Some thoughts, reflections, and trepidation following the 2026 midterms.

I fucking hate my life today. There is nothing wrong but my brain decides that the tiniest inconvenience would be a BIG DEAL. And guess what, I have to represent to team to attend an event at a mall that is 45 minutes away by CAR. If you know how small my country is you would know how fucking annoying it is. I think a headache is coming up and I am going to take the prescribed Tramadol.

videodante wrote: The Blair Witch Project (1999) - ★★★★★ I was surprised at how much this felt... genuine, even now. The acting is superb -- the kids really feel like kids, in the same sort of over-the-top stilted way that the kids in Texas Chainsaw Massacre are, and if you know me you know how much TCM means to me. It's extremely high praise. So much of the horror in here is in the audio, in the tension implied by the audio. The woods remind me of the house in TCM -- forever and nowhere all at…

This is from the project announcement for the Disquiet Junto project that launches tomorrow, November 5, 2026: This week’s project should take roughly an hour, as it’s defined by using time as a constraint, and the allotted time for the project is four stages, each 15 minutes in length. I don’t mention this in the instructions, but you might consider not doing this project in one sitting. You might do each of its four sections at different times between the launch of the project and the…

For the last couple of years, I’ve written about a growing sense of concern about the trajectory of the world, in particular with regard to AI, politics, and climate. I finally decided to actually do something about it: I started a new Substack called Reasonable Panic that focuses on practical prepping.You can check it out the Substack here. There’s also a stripped down site that I’ll be adding to over the course of the next couple of months: reasonablepanic.com. Why I Think Prepping is a Good…

The loss of widespread sickass sci-fi covers Index** Damn, I let this series go fallow. Thankfully, I finally have an ereader that can handle chunky pdfs (and this time it wasn't stolen) so I should be able to start putting these up at least more frequently than once every seven months. **Larry Niven's Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch(John Hewitt & Sherman Kahn, with additional writing by Lynn Willis, Sandy Peterson, Charlie Krank, Ed Gore & Rudy Craft; art by Ralph…

A few days ago, I wrote about the intersection between OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, introducing my newly developed tool, MyWikidataList, which allows users to manage their personal lists of Wikidata items. For some reason, the tool uses OpenStreetMap accounts for authentication.Then, yesterday, while editing this week’s edition of WeeklyOSM, I stumbled upon DinoData, a custom Wikidata editor repurposed as an OpenStreetMap tag editor. The tool is hosted on Toolforge, Wikimedia’s cloud platform,…

It was another lovely day, and I was feeling well enough to finish winterizing the cat isolation shelter. They are so happy! My brother had been able to do a bit of leveling of the patio blocks, but they some of them are still a bit off. I had to put something under one of … Continue reading Got it done!

10 long months of torturing myself. Enough. Enough now.

If you like Zoom seminars, on Thursday November 19 — noon to 1p.m. Pacific Time — Bancroft Library is hosting a discussion in re: Jack London’s best pal, poet George Sterling. Titled: Meet George Sterling The Famous Poet Nobody Remembers (but Bancroft) Sign in at the link, if interested. I’m happy to spread the word since I was a pioneer in modern Sterling Studies — also something few remember. But we got a new plaque put up on Russian Hill and on the side managed to get the park it is in named…

Next Halloween, that is! Trick-or-treating was good. I ran out of candy for the first time since moving to this neighborhood! I only bought like 40 or so candy bars (full-size of course) because usually we get like 10 people on our little dead end street, but even a light rain couldn't keep these kids away! Most of them were obviously more excited by the candy than the decorations, but more than a few stopped to compliment my work, which is amazing. I ended up not adding last week's oscillating…

Problem: KMail tags ≠ Thunderbird tags¶ Due to technical issues1 at work, I had to temporarily switch to using Thunderbird – or rather, Betterbird – and since there is always way too many e-mail, I mark important and actionable messages as such to better find them afterwards. A nasty surprise then happened, when I noticed that what I had marked as “Action item” in KMail, I could not find in Thunderbird. And on the flip-side, what I had marked as “To Do” or “Important” in Thunderbird/Betterbird,…

It is one day after the election here in the United States. The two most powerful men in the Republican party are publicly airing the grievances between them. While they're not directly attacking each other quite yet, I feel it's inevitable. I believe Trump and Vance now consider each other political adversaries. They were hostile before... maybe even rivals. Now, the wounds are open.The MAGA coalition is fracturing and this defeat is so massive that they'll descend into deep and irreconcilable…

30,000 steps in an equatorial city, tears like baby diamonds behind my round sunglasses. I do all my best crying in faraway cities, as I walk among strangers. Here, I’m a dog with new tricks. I’ve got skin in the game. Sweaty gal, thighs chafing under my pantsuit, in a dotted pattern. I still remember the department saleswoman waiting as I tried on the pants, asking for my opinion from behind the door. I was always shy with the pressure of responding positively, even if I didn’t like how I…

Celebrating this feels risky, like I could jinx it by being too happy, but the whiskey is flowing and the tickets are booked, so caution and superstition be damned! I just booked flights to Mexico City. We’ll leave next week and stay long enough to catch Lucha Kingdom on the 16th. It’s a major wrestling event co-promoted by Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) and New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW). Am I a wrestling fan? Not really. But how could I pass up a chance to witness this spectacle?! Row…

