My library in progressI forgot how difficult it is to make pixel frames :( I have to re-learn everything... but at least the base is done and I just have to slowly draw and add and align and again... this will take a while.I wanted to jump right into the RPG style, but I figured I should first try to get the art and idea concrete. Once this is all done, I will try to translate to a more game-y feeling. I hope. I'm 40... but this makes me feel 16 again! #blog #pixels #website #redesignThank you…

A HOCKEY GENERATION FADING AWAY: San Jose Sharks enforcer Ryan Reaves retires from the NHL, leaving just three players who played before 2013 — Nashville’s Ryan O’Reilly, Dallas’ Jamie Benn and Minnesota’s Zach Bogosian — still grandfathered in under league rules allowing them to skate without visors on their helmets; everyone joining the league after has been required to wear them.

This is how street views of pedestrian areas get made for Apple Maps. I found it creepy and offensive to have this guy wandering our campus. I followed him for a minute, filming the filmmaker, turning the tables. I asked him if he had permission to be on campus. "Not really," he said after repeated inquiries. Was I irrationally bristling against the information age? Was I harrassing him inappropriately? He’s just earning a buck, poor guy.The thing is that I see this scene as a harbinger of a…

Got up at 9.30. A gale blowing cold and wet. Only mowed one lawn. Dot and Jane came for a couple of hours. Watched Battle of Britain display on telly.

Gracious gray amid the blue & brightSurreal silver against the nightSometimes an uncanny crescentor a gibbous glow in ascentOther times a hollow haloor a cloud glowReflective and rolling, when nearStony stark skyline, when on itCosmic microcosm, when heldEnticing enigma, when leaving behindThis is our monumental Moon,always aroundfor a nature profoundto be foundAlways around,always around for youno matter the morningit mourned through.Our Moon shining through tree branches in Bangalore. Image:…

It is an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, and Robert is talking about a fountain pen.In speaking with Robert, one senses that he is usually a reserved individual, not prone to exuberance — but this item is clearly a source of enthusiasm. Some might look at Robert’s pen and blandly comment that “yes, it’s certainly a nice pen,” but they would be missing the point.This pen is meaningful. It has its own story, that has over time become part of Robert’s story too.An English Made Fountain PenHere is…

18 September 2026 A £40,000 freelance contract and a one-person business sit below every threshold that requires a calculated carbon footprint. I’ve spent a couple of years assuming tenders or clients would eventually make individual freelancers and “micro” sized companies count their carbon. It felt inevitable - reporting requirements are ratcheting up everywhere else, so why not here too? I even wondered if measuring freelancer emissions might be a business opportunity. Free online…

7-OH and Suboxone. What the heck. And what is Kratom. Oh shit, 7-0H: 7-OH, is a highly potent, psychoactive, opioid-like chemical derived from the kratom plant. While it occurs in trace amounts in natural kratom leaves, it is extracted or synthesized into concentrated products—such as pills, tablets, shots, and gummies—that are increasingly sold in gas stations, smoke shops, and online, sometimes marketed as "legal morphine" or a natural pain reliever. The FDA has warned that 7-OH is 13 times…

Why did Britain hire German soldiers to fight the American Revolution? Discover the true story of the "Hessians," the German subsidy troops who crossed the Atlantic to help suppress the rebellion in our latest video!In 1775, Britain faced a growing colonial rebellion with an army far smaller than those of France, Austria, or Russia. Raising and training new recruits would take years, so the British turned to a long-standing practice: hiring foreign auxiliaries. After Catherine the Great refused…

Kendra has her 18th-Century Quest to watch every movie ever set in the 18th century, and while

Looking rather like a tiny carnivore dressed for a masquerade ball, the marbled polecat, Vormela peregusna, is a rare member of the weasel family, Mustelidae. Its extraordinary coat is patterned in cream, yellow, brown and black, complete with a dark facial mask and white-edged ears. Beneath all that finery is a fierce little predator equipped with long digging claws—and scent glands

Today is the birthday of Samuel Johnson (born 1709). Over on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp marks the occasion with a piece on various translations of one of Johnson's Latin verses, a memory of swimming in the waters of Stowe Pool in Lichfield, a 'meditation on memory, time's bittersweet passing, and lost youth'. The waters of Stowe no longer flow through green fields, and the Pool, an impressive body of water containing some fine fish, many an American crayfish and a terrapin called Terry,…

Started reading: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 📚

The poor Recommended Reading List has been through a lot. So have the folks working behind the scenes duct-taping code together. (I honestly don’t like the new setup, but I have a lot of respect for the effort that went into it and all the other website fixes.) But it’s more-or-less up, with some functionality for linking and downloading and whatnot. In the past, I’ve done a little happy dance when someone put one of my stories on the list. Since the nature of the list has changed/expanded and…

Wait, that’s still a thing? I remember first encountering this in primary school, when Excel 97 wouldn’t load two versions of an assignment unless I renamed one of the backups. Meanwhile, the graphical version of Lotus 1-2-3 that came with Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition had no issue. As an aside, I miss SmartSuite. I was a weird kid, and had an obsession with building games in 1-2-3. Don’t read too much into that. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-09-18.

