I have a small habit: when I get into an Uber or a Bolt in a new place, I try to start a conversation. Sometimes I get silence. Sometimes I get a whole life story between the airport and the hotel. This time I got two. The first ride was with a middle-aged woman from Venezuela. She earns about 400 euros a month, so she shares a flat with other people - a place of her own is simply out of reach. Still, when I asked how life in Spain compares with life back home, she did not hesitate. There is no…

Mic Wright joins Tim Worthington for a chat about Jean Grey's battle to save a timeline where The Young Person's Guide To Becoming A Rock Star hasn't happened yet in X-Men '97.

Various wacky shenanigans delayed the arrival of our copy of Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years – 1929 from the good people at Eureka! Masters of Cinema, but it’s here now! Fiona and I made a video essay not quite as monumental as the one on the 1928 set, but way more finicky and complicated. […]

As I see it, the people who promote generative AI under a promise that it will “democratize” artistic / creative work or make personal communication easier are misunderstanding a very important thing. I can see the part of the argument that says that a lot of people have good artistic ideas that they’re simply incapable of properly expressing. I, myself, have a few that probably will not ever turn into complete works because I’m not good enough at writing that kind of stuff. The problem is that…

I think it should be clear to actual readers of this site that I do not want any games sent to me that use generative AI, including code, but since it keeps happening: Please stop sending this crap to me. I think it’s morally wrong to use these products, it’s an obscene waste of energy, they’re built by stealing the work of others, and all of these companies have rancid ethics. I don’t care if you just used it for code. It fucking sucks and I hope your next game will be better. Thank you.

Hello, all! Can you all give me a recommendation for an alternative to Meets/Teams/Skype? Ideally one that you can send a link and then people can join from their browser. Open to any of your suggestions. And thank you 😃 #floss #foss #teams #meet #gafam #opensource #skype #video #videoconfrencing

We live in interesting times.

For Kinderpup. Thank you so much for commissioning me! Artwork is © 2026 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use. Scraping of my work by content crawlers, or using it for the training of generative AI software, is strictly prohibited.

“We built Muse to help people build the world they want.” — Alexandr Wang of MetaMost people never say what they want. It’s not because we don’t want. We want fiercely and constantly. We may not say it, but we do type it. Not directly, but it’s implied in every search we make. Every post we thumbs-up. Every video we linger on. And at Meta, we know how to extract that information in ways you’ve never imagined. We know how much time you’re not spending with your family, how crippling your social…

Here is another puzzle from Konstantin Knop. Puzzle. A town has 801 residents, and they vote on 9 different questions. On each question, everyone votes either “Yes” or “No”, and the majority wins. A resident is happy with the result of a question if the final decision matches their own vote. We will call a resident satisfied if they are happy with at least 5 of the 9 final decisions. What is the smallest possible number of satisfied residents? I leave the solution to the reader, but I want to…

I actually play Very Few Games but I do sink in lots of hours in them when I do! Anyways, new game in a franchise I already liked playing came out about 2 weeks ago? So I'm playing it. I've sunk in 80 hours and still in part 1 lol (btw yes this means I am enjoying it). I cancelled most of my social plans in lieu of playing (haha). I've been avoiding social media/reels scrolling/etc as the algorithm is too dangerous and could show me spoilers or someone's reaction video to scenes/characters. I…

For Nero, also featuring Alby! Thank you so much for commissioning me. Artwork is © 2026 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use. Scraping of my work by content crawlers, or using it for the training of generative AI software, is strictly prohibited.

Came home from my evening walk with a rare color image. Incidentally, this is almost the same as the first ever color image on this blog. Slightly different perspective due to the wider lens and different time of day.

For Gam! Thank you so much for commissioning me. Artwork is © 2026 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use. Scraping of my work by content crawlers, or using it for the training of generative AI software, is strictly prohibited.

