Our fifth and final hike on our Hokkaido road trip was to Mt Tarumae (樽前山, tarumae-san). Near the port city of Tomakomai, it's only a 1041m elevation peak, yet the effort-to-views ratio is pretty darn good. After a short climb through the forest, you'll get to do a crater loop around the rim of the volcano with some great scenery. Your first chance of a view once you pop out above the trees is down to the nearby Lake Shikotsu (支笏湖). It's the second-deepest lake in Japan. We drove part past of…

Recently I've been thinking about my music listening habits and how they've changed over time. One facet of listening that has shifted dramatically over the last several years has been my music listening at work, or more accurately my music listening while working. Rewind ten years, and I was working on-site in an open plan office. You know the type, the ones that bosses love and workers hate. Zero privacy, loud, distracting, the exact opposite of a situation that facilitates someone trying to…

A young couple (Molly Bee, Ben Cooper) planning to elope get picked up by Woody Watts, a retired train conductor (Edgar Buchanen), and spend the morning in his chartreuse-colored caboose which is his home. The couple are enroute to Denton, where the soon-to-be bride's sister is waiting with the preacher. However, her father issued a missing person's report and they find that police are searching for them, so they return to the safety of the caboose. Meanwhile, Woody's caboose ends up being…

The results of the Design & Play Game Design Competition 2026 have been announced on Malaysia Day, 16 Sep 2026. Congratulations to Muhammad Aiman Haqiemi Mohd Shaipul (Jalan Jem), Anas Maghfur (Unlawful) and Andrew Tan Kui An (Malaysia's Last Tigers). I am one of the six judges for the competition. We had our judging day on 12 Sep 2026 at Lalaport. It was one full

[This is a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, crossposted from his blog, where an illustrated version appears. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Similar logic applies to every industry and every job. And it comes to the conclusion that we won’t have enough people for all the jobs that need to be done. [100% of this post’s prose was written by Po-Shen Loh in a vim terminal, with no AI generation. This webpage design, layout, and some headings…

All 21 of these “new etiquette rules” from Joan Westenberg are great and I endorse the entire post. Two that especially stood out for me: Don’t make your convenience somebody else’s administration. A seven-minute voice note may save you time but only by taking seven minutes from its recipient. And: Don’t join in a punishment because it has attracted a crowd. An algorithm will regularly show you a stranger and invite you to help destroy them. It will offer one clip, sentence, or accusation, then…

Japan has a rich history of packaging design that dates back hundreds of years and rooted in a tradition of gift-giving. Before industrial materials like plastic and cardboard, gifts were wrapped in straw, bamboo, leaves and paper: an art unto itself that lives on today in the form of products often wrapped in as many […] Related posts: The 2021 Japan Packaging Design Awards Clever Packaging Design For Japanese Maekake Aprons Logo and packaging design for Hagiwara Butcher

The Last Man on Earth ends with the last man revealed as the monster. I put three dilemmas inspired by it to TypeSafe’s Jev and five frontier models.

A fun gap that shows up when you’re in a relationship with someone with a different cultural background from yourself is how you relate information. Most cases it does not matter at all. Except when cooking though you kind of want it at least vaguely in a good shape. If you cut something too big, it might be good for soup, but it might not cook all the way through on the pan. I was helping out S with chopping some veggies for dinner and she hands me a carrot to cut. And I ask how big? And her…

Earnest question: Why can’t AI companies slow progress despite the lack of regulation? Is it as simple as “we refuse to risk falling behind if no one else acts responsibly, so we won’t do it until everyone is compelled by law?” 🔗 theverge.com

First time in a long time I've seen a creature feature that is this visually and conceptually inventive. This movie knows it's about Cool Set Pieces and it delivers them. If I knew nothing about Zach Cregger and you told me he was a sketch comedian who transitioned to making high-concept horror movies I'd believe you 100% just from seeing this movie; it absolutely has that construction where individual scenes all function as a joke—sometimes explicitly funny, sometimes just a monster-movie…

After the graphic and some of the titles ("Lost World", "Black Mist", "Dank") the actual music is fearfully uninteresting - fearfully lacking in fearfulness.

