It’s a classic view for sure. Why am I here? Tomorrow afternoon I will be talking science fiction at the Villa Albertine, as part of the Villa Albertine’s overall fall literary festival. That link above will take you to the whole line-up (which actually started today, but inasmuch as I just got into town and might need a nap because a certain cat woke me up at 3am, I have not taken part of). But definitely check out the whole line-up. there’s awesome stuff there. And it’s free to attend! Free…

These people turned to sand. I saw them – the way their color drained as they were trying to stop the girl. Their arms reached out to her but it was too late. The girl moved to her rhythm, clapping and tapping inside the unlocked van. Their arms went rigid. Their bodies, suspended in their moves, crumbled like old clay vessels. The wind picked up those mounds of sand and took them up to the Holy Mountain in tiny spinning whirlwinds. I don’t think it was the girl’s fault. The girl appeared in…

എന്റെയീ സാൻവിച്ചിനെയാണ് നിങ്ങൾ പൊരിച്ച മുട്ടബ്രെഡെന്ന് പറഞ്ഞ് കവിതയെഴുതിയത്. മേശമേൽ കഴിക്കാനിരുന്ന അയാളോട് അവൾ പരിഭവം പറഞ്ഞു. അതിനെ ഒന്ന് പാളിനോക്കിയിട്ട് അയാൾ പറഞ്ഞു ശരിയാണ്, ഇത് പൊരിച്ച മുട്ടബ്രെഡല്ല. പിന്നെ! അവൾ സംശയത്തിന്റെ പുരികമുയർത്തി. ഒരു ചിരിയോടെ അയാൾ പറഞ്ഞുതുടങ്ങി, ഇതിൽ പ്രാണനുറങ്ങുന്ന മുട്ടയുണ്ട്, നാം കോർത്ത ചുണ്ടുകളുടെ കടുംചുവപ്പിന്റെ കെച്ചപ്പുണ്ട്. നമ്മൾ കടന്നുവന്ന വഴികളുടെ മുറിപ്പാടുകളെ ഓർമ്മിപ്പിക്കുന്ന ഉപ്പും, എന്റെയും നിന്റെയും കോപത്തിന്റെ ചില്ലി ഫ്ലേക്സുമുണ്ട്. അവളുടെ…

E.R.O. D/UWi 1/2/2 Witham UDC Committee minutes 1918-1924 Last item in each meeting, which I have typed in italics, is endorsement, presumably from full Council about whether report accepted. Waterworks Committee, 1 August 1919, page 1 Mr Goodey had written resigning. Resolved to ask him to continue and put up his salary to £3 a week. Read but not adopted 25 August 1919 Waterworks Committee, 25 August 1919, page 4 Mr Goodey still resigned. Proposed to advertise for Engineer at £2 2 0 a week…

Today’s interview is the first I have yet conducted with a professional blogger. I’m not going to assume anything about what you picture when I say that! But I hope that from now on, when you imagine someone who has made a career and vocation of writing for the web, your mind leaps to Janice, creator of The Vivienne Files. Janice was writing about sustainable fashion, Parisian practicality, and artistic inspiration made personal even before she launched her own site in 2011. Her archives…

I normally consider myself to be an alright badminton player. Not today, though. That's the fun of sports, right? Playing like trash and losing! So fun.172 words · 3 images

Why does Lizzie Borden attract musical interpretations? Is it the blood, the summer’s heat, the generational conflict, or that there’s few things quite as punk rock as a woman in a corset with an axe?

Isn't this a handsome typewriter? Imagine how pretty it would have been when it rolled off the assembly line in 1904, with bright blue and yellow pinstripes, glossy paint, and intact golden decals.The Monarch is a machine that most collectors ignore, because it's "normal": a frontstrike, four-bank typewriter with the usual accoutrements. It was also made for several decades, so you may think it's common.But in my experience, you don't see Monarchs every day, especially not early ones in good…

The Southpaw ProblemWhy your organization is beautifully prepared for an opponent who may not show up Ninety percent of the world punches the other wayWatch a competent orthodox boxer meet a southpaw for the first time and you will witness something close to a software crash rendered in flesh. The jab that has landed ten thousand times now arrives on the wrong side of the wrong shoulder. The lead feet tangle like a bad first date. The head movement, drilled until it became involuntary, slips…

Wallgate Railway Bridge Wallgate Wallgate II Wallgate III Market Place Market Place III Market Place IV

This man comes with stories baked right in.

My alt blog, unstory, has been the talk of the town lately. Its saga spans dozens of posts engineered to increase my surface area. With Brennan linking to me five times across several weeks, I believe I've achieved that goal. In addition, Korin, Gordon, Unattributed, and Candy all commented on the question, "Who is unstory?" Without further ado, allow me to show you who I really am.

— This past week I have once again become obsessed with the line by Jane Austen (surprise!) from Northanger Abbey: “Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.” — Jane Austen — I try and stop myself from going down the rabbit hole of the last 6 years, having dug myself out of whatever hole to whatever degree has been possible. I mean, I wrote a whole book which will be published all the way into the future of 2029 titled Repair Manual for the Soul. And it’s really stupid of me but I…

Things I did Started volunteering at the local Chess club. Built a World Clock app in Python and PyQt6. Visited the local library for another book. Things I read Better CVE Data Should Mean Less Guesswork for Defenders The Customer Isn’t Always Right About IT When a blogpost eats another More meaningful online interactions, please Things still to do Another weekend of football to watch. Enjoy the rain we’re getting finally. Play some more Chess. Reply via email

