Automattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by boardBy Sarah PerezRead 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. It is the…

It is a difficult year for transit agencies all over the US, as a range of converging problems is pushing budgets out of balance. I discussed the problems in more detail in this post on Portland, but they are common across the country: the expiration of Covid relief funding, rising costs of security, and difficulties in hiring that lead to paying more for the essential staff that keep transit networks running. At our firm, we’re in the midst of this. We helped Louisville with a large redesign…

A long time in the making, Abrams Press has released (on September 15th) a new special hardcover edition of Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion Tetralogy, which is made up of The Virgin and the Swine (1936; retitled The Island of the Mighty in 1970); The Children of Llyr (1971); The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and Prince of Annwn (1974). Composed in a different order from the Mabinogion's original four

Edinburgh moments. Sept, 2026.

Getting a package published on npm has long been a mystery to me. There are too many little details that have to be just right, and I was confused about what the end product was even supposed to be. Vite really gave me the push that I needed to bring it all together. It offers a “library” mode, which handles some of the tricky bits behind the scenes. I think this is where I had given up in the past. It bundles the code and outputs it in two formats, which is good for compatibility. Next, a key…

A busy week at work: My anniversary, so I took some time to look back at this last year It was too busy to even get a draft together for This Week in Package Management I've been actioning my plan to proactively give away our Community (OSS) plan and so it's been a nice week digging into who'd get some good benefits from it, and doing some outreach A lovely long weekend in Blakeney with Anna's family We drove across Thursday afternoon (I took a half day), and then I was working from the house…

My day job consists largely of reading adventures and providing feedback. And while I've read hundreds of OSR modules by now, I still don't have a good way to refer to all the standard ways we write adventures! Outside of referring to a particular "house style" (which isn't unique to any publisher) I haven't really come across a relatable way to refer to all different approaches to keying. Yes, I'm going to taxonomize a bit here. But it's for a good cause! Frankly I find it strange that we RPG…

Here is a fun one! A fellow Referee is running an “Ocean Themed” OD&D Campaign and requested some assistance with generating interesting Jellyfish for the Adventurers to encounter. When I heard that there was a D&D game themed around exploring the Ocean, the first thought that came to my mind was this old meme: My first Random Encounter with a Jellyfish was pretty memorable: My father was stung quite severely by one at a beach when I was very young and required medical assistance from a…

I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past. The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”: When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood…

[This is a guest post by Jess Werk. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Hello, I am Jess Werk, professor and chair of Astronomy at the University of Washington. Astronomy may interest mathematicians right now because our field has already been reshaped by supercomputers and survived to tell the tale. Our magneto-hydrodynamic simulations, built on the Navier-Stokes equations (plus lots of other “subgrid” physics), are run for over a…

Hi Darling Ones, I hope wherever you are Autumn is in full effect. When the sun shines, the light in Minnesota is exquisite – golden and buttery. In the afternoon the sun hits my tree and when the wind is blowing I watch the shadows of the dancing leaves around my living room sighing in contentment. Fall really is the best. Though I miss the pool, I’m glad soup season is here. I’m making stock for chicken noodle soup as I type. So, I wanted to tell you about my cousin Lindsay’s wedding last…

I enjoyed this new documentary about AI. It’s a good primer for people who don’t really know too much about it. I can imagine those who are more well-versed being a bit more critical, but there’s only so much you can cover in 100 minutes. Also, it’s still all rather new and we have no idea where this story goes next, so it’s only a pilot episode really. The 26-episode box set AI version of the World At War in a decade or two will be the one to watch.

A compoint session that ended in sleep, the blank that keeps stopping me from building one, the white flash that answers gratitude, and the scene that was mine all along.

The Anguish of Señora Vanessa I've avoided several orthopedic surgeries via yoga and weekly therapy. I am my physical therapist's Big Project, and results have been remarkable. She's been working so hard to put Humpty together again that if she spots me wearing the wrong shoes or moving the wrong way, she becomes distressed, exhorting me to do better and stop messing up her project. At such moments, I consider her directions for a moment, and readily agree. New shoes will be ordered. And I…

pit in my stomach food is offputting new job tomorrow and things will settle ittl be good i know it will its the last day of cold this week the windows are swung wide and green tea incense circulates in the air the town can hear the music and everything is clean enough for a fresh start so just hang in there no matter how sick it makes you

