In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Sarah Wang’s novel New Skin is a debut filled with dark humor and a powerfully poignant coming-of-age story. BOMB wrote of the book: “In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang renders a…

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Hi! We had a great summer. Having both indoor and outdoor pools within walking distance from our home meant a lot of swimming, mostly in the kids' pool with our (now two year old!) daughter. It's been another year where we spend the hottest months at home. The summer is pretty nice here, and most days already feel almost like vacation. We travel during the grey and cold months instead, since we don't have to worry about the school year yet. My time was split purely between work and family, so…

# The old adage "to be a better writer, read" has never seemed more apparent to me. I used to read a lot when I was young — mainly science fiction and fantasy novels. As I grew older I pivoted to more highbrow fare. I suppose that I wanted to be seen as the intellectual type, reading particular books just so I could say I'd done so. There are some that I genuinely enjoyed and am glad to have read, there are others that were a grind that I remember absolutely nothing about, and then there are…

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

Click here to book for my tours Vivian & Toto outside The Primrose You will not meet many who can boast the distinction of being brought up on the teeming thoroughfare of Bishopsgate but Vivian Betts is one who enjoyed that rare privilege, growing up above The Primrose on the corner of Primrose St where her parents were publicans from 1955 until 1974. Yet it was a different Bishopsgate from that of the present day with its soaring glass towers housing financial industries. In her childhood,…

I’m working on a new book, Let’s Eat!, hopefully out by Christmas. It’s about Almea, but in an unusual way: it’s a series of essays on the different cuisines of Almea, from an in-world perspective. I wrote these for my Patreon, as diversions, and also to deepen the conworlding: I wanted to know what people ate, in each region, without resorting to vague descriptions or improvisation. People generally like these posts, and I think that’s because they’re light and involving. Food is fun and also…

another trip around the sun!can't believe how long this blog has kept goingappreciate all the comments and messagesgrateful for all the friendships made over the yearsthank you for coming along with us on our adventures.

00:58 - eepy. (I should get ready for bed.)

No, they are not, Donald. These are taxpayer-funded election ads. This is how tyranny starts. He read the tyrant's handbook and memorized it. Please watch this docuseries on Netflix. It is an excellent history of tyrants, starting before Rome, moving through Hitler, Qaddafi, Idi Amin, North Korea, and forward. It is not about current events. How to Become a Tyrant, Netflix

The Toronto Botanical Gardens hosted a simultaneous sale of african violets and cacti.

This has been the year for weddings. Clara and I (finally) tied the knot earlier this year after being together for more than a decade, and we have three more for friends and family later this year. Yesterday we were honoured to be at the Gunner’s Barracks in Sydney again for another, this time between Linh and my brother-in-law Victor. A bit of rain threatened to wash away the initial ceremony, but everyone laughed and the bride and groom took it in their stride. It’s also a good luck omen, so…

For once, I’m on time! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a review post out early, and in fact, there’s still one episode of Honzuki no Gekokujou IV to air, so I’m a week ahead! At first glance, there was a lot of anime I was interested in this season, but as I looked into each one, my desire to watch them declined. I was expecting to have more to watch than I could handle, so I’m glad I ended up watching a more reasonable amount. Of the stuff not listed, I watched: One episode of Kuroneko…

Just reading old newspapers… as one does, when I found this gem from the Chicago Sunday Tribune from 1900.It’s about the weapons of offence and defence used by women in one year in Chicago according to police records.You can read the full article here:https://www.newspapers.com/article/chicago-tribune-women-armed-with-favorit/110350216/ There’s more! Let’s take a look at this superb illustration. Hands-up buster: This is the scariest one, if she throws that lamp and it breaks, you’re on fire: I…

My latest Western RoundUp column for Classic Movie Hub is a review of the John Wayne film THE WAR WAGON (1967).THE WAR WAGON was just released on Blu-ray and 4K by Kino Lorber Studio Classics. I reviewed the Blu-ray, which is a beautiful print from a 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative. It was my first time to see the movie, and I quite enjoyed it.Please click over to Classic Movie Hub to read my review, and thanks to all who support my Western RoundUp column!Previous Classic Movie Hub…

Outside of a retail establishment in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards, Texas. The post In the Stockyards appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

