What will be AIs impact on the shape of multidisciplinary product teams? Giuseppe has just published this interesting post about mapping AI outcomes/activities against the goals of each point of the Service Standard. Which particularly piqued my interest as just yesterday I was catching up with Ollie and when I wasn’t bemoaning my existence and requirement to still work for a living (my default these days) I was pondering what I might be doing if I was 10/15 years younger – mid career and still…

What is the shape of story? In an early talk that became “On Stories“–published as an essay for the first time together with J.R.R. Tolkien‘s classic “On Fairy-Stories,” C.S. Lewis wants us to think about the lost art of atmosphere … Continue reading →

Sullivan Summer Under Review:The Unhaunting. Micaiah Johnson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, September 2026. “This novel is both allegorical and deeply personal,” Micaiah Johnson tells us in the letter to readers that begins her latest novel, The Unhaunting. Personal like a Rorschach test, similar to that invoked by the book’s blood-red cover, with its black-and-white image of a plantation home mirroring an open-mouthed profile, screaming in silhouette. But maybe that’s just what I see. For the promise of…

neorepl 0.5 is out! When I announced neorepl last month, I wrote that I’d always wanted a terminal REPL that felt like CIDER, without the Emacs part. A few releases later I think neorepl is mostly there, so this one went out with “CIDER in a terminal” for a tagline. It also has everything from the “What’s next” list in the 0.4 post, which almost never happens with my plans. A line editor that knows Clojure That’s where you spend most of your time in a REPL, so that’s where most of the work…

Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians - I-Beam, San Francisco, California, November 17, 1986A recent Robyn Hitchcock substack post alerted me to the fact that Element of Light — Robyn’s second LP with the Egyptians — hit the 40 year mark sometime this fall. An anniversary worth celebrating … get me going and I’d probably be willing to make an argument for EoL as One of the Very Best Albums of the 1980s. The songs, the sheen, the guitars! It’s all just perfect, one luminous groove after another. Robyn…

Gabriele d'Annunzio may be better known now as a precursor of Mussolini than a poet and so I hesitate to write a blog post about Halcyon (1903), even if it is his most widely admired book. But as J. G. Nichols says in his introduction, there are hardly any signs here of what he was to become. The eighty-eight lyrics form a 'solar diary' inspired by the Tuscan summers he spent with his lover, the world-famous actress Eleonora Duse. In Lucy Hughes-Hallett's fascinating d'Annunzio biography The…

After all these years of wandering the west, we spend very little time - anymore - exploring our home state. Part of this is due to the terrain; part is due to the weather; and some is surely due to the grass always being greener - or the desert, desert-y-er - on the horizon. Whatever the case, after several long driving trips, we were both looking to wrap up our summer adventures with something that was a little closer to home, which is when I hatched a plan to surprise @mrs.turbodb by…

There are depths to the human experience that I still can't even imagine, buried as they are under the layers of ambition, plastic and comfort that we've all been cloaked in, through no fault of our own, from the moment we were born. - Mark Boyle This week, I finished reading The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, by Mark Boyle. The author gives up technology to live a simple farming life in rural Ireland. Almost all technology. No running water, electricity, gas powered engines,…

I started work last year on an introduction to systems programming for data scientists. I assumed learners were comfortable with the material covered in the Carpentries workshops on the Unix shell and Python: Unix shell: pwd; ls; cd; . and ..; rm and rmdir; mkdir; touch; mv; cp; tree; cat; wc; head; tail; less; cut; echo; history; find; grep; zip; man Current working directory; absolute and relative paths; naming files Standard input; standard output; standard error; redirection; pipes * and ?…

Josh Rubin for Cool Hunting: Of the models we wore this week, the ceramic case held our attention longest, and the the fact that it’s made with a process quite similar to high-end Swiss horology explains why. Apple begins with zirconia powder, pink for Pearl White and gray for Night Blue, pressed into a mold while still soft enough to machine the band slots, release buttons and Digital Crown opening. A 700°C heat soak, which Apple calls, with some understatement, low temperature, burns away the…

I successfully upgraded my NetBSD amd64 system (with one hiccup, detailed below) from 11.0 to 11.1: $ uname -v NetBSD 11.1 (GENERIC) #0: Mon Nov 2 16:34:32 UTC 2026 mkrepro@mkrepro.NetBSD.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC This was my first time upgrading NetBSD and I’m happy with how it all turned out! NetBSD’s Guide describes two different methods for performing an upgrade: boot from NetBSD install media and use sysinst(8), or use the sysupgrade(8) to do an in-place upgrade of the…

I'm trying to be more brand-friendly, I guess... and part of that is that I'm going to hide some of the negative stuff behind paywalls, where I can speak more freely. That kind of counts as brand-friendly, right? I'll say generally, that I'm not a big fan of Quince. If you want a more detailed explanation of that... well, it's not going to be made available to the public. And believe me, the overview below will be, uh... much more detailed. I write not only about their marketing tactics for…

Hey it’s my birthday today and a great birthday gift would be if you read my comics over on Topaz Comics and Oh Joy Sex Toy for freeee! Or maybe check out my huge archive over on Patreon, or my books on Itchio~

16:17 - Just did my expenses for October and I spent CHF 100 less on food and etc. compared to last month! I was a bit worried because I bought a few things for Halloween.

