• 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…

With Bitcoin having crossed $86k a few days ago, there is talk of a “new cycle”: Fidelity analyst predicts new 4-year Bitcoin bull market Bitcoin Approaches A Decisive Zone: Is A New Bull Cycle About To Begin? Bitcoin price tags $86K as analysis sees crypto in ‘new bull market’ Bitcoin bull cycle could gain 3–5x, CryptoQuant CEO says Bitcoin bull market is back, key metrics to watch So it would seem as if I was wrong and lost money? Not so fast. Tech stocks, such as Meta and semiconductors,…

Up at 5:30, calm and clear. Quiet on the harbor, even the lobster boats heed the "no wake" buoys. Fog slides down the hills, never quite reaching the water. New set of clothes and a clean the boat. There is a tiny cove with a boat ramp and town dock on the northwest corner of the harbor. Motor there to get rid of some trash. I find that there are recycle bins there but no place for trash. I've come across this a few times before in Maine. Why should the little towns pay to get rid of cruisers…

The first thing I did on Yom Kippur after leaving my parent’s house was take a shit. I ate like a pig the entire day in prep for a 24 hour fast, but my fast metabolism took about 30 minutes to go “Come on. You’re not a camel, nor a bear getting ready for winter. Let’s get it out of your system.” Usually on the toilet I just scroll idly on my phone, but for the same reason I was fasting I could not use any electronic devices. So, I decided to pick up one of the books on my shelf,…

Waiting. Selfie a day for a year, day 34: Sep 23, 2026 edition.

Kate Towner Under Review:Wickhills. Premee Mohamed. Tor Books, September 2026. In Premee Mohamed’s new book, Wickhills, the setting is gaslamp Dickensian fantasy. The plot is Cold War spy versus spy, complete with a defecting scientist, a mysterious new invention, intrigue and betrayals, and Mutually Assured Destruction. The plot spins wider, the stakes get higher, and no-one is above suspicion. Our guide is Ferec. He is a former street child, and is now a secret agent for a shadowy agency…

Fashion icon, proud feminist, and a pig of many talents, Miss Piggy needs no introduction

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 3rd August 1996 The self titled debut of Norwegian progressive black metallers Borknagar thirty years ago signalled somewhat of a changing of the guard for how black metal was evolving from its second wave roots. Enter Øystein Brun, sick of doing death metal in Molested and ready to take the leap to what he viewed as the more flexible and expansive black metal genre. Gathering around him some serious legends of the genre (Garm from Ulver, Ivar Bjørnson from…

Running late today. ACCESSIONS: Apparently this thing is 1200 pages long. THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+) I’ve seen reviews for DIGGER start to appear, and, as with MEGALOPOLIS, it makes me want to see it more. Which is not something I thought I’d ever say about a Tom Cruise film. READING: finished TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT, Eugene Thacker (UK) (US+). Wondering if it’s time to descend into some of the Very Long books I have in the pile. LISTENING: Posterior Vitreous Detachment (Video…

sort of the proof of concept of a long term project im building towards. its been almost a whole year of working with tape loops, thats crazy! still learning so much about processing and building sound around them. i found a nice seamless loop for this track, but there are some other more jagged loops i have collected i just cant crack. the refrain in this track is "ang buhay magandang, mahirap ang buhay," "life is beautiful, life is hard." a current struggle i have with loops is that i find it…

I really like Tailwind CSS. Keeping styles next to the HTML makes it much easier to keep the two in sync. I can see which styles a component uses without tracing selectors across files, and removing the component doesn't leave me wondering which CSS rules are still needed elsewhere. In my projects, though, Tailwind also brought a Node.js toolchain into the build. I use OCaml for most of my software projects, including the code that generates HTML for web applications (like this blog!), so…

We all know what happens when we click on the following news item:It's a Bloomberg article, so what else can we expect but a paywall?Today, it dawned on me, and I don't know why it took so long, that the news item above is an "ad"!It's advertising Bloomberg subscriptions. But there is no "ad" symbol.The advertising industry has created a category called "native ads." This is when a news item is labeled "sponsored", "promoted", etc. For example:But the Bloomberg item is not considered a native…

The beautiful plant wall pictured above is just around the corner from where I live. I took the photo yesterday. I often take a mini detour just to stop for a second and have a look. It does something to you, that brief moment. A little pause in the midst of it all. Would it have the same effect to stop and stare at a chimney? I think most people agree that it wouldn’t. It needs to be something alive to truly bring you that soothing feeling of aliveness. The beauty of it all is that you don’t…

