On 18 September 2026, the 355th Wing inactivated the remaining A-10 Thunderbolt II units at Davis-Monthan: The 355th Operations Group, 357th Fighter Squadron (“Dragons”), 357th Fighter Generation Squadron, and 355th Training Squadron, capping a half-century of Warthog operations from the Arizona base and casing the unit’s colors. They had a pair of 47-year-old Idaho Air National Guard and ANG Test Center A-10Cs fly in from Gowen Field and Morris ANGB, respectively, for the inactivation…

Some of the vehicle silhouettes from WWII US War Department identification guide "FM 30-40 Recognition Pictorial Manual on Armored Vehicles." Source: Archive.orgIn the skies, seas, and battlefields of World War II, hundreds of different vehicles of all shapes and sizes meant US soldiers needed a fast way to tell which side a tank, plane, or ship was fighting for. The US War Department published a series of pictorial identification guides to train soldiers to quickly distinguish friend from foe.…

Kind of scary-looking, not going to lie. Official caption: A drone swarm launches during the XVIII Airborne Corps’ Exercise Scarlet Dragon 26-3 at Fort Bragg, N.C., Sept. 16, 2026. The exercise used layered aerial attacks to test sensor, command-and-control, and air defense integration under realistic conditions. Photo by Army Sgt. Noe Cork, VIRIN: 260916-A-UV759-1725 During the event: Coordinated swarms of 25 to 100 drones flew in tactical formations to stress sensors, software, and air…

Tonight represents a landmark in the history of televised sports. No, it's not the inaugural season of Monday Night Football; that was last year. It's close, though: for the second season debut, Frank Gifford replaces Keith Jackson as play-by-play announcer, a move that has twin ramifications. In joining Howard Cosell and Don Meredith, Gifford helps form one of the most memorable broadcasting teams in television sports history, one that would earn the praise and ire of millions around the…

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission. These are the weeks of Sept 7 – Sept 20. Stats Stories Finished: 3 Submissions Currently Out: 8 Submissions Total: 35 Rejections: 29 Acceptances: 0 Submissions and Responses I had three form rejections and no new submissions over the past two weeks. Goals My goals from last time: Keep up with critiques Think about process My horror story, The Magpie, is currently out,…

A geomorph:10 X 10 for the win!GeomorphsJosh over at Rise Up Comus has been writing about dungeon nodes as “dungeon patches”, or small clusters of dungeon rooms that can be easily written and assembled to form a larger dungeon complex. Building on the idea of sewing patches into a larger dungeon level (/quilt) idea, I’d like to reintroduce the concept of the dungeon geomorph (see the one below). In fact, one of my favor megadungeons, Nightwick Abbey, is built using this same principle, but I…

Source: YouTube Looks like Bungie used AI to generate the speech - the number of triads and this isn’t x, this is y is now a dead giveaway. However, I don’t like Bungie for their studio head speeches and mea culpas. As long as their games are going to be better, all this can be forgiven and forgotten.

Instagram: scroll and stare. Someone else’s life. Compare. Pause. Take a breath. Create. TikTok: a clip, a trick, a trend. The next swipe’s better. No end. Pause. Take a breath. Create. Threads: a thought, a take Another stranger walking on a rake Pause. Take a breath. Create. Twitter: pick a side. Claim you’re right. Keep going right into the night. Pause. Take a breath. Create. The algorithm: click and stay. Your own ideas wait all day. Pause. Take a breath. Create. Not everything you notice…

I released two short new poems, “Manifestation” and “Accretion.” Probably more to come soon. Hopefully more stories soon, too. Slowly, slowly, I’ve been working toward completing at least one piece of art for each passage in the New Testament Doctrinal Mastery list, and now we’re down to only two left. Since January, by the way, I’ve silently released new art here and there — twenty-three new pieces — without murmuring a word about it on this blog. I don’t remember my reason for being furtive.…

Sure, you could run a local LLM model on your computer and use it to generate some SQL to help you create a report. Or generate awful art for your D&D campaign with your friends. But who made that model? Who trained it? Where did the data come from? How much did it cost in compute and environmental resources? What are the motivations behind the company making it? — Brett Codes, AI is not “just a tool” Ah, moral absolutism. In recent years, I've noticed people making it a point to be more aware…

So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon. It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans. Here we have: A Valve that can’t be Ghosted Three Cold Hands True Kintsugi Forge-smith The Ledger Remembers Unpoisoned Firstflag And they’re not even trying. Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with…

No, wait! I’ve been using the Emacs LLM-backed spellcheck mode to go through my old comics blogs like the one about Epic Comics. Most blog posts are pretty ephemeral so I don’t really care that much, but those comics blogs are sorta kinda meant to be actually readable, so getting rid of obvious spelling mistakes is nice. (Several people have told me they’ve read an entire comics blog of mine! My god! The humanity!) Going over all those articles has been an experience. It’s just so embarrassing!…

Here's a short blog post. More of a rant. If the way you play TTRPGs is basically how a lot of people play, then you shouldn’t go “woe is me” when someone challenges or debates you simply because they play differently. Yes, I'm talking about the playstyle with GM-focused campaigns, character build, and importance of combat, and crunchy rules. Trad or Optimizer cultures, whatever. The fact is that other styles of play like OSR, storygames, what have you, they are not the norm. No, your style is…

Back in 2022, I decided to buy a pair of 1TB VAVA Portable SSDs for a pretty decent price. I cared little for brands, when it came to solid-state drives, since most vendors weren’t making the controllers or NAND themselves, so what mattered most was what was inside. For my <AU$100, I was getting Micron TLC-based NAND with an average, but common and serviceable Maxio MAS0902A DRAM-less controller in a nice USB enclosure with a SATA bridge. I wished it was NVMe, but beggars can’t be choosers. On…

