t’s been a lovely summery day in Maynooth so far, despite the summer having definitely ended and therefore having to return to teaching at the start of my penultimate academic year as a university teacher. The campus was very full this morning, and I was stopped many times on my walk into the office by new students trying to find their lecture theatres. A common (understandable) mistake for the uninitiated of Maynooth is to think that the Science Lecture Theatre is actually in the Science…

Dear Constant Reader, This is one of the first books I acquired about burlesque and it’s been sitting on the shelf, unreviewed. Get ready for a trip back to the early days of the burlesque revival. New Burlesque by Katharina Bosse, 2003. This is a collection of 38 portraits of neo-burlesque performers taken when the burlesque revival was heating up. In all of them the performers are in costume, but the settings are not performance venues. The dancers are posed mostly outdoors. I recognized some…

Lieutenant Troy Brennan’s reconnaissance mission over Soviet territory goes awry, forcing him to crash-land and survive in Russian wilderness while evading capture or rescue. When an American spyplane crashes in Soviet Russia, an unlikely alliance forms between two unlikely individuals. Ryan Reynolds is naturally funny, while Kenneth Branagh is stellar as always. A light, easy movie set at the end of the 80s that entertains properly. Five popcorns. To see all 15 photos, visit the article page.…

It’s a little surreal watching Kevin recap the current CSS-Tricks situation. It’s been rollercoastery after DigitalOcean’s acquisition. Thoughts: DigitalOcean bought the site. They can do whatever they want with it. At the very least, I hope it stays online. Aside from a general distaste for bitrot, a lot of people have bylines on that site, and they deserve to have those online to benefit them in perpetuity. DigitalOcean should be clear and honest in their communications about the site,…

Boris Artzybasheff’s art was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of American cartoonists who were delighted by his illustrations of anthropomorphic machinery and other technological artefacts. These were the illustrations which made Artzybasheff popular with advertisers and the commissioners of magazine covers in the 1940s and 50s, and their continued popularity today has tended to overshadow his earlier book illustrations, in the same way that W. Heath Robinson’s drawings of…

On the blog this week, I am considering the possible benefits of arranged marriages, of the connubial kind and otherwise. Add your thoughts here. My therapeutic riding barn has kindly included the first nine Lord Julian mysteries as a single item in its charity auction. I will sign these books to the person of the highest bidder’s choice, and–contrary to the stated auction terms–I will send them anywhere in the world. If you’d like to bid (scroll down past all the lovely pony portraits), that…

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them. —Edward Weston It is the habit of most photographers who write about photography to extoll the medium’s virtues and positive affects—all of which may be true, but none of which are guaranteed to occur. It’s not often acknowledged that the pursuit of photography may also have downsides, some of which may be severe. Often, what tips the odds in favor of photography being a…

Nightmarish. Ice is a novel saturated with atmosphere and just as thickly cloaked in ambiguity and all the discontinuity you get with the average nightmare, wrought out of the most wonderfully foggy prose and with a constant stream of dread that build and builds throughout the book. The story is essentially about a man who tries to track down a women he apparently (apparently) loves in a world where the apocalypse is coming in the form of ice slowly encroaching the world, killing everything.…

1997 Virtual Studios Platforms: PC, Sony PlayStation MELT was an ambitious Iron Maiden game developed by London’s Virtual Studios during the mid-1990s, with Eddie taking on the role of the game’s villain. Announced alongside Iron Maiden’s Best of the Beast campaign, it promised a fully 3D adventure through time and space, with the player hunting down Eddie’s scattered energy Pods before ultimately facing him in Hyperspace. Although the game was heavily promoted and appears to have come…

I am the worst at routines. I try to set something up, start feeling good about it, then something comes up and gets in the way of the routine and it all falls to pieces. For example, I spent 9 days going for a walk at dusk, coming home and making a mug of hot apple cider and then getting my writing and blogging done before reading a bit and going to bed (usually pretty late, but still). I was feeling good about my writing, about my health, and was making better choices in order to keep the…

While I read a lot of Batman comics in the '90s, I sat out Chuck Dixon and Scott McDaniel's Nightwing ongoing series. I mean, as a teenager and college student with limited income, I had to draw the line somewhere, and that seemed like a good place to draw it. I had obviously read a lot of Dixon, and while he was not a particularly colorful nor imaginative writer, he was great at coming up with new crimes and heists on a monthly basis, and penning comics that read like mini action movies that…

If you’re a writer practicing independent publishing, you need to take on a whole lot of tasks and develop skills that are tangential to actually typing out your books. In a sense, it feels like a distraction, instead of focusing on your writing. Another, more useful, way to see it is that all of these skills are actually essential to the publishing process, and once you’re competent with it, then you no longer need to rely on a publisher. You don’t need to depend on anyone. There is liberation…

Here’s the fun things about spoofs: they can embrace cliches. If a “serious” movie tries to be too much like something else, then it’s considered derivative. But a spoof has license to do exactly that — that’s the actual point.Such is the case with the reductively named Spy. This is a Melissa McCarthy send up that puts her in Europe working as a CIA agent to… you know what… It doesn’t matter. The plot has something to do with a nuclear bomb, but who cares? The movie is basically a vehicle for…

It went a little something like this. FUCK YES IT'S A GODDAMN DECORATIVE GOURD MOTHERFUCKERS— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-09-20T18:25:31.829Z YEAH AND YOU BEST BELIEVE WE GOT SOME MOTHERFUCKING MUMS TO GO ALONG WITH THAT GOURD DO YOU THINK WE'RE FUCKING TOURISTS WITH THIS SHIT, NO SON WE'VE GOT ALL THIS FUCKING WIRED— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2026-09-20T18:31:05.250Z OH FUCK YES WE'RE ALL AUTUMNAL IN THIS MOTHERFUCKER YOU BEST BELIEVE SHIT'S GETTING SWEATER WEATHER AS FUCK LOOK WE DID NOT…