Personal websites (maybe) worth checking….IMHO. Chris Glass: There’s a slew of topics that’ll perk up my ears: design, music, travel, computers, books, ideas, and how awful and wonderful cellphone cameras are. JT: Hello my name is Jasper. I have a wife, a daughter, a cat, and a beard. I like cameras, music, video games, bicycles, baseball, German compound nouns, the Oxford Comma, and going to bed too late. It’s Craney: I’m Davey and although originally from Oldham in the North of England I now…

Imagine if you productised a really cool technology that would absolutely change the way we live and work forever, would absolutely generate bazillions of dollars of revenue and profit, but you wanted to secure your spot in the market. You would make a big song and dance about how there was always a very small chance that someone could get hurt, which would seem like a generous act, but what you’re actually doing is just locking out future competition. Am I talking about airlines in the 1920s…

In part VII of the series, we saw how to validate a UTF-8 sequence, that is to ensure it can be safely decoded into a Unicode code point. In part VI, we set validation aside and saw how a non-validating decoder would look like. Now it is time to investigate a decoding validator - e.g. decode a UTF-8 sequence without assuming it is valid.An obvious approach would be to perform the two steps sequentially: first validate the sequence, then decode it using the non‑validating decoder. That is a…

Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to be worse at shipping. Ira Glass has a classic quote about this. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got…

Spring afternoon at Tulip Tops just outside of Canberra.

I'm pretty sure Steve was already on the scene when I started paying attention to Bill's shenanigans (again, after a multiple-year hiatus) back in 2023, though I didn't know it at the time. Back then, Bill was advertising (via hand-painted lettering on an old derby car) that he'd be opening "INVICTUS LODGE FOR HOMELESS VETS" which I recall ended up having "AND MEN" tacked on to it at some point. He was doing this with Garrick Halinen - a man who described himself as a retired vet, but who had…

Today’s recording starts with the end of Countryfile. There’s a trail for Five Days That Changed Britain about the recent election. Plus a trail for an undersea drama The Deep that looks like the kind of think I might have enjoyed, but I don’t remember at all. Then, it’s Sherlock – A Study in Pink. Three unusual suicides have led the Metropolitan Police to link them because they closely resemble each other while the victims were not connected. There’s a press conference with Detective Inspector…

I have enjoyed most of Zach Cregger's previous few films, so I was absolutely locked in to see Resident Evil... even though I've never played a single one of the games, or even watched a single one of the other movies all the way through. I really enjoyed it, though!! And I have absorbed enough Resident Evil knowledge through industry osmosis that I could recognize what it was doing with respect to the games. What "it's doing" is obvious enough, actually, that I think anyone could enjoy this…

I’m happy to say that I woke feeling very well today. It was also a lovely, warm day, which meant getting things done outside. That included moving the cat stuff out from under the canopy tent to dry in the sun. I got this picture before they got put back under the canopy tent for … Continue reading A good day – mostly

Or, the process of anchoring language to the real world. Which is basically what this weblog writing praxis is all about. (And which the other one from a year or so ago was and, of course, the ur-blog over at TFR from decades ago now.) [ in progress... ]

Daffy comedy is at a premium in this delightful, long overdue local revival of hit Broadway musical Spamalot. “Lovingly ripped off” from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spamalot was part of a wave of musical comedies that followed the extraordinary success of The Producers (2001). Adapted for the stage by Monty Python’s Eric Idle (with John Du Prez as co-composer), Spamalot won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Musical, running on Broadway for four years. With the original 2007…

Before the freak-out about em-dashes in AI-generated text I didn’t even know how to produce one. I’d just copy and paste them as needed. But since the Great Em-dash Emergency, I learned it’s quite easy, so now I use them more, not less. Anyone else own up to this experience? Is it proof we’re bots?

This description at Goodreads is excellent:Forrest County, Mississippi, became a focal point of the civil rights movement when, in 1961, the United States Justice Department filed a lawsuit against its voting registrar Theron Lynd. While thirty percent of the county's residents were black, only twelve black persons were on its voting rolls. United States v. Lynd was the first trial that resulted in the conviction of a southern registrar for contempt of court. The case served as a model for…

As time goes on I realize, I have less and les to lose. I am dispossessed. We all are. So why not be true, why not be Antigone, why not fearlessly die on the hill.... What other option is there than the pity of generations after?

I paraphrased my title from this exact line: "Because while it may be full of trash and fake news, the Internet is not dead. You just need to know how to search, like in a chaotic flea market." That I read in this Blogpost: https://my-notes.dragas.net/2025/12/19/what-if-i-were-twenty-again-thoughts-on-my-46th-birthday/ I like analogy a lot, seems accurate. One can easily spend 1 or even 3 hours wandering around a flea-market, and though you might see a few interesting things, but even those may…

(This post is a part of the 13th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)The 1940s saw a number of supernatural fantasy films on both sides of the Pond. From Hollywood emerged such movies as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The British film industry produced such films as The Ghost Train (1941), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Miranda (1948). Arguably, the greatest British supernatural fantasy of the 1940s was A Matter of…