Entering Hudson Yards – New York, New York At the northern end of the High Line, my wife and I turned left into Hudson Yards. There was a rather smooth transition from the elevated linear park into one of the newest developments in New York City. The entire development is well executed and gives the impression of coordinated urban planning, which sometimes sounds like an oxymoron. In addition to the tall and slender mix of skyscrapers at Hudson Yards, there are two notable architectural…
This summer has felt hotter than previous summers we’ve experienced since moving to Tucson over five years ago. I’m definitely feeling the effects of what I call “reversed SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)”. I’m feeling a little ‘trapped’, for lack of a better word. I’ve never liked the feeling of sunscreen on my skin, so I opt to just stay out of the sun during the particularly crispy parts of the day. When it comes to my personal discomfort I find the sun a little more menacing than the heat.…
In past posts I’ve listed numbers that don’t have: Nine Seven Seven, again Eight Based on overwhelmingly positive feedback, today we’re looking at numbers that don’t have six. I provide this service free of charge. 6 Wait, damn it. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-08-07.
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Marcia Muller GRAHAME GREENE – The Ministry of Fear. Heinemann, UK, 1943. Viking Press, US, 1943. Penguin #530, US, 1946. Reprinted many times. Graham Greene has a rigid-and pretentious-habit of classifying his own work into two categories: “entertainments” and “novels.” While all of his work is suspenseful and contains criminous elements, the “entertainments” are more action-oriented and their mystery elements are stronger. The “novels,” on the other hand, tend to be…
There are too many links and posts of the entire saga for me to put them all here, but I will note that last time I mentioned Diamond Comic Distributors in more than passing, it was to note how they were, "No More." Within a calendar year, they had gone from a struggling-but-sizeable part of the business to comic distribution to bankruptcy and shutting down. As I said, "One long National nightmare is over (out of many that still persist, but oh well). Yes, Diamond Comic Distributors ceased…
My co-worker is obsessed with bats. I don't know exactly when it happened, but wow: they fell hard. One week: regular conversations, or at least approaching regular. The usual detours, sympathetic complaining, mostly lighthearted, occasionally with actual work getting done in there somewhere. And then, out of nowhere, bats. All meetings must now by necessity begin with a short preamble on "bat facts". Details about these little critters are interspersed into chats throughout the day. I've seen…
Damn this is spot on. It’s a long read and you’ll get the gist a fifth of the way through, but Aeon has a highly astute take down of the technocrats’ misinterpretation of our literary science fiction past, darkly reflecting on their actions and ambitions.
Finally got Uma, the VRRV's most pressing issues repaired. The last repair was replacing the front shock absorbers as they were toast according to the mechanic!Being almost 20 years old, it's not surprising stuff is wearing out. After all, we have put more than 105,000 MI on the motorhome since we got it. The new shocks had been replaced sometime ago, but the tire cupping issue I saw on the old one tires dictated new shocks.Anyways, I decided to do some short term camping, to test everything…
[This is me reposting a comment I left on Lobsters about “Taste Is All That's Left,” a post about vibecoding. I think my comments works well enough on its own here as a post. —Sean] As I read this, I was reminded of two quotes. The first is about the taste gap from Ira Glass: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just…
I use the Shunting Yard algorithm to handle precedence when parsing expressions in my assembler. It's great because not only is it simple to implement, but it simplifies the code in a hand-written recursive descent parser. The BNF is effectively: ; BNF per RFC-5234 expr = factor *(op factor) op = '*' ; just the basic ops for now / '/' ; adding more is just adding / '+' ; them to this definition / '-' factor = literal / var / '(' expr ')' literal = DIGIT+ var = (ALPHA / '_') (ALPHA / DIGIT /…
🍿Finished watching: Ted Lasso S4E1, Home. It’s good to have Ted Lasso back! Super annoyed that I can’t binge, but honestly that might actually be a good thing. Having gulped The Bear in a sitting this weekly dose might be a good thing.