The ladiesThe fellasThe people that don’t give a fuckThe loversThe hatersThe people that call themselves playersThe hot mamasThe pimp daddiesThe people rollin’ up in caddiesThe rockersThe hip hoppersAnd everybody all around the world. Reply by email

Link: First steps of the PLC organization, by Public Ledger of Credentials OrganizationSince Bluesky’s foundation, its mission has been to work on an open social media protocol that gives users a “credible exit” from any one company’s services while allowing them to continue participating in the network.This has two important effects. The first is that users can feel safe investing in the network knowing they’re insulated from any one company’s individual business decisions (if their social…

Given the incentives at play in software engineering and tech, generally, hype may be an unavoidable fact of life. Hype is a common phenomenon in competitive environments, including in software engineering. It generally involves overstating the benefits, significance, or potential impact of some new product or idea, usually before they are fully vetted. It seems, however, that some unique characteristics of software make it exceptionally susceptible to hype when compared to more traditional…

IndiaFOSS is FOSS United's annual flagship conference. It aims to bring together India's technical community under one roof to discuss anything and everything Open Source. Its 2026 edition happened on 26th and 27th September and what a blast it was. Amazing talks, engaging booths, inspiring personalities, loads of random catchup, fascination, motivation, confusion, all together in a neat two day package! Let's unfold the same :) First day With heavy "first day, don't miss anything" motivation,…

This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting the making of my workout log. Although not required, you might be interested in reading the first three before proceeding: My blog workout log Workout log and site updates Workout log now totally, 100% feature complete (LOL!) It started out, as these things often do, with a small spark of a thought. ‘I wonder what my training load right now is like compared to back when I was training to run marathons?’ My options for trying to get a proper…

It’s important that we respect our users’ preferences, which includes their choice of Light or Dark Mode. Recently, I’ve been looking at a tidier way to do that in CSS. In 2024-ish, the light-dark() CSS function quietly became available in most modern browsers. It caught my attention as it’s a really efficient way of defining Dark Mode colours without using media queries (and SCSS mixins). This is how I’ve been tackling Dark Mode, using a media query: color: black; background-color: white;…

Before attempting my record attempt between Kemijärvi, Finland and Lagos, Portugal, people told me over and over it would break down in Germany. So much so that I even tried to re-but (pre-but?) some of the likely critique.Now, having made the trip, and none of the total delay of 25 hours 30 minutes (making the journey 125 hours 31 minutes, rather than the 100 hours 9 minutes foreseen) was attributable to Germany. 24 hours was Sweden, the rest Portugal.But the "jokes" keep on coming - just see…

[This is a guest post by a coalition of Caltech mathematicians: the original organizers of Mathathon (Alvan Arulandu, Andrea Li, Avni Garg, Brian Zhao, Caiman Moreno-Earle, Sathvik Redrouthu), two coauthors of the Open Letter about the Mathathon (Dylan King, Tasmin Chu), and other members of the Caltech community (Mayla Ward, Merrick Hua, Robert Joseph George, Sergei Gukov, Shaowu Zhang, Tony Yue Yu, Vihaan Dheer). This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted…

Started reading: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli 📚 I’ve been spending a lot of time on podcasts, but I want to transition to audiobooks. Podcasts keep me entertained, but I don’t feel like I’m getting much from them. So I’m hoping audiobooks can fill that void. My plan is to listen to fiction audiobooks, since I prefer nonfiction in physical-form for annotation. To that end, I looked at (what I thought were) fiction books I saved as “Want to read” in Goodreads and started requesting the…

For Mwako! Thank you so much for commissioning me. Artwork is © 2026 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use. Scraping of my work by content crawlers, or using it for the training of generative AI software, is strictly prohibited.

(Sent to the AV News on September 28 2026) Dear Editor, The 2PM city council meetings are not only supremely inconvenient for the general public who have a job, they also, according to at least one potential council candidate this election, limit who we have running to represent us on City Council. The ACRD directors … Continue reading "Afternoon meeting times are undemocratic"

I was just posting on Friday about an older Marvel MAX comic I enjoyed, and now we get news about one of the other best ones from that era! Yes, "Alias," which was written by Brian Michael Bendis and had art by Michael Gaydos, it told the story of Jessica Jones, a detective with powers, but who isn't much of a hero or big shot in the Marvel Universe. It was superb and followed by the decent "The Pulse," before she was folded into, "New Avengers," with her eventual husband (they got married in…

My Ploopy Adept has been out of commission for about a year due to rust. I bought some full ceramic bearings to get it back in working order.

And now, more links for your reading pleasure. We Tell Ourselves Dinosaur Stories in Order to Live, by Alison Laurence, Los Angels Review of Books The Best Thing I Ever Ate? Mum’s Boeuf À La Mode On My 21st Birthday, by Jeremy Lee, The Guardian ‘I Cannot Hear “Stuffed Vegetables” Without Flashbacks’, by Ruby Tandoh, The Guardian Why Ghosts Are Haunting Us in 2026 (For Real), by Tara Badstubner, Literary Hub