Hope you had blessed Sunday! ✝️🙏 Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 244 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Catholic Meme Monday— Issue 244 appeared first on The Simple Catholic.

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ask…

This was a good week for progress on our code! A couple of tests started flaking on JRuby mid-week. I like to get on top of these pretty quickly, so I pushed up fixes to dry-monads and dry-effects. Now that we’ve achived full JRuby support across Dry, I’m very serious about making sure we keep it! Adam has been on a tear lately. This week he added % formatting support to the new Dry::CLI::Style::Text, and prepared a built-in spinner for Dry CLI! I merged a fix to make provider usage work inside…

Part of Big Tech's War on Users Back in January, Brad Smith stood up in Washington and launched Microsoft's Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative. Five commitments. Pay their way on electricity. Replenish the water. Create local jobs. Add to the tax base for hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries. Invest in local AI training and nonprofits. Microsoft was going to be a "good neighbor," and it was going to "set a high bar." Nine months later, per Ars Technica, a group of churches in…

28 Sep 2026 Tangled earphones were a feature, not a bug. My parents gifted me a Sony MP3 player in 10th standard, in boarding school. A bright red Walkman. Actually I got it because my elder brother had been demanding one for a while. So we both got one at the same time. But everyone from my generation will tell you the same thing about that era. We hated the earphones. Not the music. The wires. They had a superhuman ability to tangle. Throw them in your bag, tangled. Pocket, tangled. Leave…

We were visited by UNC Professor of Public Policy Jae Kim and Fordham Law Professor Aniket Kesari to talk about their study of AI procured by government agencies: Apple Spotify YouTube

The happy guy with the large hat is back! I gotta say these are big servings in these packs – a ton of noodles for sure. This is the third of the four the Tapatio folks sent – only one more after this. Let’s cook it up and hit it! Tapatio Ramen Noodle Soup Original Flavored Ramen – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, boil everything in 530ml water for 4 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! A single from the multipack.…

Not so nice today. Cloudy and cooler. Pruned shrub on the library wall. Cleared workshop bins and cleaned both jets. Went for juice. Finished tonight until Monday.

Prompt #3 Source

Pulp Adventures #49 from Bold Venture Press, dated Summer 2026, came out toward the end of June. We get 130 pages of classic and new pulp of various genres (historical fiction, horror, science fiction, intrigue, detective, and more), plus reviews and some nonfiction. The front and back covers are again AI-generated, and that’s fine. So, […]

by guest bloggers Bruce Boyden (Marquette Law) & Zahr Said (Santa Clara Law) As we mentioned in our previous post, the Ninth Circuit’s intrinsic-extrinsic framework for substantial similarity has a number of problems. Those problems include confusing terminology, misuse of the terms “objective” and “subjective,” the lack of a clear goal for the infringement determination, and an unnecessary division of the substantial similarity inquiry, which creates havoc not only at trial but on appellate…

For this critical thought, there are plenty of games that feature inverted difficulty — starting very hard to becoming easy, and I (Josh Bycer) wanted to talk about why this often leads to frustration and imbalanced design.

Sometimes the real world hands you a story at exactly the right time.A little over a week ago, ABC7 Chicago reported multiple mountain lion sightings in southern Illinois. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources received reports from both Union and Jackson counties and believes they are likely sightings of the same animal.Mountain lions are rare in Illinois. According to the report, this is only the twelfth confirmed mountain lion sighting in the state since 2002. But we (Illinoisans) have…

A recipe for classic halaszle, a Hungarian fish soup heavy with paprika. It normally uses freshwater fish like carp, but most fish work here. Halaszle, Hungarian Fish Soup is the latest post on Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

While the Byzantine Empire under Justinian I and the Sassanids under Khosrow I might have decided to stop fighting on their southern borders, hostilities continued in the area east of the Black Sea. This was a 20-year conflict, from 541 to 562.The Byzantine control had been settled years earlier, in a treaty made in 532 that was called "Eternal Peace" after five years of conflict. Iran recognized the Byzantine control of the place, and the monarch of Lazica, Tzath I, was even made to convert to…

Karntakuringu JakurrpaI've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it…

I spent time recently along a portion of the iron curtain. All this time, I sort of thought that “iron curtain” was a metaphor, not a real thing. Not miles and miles of posts and barbed wire and watchtowers, and the band of no-man’s-land that ran alongside. It was chilling, to see among these benign rolling hills and fields of gourds and sunflowers, oak forests and locust stands, signs of those perilous times of desperation and cruelty. Of death and iron. Small villages dot the landscape, and…

