[Epistemic Status: Speculative unifying theory of biology.] I don’t know about you, but I greatly resent having to be a biological organism and subject to all the poor engineering and design decisions that entails. This has many manifestations. A recent one is often wondering, why is the entire body such garbage except for the liver? Take the kidneys. Once you reach adulthood, they start to slowly decay. You can damage them through not-obviously-dangerous stuff like taking too much vitamin D or…

A week and a half ago, I made the trip out to Schaumburg, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago if you’re not familiar) to attend the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. I was only able to attend on Sunday, and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In my head, I had planned on documenting the entire experience for an upcoming episode of Magical & Revolutionary, but was basically gobsmacked the minute I walked in the door—there was so much wonderful vintage tech and people simply enjoying both that and the…

I have a couple of days off work so I’m planning to get some small stuff done. Things that have been neglected during the last several weeks of heat. This morning I replaced the ignition switch on my 96 F150. Very simple. It’s been sticking for a while; now it turns like a corrupt politician. I also picked up some work shirts at Goodwill. Why does anyone buy new when you can get like new for $6? My fun project will be to install Linux Mint on my laptop. I used Ubuntu many years ago. Don’t…

In 2021 my job had us go back in person about six months before the rest of Austin did. At first it was great, there was nobody on the road and I could putter along to work in our 20 year old Jeep without issue. Then one day I went to reverse out of the parking lot at work and it popped out of gear. I put it in drive to get back in the spot and it popped out again. I get out and see a huge puddle of dark red transmission fluid all over the ground. Got it to the transmission shop only to find…

On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is using our product name and logo, without permission. I reported it to Github as an imitation on the same day. I got this reply: A colleague scanned the Mac .dmg file from the repository using virustotal.com and got a whole load of malware warnings: Using Isobuster he found out that they have also changed…

Perhaps it's how I'm currently feeling at the minute, but I've been in corporate employment for just over 9 years and in that time I've worked myself from the entry level position of my department to becoming the head of department. I've been in the role of head of department since January and in that time, I've had some highs and some lows, but the longer I've gone on and the more the business has changed and the decision they're making, I'm feeling more and more ground down. I'm not naive…

How many times have you been told what you should put “above the fold” when creating a landing page or marketing email?It’s become my #1 annoyance with content strategy advice.Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen debates over which elements take priority, how much content can be added, whether the navigation should be removed, and where the “fold” is even located.It all misses the more important point. Time matters more than space.You have precious few seconds to capture any attention.Every second…

The Jerseymacs have been very good this summer, and I am both obliged and pleased to reconsider my 2008 take: There is a moment when you take a bite that you can convince yourself it is going to taste like a McIntosh.... ¶ This year's is the same round, oblate, modestly ribbed apple, its red blush, streaky in spots, over spring green and decorated with light lenticels and a light bloom.

(click on the image to see the full issue)

So as I was getting ready to write this day-late weekly Boston-centric upcoming shows & announcements post, news of the 2027 edition of the Something In The Way fest over at Roadrunner (with a pre-show at The Sinclair) in early February popped up on my screen. Headlined by The Jesus And Mary Chain, Turnover, & […]

I've been playing music for a very long time...since I was in middle school. I have a pretty eclectic palate, but I have some staples pretty common for those of my generation. Shoegaze and its variations (specifically Dream Pop or Dream Rock) would never have been something I guessed I'd latch onto. Sure, the 1980s brought this musical idea to the masses with bands like Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine, but they were really overshadowed by synth-pop and New…

we could’ve never been just two people in love. i loved him, but i loved myself staying at home more, lazing around with my pen and the world i would never walk on. he loved me, but he loved himself going out to explore the world i carefully drew with my black pen and brought a child back. he could still say to my face he loved me. if i didn’t throw up, rolled my eyes, then we would’ve been just two people stupidly in love. i didn’t. but, can i recognize him now?

Here in The North the weather is slowly turning against the wearing of T-shirts outdoors but this week I’ve made a new shirt available based on an old design. The first Cthulhu Labyrinth came about when I was putting together pages for a Cthulhu calendar in 2012. In the end it didn’t get used for the calendar but the design stuck around even though I was never entirely satisfied with it. My recent work on the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark has had me going back through all my…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Marvel UK.What craziness is it up to now?John Romita's short run on the Fantastic Four reaches its dramatic conclusion with victory over the "monster" that's been rampaging through the streets of New York.But that's nothing compared to the nightmare to come, as the Thing's been left in a high-tech chair in the Baxter Building with no one around to make sure it doesn't kill him!When it…

Thanks to Zachary DeBottis what3words’ 2025 accounts I am fascinated by what3words, it defies the laws of finance that apply to most businesses and shows how little my old fashioned understanding of business models is relevant in the modern tech economy. The idea of a verbal description of a 3m square as a proxy for coordinates might have sounded like a good idea a decade ago but adoption seems to have been slow and new technology may be about to overtake the idea. The 2025 accounts just landed…

