I have rhapsodised at some length about the superhero-themed Fighting Fantasy book, Appointment with F.E.A.R., on several previous occasions: a loving homage to superhero comics, down to the cover art provided by 2000 AD artist Brian Bolland, the book gives you the choice of four superpowers, namely Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill and Energy Blast.The adventure will play out completely differently depending on which superpower you choose, for on each possible…

I should be building Cwmbach, my long standing N scale shelf layout. Instead, you’re reading about the latest in a long line of Mosslanda based projects, this time set once again in North America…From sketches, to mocking up inlaid track to ‘testing’ the track plan on my bench things have moved at pace - which is usually a good indicator of a scheme well formed. I hate building baseboards though - thank goodness a Mosslanda is usually fairly straight forward! In this case, some 9mm ply and a…

Daily Drawing 994

I’ve been doing the Weekly Challenges. The latest involved a median calculation and box fitting. (Note that this ends today.)

We can't stop bad things from happening to us, but we can change how we react. This month: Hospital visits, LLMs that struggle to identify a car, London's new 24/7 grindset café, and a new Weezer album. | Read full post >>

Last week DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash went live, and as it happens whenever DeepSeek releases a new model, the AI sphere went crazy. Going from v4 to v4.1 may not seem like a major release, but according to many experts in the field, the changes in the architecture could have easily justified this model being DeepSeek-V5.With this, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to extend the series of posts that I started with Kimi K3, the post-training piece and the Flash pair, and dedicate a post explaining what…

WAKE UP! Time to get knocking on doors and opening windows with the story of the BBC and ITV's attempts to get children watching television on Sunday mornings...

This article appeared in Social Education, September 2026. I thank Kim Marshall for selecting it for his “Marshall Memo” at:https://www.marshallmemo.com/issue.php?I=b8bcee51f5609870a0379c6971846fcb#Three Andrew Schiera is a former high school teacher and now at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Andrew del Calvo is also a former high school teacher at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Running a good classroom discussion is “challenging work,” say Andrew Schiera (University of…

Where in the world are we? The splendour of some extravagant tile work. Odd boxes were opened and applied. What might it mean? It addles the brain in a confined space. Keeps you on your toes. Heaven knows. I'm certainly not miserable right now. I may have done some damage to my retina. It's the high price of artistic appreciation. Be economical with your time staying and staring. After all it's only a toilet wall. Nothing that matters.

One of the best public facilities is a library. A library of outstanding aesthetic beauty is even better.A few years ago we travelled to Toyama. One spot we visited was the Toyama City Library, a Kengo Kuma-designed glass-and-wood-heavy edifice. It was a highlight of the trip. We talked about how nice it would be if Hachioji were to replace its functional but aged Chuo Library with that kind of facility.On October 3, Hachioji will open a new park / multipurpose complex called 桑都の杜 / Sōto no…

"The Weight" by The Band Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? - The Weight by The Band After pulling into Nazareth, the son's narrator get's no relief from people who keep passing the load but in the end, the whole town shares the weight. This is a song about community and its importance. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

We might model how good a post overall is by drawing a bar chart, one bar for each reader, reflecting how good they think the post is (how much utility they get out of it). Then the goodness of the post is the area under the curve. readers utility We might also model that a reader upvotes a post if its subjective goodness crosses some threshold, so, the number of upvotes a post gets is just the number of bars passing the threshold: upvote threshold number of upvotes readers utility The post…

This week we spent a few days down in Brighton, and I have brought back coffee and food recommendations for you. Loam (Gloucester Rd) — a cute little spot in the heart of the city; probably the best coffee I had this trip 17 Grams (Meeting House Ln) — impeccable packaging design and a really good veggie breakfast; let down only by whoever was on aux playing some questionable stuff Fika (Madeira Dr) — really good coffee + stupendous baked treats 44 Poets (Rutland Rd, Hove) — worth the journey…

My story writing brain has become rusty, but I am trying to lubricate and clean the pieces for a few months now. However, when I saw James prompt for the Fiction IndieWeb Carnival, my creative soul begged me to take part. I took to writing this story with all seriousness on the matter. Having spent considerable amount of time learning to revise and edit my blog posts, I decided using this approach and learning to create the kind of atmosphere which I look for in stories. “Moonlight” is one of…

Well, I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this so quickly, especially after the series of guest entries that we just had over the summer, but as usual, the first month of the new semester has left me exhausted and buried. Fortunately, commenter Quirkz has provided some material to tide us over: A completion of Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989), a Wizardry-inspired game for the Macintosh that I "tried" over eight years ago. I got frustrated, probably too quickly, with various…