📷 237/365 - Passing train

Great weekend, good food, absolutely slammed. I wish I could press pause in life, breathe a bit, because suddenly it's Monday again. I've been doing patterns and that does take away the stress out of making a full painting. Some days I just want to slap glitter paint all over a page and that's it. Start a doodle. Stop. Continue some more. Vent the anger. I'm afraid of a lot of thing. Fear manifests into anxiety. Anxiety manifests into anger. The heat burns and spread. I interpret innocuous…

Searching for the previously undiscoveredWalk 3 in London's Hidden Walks finds me in probably my most visited part of town, Soho. How it changes - when I first came, 30 years ago, I can remember a pimp offering services, answering no, until we both laughed. "Do I want a woman? Do I want a man? Well what do you want then?"It's all sanitised now. The council refuses new alcohol licences unless there is table service to seated drinkers. After dark, I was surprised to see organised walking tours…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

A simple way to build better presentations: don’t start with the presentation. Start by writing out the logic, the storyboard, and the narrative. Get that right before you touch a single slide. The same holds true working with AI. These tools are fantastic at visualizing difficult concepts, building things that would’ve taken hours in minutes. But the art isn’t in the visualization. It’s in the rigorous thinking underneath, the insight that decides what’s even worth visualizing. Get the…

Music Catatonia is catatonic...and many other tabloid headlines will ensue. Anyone who saw Cerys fawning over PAUL CLARKE! on 'Big Brother's Little Brother' those few short weeks ago will have known it was on the cards. Cerys seemed at best loopy, at worst deeply fragile. Looks like Gorki's Zygotic Mynci are Wales's number one band again. About time too... ** God, I was little shit then wasn't I?

My favorite poet and my favorite poet’s favorite comics scholar are giving a double new-ish books talk on Wednesday at our university library. Lesley will lead-off with a selection from Mycocosmic, followed by a reading/viewing of our collaborative tarot poetry comic “Rhapsodomantic,” then I’ll try to condense The Color of Paper into the following fifteen-minute slideshow. My comments will be semi-extemporaneous, but here are the basics. Like Tarot, my drawing technique has a random element. I…

Before you race to the comment section, hear me out. The Hugging Face hacking incidents are very much real and are something we should all be frightened of, particularly given all of the other recent revelations. At a bare minimum, we should immediately start aggressively investigating and prosecuting all crimes committed by these companies (which is an ever-growing list).But the seriousness of the incident does not in any way justify the horrible job the press has done with this story (at…

title here Picture people running around, sneaking up behind one another with a big ram's horn, giving it a blast, as if to say, "Wake up! It is upon us again." The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah is designed to get you to wake up and pay attention not only to who you are, but to who you have been and who you mean to be. Yom Kippur is not eating, not drinking not sleeping very much, not having sex, not dressing in fine clothes and looking in the mirror and seeing what you're going to look like after…

‘Things of tinsel and sawdust,’ Noel Coward’s perspective on acting, on stardom and the demands of the profession remain relevant even 87-years after Present Laughter was written. Revived often by companies in the last decade with two quite different national tours including this Theatre Royal Bath production staring Tracy-Ann Oberman, along with a major and […]

Joshua T. Katz, "Fit as a philologist," New Criterion (September 8, 2026): A true philologist is what friends will call a careful reader and enemies a pedant: someone who uses deep and broad knowledge and minimal prejudice to try to understand, down to the nuts and bolts, the commas and the words in italics, what a document is trying to tell us.

Chris Gervais (drums and percussion), Kevin Colgan (guitar and backing vocals), Jesse Gordon (bass and backing vocals) and Edwin Paroissien (lead vocals, guitar) where The Reds. They were based in the Boston area in the U.S. They were pretty young at the time. They were between 16 and 17 years of age. It was the late 80s. And they were making some fine guitar pop! Chris has a Soundcloud account where he has songs for two of his bands, The Reds (1987-1989) and The Nasties (1997-2000). For The…

Surfer and stumbler (2026)I'm not sure if "Reduce & Simplify" means Emacs with a browser and file manager on Linux, or macOS with the default apps. I am fully on Linux now, but I keep side-eyeing the MacBook Air as if it will somehow rescue me. Honestly, I'm burning out on computers and software. I'm addicted to farting around with things. I spent the weekend installing and using Lotus Agenda from, like, 1990. For a minute I considered trying to use it exclusively as my task/project manager for…

First, disclaimer. I am not related to anyone the theater is named after. 1. Like many theaters, it is really multiple theaters. There's an opera house, concert hall, millennium stage, the terrace theater, the theater lab, a family theater, and a jazz club, all with different capacities from small to large. 2. I have had the chance to be backstage in the rehearsal areas too, and there is so much behind where the average visitor goes. 3. Some things there are quite fancy, and some are very much…

After setting up Audiobookshelf, my media stack was pretty much complete. That was until I tried Moonfin and realised trailers would be a nice addon. In another post, I might write on why Moonfin is my current favourite Jellyfin client for TV and how to set it up, but what it revealed to me is that I need high quality trailers on my server instead of the default low quality YouTube options it defaulted to. Cue in Trailarr. Having Radarr/Sonarr is a pre-requisite and if you have set them up,…

There is something about the transitory, enigmatic nature of the following little story that charms me. I always enjoy those moments when The Weird suddenly appears, slaps you in the face with a dead fish, and just as quickly and inexplicably vanishes for good.Our tale takes place on a pleasant English Sunday, May 5, 1924. A young woman named Betty Bone went on the bicycle ride of 15 miles or so from her lodgings in Breamore, Hampshire to visit her family in Southampton. However, along the way…