I was on auto-pilot in July. It's probably my worst month this year, or in quite some time. I'm still wondering how I survived, but here I am anyways. I didn't shout into the void that much, at least in digital form. I did plenty of shouting in real life. ⚠️ Want to learn what these Micro Thoughts are? Read the explanation here July 30, 2026 @ 11:13 AMToday is @lescar and my first wedding anniversary. We’re celebrating a year of marriage while grieving our best friend, Cocoa. It’s a bittersweet…
I have documented free things seen around Brooklyn, New York City, in these humble pages. For example, I have reported on five free desks across three articles – one on Hamilton Avenue, three in Carroll Gardens and Columbia Street Waterfront District, and one in Brooklyn Heights. In those cases I did not take any desks home, although I do have a free desk story in my front room that I still need to write about. I also have a discarded monitor that I picked up for free that I should also write…
Kati Outinen is the whole deal here, wearing a mask of impassivity the whole movie but always with so much bubbling under the surface. This is still middle period Kaurismäki, with the same icy gaze that also haunts Lights in the Dusk. But it’s a much gentler version of that; a downright optimistic movie under all the melancholy. I can see why some real Kaurismaniacs might love this movie, but for me it just doesn’t have the same life that’s in Shadows in Paradise, or the sharpness of Match…
Good morning, and again, happy “Discovering sweat glands in places on your body where you never thought there were any” Day. 🏝️ Reply by email
I wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler can control the future, but they all have a chance to shape it. Anyone who says that a technology or institution is inevitable is selling something, and anyone who thinks that a wise council or…
As I wryly commented on some Slack space somewhere, Matt's short story this week (#291) is such a perfect parable it should be in all children's books everywhere throughout all of remaining time. Then again... not exactly the sort of thing one would read to a little Callum or a wee Circe. ::chuckle:: [ day still in progress... ]
There’s a game called Mass Effect, which I haven’t played, but I’m told in the game there’s this species of sentient robots, the Geth, whose creators try to exterminate them, and the trigger for this Butlerian jihad was a domestic servant Geth looking up at its owner and asking: “does this unit have a soul?”. And if you’re playing the game in 2007 you probably think: yeah, a machine asking this question is proof that it has personhood or sapience or sophonce, whatever you call it that separates…
My glaze of “Iron Man”.
Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 10th June 1986 Rediscovering earth-shaking debut records is the bread and butter of the Anniversary Series, and few shook as much earth in the doom genre as Swedish icons Candlemass, and their ‘Epicus Doomicus Metallicus’ debut from 1986. An album whose name you’ll never forgot, paired with songs that once you hear you’ll never forget, this was a real epoch altering record. Forty years later, this is still an album that resonates deeply within the doom…
A few days ago I suddenly developed an impressive case of laryngitis — utterly painless, but incredibly annoying — which I attributed to a change in my medications (a huge increase in the dosage of the steroid prednisone). And so it might have been. Then after breakfast this morning (around 4:30 am) I was visited by the unmistakable intestinal symptoms of cryptosporidiosis, crypto for short — notably uncontrollable watery diarrhea, dammit. Some days earlier, when a widespread US outbreak of the…
From volume IV of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle: The world is not a calm sea, where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat… The world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.
On our way to Porto, Portugal 🇵🇹 by way of Amsterdam. ✈️
Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries: Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial digital content is a perpetual access license (PAL), and the marketplace may be deciding that PALs are…
Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 26th June 2026 I hadn’t realised it had been three years since the first record from Costa Rican death metallers Astriferous, and ‘Pulsations from the Black Orb’ was a firm favourite of mine (check out my review of it here) from that year, but apparently time is a flat circle and we’ve had to wait all that time for a follow up. Well, Astriferous are back with ‘Atavistic Unraveling’, an album ready to test the psychic bounds of your mind once again with its…
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier. The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models autonomously hacked into several companies have upended our understanding of America’s computer hacking laws,…
The main tool I use for to write this blog is vim (specifically Neovim. “Vim” at this point is not really a particular program, but a clade of software.) I have been using it for many years now, so this is not surprising. What is surprising (to me) is that I do not write (or at least draft) more posts by hand. I like writing by hand. I have quite a collection of analog writing instruments and I certainly am looking for ways to justify that. I have fountain pens, I have typewriters, I have far…
Have you attended a theatre or cabaret show in Paris? We, sadly, have not. That was something we missed on a trip to Paris many years ago, even though there was much else to enjoy. We were reminiscing about that trip the other day when we re-watched the Doris Day musical April in Paris (1952). Day stars as a chorus … Continue reading →
Posting these things is a hostage negotiation. This stuff I'm making this week has been a for real internal battle. These things so rarely look like what I think they will and only sort of feel like I want them to feel when I look at them. There are naught but a dark council of internal dreads, with increasing sharpness and derision, just laying into me as I scratch and scratch and scratch. It's loud in here. The voices have more stamina than is reasonable for being as old as I am. The shitty…
This was a trip to see family we hadn’t seen in awhile and meet a new baby niece. I didn’t get too many non-family photos in South Dakota but we did go to an indoor butterfly hatchery and habitat that was a hit with our toddler who got them to land on her finger. Then we stopped by to see the Sioux Falls downtown and checked out a nearby fair. Missoula, MT# Missoula was fairly smoky when we were there due to nearby wildfires. The night we got there we checked out another fair and watched a dirt…