I’ve not had a clothes dryer for at least 15 years and even when I did, I rarely used it. Growing up in the 1970s, they never were a thing so I’ve got used to natural drying. As the UK weather turns warmer, drying your clothes outside seems an even better idea now. And, in recent years, I’ve been looking at more environmentally friendly ways to do it. So, no I’m not going to be recommending running dehumidifiers for many hours to help dry them. During the wetter months, they do end up inside,…

I no longer have appetite for food. Okay, not exactly that. What I meant to say is that I will no longer go search out for yummy food, especially when I am alone. Life is simplier if I don't have to make decisions on lunch choices. And cheaper too, espeically 'in this economy'. I don't like having buyer's remorse: did I just spend three plates of Hainanese Chicken Rice for one delicious Whopper with some so-so french fries and a cup of sugared water? Actually, I am not that interested in that…

I’d like to make you tremble. You know those adrenaline-fuelled shudders of desire that you (specifically you) get when you’re on the verge of doing something hot? Or when you’re hovering just before orgasm, craving release but forbidden from truly letting go? I want to make you tremble like that. Note that this story contains […] The post I want to make you tremble appeared first on Girl on the Net.

Desert Brat 2026-09-20 digital realm 3: snail kingdom

Power Cat 2026-09-20 happy 1 year of Power Cat!!!

Distill Lock freezes context inputs, refuses drift, builds byte-identical portable artifacts, and verifies their integrity offline.

The Strictly Come Dancing series opener for 2026 has now been broadcast – and it is something else. The show, which is now in its 24th season, opened with a launch show complete with celebrities, presenters, judges and professional dancers taking to the stage to present an opener which fans will be talking about for years to come. Like another of the BBC’s flagship shows, Doctor Who, Strictly has just undergone something of a regeneration. For readers outside the UK, Strictly is the British…

Today's Snoozles™ are examples of slides that I was excited to scan, only to find that they were kind of blurry - to the extent that they were not going to work for a regular blog post. It's OK, now I can feature them as Snoozles, but these are ÜBERSNOOZLES! I'll bet you didn't know that there were so many subcategories, but that's how science works. This first one is from the early 1960s - a Skyway view (surprise surprise), in which we glare down upon Tomorrowland with our teeth clenched and…

The season is definitely turning and it’s time to head to the woods to see if we can find any mushrooms. I asked the star of Ye Olde Blogge if he was up to this challenge and he said: Reporting for duty, Oma! So far, no mushrooms seen but we did come across these beauties. So many gorgeous rosehips from the Nootka roses. On the other side of the path I came across a familiar (to us) place: the spot where I found a gutted deer a couple of autumns ago. Absolutely nothing left to show Jim’s final…

Peg o' My Heart (1933)

Here are some choice cuts — with a bit of a through-line — from The Day the World Stops Shopping (2021) by JB MacKinnon: On the free will that comes with minimalism: Classical economic theory holds that consumers know what is best for themselves and act rationally in their self interest, a perspective that remains influential today. Paradoxically, it is anti-consumers, not mainstream ones, who come closest to this ideal: they are more likely to make active, informed choices … are less swayed by…

Quick bits After passing the audition, I have now enrolled in drama school. Two weeks until it starts. This drama course also likely officially makes me a student again — part-time, but a student nonetheless — and I’ll qualify for discounts. My current six-week drama course finishes coming week, just in time for the aforementioned semester-long course to start. The six weeks went by quickly, but it was helpful to get back into it, and I learned a thing or two in the process. I added a podroll…

I recently acquired a Sig Sauer P229 CO2 Pistol. Although it's a nice comfortable pistol to shoot, the open sights aren't adjustable and (as reviewers have found) are off. One of the key selling points of the P229, though, is that it's optics-ready: the slide is designed to be able to take Sig's reflex sights. This is both good and mildly frustrating: rather than something semi-standard (like a dovetail, an RMR, or a Docter mount), the P229 uses Sig Sauer's proprietary mounts. What this means,…

After the war we the humans of the universe must turn to diplomacy and reassemble humanity across the stars. To that end part of Skyward flight heads out to a planet block from cytonics by an unknown force. Met with unexpected aggressive hostility Skyward flight must figure out what is going on in this human preserve. I enjoyed this addition to the Cytonic universe and Skyward Flight. It was a fun romp and deeper insight into characters that hovered around the main characters in the original…