Like some of you, we have several kitchen appliances with integrated digital timers. I find them annoying: they are clunky to operate and if one uses them while cooking, the reflective surface gets covered in muck.Confusing, alien, evil technology.You can buy mechanical (wind-up) kitchen timers, but they’re imprecise and only ring once. There’s also a couple of cheap battery-operated units that can be adjusted by twisting an outer ring, but they have so-so reviews.But if there’s no good product…

Jonathan Barrett in The Guardian: Australia’s premier upmarket department store David Jones has collapsed into voluntary administration, putting thousands of jobs at risk and leaving the future of the 188-year-old retailer hanging in the balance. The collapse marks the first time David Jones has been in administration, having previously weathered nearly two centuries while cycling through almost every type of ownership model, from public listing to foreign conglomerate ownership and, […] You’ll…

Feathers are miracles. Let’s face it — everything about birds is pretty miraculous — but I find myself thinking a lot about their feathers in the fall — the post-moulting season for our local crows and ravens. They go from this … Fred in late August, well into the moulting process. Note that his head feathers were so sparse that you could see his ear cavity peeking out behind his eye. Fred this morning, November 3 To this in a few short weeks … Following those difficult weeks of loss and…

I’m not sure where the bicep heart thing came from, but here we go. #muscle #gay #gym #bicep

by Nathaniel R Andrew Scott stars in ELSINORE Hot on the heels of the Gotham nominations here in New York, London follows with the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) nominations. Elsinore, hotly tipped to land Andrew Scott an Oscar nomination (finally) leads the field with 12 nominations while Clio Barnard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a distant but still impressive second with 8 citations. Because these nods are overseas AND independent, I’ll attempt to explain some of the…

Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer is full or an explicit flush event at some arbitrary point in the future. Line buffering is a common bottleneck in non-interactive terminal applications such that it’s worth…

Sometimes a person needs to spend time with a good ol’ fashioned movie. The Incredible Journey (1963), from Walt Disney Productions, is such a flick. It’s a ludicrous yarn about three pets who travel 480 km (300 miles) across the Ontario wilderness to their home. It’s quite a trek, made all the more difficult by their avoidance of populated areas. … Continue reading →

# Not broken, just different Yesterday was a BIG day: I had my assessment for ADHD and received confirmation of what we suspected, that I do indeed have it. I had assumed that I just had the inattentive type, but various behaviours I hadn't considered mean that I also exhibit the hyperactive type. The resultant diagnosis is, therefore, Combined ADHD. Over the past couple of years, I have reframed a lot of things from my earlier life through a neurodivergent lens, but the assessment yesterday…

Sometimes it’s useful to check how a Hugo site looks on a real mobile device before deploying. That requires serving the site on a local network so other devices on that network can access it. Here’s the command to serve a Hugo site on a local network: hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0 --baseURL <local-IP-address>Then open http://<local-IP-address>:1313 on your phone. The site should load and work as expected. The --bind 0.0.0.0 option is necessary because Hugo binds itself to 127.0.0.1 by default,…

Jess Bidgood and Catie Edmondson, reporting for The New York Times: A new political era opened in Washington on Wednesday, as Democrats vowed to use their sweeping majority to check President Trump’s power, while prominent Republicans blamed their midterm wipeout on his agenda and party leadership. Democrats were on track to secure at least a 50-seat majority in the House and solid control of the Senate after notching seismic victories around the country, in deep red House districts and…

Today’s recording is The Sarah Jane Adventures – Death of the Doctor, Part 2. The Doctor and Clyde keep swapping places, and they run from the Shansheeth. They find a room to hide in, lock the door without letting Colonel Karim in, and the Doctor takes Sarah Jane and Jo back to the planet, with Clyde returning. The planet is the Wasteland of the Crimson Heart. Colonel Karim is working with the evil Shansheeth. The kids are rescued by the Groske. The Shansheeth have the phone box! The Doctor and…

It drips with sex and camp and the fast jokes fall like rain. The framing and camera movement make you feel dizzy and high with the characters and the classic storyline still hits. I would have loved to be in the crowd for that Beef concert! Chop off MY arm!

I’m a huge fan of Chris McDowall’s work; not only has he created some of the most famous lightweight fantasy roleplaying games, he’s also filled them with referee advice that’s often missing from more mainstream games. Despite his many excellent takes, there is one line of advice in Mythic Bastionland that I cannot disagree with more: When faced with a question not answered by rules, notes, or procedures, you improvise. Anything too beneficial or too harmful creates the feeling of an arbitrary…

Jamal Khalique of the Taj Stores is giving an illustrated talk telling the tale of ninety years of trading in Spitalfields at 7pm on Thursday November 12th in the Hanbury Hall, Hanbury St, E1 6QR Click here to book a ticket Please note that tickets are free on the door to all Taj Stores customers The gentleman on the right is Abdul Khalique, standing with his shop assistant, in the early nineteen-fifties outside the very first Taj Stores in Hunton St (now Buxton St). Abdul Khalique’s brother…