Un jardín digital es una infraestructura abierta, relacional y en permanente cultivo donde datos, documentos, notas y conversaciones son seleccionados, contextualizados, anotados, enlazados y revisados para ensayar su transformación en conocimiento situado. A diferencia del archivo cerrado o del flujo cronológico de las plataformas, conserva visibles las relaciones, procedencias, versiones e interpretaciones que configuran cada objeto digital. Es, al mismo tiempo, un espacio para habitar la…

The more I learn about the web, the more appreciative I become of what came before. We truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. In the past week, I've had the pleasure of (finally) becoming an ARPA member on SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system and online community that has been in continuous operation since 1987. But what is SDF? Well, to answer that, we need to go back four decades and talk about the BBS era. Bulletin Board Systems It's June 16, 1987. Ted Uhlemann ("iczer") plugs…

Until recently I had only used the AI tools pay-as-you-go, but lately I have been experimenting with the $20 monthly subscription. So I ended up with extra credits to burn. I would periodically just set the AI tools on writing papers I have wanted to write for quite some time. Here are some of those experiments. Of these, the Crime Decomposition paper is the only one I spent more than a day on. (And that was mostly because it was running models that originally took 10+ hours and then would…

"Monsters are always other people"… and other links for your bedtime reading tonight. AI: A Very Human Tragedy, by Terry Eagleton, Unherd Opening the Door: On the Secrets Old Buildings Can Keep, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Literary Hub What Learning to Paint and Reading The Elements of Style Have in Common, by Susan Coll, Literary Hub (Excerpt from Word Salad)

When I was in high school, I spent a semester riding a bus to and from a co-op placement. In need of listening material, I came across downloadable university lectures through iTunes University. I felt incredibly energized by how much knowledge from great schools was available without paying tuition. All you needed was a willingness to listen and pay attention. That’s still true today. If it seems too boring, just start with five minutes. The post Willingness is the cost of admission appeared…

It finally feels like fall here, it was about 48F when I took the kids to school and daycare. Enjoyed getting dressed for that sort of weather, not so much sunscreen and sweat. And my ears don’t hurt in the wind anymore thanks to the hydroxychloroquine, turns out that was Raynaud’s. But the joint pain is much more obvious with the cold. That might improve over time, but this is my now. Late-30s going on 70. I’ve been taking a lot of comfort in Ursula Le Guin’s writing, as usual, but her writing…

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 202-205: An even worse damper on the public morale than the bombings was the news from the eastern front, where the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviet Red Army at Stalingrad. On February 2, amid the stench of rotting corpses, blood, and human waste, only about ninety thousand exhausted, hungry, freezing German soldiers were still alive to be taken prisoner. Hitler was furious. He had demanded a battle to the last…

[In online mentions of favorite old, threadbare basketball book, Blaine Johnson’s What’s Happenin’? often makes the cut. Johnson, who covered the SuperSonics in the late-1970s for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, shares his “revealing journey through the world of professional basketball.” Published in 1978, Johnson’s book today is a treasure trove for anyone trying to make sense of the enigmatic Bill Russell as an NBA coach. He was one complex human being. But Johnson didn’t only write…

Source: dansinker.com/posts/202…

If I’ve been missing from the internet it’s because I’ve been spending my evenings grinding on a game from Butterscotch Shenanigans called How Many Dudes? Hot off the heels of the release of their massive multi-year sequel project Crashlands 2, the family+ operation at BS turned a little game-jam style prototype into a “Featured on the Apple App Store” game in under a year. How Many Dudes? seeks to solve ancient internet riddles like: How many toddlers could you take on in a fight? Would you…

A few weeks ago, I posted the following item about a strike ballot of members of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT): @telescoper.blog The IFUT ballot has now closed, with the result an overwhelming majority (92.5%) in favour of industrial action, up to and including strike action. For more details see here. The planned strikes have already generated some press reaction: Unless the Government changes its position and starts negotiating very soon, the next steps will be as…

For some people, their pulse beats faster when their favorite sports team wins, or their favorite musician drops a new album. For others, pulse and respiration accelerate when confronted with “Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts.” If you (like me) are in this second category, Jessica Riedl has got your back (Brookings Institution, April 2026). This is a book with a lot of pictures and not too many words. Here’s the basic picture. Federal debt as a share of GDP is near the highest…

I like this comic, even though I didn’t when I made it. It’s pure melancholy, and the whole day felt exactly like this. On a related note, I always struggle with the end of summer and the beginning of the worst seasons. I will persevere, but it’s not going to be fun.

A Saffron Finch rests on the bar of a metal gate.