quick note: I wrote this blog post before Meta’s Connect 2026 event. I’ll most likely make a short followup regarding that soon! Man, oh man. Sigh. Well, I’ve done two previous versions of this post, talking in 2024 and 2025 about the state of VR as a gamer. So I figured I would continue the now annual tradition. Will this be the last one? Only time will tell! TMNT: Empire City So I went back and read my 2025 post to see how I was feeling about things back then. I used the word stagnant to…

In the Newsletter this weekMore about the Longest Journey in the EUAnalysis: In this Innotrans world all seems fine. The rail world outside, not so much.Good week: Leo and Magyar Vagon conclude an agreement for a fleet of 200 passenger carriages for leaseAlso a good week: SBB to buy 21 high speed trains, with an option for 20 morePeople want trains this week: Nancy - Lyon a surprising successPolitical sop of the week: Republika Srpska gets a cross border train from SerbiaBad week: Rail Baltica…

Some years ago, a friend married a woman who believed she had been abducted by aliens. Aware I was a skeptic, he asked me not to bring it up with her. Fine by me; what would be the point? Then, on arrival, she backed me up against a wall and began ranting that humans couldn’t make all those crop circles. Eventually, she said I didn’t believe in alien visitation because I was scared. “I’m scared of death. I’m not scared of aliens,” I told her, and managed to wriggle out of further discussion.…

The mobile app for GoodLife Fitness has charts for each day of the week showing how busy the gym is. I grabbed the charts for Charlottetown and animated them by way of understanding the flow from day to day, and the differences between weekends and weekdays.In making the animated GIF I discovered a very helpful feature of Graphic Converter, my go-to Swiss Army knife for image editing: if you want to crop a bunch of images exactly the same way, open them all, crop one, and then select Edit >…

An interesting post on Twitter by Gregory Crane of the Perseus project leads to some interesting finds: The Scaife viewer build on work by @PonteIneptique. It would be easy to import the texts into https://gitlab.inria.fr/almanach/cllg/freed-corpus from @ThesLingGraecae. We have chosen not to do so but there is no copyright at play. Here are the biggest 20 not yet in Perseus…. Thibault Clérice seems to be the main man here. Inria seems to be doing some very useful things. The Corpus Liberatum…

As part of my ongoing quest to play a couple of Classicvania games that I somehow missed before the upcoming release of Belmont’s Curse, I find myself jumping 16-bit platforms and this time unexpectedly landing on the SEGA MegaDrive. Even stranger: the game was in fact released in the USA and Europe—and even more strange for a nineties console game: within the same month! What did we do to deserve this? Our family was a MegaDrive one yet in 1994 at the wee age of 7 I wasn’t aware of the genre…

I do not waste my time and tempt fate or dare the odds of my unforeseen destiny anymore. At least, not like I used to.I am too far gone now. I am far from the person I was and growing farther from the distant shadows that used to remind me of what took place on 3rd Avenue and 54th Street.I am grateful for this, however, so please understand that despite my past and my mistakes; I am aware of who I am now and in the end, awareness is the key which can open the door to a brand new life.Or, at…

HELLO SAND!

How’d my birthday roll around so quickly?!? It feels like my last birthday was just a couple days ago… not a whole 365 times around the sun! Birthdays are probably a good thing, though. It means I’m still alive and kicking. But as the years roll by, there are fewer people around to celebrate with. Gone are the days of family birthday celebrations. Many have passed away and the few who remain are scattered around the globe or physically unable to join. These days, modern technology fills in when…

Mandy Brown, riffing on the late Joanna Russ, labels the sustained hysteria of Those Two Letters discourse as a sort of addiction. Regular readers may recall that I’m really not keen on addiction as a diagnostic concept, and especially not in its more metaphorical deployments, such as this one; I much prefer the term habituation, and here as most other places I think it’s a far better fit. Nonetheless, Brown is right on the money when she writes: If there is anything novel about the language of…

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. “isn’t it strange that we were taught to fear the witches, but not the men who burned them?” —@Laura “The AI panic looks like an orchestrated con: The bosses of these rapacious, sleazy, and infinitely sloppy companies are angling for government permission to be a cartel. This would be followed, as certain as day follows night, by the bailout they all…

The Traitors: New Blood episodes 2 and 3 gave us a new traitor and two new murders, but it's CBS that may have committed murder tonight, moving Big Brother against The Traitors: New Blood's second hour.

The three most painful sensations known to science: Childbirth. Stubbing your pinkie toe. Sending a link to something you made and being left on read.

I bought this LP because of its Milton Glaser-designed cover featuring the colored pencil musical notations of composer/synthesist and former monk Jean-Yves Labat, alias M. Frog. It was 1973; I was about to become a high school senior, and I had hitchhiked to New York City with my friend Al Crump. The multi-floor Sam Goody record store in filthy Times Square was where I first laid eyes on it; hands instantly followed. Produced and recorded around the same time as Todd Rundgren’s psychedelic…

How do you know a thing is not for you? It’s a difficult question. In the back of our minds we might be thinking, “sure it didn’t work out that one time, but it might if you try again” or “you haven’t tried it…maybe you’ll like it”. But let me tell you, there are times … Continue reading How do you know when a thing is not for you, and what you should do

