulting telling these companies how to improve their products. They have not followed any advice I’ve offered over…

I’m hiring security engineers to join me at Factory, and you should apply! Factory is an exceptional place to work. The team is brilliant, customers love the product, and we’re growing quickly. We’re also early enough that new hires will have real influence over what we build and how our security program develops. Whether your strengths are in pentesting, application and product security, cloud security, corporate security, or compliance, I’d like to hear from you! I’m looking for people who…

Depression is so cruel. it's agonizing, when you think about it. when you've gotten this far and realizing you have wasted your youth so thoroughly thanks to this common but horrible disease that your prospect for the future is bleak. No money, no job, no nothing. just you and the ashes of every plan of being more productive, more disciplined, more proactive, left as ashes that once held a lot of dreams. it's genuinely tiring, to have one slip up ruin your mind like that. That this condition…

When people ask me how to learn software, I often say that: They're probably overrating books and underrating experimentation; They're probably overrating tutorials and underrating non-tutorial projects. Generative AI is making these even more true. You can experiment with a huge range of possible projects, with all sorts of cheap or free tools and deployment options, and with the help of better and better always-available tutoring in LLM form. I do this when I'm trying to learn new tools: I…