• 3-star hike • 2 mile part-loop • Moderate | Gain 160 feet • Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA | Northeast . On the boardwalk trail spanning the Cedar Swamp. This hike begins with an easy stroll. From the parking lot, head south on a wide flat double-track trail that offers a forgiving comfortable way to warm up your legs. Before long, bear right onto the Founders Boardwalk, which carries you across Cedar Swamp. When we visited in late summer, the lush vegetation crowded in closely on both sides,…

I read the passage below that describes wild Highlanders in Glasgow at the start of the 18th century in Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy and immediately thought of Queretaro in Mexico, where our son and his family live. The Highlanders in “antique and fancy dress” are akin to the many indigenous people you see in Queretaro in their usually brightly coloured clothes. One night before dawn we saw what seemed to be almost an army of indigenous people marching out of Queretaro. The Highlanders spoke a…

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding: Sometimes people talk about fantasy as allowing readers to see or realize things about our real world that they would not otherwise have seen (that is, they argue that fantasy can more effectively help us see reality than realistic fiction or even nonfiction can). Has this happened to you? Is there something you think about…

The link. The paragraph: If Fat Tire were an actual bicycle, most people would put it on Craigslist and call it a day. But New Belgium can’t toss its former glory on the junk heap just yet. Even as younger drinkers gravitate toward the Voodoo Ranger clan’s bolder flavors and packaging, there are plenty of Gen Xers and Millennials with plenty of money for whom Fat Tire represents the golden era of early 21st-century American craft brewing. People still drink it! And despite its diminished…

And from those teeming places of shadow and virulent beds of life and seething pits of chaos, the Natharl’nacna bent the substance of the world unto their will. From the work came the least of their servants, a swarming brood of anarchy and despite. This slim folder of supple hide, clasped shut with a length of emerald green ribbon, contains a dozen or so individual sheets of parchment. Written in an archaic – almost alien – form of the Common tongue, they tell a sad and cautionary tale. In a…

It's drizzly out, and I have a dental appointment in a couple of hours, so rather than taking a walk, I'm writing a post. Things that make me happy (for now). Slow Horses has (finally) returned. I gather that Slow Horses is not the worst of Apple TV shows in terms of the length between seasons, it may even be the best, but it feels like an eternity. Especially when there's only eight episodes in a season. But I do so enjoy that show. The cast, the setting, Gary Oldman. The plots are just the…

Weymouth, Massachusetts, that’s where I’m heading today. Back in time. To the early 2000s. “”This is Sour” – Lemon Peel” (RORA-14) is the name of the only album Awesome Animal Ambulance released. It came out on CD in 2003 on a label called Aurora Seven Records that was based too in the same city. I was familiar with this label thanks to The Snow Fairies, but didn’t know many of the other bands. So discovering some of it now. Very cool. Awesome Animal Ambulance was formed by David Conway on…

I’ve been a fan of Brendan Fraser since Encino Man (1992) and truly, there really isn’t

On Twitter, Hans-Jörg Schulz put up a nice example of two charts. The first chart, shown above, paints a picture of an influx of immigrants into the United States, since the 1970s. We also notice that the proportion of immigrants was similar to the present share if we look back to the 1920s. The trend is U-shaped, first falling, then rising, now reaching a level comparable to a century ago. Depending on one's political views, the message may be alarming or optimistic. Here is the second…

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, about Marvel's new trade collection of Punisher: Confederacy of Dunces, there were a few other aspects I thought were of some interest that I just couldn't quite fit comfortably there. So, I wanted to mention them here. ***********************Three jokes I don't think Marvel would have published if these issues had come out today:1.) Transgressive of transphobic? Ennis has a reputation for pushing the envelope (an understatement if ever there was one),…

The Albatros D-III was built under license by the Austro-Hungarian OEFAG factory, but they improved it considerably with a much more powerful engine and strengthened structure.They usually (but not always) removed the propellor spinner, as they found it made the machine faster.It was often armed with a pair of German Spandau machine-guns, like the original D-III, but it was also often armed with a pair of fully-shrouded Schwarzlose guns shooting out through the engine bay, as I've represented…

First day of reset. Index cards, paper, pens. Haunted Ambient Mix, which I need to remember I need to listen to at the end of the week! Researchers trying to use AI to build an “Out-of-this-World-Model” that will allow AI equipped spacecraft to “‘dream’ dozens of potential futures and control the system outputs to “step” toward that dream future” of docking with low earth orbit space stations The deli was randomly closed – fuck you, Dan – so I stopped in at the Pipe of Port for the first time…

Jeppe (aka winther blog) is hosting this month’s IndieWeb carnival, and the theme is “Parenting”. Thanks, Jeppe, for hosting! It took me a while to find inspiration to write about this subject, as being a parent hasn’t been on my bucket list for a while now, due to personal reasons, so I felt I didn’t have anything to say on the matter. This weekend I’ve been on a citybreak in a town about 350km away from home with my best friends and their one-year old girl. I love her to the moon and back,…