Joe Otterson / Variety: The “Darkwing Duck” reboot has been ordered to series at Disney+, Variety has learned. You’re not wrong if you’re thinking you heard that this was coming ages ago — it was! The Seth Rogen produced project was announced to be in production years ago, and only now has been picked up. Here’s the concept for this one: For the last 35 years, Darkwing Duck has been trapped in his worst nightmare: an alternate world that’s never heard of his superhero exploits. Now a rebellious…

Pausing on a bike ride to look at the trail below. Haven’t been riding this leg much through the heat of summer. I feel remiss as all these leaves will start to turn soon. That trail doesn’t allow for bikes, so I’m making mental note to explore it by foot and check out some new perspectives. Currently Listening: Shudder to Think “Something To Do”Reply via email

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. May-Lee Chai’s essay collection My Hungry Ghosts is an ever-smart exploration of generational trauma and racism. Megan Giddings wrote of the book: “My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection…

I pulled this out of my non-obvious nixos config piece into its own post. On this page Oh no, I'm going to talk about swap, zram, zswap... Whether to use swap is a perennial fight online. The conversation is often muddled when people conflate recommendations for servers with recommendations for workstations. In my case, I'm going to focus on desktops and laptops. I use swap because I like suspend-then-hibernate, or "Standby, then hibernate" in the KDE settings: ![[Pasted image…

Photographer Maya Barkai gathered dozens of depictions used at the green light of pedestrian traffic lights around the world and exhibited them outdoors in some cities in the early 2010s. She also made another collection with “men at work” images.

John Stossel reports that rent control -- a cause leftists embrace as steadfastly and baselessly as Trump does tariffs -- recently experienced a setback in St. Paul, Minnesota:So what's happening now in St. Paul, four years after its clueless politicians imposed strict rent control?There was so little new construction that the politicians rolled most rent control back.This follows as the predictable climax to the earlier part of his column, where Stossel recounts why rent control fails. Based…

We recently landed on an interesting question while talking about The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A lot of the tools we use every day, and a lot of the problems that come with them, depend on recording almost every moment and interaction of our lives. Zuboff calls the extra data pulled from those interactions "behavioral surplus." Behavioral surplus is leftover data companies collect from how we use digital services. It is more than they need to make the product work.…

I've had this on the back-burner for a while now, and I finally got it finished. It's the Sopwith Snipe of 1918, the replacement for the Camel.Once again, I've designed it in 1:144 scale, with tolerances to allow it to be printed in FDM with a standard 0.4mm nozzle.I've done it in early and late configuration. The initial production (the back two in the render) had an odd tail fin arrangement that proved to be unsatisfactory, and it was replaced in the later models (the front one) with a more…

Breezy and cold, with the last few clouds moving off by 9:00: a morning for blue jays and the random marimba-sound of acorns dropping onto rocks and logs.

You’ve probably heard about the controversial film “NAZA” that apparently describes how the Israel Defence Forces draws up plans to kill large numbers of Palestinians. While very few people have seen the movie, it seems to be an inaccurate distortion of what NAZA really is. If you’d like to read more about what it actually is, here is a post by one of its architects on The Times of Israel: The Blogs: What ‘Naza’ really means: The truth about collateral damage | Sarit Zehavi | The Times of Israel

Alan Alda in The Four Seasons (1981) Vitals Alan Alda as Jack Burroughs, married lawyer Connecticut, Fall 1980 Film: The Four Seasons Release Date: May 22, 1981 Director: Alan Alda Costume Designer: Jane Greenwood WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background The start of each new season this year tends to send me back to The Four Seasons for content. Written and directed by Alan Alda, this 1981 comedy follows three couples on their seasonal group trips as they navigate their own complicated…

It's late-September, 94 degrees, raining, and we need something to save us, bakers. Something to light a light at the end of this hot, dark, wet tunnel.No, I'm not talking about porn.Why would you even think that?Stop it. Stop thinking about porn.Er... Right.Now...BRING ON THE PUMPKIN SPICE STUFF!!::upbeat techno music::::sounds of vrooming engines:: ::announcer voice:: Thaaaat's right, ladies and gents, here they come! Our new pumpkin spice products of 2026! First up, in celebration of today's…

(Caroline Foty's first fountain pen was a 1970s Sheaffer No Nonsense that still writes perfectly. Since she discovered pens by independent makers, she wants "one of each, please" and wants to meet all the makers. Maybe you do, too. She lives in Baltimore with pens, cats, and all kinds of fiber arts supplies.)You can’t talk to many pen makers who do anything with metal, before you hear mention of David Broadwell, and how he has been an influence or inspiration for their work.So it’s particularly…