It’s been almost a year since being back on the island and we’ve made a lot of progress with the house. It got power washed, garage windows replaced, roof redone, concrete patched, and finally painted. The yard also got a decent cut. Stressful and expensive, but these hurdles are in the past now. Not near our house, just nice scenery Our focus has now turned to solar panels… Since trump started the war with Iran prices here have shot up. Especially everyone’s electricity bills. So much so that…

I recently reverse-engineered the formula behind the pickpocket success rate in Skyrim. One of the Pickpocket perks in the game is called "Keymaster", which makes pickpocketing keys "almost always works", and which which I described as "maybe the most worthless perk in the game". Now that we have the formula, we can prove that it's mathematically useless.

I applied for third shift stocking at Meijer tonight after work. And because they have one of those platforms (Workday) where you sort of apply once and can use that information towards additional applications, I also randomly applied for the Meat Cutting position out there. Not even really sure why, the hours wouldn't work out, but I guess I just wanted to get an interview so I can sharpen those skills. Not that getting to an interview will be easy by any stretch of the imagination. I have a…

Chinatown Facade – New York, New York My wife and I went to the original Chinatown in Manhattan to have lunch with my high school friend and his wife. I hadn’t been to this part of New York for decades. More recently, for Chinese food, I’ve been going to Flushing, which has now eclipsed the old Chinatown for variety. The architecture, however, was terrific, with the old brick structures and their characteristic fire escapes on the front facades. It was bright and contrasty, and I thought the…

Book review for The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. I rated it 4 stars. I originally read this in 2021, but came back for a re-read as they recently released a movie adaption of this over on Amazon Prime. The book uses the classic "fake dating turned actual dating" trope and is about Olive, a PhD student in biology at Stanford getting with Dr Carlsen, a professor who has a reputation for being very mean to his students. For me, my favourite part of the book is knowing that it was originally a…

Bret Devereaux writes about the origin of cities. He critiques a fantasy fiction-oriented YouTube vlogger who isn’t a trained historian, and in his critique, he expounds on the origin of cities, as coming purely from extraction, either by temples or by kings. I do not wish to contest Bret in Ancient history, where most of the examples in his post are drawn. But once one gets to the second millennium and cities are more visible to us in economic history, this is no longer the only origin of…

TL;DR Link to heading I pay by card wherever a shop takes one, use an eSewa wallet topped up from Revolut for the many places that only take Fonepay QR codes, and keep a little cash for the rest. I opened the eSewa wallet as a foreign passport holder by doing the KYC (identity verification) in the app with photos of my passport and visa. My first Revolut transfer landed as Rs50,000 within a couple of minutes for Revolut’s fixed £1.10 fee (about 0.44% of this transfer). So far I’ve found this…

21st september to 27th september It's been a minute! Between travel and my surgery immediately upon my return, I haven't had much of a mind to keep up with anything. what i did i am still not recovered enough to work or job. so i've been playing a few less strenuous video games: chants of sennaar, untitled goose game, goat simulator 3, and now valheim. i really like valheim. i really like that i can basically do what i want at my own pace. since it’s unclear if i will be able to do so closer to…

Blawan – “Gi Mi Keys Back” Bicep – “Lemonder” Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke – “This Conversation is Missing Your Voice” The post Visual Velcro 61 first appeared on Palms Out Sounds.

This evening, before things started to get dark, I headed outside to do my evening rounds. I remembered to bring a bowl to finally harvest some tiny Orange Currant tomatoes! I actually dropped quite a few of them that were damaged by frost to the ground. Which means we might have some self seeded tomatoes … Continue reading Our 2026 Garden: harvesting tomatoes and beans

2024 2025 Last year I made it to day 20 before giving up. I was proud of myself for getting that far. Let’s see what this year brings! I’m contemplating using the one-continuous-line method for some or all of them. OFFICIAL 2026 PROMPT LIST 01 APPLE 02 RELIC 03 MINIATURE 04 CACTUS 05 SMACK 06 OGRE 07 PANIC 08 STINKY 09 RAM 10 MYSTICAL 11 RESCUE 12 TOSS 13 FLIMSY 14 LADY 15 HOORAY 16 GANGLY 17 CONTRAPTION 18 FLIGHTLESS 19 CONFUSED 20 LOUNGE 21 HERO 22 BEACON 23 DAPPER 24 BAKE 25 FRACTURE 26 ZIP…

In between # Sabrena and I are in between things right now. Careers, life stage, where we are in life, all of it. So we put everything in storage and went home to South and Southeast Asia for a few weeks. Tailored clothes # I'm starting a company (still in stealth, more soon), and my new life needs better clothes. I detest shopping. But I found a good tailor, and I am so happy. Clothes that actually fit! OASec 2026 # We ran OASec, and it went really well. AI is going into critical systems…

Photo by Growtika / UnsplashA few years ago I was sitting at work using the newest AI tool (GitHub Copilot) that gave me the ability to "tab" complete a line. An LLM sat in the shadows predicting what probably would come next and often times it was wrong, but often times it was right. It felt like magic at that point because just a few characters into typing and the rest of the line might be automatically completed with a tab. I evolved into this engineer that could tab complete a line and then…

$513.19, to be exact, but that’s not the total for the day. Just the two I got pictures of. My younger daughter and I headed out for the city shortly after 10. Normally, we would have taken the highway that, once reaching the city, because the street that goes past all the places we were … Continue reading First stock up shop: this is what $513 looks like

