We are flying through September, and our St. Jude campaign is rocking and rolling. As of this writing, we are knocking on the door of $450,000 raised this month! St. Jude cares for some of the world’s sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face. Donations from normal folks like you and me make that possible. If…

I found it interesting that Terry Pratchett had been so good in writing down poignant thoughts that would make you pause and think, without him being preachy. This book reminds me of Studio Ghibli’s movies exactly for the same reason. The ideas are always oh so subtle, but it made you feel a certain way about how you used to be and, hopefully, a gentle nudge to be better. My first introduction to Terry Pratchett’s work was the novel “Good Omens”. I love how “naive” the characters always are,…

So I was commissioned by Filthy Figments to write-up a NEW RSS COMIC! This went up on the FF site a few months back, but now was a really good time to post it more publicly with the most recent Tapas news that came out. So here’s a brand new RSS comic, up-to-date with what I’m using, how I’m using it and how you can to! Want to read more of guides/tutorials/etc? Find those here on Patreon or here on my art blog!

It’s happened: chrisdeluca.me now speaks gopher. The content there is unique from the content here. To see it, you’ll need a gopher client. Long live obscure, old internet stuff!

As the great Whitney Houston once sang, I believe the children are our future — but in Precious Children, author Mary G. Thompson posits a very different future with some very different children… and some very different stakes. MARY G. THOMPSON: What if you could guarantee that your precious child would never die? What parent, if they had the means, wouldn’t do everything possible to protect their child from all the dangers of the world, especially if those dangers were growing, if other…

Current New England late September home office status: Outside: 58° Inside: 59° Minisplit status: still off.

As I write this, it is April Showers Day and Earth Day. I’m on Earth and indeed it is dumping rain outside. Ramen Bae makes some neat stuff – a myriad of toppings and mixtures to improve your humdrum ramen. This doesn’t look so humdrum though and I’m very curious. Let’s give it a try! Ramen Bae Original Flavor Protein Ramen Stir Fry – United States Detail of the packaging (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, boil noodle in 2 cups water for 6~7 minutes.…

Last week’s edition of Culture.pl has an article by Wojciech Oleksiak, first published in 10 March 2015, titled 10 Mind-Boggling Oddities of Poland Under the Communist Regime. Here are some excerpts without his illustrative images. We are all taught at school about communism as a social system, but do we really understand what it meant for those who had a chance to experience it firsthand? Empty stores, propaganda, and censorship, but also a plethora of funny details, born of attempts to make…

If you have followed me for a while, or know me in real life, then you will already know that I love doing hard things. There is nothing I like more than pushing my boundaries and taking on something a bit crazy, and it gets even better if there is a long training programme attached, with months of turning up and doing the work before I get anywhere near the start line.Unfortunately for me, this always ends up with me trying to break my body, or my mind, or both. That is the version of hard I…

At New Elementary, we enjoy parts, and the November 2026 LEGO® Architecture set 21065 Sagrada Família has a lot of them. Furthermore, it is a eye-opening dose of an architectural past and future.Continue reading »

Hair colorists of the world, take note: You might just be out of business: What’s seen in the above clip (courtesy of the Monty Montenegro YouTube channel) is beautiful Mari Blanchard, playing a woman named Kyra in a 1957 low-budget sci-fi/horror flick called She Devil, changing her hair color from dark to light by what seems an act of sheer willpower. Which could mean (in an extrapolated musing of my own) that the rest of us, by applying a similar concentration and Power of the Will, could do…

As fall approaches, and my linens revert to the back of my closet, medium-weight cotton pants will once again be my default. And while jeans, chinos, and cords will always have a place in my closet, pole position belongs to the very best casual pants of all, fatigues. Now, does the premise here make a lot of sense? No. Is there any reason to compare the two styles of pants when a decent wardrobe can just contain both? Yes, and that is that it's fun. Also, it's true, Fatigues are better than…

I found this while looking on my RSS feed No Sloptober – “This October we challenge you to abstain from LLM based tools entirely. Think of this as a fast for your mind! This is not a judgement of others, but a personal challenge to you.” I don’t really use AI/LLMs anyway except for working ... Read more Source

A24 / YouTube: A documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING – In theaters October 16. Just a few weeks ago, You Can See Everything, the documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes by Nathan Fielder (Nathan For You, The Rehearsal) surprised audiences at the Telluride Film Festival with its debut. It then debuted a teaser trailer, that, beyond being unnerving, launched a thousand memes. Today, just weeks away from its theatrical debut, A24 has released…