What a great season for fantasy! We are both loving Clevatess and Mushoku Tensei! 00:00 Intro 00:31 Clevatess Season 2 14:10 Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 26:20 Outro Music Credits: “Clover 3” by Vibe Mountain “Seasons” by roljui

String Theory: The Conspiracy Theory Podcasting Game (Tessellation Games, 2026) is quite overt about its narrative string theory:Build A Wild Web of Conspiracies To WinThis is not a metaphor. You’ll use colored spools and string to connect conspiracies on a collective murder-board, creating a growing web of “truth” that looks like your group lost a fight to Pepe Sylvia with a corkboard. ▲ String Theory: The Conspiracy Theory Podcasting Game (Tessellation Games, 2026) ▲ String Theory: The…

Black Triggerfishes congregate and feed near the surface so snorkelers see them often. They’re mostly black with bright lines at the base of their dorsal and anal fins, but they can also display iridescent blue lines between their eyes and blue lines along the length of their bodies.

Nature, maps, reviews, nostalgic music, disability, sports drama, and cookies. I've been forced into mandatory rest due to developing some sort of sinus/cold/covid thing last Sunday. Right now it's mostly fatigue and post-nasal drip. I can't help thinking it's punishment for working so hard on job hunting stuff for the past month. Well, I have my last four shifts at work this week and nothing else lined up so I may have plenty of time to rest soon enough. It is currently (Sept 18 - Oct 4) the…

For months, I have been looking at the Sailor Pro Gear Slim 2024 Celestial Grey EF ($280) on the JetPens site. It is one of the last places that had one in stock and the price was more 2024 than 2026. However, I have been on a budget and even at the reasonable 2024 prices, the Celestial Grey was still pricey. So, on Sunday, with the window still open on my laptop, Bob says, “Hey, hon… I have a little present for you.” And he pulls a bubble wrapped packed from his backpack and puts it in my…

2026/09/21: They are loving the underworld so much that Doralice started sneaking into my room to sleep there (and I only notice when I open the door in the morning and see her escaping... but now, she is even banging and meowing at my door to open for her when I close it to sleep! I guess she's back in the Boy's Club.

Long Island woman rescued after plunging into hole in her backyard on her birthday New flavor of quicksand just dropped. My inner Gen X child smiles and nods, vindicated.

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding: Ursula K Le Guin has written about “consciously imitating” Tolkien and creating a wider landscape and history for her fantasy world by naming events or places she actually knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work). What do you think of…

Maybe not exactly the same as “popularity”, but the book series with the most online searches (at Awesome Books) are: 1. Percy Jackson and the Olympians 2. Harry Potter 3. The Lord of the Rings 4. Throne of Glass 5. The Wheel of Time 6. The Hunger Games 7. Junie B. Jones 8. Twilight 9. Goosebumps 10. Outlander According to Book Riot, the number of searches ranges from over half a million at the top to almost 90,000 for Outlander. This doesn’t of course necessarily have any direct relationship…

Roadside picnic is a very interesting book. I think the way most people hear about it is via the summary that I first encountered which got me interested in reading it: "Roadside picnic is about stalkers, people who go into "the zone", a mysterious area filled with alien technologies left by aliens who visited earth." Sometimes there is more information, sometimes less, but essentially the purported focus of the book always seems to be on the things that the stalkers do in the zone. Certainly,…

Joint Indo-US discovery of water and hydroxyl across the Moon’s surface by the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, prominently highlighted as blue and violet on this reflected infrared radiation map. Individual images: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University / ISRO / TeamIndus | Graphic: Jatan Mehta17 years ago this week, a paper published in Science announced the discovery of water on the Moon by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter. Changing the notion of a bone-dry Moon as cemented during the Apollo era, the…

Jason Snell, reviewing the new M6 Mac mini: I get it. Memory and processors are skyrocketing in price due to the AI gold rush, on top of inflation. But the fact remains that at $599, the Mac mini was about as close to an impulse buy as a Mac desktop could get. At $899, it’s crossed an invisible threshold. I can understand it, but I don’t have to like it. It is unfortunate just as Apple seems to be pushing for lower-cost devices -- Mac mini, Mac Neo, iPhone e -- prices for memory and storage go…

VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels? ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy. VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet. ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious? Silence.

Do you have old software that no developer wants to touch? It worked fine for decades, your company relied on it and still does. But every time you have someone take a peek, they come out sweating, talking about rewriting it all from scratch? What happened? The messy basement Imagine you're invited to help a struggling business. You walk into the storefront and everything looks great. You're led into the basement and you nearly trip down the stairs. There are boxes everywhere, every surface is…

There is a particular freedom in not feeling anything. Not overthinking every conversation. Not replaying those old insults. No allegiance to the moral standards that the world has created for you. Everything that was handed down to you from childhood has been dismantled. You did it on your own, gradually, one pillar at a time. It is a liberating feeling. You are no longer tied to your past. The old memories no longer hurt you with the same intensity. This sounds harder at first, but it is…

L found a basketball stand/hoop offered for free from a local family and set it up for the boys on the patio. I grumbled because it’s further creeping Americanisation of our children, but I have to concede it does get them active and playing together outside. I visited the school for H’s latest assembly where each child read out their own themed poetry. Not many of these left for him before he’s off to secondary school. This year he’s been voted house captain, for which he proudly wears a…