Bleep and Booster was a beloved children's animated sci-fi series featured on the BBC's Blue Peter from 1963 to 1977. For 1966-1968 there was a yearly annual album with adventures of the duo. I love space art in general and feel that images of children exploring space are important in helping them imagine people (and themselves) in space and the possibilities. These adventures are seen through a British eye since England did not have a manned space program. Instead "plucky" children were taken…

This month saw 48,753 votes cast in 20 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 11 council seats changed hands. For comparison with August's results, see here. Party Number of Candidates Total Vote % +/- Aug +/- Sep 25 Avge/ Contest +/- Seats Conservative 20 8,908 18.3% +4.0 +3.0 445 0 Labour 19 11,250 23.1% -1.8 +8.7 592 0 Lib Dem 17 5,885 12.3% -2.7 -3.9 346 +1 Reform 20 8,138 16.7% -11.8 -9.2 407 +3 Green 18 9,553 19.6% +9.4 +5.9 531 -1 SNP*…

i am usually a very talkative person, too much so sometimes. i get into conversation and do not easily keep to surface topics (this is not me stoking my own ego, i think it's a dumb trait to have). i've been (trying to) text my former colleagues and just acquaintances, and you know what? people don't respond in kind, they are usually colder. as a result of that, i am now also becoming sort of cold - not mean or flippant, just sticking to more surface conversations, and don't get excited much…

In a previous posting, I’d noted that the number of arXiv hep-th preprints/month was significantly higher recently, clearly due to LLM use, but that I hadn’t heard of much in the way of significant new results coming from this. Around the same time, Matt von Hippel issued a challenge to the LLM agents: So if AI companies want to impress people like me (or scare us, for that matter), then they need to tackle my old field. Show that an AI can take the kinds of computer resources an academic has…

A significant number of my personal projects at some point involve wishing I could put a container registry closer to users. In my past few (breif) attempts, I've looked at re-implementing the OCI specification as a Cloudflare Worker, backed by an R2 bucket, which has the dual benefits of being: fast, and cheap to operate. Unfortunately, that also comes with the downside of being yet another thing I need to maintain as the underlying specification evolves and, to be honest, I already do enough…

Just a quick post to note that the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) has released a statement on mathematics and artificial intelligence (as well as a longer version), which makes many points echoing several already made recently here and elsewhere. The longer statement also makes reference to a recent statement by the London Mathematical Society on recent developments around the Navier-Stokes equation. Perhaps the comments to this post can also be used to…

Even if you don’t want to commercially sell your writing (or other creative endeavor), if someone else wants to use it, you should have a contract. And while that contract doesn’t need to be super-fancy, there are several parts that it needs to contain. This isn’t just a hypothetical; I’ve got real-world examples here (though my privacy policy is in effect). Also, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is officially not legal advice, as I am not a lawyer. That said, this is the stuff…

Mocked for an especially stupid death. Guest post by Quirkz: [Ed. We pick up after Quirkz's disastrous previous session in which he made almost no progress except for his hand-drawn maps.] On my next reload, I try a different path and immediately find a pile of treasure which includes four scrolls and a spellbook! For the last two hours, this repository has been only nine steps away from the room with the Tasmanian devils. That's what I get for following the right-hand path instead of the…

Miley Cyrus featuring Model/Actriz “Different Religion” Miley Cyrus isn’t consistent, and that her charm. She’s willing to try a lot of things and doesn’t seem too anxious losing about her position as a pop star. She can shrug off releasing a lot of duds because there’s seemingly always another mega-hit for her around the bend. And that gives her the capital to make wild creative decisions now and then, like collaborating with an abrasive art rock crew like Model/Actriz. It’s not surprising to…

Coffee and camera. And doughnut. If you’re going to walk around all day you gotta treat yourself. I’m at: Café Saint-Henri (Verdun), Montréal, Québec Location map: https://misterchrisjones.ca/location/chris/7385/ Note tags: checkin, food, montral, qubec, coffeeshop

Following the tumultuous revocation of eMudhra’s TLS certificates (and miscellaneous fallout by being a shittily run lowest bidder government contractor), what actually is the state of patching this vulnerability?

The encounter that led to the pregnancy is far more complicated than you might think. To keep things tasteful, let me simply say that while they used an air duct, there was no meeting of a (ahem) glorious sort. Both Daisy Link and Joan Depaz (Joan is pronounced like “Juan”) were held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, with Daisy on the 4th floor and Joan on the 6th. So no, there was no (ahem) glorious congress. They communicated by passing handwritten notes that were guided…

Autumn always makes me feel like I ought to be back in school, either to learn or to teach. In turn, that makes me think about student projects I would like to run. Tools Bram Bram (“Bram runs agents mindfully”) is a desktop app that embeds Claude Code and Codex in a GUI that provides structured, audited workflows. This project will add several new features, including support for other families of models such as DeepSeek. A Little WYSIWYG Editor Web Browser Engineering builds a small but fully…

First off, I assume this is some anti bot tactic. I don't mind typing in the link and title but the exact formatting for the date is kind of a pain. Anyway, I've been looking for the versions of shows I used to watch back in high school. Most anime now on streaming services has been re-dubbed to be a closer match to the original. For example, the Netflix version of Evangelion has all new voice actors, and it's just not the same. But recently I went to watch 08th MS team and Endless Waltz and…

diary entry about the lack of rights of children and how my stomach hurts

This summer’s been rough, huh? In Europe we’ve had one of the hottest seasons in recorded history. Maybe you’ve heard or read about it in the news. Now that we’re closer to the fall, I hope we get a little bit of a breather. Even though it’s been tough, I’ve tried to keep working on stuff all the same. Website redesign # I’ve had the itch to rework my personal site for a while now. I think my first prototypes go back to late last year, but I didn’t find something I was content with until now.…