This will be a talk for the Mathematics Graduate Student Seminar on 23rd October 2026, 5pm at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan. On the fundamental theorem of finite games Abstract: We will give five different proofs of the … Continue reading →

Before September 11, 2001, popular culture had already imagined many of the images that would later become permanently associated with that date. Movies, television shows, comic books, advertisements, music videos, magazine covers, and other forms of media occasionally featured the World Trade Center alongside airplanes, explosions, burning buildings, or scenes of destruction. Some of these […]

I recently shared some art I drew of Batman in the style of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. In that post, I shared two different drawings I made based on that concept. Well, now I’ve got a third. I’ve been playing around with a few WigglyPaint clones lately and decided to try drawing this Batman piece using one of them. Here’s the result. WigglyPaint is a digital drawing app that embraces an old-school MS Paint aesthetic, but adds lines that wobble around in interesting ways. The original…

The grind: Meal-prepping when it’s still dark and cold because that’s the only time of day where the flat feels like it’s mine. Whatever money I saved from meal-prepping, I have now lost to paying the customs fee for a birthday book from a European publisher that only has US branches in North America. There’s a neighbourhood spot I’d been frequenting as a kind of third place where I don’t think the vibes are quite what I’m looking for so I’m on the look-out again. I was taste-testing their iced…

Bad Books for Bad People, Episode 96: Judge Dredd Complete Case Files Vol 01There’s no debate that Judge Dredd, a character created by John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, and Pat Mills for 2000 AD, is one of the most influential sci-fi figures of the late 20th Century. That makes it incredibly weird that this podcast episode marks the first time Kate and Jack read any comics featuring the scowling scion of justice. Join our hosts as they venture to Mega-City One and encounter Dredd’s very first…

Adult movies, Los Angeles, Calif., 2023 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin I’m working on an art installation about the San Fernando Valley adult movie industry that will be part of a group show at an art gallery in Los Angeles. I’m looking for original adult movies on VHS tapes from the 80s and 90s. If you’re interested in donating your collection, let me know. Thanks! You can contact me here.About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

After much hemming and hawing I have finally, finally settled on a suitable 3-2-1 backup plan that works for my budget, runs unattended, alerts me when there's a problem, and only uses programs and services that I don't find objectionable. That's a lot to pack into one sentence, so let's break it down. My entire backup strategy is based around Borgmatic. After looking into a number of options, including a custom script, vanilla borg, restic, rclone, and a few others, I determined that Borgmatic…

On a Saturday towards the end of September I once again step off the top of the boat as the anchor drops. As my body hits the water two stories below my first thought is “at last”. We’re back on a boat, adrift in Clearwater Bay up around the north west edge of Hong Kong. It’s been longer than I’d expected, some six years now since the last time. In so many ways those six years are what I talk about when I say “I am no longer making five year plans.” Our lives are brief and the future hard to…

On Saturday I set out with a friend to tackle the Spring City Cycling Club's annual All-You-Can-Eat Century↗. Like last year we opted for the 60(ish) mile / 100(ish) kilometer "Metric Century" route. Unlike last year, I had a proper road bike for the ride. My friend and I had done a lot more training over this summer to get ready for the ride, and that (plus the right equipment) really paid off. We finished about 40 minutes after than last year, and held a 2.5 mph higher average speed across…

BLACK MASK – June 1940. Editor: K. S. White. Cover artist: Rafael DeSoto. Overall rating: **½. ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Tong Trouble” Ed Jenkins. Novelette. Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook, applies his talents on behalf of Chinese friends, and a tong war, threatened by an unsolved murder, is averted, Told in the obvious Gardner style, as we learn as a bonus how to panhandle on the street and some information about the Chinese people. (3) ROGER TORREY “Too Many Angles.” Donovan. Novelette. A private…

In music, if you work your ass off, throw in, do your part, and something gets successful, I got bad news for you. If it’s any kind of band, there’s at least a 60% chance that someone will upset the apple cart and it’ll all go to shit. And you’ll kind of know when it’s peaked. I used to play bass for a pretty popular guy in town. And we’d built his following back up through a series of happy hours and gigs, and it was an amazing time for me because I was the worst person in the band and I…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 24th April 2026 After 2024’s ‘The Way of Ancients’ made a surprising dash to our top 30 in the Album of the Year poll, I was looking forward to the next instalment from Kentuckian melodic black/death metallers Volcandra, and luckily for us they’ve hopped right back in two years later to bring us ‘Beyond the Will of Mortals’. They were a completely new band to me when I heard them on their previous record, but it only grew on me over time, so I’ve got some…

Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well. Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d…

If you’re on the northeast coast in the U.S., I hope you’re safe in the nor'easter. The usual kinds of updates for this month. 📬 In this issue: Zines Media fare Links Zines I’m working on a short story for the next issue of Planetesimal. Vlasinda Productions is releasing Broken Galaxies Vol. 3 on October 18 at San Diego Zine Fest. Afterwards, all four issues will be available to purchase online. I have flash fiction and a one-page comic in this volume. I got accepted to FediZineFest 2026/2027,…

2026-09-28: Joined the CDRing webring, fixed my last.fm widget, fixed RSS templates for bookmarks and site updates

In CommonMark, there are two ways to add line breaks within a paragraph: Add two spaces at the end of the line Add a backslash (\) character at the end of the line I tend to prefer the latter, since extraneous whitespace is invisible in many editors and tends to be stripped. For example, the silly haiku from my (current) /now page: Onset of Autumn,\ Squirrels collect butternuts;\ Last days on the beach.