I've had this book on my shelf since it was first published. I actually stared reading it then and DNFd at around 50%. I remember thinking that while I enjoyed Miéville's prose - I always enjoy his prose - I didn't really understand what was going on at all. The language was slippery and the concepts and images were too big and weird for me to properly envision. 15 years later my tastes have expanded and changed, and with the release of The Rouse I figured I should revisit the only Miéville…

Twin Peaks fans have been blessed with quite a few opportunities to catch our favorite show on the big screen lately, but no other screening has been quite like the Twin Peaks: Moving Through Time series by curator Daniel Knox. WHAT IS TWIN PEAKS: MOVING THROUGH TIME AT THE MUSIC BOX THEATRE IN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS?... The post Trip Report – Twin Peaks: Moving Through Time at the Music Box Theatre in Sept. 2026 appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Overcast and still. The bracken in the yard has all turned brown and the stillgrass is reddening, revealing the dark green leaves of a new volunteer spicebush.

I’d like to propose a small practical exercise this week: learning one crochet stitch properly rather than trying to take in a whole pattern's worth of them at once — no judgement here, btw. My first crochet project was a cardigan, and I definitely learnt on the go, with no practice beforehand. But think of this exercise as a grounding practice, if nothing else. Why beginners find crafts frustratingWhen a person starts in a craft, it's tempting to jump right in and start making the thing, the…

This started after I watched Drew Gooden’s video about the music industry, focusing on Spotify. It’s a good video, and like with many of his videos you’ll end up going “yeah, that is crappy!” every few minutes. I’ve been using Spotify continually since 2019; before then I’d moved between a few services (making the most of free trials while I was a student). Overall my attitude to Spotify was that it was fine. The app wasn’t great, but it wasn’t overly offensive. It would play music when you…

There has to be a time when we say to hell with it. There has to be a time when we say life is life death is death and all we have is this moment. Understand?All we have is this, which is right here and right now.There has to come a time when enough is enough and so, now becomes the time to make a difference between the definition of what it means to live or die.Living is far more than just existingAnd dying alive is far worse than dying alone. There is no more time to waste. There is no more…

WOKEN

Around 10 years ago Google DeepMind showed that you could use deep reinforcement learning to play video games. It’s something that I found fascinating at the time and wanted to try but never had the time to really look into it. With LLMs now being able to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me, I’ve started to work through my backlog of “this is interesting - I’d like to try it out”. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and my childhood computer was the ZX Spectrum, and my ESP32 Rainbow project has given…

The vibeA satisfying week of making things, with some much-needed rain to close it out.Highlights🎨 I did some design work on the website this week. It was nice to spend time on how the site feels and looks, alongside the writing.💻 I kept working on my next app, including time with the iPhone Duo in mind. I am not ready to get into the details yet, but it is moving along.🎨 I created Catppuccin themes for Xcode. I have been enjoying having that palette available in my development setup, and it…

Nice way to start the week.

I will admit that I tend to tune out claims from certain quarters to the effect of Something you've been doing for decades is an imminent danger to your health!Nevertheless, I am aware of at least a dull drumbeat about microplastics and their potential to cause biological harm. I see the subject as one worthy of further study, but not as one worthy of such measures as banning single-use plastics, a favorite cause of many leftists. Plastic -- and individual freedom for that matter -- are so…

This was an amazing week! I already wrote about a few things in my two thoughts posts this week1, so there's not much to expand upon. Suffice it to say that the rest of the week after Friday was pretty great! My friend and I caught Game 3 of the Frontier League 2026 Finals between the Ottawa Titans & Evansville Otters; it was a really great game with a lot of scoring, and the home team won! Had my wife and I not had plans to see a pre-season Ottawa Senators game on Saturday, we would have…

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Dorothy Cameron Disney was an American journalist, writer and columnist whose column, "Can This Marriage Be Saved," ran for three decades in Ladies' Home Journal, but she also authored nine detective novels – published between 1936 and 1949. I remember some were amused a woman named Disney wrote suspenseful, bloodcurdling tales of murder and detection when her work briefly resurfaced in the early 2010s. Disney's Death in the Backseat (1937) and The Strawstack Murders (1939) showed her novels…

What do you do when you have one of the best-looking Kaweco Sports ever released, and one of the wildest inks ever made, sitting on the desk right next to each other? 🍍🖋️🍍Pineapple Pen!🍍🖋️🍍The Kaweco Sport Marble Ocean Fountain Pen and Pennonia x SultisAttila - Viharos Tisztás, translated as Stormy Meadow, look like they were made for each other. Marble Ocean features a Blue and Green swirl pattern throughout the barrel, with some translucent areas mixed in, and Stormy Meadow is a bright Green…

We've decided to put the campaign on hold with the passing of our friend. No one feels like delving in those dark halls at the moment. I hope one day to return, but not now, and until we decide we're ready, we're going to play some other games. It's funny, it was never meant to run this long. What started out as a filler campaign has stretched on for more than a decade, 332 sessions... and now... Not ending. A pause. To be continued... How? When? I don't know yet. We'll figure it out when we're…