I participated in yet another writing contest called 1Picture1000Words:They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Look at this picture.Write 1,000 words about it by August 31st, 2026. You can write whatever you want, so long as you connect it to the photo. Creative nonfiction. Sci-fi. A joke. Something else. It’s up to you.No prize-winning places for me, but it was a good exercise. I published my piece in my blog, as usual: Little Charlie, 1Picture1000Words

In the early 1980s, role-playing video games were taking hold. Ultima and Wizardry arrived on the scene in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and kicked off a chain reaction that would result in Japan’s own role-playing scene on both computers and consoles. Falcom, Square, and Enix would all take influence from those western computer RPGs in building out series like Dragon Slayer, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest, but there was also plenty of influence left for the west. Might and Magic was one such…

Little Charlie was born under an unlucky star, and though he wasn’t so little anymore, he did indeed come into the world at night.The moon was surprisingly bright that evening, its light glinting in the windows of nearby houses, flashing from road signs caught at just the right angle, and flickering in the rearview mirrors of cars speeding up and down Atwater Avenue, while beneath the deck at number 1900, the newborn puppies saw none of it, their eyes still closed as they huddled against their…

Link sharing is a fundamental piece of the IndieWeb. It's a kindness we show to other bloggers and sites. We share things we find good or interesting so that others may enjoy them, and it provides the author a bit more reach. I notice there are two main ways people tend to share links. The first is as link dump posts like the way Andre does it. I assume they save the links as they're going about their week then post them all at the end of the week. The second way is to post the shared links…

“Darling, you feel heavy because you are too full of truth. Open your mouth more. Let the truth exist somewhere other than inside your body.” - Della Hicks-WilsonHello friends! Feeling a little scrambled making my way towards this weekend. I’m taking a class this weekend, so I'm expecting Sunday’s post to be “just photos”, lol, as if you all will mind. :) I love you guys so much and I’m so grateful you are here!Here are my photo choices for today:Sunrise, September 23, 2026 - the winds of…

The Fibonacci sequence is so-called because in Western mathematics is first appears in connection with a problem from Fibonacci's 1202 book Liber Abaci. Fibonacci asks us to consider a rabbit farm where a pair of baby rabits grows to adulthood in one month, and an adult pair of rabbits gives birth to a new pair of babies after a month. Representing an adult pair with a and a baby pair with b, we could write this as: b → a a → ab Starting with one pair of baby rabbits, and performing the…

You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone else sets it down the way you drop a heavy backpack after a long day of walking. My wife does not set her phone down so much as launch it. From her hand to the far corner of the room, the phone travels from indispensable to…

The Lockheed L-188 Electra airliner made its first flight on 6 December 1957, and within two years, a variant pitched to the Navy as an armed maritime patrol aircraft joined it. Soon to be accepted as the P-3 Orion, the first of 757 production models rolled off the assembly line in April 1961. Ironically, just 170 Electras were made, with its military sister much more prolific. Now, an extremely respectable 65 years later, one of the last of the Navy’s handful of operational Orions, BuNo…

While the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by 1,400 Brigade 2506 Cuban exiles in April 1961 is a well-known Cold War fiasco, the much more recent February 2026 shootout between 10 Floridamen on a 24-foot boat and Cuba’s Border Guards is much murkier. At least until now. The story, from The Belly of the Beast, includes being recruited on TikTok (welcome to 2026), coordination on WhatsApp, training on a 13-acre farm in South Florida, and packing 25 guns and 13,000 rounds of ammo (none of it…

(Global Frequency Deluxe Edition at DC.com) The version from my local library is the Deluxe Edition, containing all 12 original issues from the 2002-2004 run. As an early 2000s title, I’d say this is on the tail end of non-superhero books working their way into mainstream culture. So there is no spandex and no superpowers (at least by that parlance), but Global Frequency does dabble in super-villain sci-fi and supernatural stuff on roughly the believability level of The X-Files. The Global…

My dog stole my laptop...LOL...

With Muse confirmed to give everyone a Virtual Machine on the cloud, we can now confidently say, 2026 is the year of desktop Linux. I’ve seen a couple of posts about this so wanted to demystify. Today, every Muse user gets a free computer in the cloud. It's a real computer, and we’ve designed the security architecture of the Muse Secure VM carefully so you and your Muse can do almost anything you could with a… pic.twitter.com/tdk4vYvF5z— David Singleton (@dps) September 24, 2026

First published in Barely South Review Josie Deleon was gobsmacked by the divorce papers. The longevity of her marriage to Roscoe was a point of pride, a dividend of the successful navigation of their union. Divorce? It took her a moment to recall her maiden name. Keep reading →

This week's opening salvo comes from Cult TV Blog, where John's review of the actress Patricia Hayes continues with some of her comedic work from the 1960s and 1970s, which gives us a great look at the versatility of her roles.Earlier this week, you hopefully read my interview with David Hofstede regarding the second edition of his wonderful book, When Television Brought Us Together. At Comfort TV, David continues with his behind-the-scenes look at how, and why, this updated version came to be.…

I got a tipoff about Clouded Yellow (Colias croceus) on a lucerne/alfalfa and clover field in Aldreth a couple of days ago. Many dozens of them, apparently. I had a look a couple of days ago, but it was cloudy and windy and we only saw maybe a couple of dozen. A day later with better conditions, perhaps 50 or so (female helice form seen). But, I did a proper walk around the perimeter of the fields on 25th September (with permission from the farmer) and counted 108 as well as many dozens of…