LLM-Complete: The next 700 programming languages Note: An LLM was not used in writing this article. I was reading microgpt1 and found myself brushing up on linear algebra and tensors, and then separately was reading articles du jour about how prompting will replace coding and so on,2 and thought: why might that be? That is, if we are to take all the bold claims of vibecoders at face value. Bear with me. Dijkstra comments, in various places, that language is important. LLMs by definition provide…

At my local park run there are some bollards, and when people run through them in a crowd, they put their hands in the air and some yell “BOLLARDS!”. They also have bright pink bollard toppers that sit over the top of them. None of this helped me on Saturday when, while looking back at someone on the side of the path I ran squarely into one. It was extremely painful and, I assume, also very dorky. I was saying hello to someone and I was also thinking “there are some bollards coming up i’d…

I’m a fan of the HP(E) ProLiant MicroServer line, and still have a Gen 8 kicking around for NetBSD testing. I call it my Companion Cube. But its limitations and quirky boot behaviour do have me looking for another tiny machine with four bays I can eventually upgrade into. I was also thinking of building a server for Clara to be able to tinker with. If only someone made a case with a similar internal design and footprint to the MicroServer that… oh, wait a minute. What’s this handsome thing? I…

A hyperactive tropical East Pacific slings hurricanes toward Hawaii and Baja California, with indirect effects (modest moisture & potentially damaging ocean waves) in SoCal It has already been a remarkable, and arguably historic, East Pacific hurricane season. Three hurricanes (Lala, Lowell, Nolo) have now directly impacted the Hawaiian Islands (though none made formal landfall), with […] The post A parade of East Pacific hurricanes will miss CA (but soak the interior Southwest) before major,…

Dario Amodei’s essay We Must Pace the Frontier committed Anthropic to embedded evaluators, who would be placed inside Anthropic and given employee-level access, so they could provide outside perspective and also reports on what was happening. There is only one problem. Who will be the evaluators? OpenAI followed suit on committing to the evaluators, and also issued a milquetoast but welcome call for international coordination. I will cover that here as well. What I won’t cover today, but hope…

A website needs to know whether I'm old enough to buy wine. It doesn't need a copy of my passport. Companies keep collecting far more than they need, then act surprised when someone steals it. Here's how to build it better, and what to do if your data's already out there.

Unexpected Game Revival A while back, there was this mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. It had a pretty decent story and the central conceit of the play mechanic was also pretty nice. The art and music was good for a mobile game. They had a gacha system that was reasonably generous, though as time went on and they continued to need to release new characters, the power creep became super real. It shut down back in 2024 (the Japanese servers went until 2025, but did eventually also close).…

“She is like the rest of us; we all have no more than the words that come to us in the play.We go on with these words. We have to.” In let me tell you, Paul Griffiths gives Ophelia what Hamlet scarcely allows: a childhood, a family, and a love whose end we already know. He makes this life from the 481 distinct words Shakespeare allotted her. Whereas Hamlet can ask whether to be, Ophelia is given “I shall obey” and must discover whether its “I” can survive the command. What sounds like literary…

How to SSH into an Otto, and how I got its OpenClaw Control UI working over Tailscale Serve.

I accompanied Andy on the rally.

I bought a graduation catalogue from december 1981 at the trift shop Het Goed.

übel Ich wollte diesen Beitrag auf Englisch schreiben, aber ich habe mich in letzter Zeit nicht besonders intensiv mit dem Deutschlernen beschäftigt. Heute fühle ich mich nicht gut. Mir ist übel. Ich denke, dass ich mich zu fettiges Essen gegessen habe. Zum Beispiel habe ich zum Frühstück Kuchen gegessen. Ich habe ein bisschen „Witcher 3” gespielt und dadurch ging es mir noch schlechter. Von 17 Uhr bis 20 Uhr war ich im Bett. MontagIch habe geputzt. Am Abend hatte ich einen Videochat mit Joh,…

Automattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by board By Sarah Perez Read original post → I have been holding off on writing about Matt Mullenweg and everything happening around WordPress because I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reacting to the latest round of drama. I don't know Mullenweg personally, just like I don't know Elon Musk. But the more I watch his public actions and statements, the more I see a similar pattern. That pattern is what bothers me.