They can be dragged and stuff!

We played the twenty-second session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game last night. You can read past play reports here.The roster for this session was as follows:Llombaerth, CG elf thief 4 (Adam)Mirkle, N human fighter 3 (Maya)Rory the Small, LN human fighter 2 (David)Zommernar, CN elf fighter 2 (Nael)Egbert, human necromancer 1 (NPC)Bilodeau, man-at-arms (NPC)Graves, man-at-arms (NPC)Brazile, halfling porter, and his dog, Ripper (NPC)Ejiofer, human porter…

I must hold my head up and admit to judging a book (entirely) by its cover. I had seen this book frequently in Waterstones but since it shared its design style with Richard Osman (for whom I have an irrational dislike) I dismissed this as a shallow piece of cosy crime fiction. In reality it is the intertwining story of an amateur dramatic society’s staging of a play and a GoFundMe appeal for a local girl who needs life saving cancer treatment that eventually results in murder. But who is the…

Anyone sending this to their employer has volunteered to be part of the next “reduction in costs” https://no-sloptober.com/

My thanks to Oleh Providnyk for adding disassociated to his Pixel Area project. Pixel Area is a blog directory, or blogroll if you like, solely for personal and independent websites/blogs. Instead of a text listing though, linked websites are represented by a square block, called a pixel. A quite large pixel, granted, but that’s beside the point. Each “pixel” has its own grid coordinate, and mine, for instance, can be found at X31 Y2. It’s a little like the Million Dollar Homepage, created by…

It's billed as an adaptation of a novel, but Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky actually turns out to be three of them, a trilogy of interconnected stories about working class Londoners in the 1920s. It means Simon Reade's adaptation of them into a single two-hour show can be called brave at the very least, possibly foolhardy - it does explain something about the rather stilted evening we end up with, always hovering on the edge of something charming but never really…

Getting to the part of the year where walking Ghyll happens in the dark. I put on my headtorch and my hat and my orange jacket but it turns out to be remarkably temperate. Cool but not cold, a full moon shining through a thin layer of high, patchy cloud. Stars are showing through the gaps.It's quiet in the field. The air is still, so all of the audio clutter of suburban living comes out to the fore: a dog barking, a hollow noise like a machine coming down a metal pipe, some buzzing vehicle…

Here is the tracking map for the fall sail, or copy and paste the link at the bottom of this post. Hope to start the Chesapeake Bay sail as soon as this nor'easter moves on. Hopefully Sunday, maybe Monday. It reminds me of the nor'easter that had me seeking shelter off the Patuxent River during last year's Bay sail. Anyway, at least I'm not out there for this one.https://maps.findmespot.com/s/NN47#history/assets

I believe that the current Terminator / Matrix narrative pushed by the most loud AI companies, and its amplification by the news channels, fails to describe honestly what the risk is. I believe that these companies are at risk of a third winter of AI, that would completely wipe out their value on the stock market. In other words, I believe that the investment funds and institutional investors of these companies are afraid to lose big. Many European countries rely on colossal portfolios of…

words escape me but I can't escape sleep these lines will remain unfin

Okay, let me tell you about my day. I took today and tomorrow off because I am almost maxed out on my vacation time. That is a separate story and not really important to this one. I went to Costco to get a new pair of glasses. Once I get them, I will finally be finished with everything related to my cataract surgery. I already have a pair of frames from Costco, so I just need new lenses. When I got to the optical department, I had to sign in using the app. There were plenty of workers there,…

Okay, let me tell you about my day. I took today and tomorrow off because I am almost maxed out on my vacation time. That is a separate story and not really important to this one. I went to Costco to get a new pair of glasses. Once I get them, I will finally be finished with everything related to my cataract surgery. I already have a pair of frames from Costco, so I just need new lenses. When I got to the optical department, I had to sign in using the app. There were plenty of workers there,…

How did I not know about the existence of the Suzuki Andes 25F, an instrument that looks like a melodica… …but sounds like a recorder or flute? Here’s Suzuki’s official product video for the Andes 25F, and the only it could be more Japanese would be if it didn’t have English text: (Also, I just learned that Suzuki trademarked the term “melodion”.) It can be quirky… It can be serious… It can even be haunting, in a melancholic 1980s way… Here are its innards …and I’m thinking, “You know, with one…

I've always loved the water. Growing up, summer meant daily swimming lessons at the local pool and returning in the afternoon for the public swim. Visiting my mother's relatives in far northeastern Oregon meant swimming lessons at Radium Hot Springs in Haines with my cousins. Yearly summer camp at the Episcopal church camp in Cove had daily sessions in the hot spring-fed pool where we'd dive for the smooth black river rocks at the bottom of the deep end. Radium Hot Springs in Haines, Oregon,…

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … kinda like using a Chatbot. But worse. Huang says many outrageous things in the podcast. Like when Klein asks about how kids don’t learn skills when using LLMs, Huang responds: I…

I’m at Album Club #187. I know Crash from when I was a kid, but have never heard the rest of the album.