Vladimir Campos, posting on Masterdon last week: Catching up on my RSS reader today, I came across really nice posts from @ellane [Ellane], @disassociated, and @dcbuchan [David Buchan], and had the same thought I’ve been having for so long: why isn’t there an easy way to reply to articles when using an RSS reader? rss.chat, created by @davew [Dave Winer], is the closest to that idea I have seen so far. In the twenty-plus years I’ve been reading RSS feeds, I’ve never once given thought to the…

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It’s time once again to check in with the Fifth Doctor’s audio adventures. Last time, we had a mini-season of further travels with Nyssa in that gap between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity that Big Finish have benefitted so greatly from, a couple of Companion Chronicles, and the first audio adventures to include the team of Tegan, Turlough, and an aged-up post-Terminus Nyssa. This time around we’re going to check out the second mini-season of that particular lineup, but before that it’s time…

As I get older, I become more aware of how important the ability to freely choose your relations under no external pressure of interaction (such as material reliance) is. I'm also coming to terms with the fact that someone can help you out when you really need it, and they can still not be enough for you or contribute to an environment where you feel limited in other ways. And no amount of "I should be grateful" can wash away resentment from the inability to choose. Granted, there are choices I…

In 1954 IBM promised FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. In 2026 37signals went pencils down. Both were right about the typing. The quarter of the dollar that was always the job is still sitting there.

🍿️ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) was available on Apple TV and heavily referenced in Ted Lasso, and not having watched it before it was a natural choice for the family’s Saturday night viewing. It aged much better than other 80s teen comedies (looking at you, Revenge of the Nerds). Contains a surprising amount of cursing, but a distinct lack of alcohol, sex or violence. A surprisingly short intro credits scene made me think that this was re-cut for the modern viewer but no, this is the…

So yeah, it’s been a week since I last posted. I had a major chronic fatigue crash on the 19th, the likes of which I haven’t experienced for a long time, maybe since Christmas? It wasn’t nice and I don’t really feel the need to revisit it now but suffice to say it took a while to get over. I’m still feel a bit on the edge of exhaustion but I appear to have fleshed out my notes about some links today, with a degree of verbosity that resembles the bursting of a festering boil of thought-juice, so…

I'm writing this a bit late into day three, but day two was so fun and busy! We started off running to a book store, but couldn't find what we were looking for, so we went to another that turned out to be connected to a huuuge mall! I got a copy of the Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos book, wrapped up so it had the promo card(!), from a seperate location of the card shop I did prerelease at! We ran around different stores, got some japanese chips (I got spicy crayfish chips, and my partner got squid…

Me: "I wonder why the dishes always pile up around here." **an hour later** Me: "I was about to wash the crayon wax out of the cupcake pan my wife used for a 'Which things will melt?' experiment at the homeschool co-op, when I noticed that the sick three-year-old had fallen asleep and spilled his Gatorade. So I spent the time shampooing the couch instead."

my skin is electricity I hear the air crackling when your hand moves on paths I've allowed to be traced little fires lighting up along the way soon I am wildfire

Man, I miss this era: Consequence of Sound gives us a list of the 60 best albums of 1996. There’s so much good stuff here, and some stuff I’d either overlooked or forgotten about. I have to go back and revisit Dr. Octagon, Silver Jews, Acid Bath, Tortoise, and Polvo.

From humble beginnings in eLearning, I have somehow spent the majority of my career thus far in or around email. Not to flex, but I am an email expert. Cold, hot, and everything in between. I'm one of very few people on the planet that can say they've personally been responsible for sending 10,000,000 emails a day. I've recently nurtured an email-infrastructure-as-a-service platform from the ground up to over 100,000 monthly sends. I know nuances about SMTP and IMAP servers that would give you…

Trips for four, five days. Enough to get just a taste, enough to leave me wanting more. What a sweet escape: a place new to me, home to someone else. The smell of foreign shampoo lingers on your pillowcase, and in my hair. We wander through costume stores wearing each other’s coats, as if the costumes we're wearing already aren’t enough. I’d paint a portrait of you while we sit on the bus if my pencil was oil, if the inspiration would travel down from my head into my fingertips. Travel in the…

I made persimmon cookies today using this recipe. Two notes: Under no circumstances should you put raisins in these cookies. I like raisins but that is just silliness. Don’t put walnuts in the cookies. Put a single walnut on top.