While figuring out what I could do for a breakfast smoothie with ingredients on hand this morning, I learned of a neat trick for hulling strawberries: using a straw. It's very simple. Insert a straw into the base of the strawberry and poke it up to remove that little white stem thing. Makes for less waste when you're preparing them for just about anything. Awesome! (The smoothie turned out okay! It was skyr yogurt, skim milk, strawberries, blueberries, and ice.) ¶ I figured out how I'm going to…

PC There’s no escaping the obvious X+Y format when describing the absolutely wonderful Ambrosia Sky. That’s because it’s absolutely Prey meets PowerWash Simulator, albeit with a smaller budget. And that works for me. Dalia is a Scarab, a sort of investigative action-type who is returning to her former colony of stations situated around the rings of Saturn, trying to recover survivors and data after the outbreak of a fungal disease called Clusterlung. Not only do these spores infect humans and…

one day i will have posters and walls to put them on an xbox, the original one, and a 360 and maybe a ps2, and a cute shelf of all the games i love. a handful from my uncle, everything i found from the trade-in pile at eb games, more not yet found on cashies trips and reclaimed from my dad i'll have stickers on all the doorframes. photos i've taken, printed out, stuck up haphazardly on the wall behind my computer the collection of cds i want to build, thrifted and found and stolen and borrowed,…

Have you ever had the urge to leave the beaten path and just go exploring in the wilderness? To leave the safety of the hiking trail or road and walk through dew-soaked, waist-high prairie grass and copses of young trees? To head away from civilization just to see what's out there, hidden by trees or hills? Just to see what it's like? To see what it smells like, what it sounds like, what the ground feels like beneath your feet? It's finally cooled off for the autumn season. The road I drive…

Ran another session of our family Tegel Manor game. Session RecapThe group keeps trying to reach the western tower, but don't quite seem to get there. They head south through some servant rooms, finding one of the maid bedrooms. They dig up a fancy silver goblet from a chest, but the room is, unsurprisingly, very haunted and starts to breathe heavily, the walls bulging inwards and threatening to crush the adventurers. Jokel orders the ghosts to calm down, but even his extremely loud voice can't…

I was reminded today of Spy vs. Spy, the comic series in MAD Magazine.I was a little surprised to find it dates all the way back to 1961 by a Cuban cartoonist living in exile. It’s been published continually since then. The original cartoonish retired from the strip in 1987, when he passed it on to several others. In addition to MAD Magazine, there was a Sunday comic strip for a period of time, and there have been book compilations, a cartoon or two, and lots of cosplay.The two spies are white…

When I was in my early teens I knew that I wasn’t wired like most of the people around me. I knew I found other males “cute” as early as second grade, but I didn’t know what to do with that information. I couldn’t figure out if it was something that everyone went through but I never denied myself the acknowledgement of this fact. In my head it was like when we did geometry proofs in high school: “Likes other guys – given”. I had a cute angle on the whole thing. For a brief moment of my early…

Part of Big Tech's War on Users So someone's actually going to try it. On Thursday, October 1, Google launches the first hardware test for Project Suncatcher, its orbital data center moonshot. Back in May, in Evil vs Evil, I spent a good chunk of a trial post explaining why the orbital data center pitch doesn't survive contact with physics. Launch mass. Radiation-hardened everything. And cooling, which is the one that doesn't care how much money you have. Now someone's actually going to find…

There’s a literary scandal in France this week, and it has to do with AI use: Thélyson Orélien wrote C’était ça ou mourir, the book of the season. It was sold about 50,000 times already, critics are unanimously praising it, the Fnac prize, in the running for the Goncourt, the Médicis and the Femina, three major literary prizes in France. A big deal. Then someone said that they checked the book with Pangram (not sure how unless they typed the book themselves for analysis, but let’s ignore that)…

The farther I get into growing avocados, the more I appreciate the part of the tree that is hidden underground, the part with the roots, the rootstock. It is the engine of the tree, and it can be its armor. This post dives deep into the development story of one of the toughest avocado rootstocks. […] The post ‘Dusa’ avocado rootstock: the story appeared first on Greg Alder's Yard Posts: Southern California food gardening.