Another Far Outliers excerpt from Philip Bowring’s Empire of the Winds (see Hindu and Buddhist Texts in Nusantaria): As elsewhere in the maritime zone, Chinese and Europeans alike were surprised at the prominent economic role of women, particularly in trade. But even more remarked was widespread literacy, of women in particular, albeit their literacy was used only for transient or practical purposes, for messages and personal letters rather than the reading and writing of literature. Spanish…

A certain kind of document management is embarrassingly important to me these days. as more and more of my projects are fundamentally the maintenance, interrogation, and development of some corpus. So, for example: I curate financial documents, and I use LLMs to ask questions about it (e.g., to help with taxes). I curate academic-year documents, and I use LLMs to ask questions about it ("wait, when is X happening?"). If I'm planning a major purchase, I curate documents for that, too. As LLMs…

A token is not a gift, but a trap. 2026-09-24T20:18:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 A fae stepped out of the fold between the worlds and looked the CEO in the eye, “Tell me your true name, and I’ll grant your heart’s desire!” “I’m Sam Altman, and I want Artificial General Intelligence.” The fae shoved a fat manila envelope into Altman’s hands. “You’ve been served, Mr. Altman,” said the fae, with a pleased lit in their voice as they stepped back from the CEO. “What?”…

Previously: Ordinal numbers and basic set theory Ordinals as nim-heaps Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals Infinite Nim as a coin-moving game Coin-moving games with no coins Productive programs and well-founded orders Shortlex order also orders sequences of numbers Something tricky happened a couple of articles ago that I wish now I'd explained more carefully. The recent articles talk about “shortlex order”. But “shortlex order” isn't really just one order. It's actually a method for…

I recently picked up a Coospo TR70 Radar Bike Light to use for my bike riding, specifically for my commute to work since it puts me on a few roads where there can be heavy/fast car traffic, mainly Hampton Avenue through Milwaukee, Butler, and Menomonee Falls. Matt has a Garmin Varia and I thought about getting one but I still get nervous spending over $100 on something. The Garmin Varia is $150 USD while the Coospo TR70 is $70 USD. That half-price deal really got me interested, though I was…

The title of this post is making a connection to my previous post titled Group communication is hard. Like in that post i am discussing a current matter of conversation in the OSM community. There is a discussion happening at the moment in the English speaking parts of the OSM community that is well suited as an example for two topics that have been dear to me for a long time – that is documentation of tagging practice and cross cultural communication. How to propose The current discussion is…

And here we are three years after I wrote about the Google Pixel Fold being announced, followed now with the announcement of the iPhone Duo...(I have questions about the naming by the way). Four years ago I was talking about web primitives in the platform for the Surface Duo. My how time flies. There are CSS media features, a Viewport Segments API, a Device Posture API but Chromium based browsers are the only ones currently supporting these things. I haven't been able to find any signal yet on…

Is the LAMY 2000 part of stationery journey? Myke and I are fired up to meet in Memphis next week for the St. Jude Podcastathon, but first, we have pens to talk about! Wait, make that pencils, as I have a few words on the latest uniball Kuru Toga Dive, and then we dig into pens, and some advice on the stationery hobby as a whole. Show Notes & Download Links This episode of The Pen Addict is sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code PENADDICT.

I’m boycotting the feedback-hostile Apple Feedback Assistant, so this blog post is my bug report. The bug was brought to my attention by a reader of my blog, who said that it was introduced in iOS 26 and continues in iOS 27. I’ll illustrate the bug with screenshots. First, you need to save a pdf file to the Files app. I recently filed a WebKit bug report (the WebKit Bugzilla is less hostile than Feedback Assistant) with a sample downloadable pdf, so I used that to test. (Don’t worry, the…

{ a project with Styx and the Skandhics } [ in progress... ]

The current issue of Delayed Gratification looks back at January to March 2026, and includes an interview with Mark Lloyd, the CEO of The Rivers Trust. If you have access, it’s “Troubled waters” (DG#62, p. 102).A couple of things happened back then. News arrived from the Environment Agency that 2025 had seen 1.9 million hours of sewage spills. And Channel 4 broadcast Dirty Business, which you will have watched.The focus there is on the sewage—rightly, as it’s grim. But as with many things, it…

Blooger isn't fixed but it is a tiny bit less broken. Two of you have reached out, the blogroll updater is still totally broken for some, sorta broken for others, but when anyone clicks the site button they are sent to the front page of the respective site which is current and up-to-date, click on the site title, not the alleged lastest post link. My bandcamp is up-to-date and has the new Bonnie Prince Billy live album, released last FridayBlogger sent me an email last week telling me they had…

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/edk36npkqa

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level, in which one can be absolutely precise. Edsger W. Dijkstra, computer scientist Poem: Abstraction Towers Abstraction on abstraction, Put some more on top of that; Abstraction's the attraction, Till there ain't no turning back. I don't like abstractions; I feel they blur your vision and make you weaker. In almost all scenarios I could think of. Take for example, on the web. I like using HTML, CSS and JavaScript…