“AI governance framework” pulls close to 3,000 searches a month, and most of what ranks for it is written for a Fortune 500 compliance department with a dedicated AI ethics officer. If you’re running a business in Denver, Boulder, or Golden with 5, 20, or 100 employees, that content is useless to you: not wrong, just built for a company ten times your size. Here’s what governance actually looks like at your scale. Governance Isn’t a Document. It’s Four Questions You Can Actually Answer. I’ve…

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007): “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie.” Genuine influence is difficult to gauge in any writer, and probably in the other arts. Copying, a…

In the novel Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, a sailor asked Nathaniel Bowditch to teach him how to do navigational calculations, but the man only knows how to add and subtract by counting on his fingers. He had not heard of multiplication. Bowditch is surprised, but realizes if he made tables of logs of trig functions, then it would be possible for barely numerate sailors to calculate their position. Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is fiction, but it’s essentially factual, and so I imagine something like the…

📷 239/365 - Morning lines. I really enjoyed biking to work.

Netflix / YouTube: Academy Award winner Brad Bird, the visionary director of The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and The Iron Giant, brings you a whole new world to investigate… In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Watch Ray Gunn – in select theaters December 4 and on Netflix December 18. Ohhhhh boy am I excited for this…

An interesting series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches is the “Secret Adventures” series by author, editor, and publisher Gary Lovisi. It was published by Ramble House in three volumes: The Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2007), More Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2011), and The Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Book Three (2016). The idea is […]

I will admit, I did not know the name Manly Wade Wellman when I began this "Witches of Appendix N." Yes, I had read the name in the list, but that was all that I knew.I have put in the hours for this issue of The Witches of Appendix N, though. I have made it a point to spend some time with Wellman: reading his John Thunstone tales and Strangers on the Heights, working through what is in Sin’s Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances, and, as is fitting for the subject at hand, getting to know Silver…

Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction. PC Starflight (image from the article) It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games,…

Week notes, week 1338 / 2026-09-13 The main highlight of this week was being back home with family. I cherish such moments; there's a bunch of warmth to be around dear people and the air out there is so clean... in ways that the big city can, could never replicate. Yet every good thing comes to an end, and, alas, I would need to be back in office in the coming weeks. (Technical and unrelated aside. If it is true "every good thing comes to an end", is it also true that every bad thing comes to…

A few years back, the “Appchain” thesis was raging in our ecosystem. The main idea was that there would be a chain for social networks…

Another nice day again, warm and some sunshine. Finished holly trees and cleaned up. Cleared a truck load out of hay lab. 14 sacks of fowl from Hanns Hall. Dot and Jane at home.

That little bird-like beeping noise at the corner when the street light changes used to mean “it’s safe to walk” but now it means “you can put down your phone because now you can walk.” People don’t look at the lights. They look at their phones and wait for the bird to tell them the coast is clear.

• 4-star hikes • 1 to 4 mile options • Easy | Gain 170 to 500 feet • North Andover, MA | Northeast Region . The Solstice Stones on top of Ward Hill. Nobody knows who in distant history placed the mysterious Solstice Circle stones that adorn the small summit of Holt Hill just outside North Andover. Only kidding. The real story is a bit more recent and a bit less mysterious. Mabel Ward visited Stonehenge in 1911 and came home so taken with the place that she had a ring of granite stones set up on…

The Twisted Presents Kickstarter has funded, yay! But there’s something odd about asking folks to back a book they haven’t read any of. The obvious solution is to share a chunk of the book for people to try. So here’s my story “The Last Hour of Hogswatch.” If you prefer epub, it’s also free on my bookstore. When the campaign finishes, this story leaves my blog. If you enjoy this, please consider backing the Kickstarter. The Last Hour of Hogswatch Snow streamed past the windshield like stars on…

One of the first things I was surprised by working in technology in Japan was the prevalence of “#times channels”. Channels named after individuals in which they (and others) will post more-or-less whatever they like. Reader, I have come to really love them, and I think you might too. OK I'll bite, what is a #times channel? Times channels are personal channels (on Slack, but sometimes in Discord or other systems), and they are somewhere between a personal log, water-cooler chat and a back…

In his novella The Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang imagines a woman who learns to comprehend the language of an alien species that perceives the universe through a teleological lens, meaning that instead of seeing cause-and-effect as we do, they live their entire lives always knowing the past, present, and future. Physicists like Stephen Hawking have pointed out that the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish past from future in the way our experience does. The fact that we perceive…