You'll never guess what Beth ordered for her daughter's birthday party! Or, ok, maybe you will. Ah, but can you decipher the exact words used in this phone call? Nailed it.Hey, you're good at this! Now, how well can you follow directions? Nice to know Jackie keeps herself centered. Marissa's boss was leaving on a trip, so she wanted to get a cake that said, "So................" as an inside joke. She specified that there should be 18 dots, so...Good luck with that, Marissa. (I like how the…

i listen as she describes how ai plans meals, emails, vacations. was it always a challenge to figure out dinner? it saves time, she says. question: how much time do we have before we run out of clean water on earth? google: by 2030, the immediate deficit. i listen as she shows me her ai-generated photos: just tell it what you want or upload a picture and look, look, look at this, it will even make a cartoon! i know what she means. gemini helped me cartoonify frida kahlo into a toddler, her…

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store: It's now a single menu bar app, which offers a few options: In addition to normalizing your clipboard, it can also convert copied rich text to markdown and back again. Video demo: youtube…

2026-09-28Hello!I hate to say it, but I think I've exhausted the interesting compositions from my local area. If I'm going to drive out anyway, I might as well head to the city and do some work there.The changing of seasons might serve to give me some inspiration, but an unfortunate amount of plans I've made as of late have failed in some crucial way or another. I ought to pull out of this dive.Finally, The Ambassadors is a nearly 500-year-old painting of scientific objects in high detail. Also…

Downtown Dallas through Bus Shade, Dallas TX. First, the bus. It was indeed a nice bus, with reclining seats and a bathroom. Basically an airplane without wings. However, I won't be doing this again. The main problem: I can't pull over and stretch anytime I feel like it. That loss of freedom was more crippling than I expected. Parking, Houston TX. Second, the funk. Houston was indeed funky. We photo-walked from a touristy area to the edge of a real area. The problem for me was, neither place…

I left Facebook more than 8 years ago. In the past 8 years, I’ve missed being on the platform for precisely zero days. At the time I wrote: I am not decrying digital platforms or online engagement. We live in 2018. I’m not dropping out of society. However, I have recognised that Facebook has made me less human, not more. I’m trying to become better, not worse. And, for me, Facebook is causing regression rather than advancement. Until now, I’ve held on to my Instagram account. I joined in…

Here we stand again. After years of Apple making default apps removable and deletable or at the minimum eliminated through Screen Time they're back to forcing things down our thoughts with the Siri app. There is no way to remove the Siri app completely even though I can shutdown Siri and make it as dumb as possible it's still there. There is no reason for this and the fact that I can even hide Safari and Mail using the screen time settings, but not Siri is weird and clearly an attempt to…

Clive James (1939-2019), "Thomas Mann," Cultural Amnesia (2007; rpt. London: Picador, 2012), pp. 441-454 (at 446): More problematic is the Aeneid, which reverses the proportions: the Dido episode, and the journey into the underworld that succeeds it, add up to an oasis in a carefully landscaped desert, and it takes a lot of thirstily summoned dedication to convince yourself that those parched miles of dunes, elegantly arranged though they might be, are worth crossing just for the prospect of…

Amy KayYesterday my family had dinner. The food isn't important, but the conversation during dinner is. For context for what we'll get into: My older family members are very... ignorant. They're very supportive of Trump. They thankfully don't buy his merch and cover their cheap cars with his stickers but still. My mom mentions to my eldest sister (B) that our taxes are being raised to subsidize NYC's Free Bus program. She says something along the lines of "did you hear that communist in NYC is…

So Mayer Under Review:Alston Moor. Anne Charnock. Gold SF, September 2026.Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture. Noelle Catharine Allan. Black Lawrence Press, September 2026. It feels strange to proffer character-led summaries of these two narratives; as their titles make clear, they focus to a significant extent on displacing the human from the center of the story. Anne Charnock’s Alston Moor has several point of view characters of different ages and genders across two time periods, but one living…

The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; . . . I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. Charles Lamb (1779-1834)

Yes, exactly — it’s “Green Birds”! Ordering this fabric sample has really helped me with my decision as to whether to buy this fabric to use as curtains here, Svenskt tenn. Thanks! A lot! (This is what the fabric looks like if you’re not only interested in the birds’ legs. Perhaps they assumed that I was a bird leg man.) I’m also impressed with the “protect textiles from direct sunlight” warning here… super reassuring when we’re talking about a textile meant to be used as curtains. Besides…

You can reduce token usage in Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor by guarding what your agent reads, not what it writes. I analyzed 1,674 of my own agent sessions across RocketSim, RocketTrace, and my other Swift apps: only 0.6% of my tokens were the agent’s replies. The rest was the agent re-reading the same context … → The post How to reduce token usage in Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor appeared first on SwiftLee.