A Praying Mantis on a branch of a Plumeria tree.

Massive Megalodon SharkIf you were sitting on the side of a 25-metre swimming pool and looked down to see a shark, this fellow would fill one end to the other. It is wild to consider that megalodon would leave just a wee bit of room at either end of the pool. He would fill it entirely! The image you see here on the left is a reconstruction that gives you the scale of these amazing animals.

This week’s theme: Selected items in honor of the birthday of the Lovely Mrs. JC. Featured artists include Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Annie Ross, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Rosemary Clooney, Billie Holiday, Nancy Lamott, Frank Sinatra, Melissa Errico, Gerry Mulligan, Judy Holliday, Bill Evans, Nat Cole, Dexter Gordon, Maxine Sullivan.The post Podcast: Another “Lovely” Playlist first appeared on jazzcollector.com.

I have kept my SSH and signing keys on hardware for years. The private key lives on an OpenPGP card or a Nitrokey, it never touches the disk, and a stolen laptop is a stolen laptop rather than a stolen identity. What changed over the last year is the software I use to talk to those cards. For SSH authentication and Git signing I no longer go through GnuPG at all. I use three small Rust programs from the OpenPGP Card project instead. I use them daily on Fedora and on my FreeBSD T480. On FreeBSD…

This week’s podcast explores the relatively new boxed set from Craft Records called Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings by the Bill Evans Trio featuring Scott Lazaro and Paul Motian. It features the Riverside LPs Portrait in Jazz and Explorations, with 26 alternates and outtakes, including 17 recordings that had never been released before. The show offers a mix of some of the original issues, such as Autumn Leaves and Nardis, with many of the newly released takes.The post…

Allison Sheridan: Everyone listening (or reading) has faced that moment when they really want to buy a new computer/tablet/phone, but they clearly do not need a new device. Some of us stay strong, like SR, who wrote in our Slack that instead of buying the new shiny, he buys stock so he can continue to afford more new, shiny retirement living. Smart guy! This article is not for him. I come to you this week to tell you how I justify making purchases that I don’t need. My goal is to be an enabler,…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 243-244, 249-250: The cascade of wars that brought mayhem to the Balkans began in Africa. It was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 that flashed the green light for the all-out Balkan assault on the Ottoman periphery. Unlike Egypt (now British) and Morocco (now effectively French), the three vilayets later known as Libya were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The totally unprovoked Italian…

MATCHSTICK STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (HASBRO) “Matchstick is a clone pilot in Shadow Squadron who goes on a fatal mission to destroy a Separatist ship. He flies a Y-Wing fighter/bomber to attack the Malevolence, a huge vessel armed with a deadly ion cannon. His Y-Wing is damaged while passing through a large nebula, a mishap that results in dire consequences for the trooper.” Would you believe it if I told you that for the third week in a row, my dive into Hasbro’s Clone Wars tie-in line was…

During our scenic drive, we visited the Staircase area of Olympic National Park.Here’s an interactive map of the area:The Staircase ranger station:Staircase area map in the ranger station:Picnic lunch:Pedestrian bridge over North Fork Skokomish River:Staircase trailhead info:Campground info:We strolled around the campsites, and took photos of sites that looked level enough for a van; this is the kind of campground that we couldn’t use with our Tiffin motorhome, but would be perfect for a van…

This is going to be part of a semi-recurring series set in Jackson, IL. While my other series, Mirror Mondays, focused on Jackson and Advanced Witches & Warlocks as mirrors of each other, viewed through the lens of 1986, this one will be more game-design-specific.There will be mostly world-building items, things the setting has that other NIGHT SHIFT settings don't, plus some game mechanics. There is always a chance that another project will leak into this as well. There are things I have…

I’ve updated the typography on this site to use Apple’s macOS and iOS type scales. Interface body text is 13 on the desktop layout and 17 on compact or touch layouts, with titles, captions, and supporting text drawn from the same systems. Article bodies, including Weekly Links, keep the larger 17 equivalent on desktop too. Those numbers might look a little odd if you’re used to keeping everything divisible by four. I’m quite comfortable with that. I wanted a clearer relationship between the…

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications. Been awhile since we did a romhack, and this one is pretty cool. Someone used an editor to turn one of the DS Castlevania games (probably Portrait of Ruin, I’m guessing) into an homage to the comedy vampire sitcom What We Do In The Shadows, starring Laszlo Cravensworth the vampire. You can play it in your browser, or pay five bucks for a downloadable ROM that you can transfer to a physical Nintendo DS, if…

is that sometimes it just shuts up.The past month and change I've been in no mood to discuss my inner life with the outside world. I necessarily don't want just anybody glancing in– it's kind of a mess right now. The lamps have been knocked over and there's a growing pile of failed 'fits and dirty dishes. Forget about hosting; there's no food other than protein bars and tap water and I don't feel like changing out of my pajamas.It happens.And last week, I was in bed with the flu. And I was…

I've neglected my calorie tracking for several weeks, and when I was counting my calories I wasn't doing so in any meaningful way. As a result, my weight stalled for months. Just now I tried to find out exactly how long via my Libra app, but data is missing since July...there must have been some change with how it or Samsung Health syncs with Health Connect. Something to figure out. I'm sure I had excuses ready to dole out, but the reality is I did not put the time and effort into weight loss…