I would love to build the Sagrada Família LEGO set. I had the privilege of visiting the church in 2024. It is hard to put the experience into words. I was glad that I was able to linger as long as I wanted to. It was such a beautiful space that you don’t want to leave. The pictures I have do not do it justice. I started seeing rumors that LEGO was going to release this set months before they officially announced it. I have recently seen videos of others who built it. They must have received…

⏪ Week in rewind 🏀 Basketball season is now officially underway. Nelson had his first game, and he really enjoyed it. It's different from football, which he/we did before, on a much smaller scale, but that's OK. One thing I do look forward to is winter, when I can watch games indoors instead of freezing next to the football pitch. 🍲 Our youngest kept asking to eat mussels again, and as his swimming lesson got cancelled, we took the opportunity to eat mussels and do some shopping at IKEA on…

⏪ Week in rewind 🏀 Basketball season is now officially underway. Nelson had his first game, and he really enjoyed it. It's different from football, which he/we did before, on a much smaller scale, but that's OK. One thing I do look forward to is winter, when I can watch games indoors instead of freezing next to the football pitch. 🍲 Our youngest kept asking to eat mussels again, and as his swimming lesson got cancelled, we took the opportunity to eat mussels and do some shopping at IKEA on…

I've a little utility on my iPad called Momento Mori. All it does is tell me I'm going to die in a daily notification. I've just been laughing at it every day. That may not be healthy...?

The profit motive is good, I suppose, for some things, like televisions. If the demand for TVs goes up, then the big manufacturers can make more by doing business things like expanding capacity or becoming more productive through creating efficiencies. If demand falls, they can protect their profits by cutting back or lowering prices. The bottom line is that at the end of the day no one really needs a TV and there is still enough competition in the consumer electronics market that the promise…

It’s a much shorter one this time. Enjoy!

This is the kind of project where I’m split evenly between derision, admiration and respect. Someone is actually doing this thing, with as much accuracy to the 16-bit games (and DK64 too) as is merited, however much that may be. And they’re doing it, not as some D&D adjunct, but I would say as an accessory to an unproduced (as yet?) Donkey Kong RPG. If you don’t know what that is, and I’d admit it’s meaning is sorta inside baseball…. A hexcrawl is a kind of RPG adventure that’s either partly or…

Got up at 7.30. Made cup of tea. Went back to bed until 9.20. A very bad day. Rain most of the time. No gardening. Saw Joe and Bet in the pub. L’pool beat Everton, 5-0.

The definitive test for generative AIs: which creates the most accurate ass. There are several models available and you can read the prompt. Don’t forget to also evaluate the reaction of the buttock to the pat. Tip from Renan, who refused to answer where the hell he found this.

Commentary on map projections continues in the wake of the UN resolution about replacing the Mercator projection with Equal Earth. There were two pieces in the Guardian last week. This one is less about projections… More

The young King Edward VI resembled the late Prince Arthur, the uncle he had never known, more than he did his own father. Studious, thoughtful, and idealistic, especially in matters of religion, he understood from the start the gravity of his role in life with a thoroughness that belied his age of just nine years. Less fortuitously, his earthly shell was frail and sickly, again more like that of his uncle than his father. King Edward VI, as probably painted by William Scrots. (Public Domain) He…

Over the last couple of years, I’ve found myself increasingly aware of my sense of perspective. Or aware of an increasing sense of perspective. Of the notion that we have a limited time until we die, and that some of the things - many of the things - which might previously have mattered to me or seemed significant are, in fact, inconsequential, and are not worth getting bothered, let alone worked up, about. That some things are just not worth the time or effort. Not to the point of not caring,…

Clear and cold. The high-pitched kik-kik-kik of a sharp-shinned hawk elicits a chirr from a red squirrel and a furous denunciation from a crow at the compost pit.

Born on this day in 1683 was the great French composer (and music theorist) Jean-Philippe Rameau. His father was an organist in Dijon, and Jean-Philippe was taught music before he could read or write. It wasn't until he was nearly 50 that he began to compose the extraordinary operas for which he is best remembered today. As it's his birthday, let's celebrate with the roof-raising Danse du Grand Calumet de la Paix [peace pipe] from Les Indes Galantes. Be warned: if you haven't heard it before –…

A couple1 of people have asked what my process is for developing the various Pure Commons apps. This comes after I've mentioned a couple of times that I've released a feature I've been working on for months. So I thought I'd write a quick post that explains how I do it, so I can refer people to it if/when they ask in the future. I also find this kind of post interesting, so I'm hoping you do too. If not, feel free to skip this one. 🙃 Using Git without branches Git is a staple in my development…

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here. The series will, when necessary, go into detail on the development of my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, but will also discuss sandbox development more generally. You can read play reports from my B1 campaign here.This post will focus on creating rumor tables for your towns and cities. What is the purpose of an in-world rumor in a TTRPG? According to the Designing…

Apple Watch: You didn’t sleep very well last night. Me: No shit.

A Friday Hodgepodge Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.***1. A few weeks ago, I suddenly became unable to back up my blog with a script I've used for that purpose for over a decade. My suspicion was that something had changed on Google's end, and that I might need to change the script. But then I asked ChatGPT about what I was seeing and it raised another possibility: A change at Google caused a bug in the wget utility…

Desert Brat 2026-09-25

Power Cat 2026-09-25