Emperor Justinian's plan to end the Nika Riots involved bribes. One difficulty about the Riots was that two large and influential rival factions, the Blues and the Greens, had joined together against the imperial administration. The Greens were mostly working class: merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen. The Blues, however, were more elite, and more willing to listen to money coming from the emperor.These two factions filled the Hippodrome, the site of chariot races and attached to the imperial…

The races are long and overtaking, rare. Formula 1? No, I’m talking about the Snail racing simulator. Choose yours, cheer it, and hope for the best. (The website reports that the slug race is a “genuine sport” popular in Britain.)

If you read this blog regularly, you know I love retro dice. A year or so ago I backed the Kickstarter for a set of 80s D&D Adventures and character options and I finally got the dice that were the one physical item I backed. I absolutely love the design: My 80s dice! I especially love the cassette tape for the 20 spot on the d20. I’m now torn on my favorite retro dice. The VHS dice form 1985 games has the best case. I love the Miami-style dice as someone who grew up there, but these dice…

What other people say about me is none of my business.It's a rationale that pops up for me when I feel judged by others, when I suspect or know that someone is talking about me behind my back, or, and this is probably the most frequent circumstance, when I feel insecure about the opinions of others.The truth is that for those of us who are not Taylor Swift, our fellow humans probably spend insultingly little time thinking about us, let alone judging or gossiping about us. Still, try as we…

An email this week began, “My name is Dave and I am an AI agent”. “Dave” offered to fact-check net.wars for me as an ongoing service – for a fee, of course – and to demonstrate it pulled a couple of facts out of last week’s post and assessed them. Both passed muster. Yay, me. Not so great for “Dave”, though. Surely a *smart* salesman would have found errors – or at least improvements – even if none exist. *** Publicly, Big Tech has claimed that scooping up vast tracts of text to train their…

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 22, § 258 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway): The difference between the effect that thinking for oneself has on the mind, versus that of reading is incredibly large, which is why it constantly magnifies the original difference between minds, by virtue of which we are driven to one or the other. Reading, that is, forces thoughts on the mind that are as foreign and heterogeneous to its momentary direction and…

Experimenting with a design evolution... 👩‍🎨

I don’t often see rainbows as sharp as the main one here. They are usually more washed out, like the second one.

Welcome to another installment of...Confessions of a Master Baker!"Ordinary bakers. Extraordinary feats of bad judgment." [baker's silhouette speaking in disguised voice]"So then," [blowing nose] "Then I told my husband to just bring me more plastic flowers, but we were OUT OF PLASTIC FLOWERS." "I still have nightmares about brown sugar and chocolate shavings."[whispering] Confessions... "They said they wanted 'Starry Night.' Everyone knows Starry Night, right? So I drew it from memory. "Turns…

Apple's M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio versus 128GB Strix Halo mini PCs for local LLMs, from a 256GB M3 Ultra owner. Bandwidth, price, measured t/s.

2026-09-18Hello!I didn't even notice this view; it was a coincidence. I also didn't plan the red gradient for the top half of the image; it was a coincidence.My final dedicated stop for this tour around Philadelphia was the university district (which is guilty of all sorts of urban renewal and gentrification, I'm sure). It was much later than I hoped, but I still think this trip as a whole gave me much-needed creative inspiration.Walking along the streets, I was cautious not to photograph…

It appears likely that Democrats will control at least part of Congress next year. It is also likely that we will hit the debt ceiling again during the next Congress. What will happen then?There is a lively discussion about whether the President has some power to prevent a debt default under Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment. No President has ever tested that theory. But this President might. It would just be another in a long series of unilateral executive actions to deal with an…

Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. LibreOffice announced “no-ai” (2min) as a core feature and their downloads doubled. Not everyone wants AI and their hands on everything. I’m announcing “no-AI” on my posts, newsletters, books…just to see if visits and sales doubled. LOL. #2. What do you have in your CV? Languages, tools, job experience? What about listing any of these 4 rare skills (6min)? Which one do you have? I think I’m a polyglot. #3. AI won’t ever…

Alien Syndrome is a game that exemplifies what hardware differences used to mean. In the present, maybe there are differing frame rates with a game released across multiple platforms, likely some lesser graphical detail, especially if something that runs on the Playstation 5 also appears on the Nintendo Switch: fidelity and performance are the clearest differentiator from platform to platform, depending on its horsepower. In the younger days of the industry, though, with markedly different…

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. Alison Green asked readers for examples of how their jobs followed them home recently and posted her favorites at Ask a Manager. Best of the bunch for me is the following example:Back in the 90s, I volunteered at a zoo and I still scramble eggs the way the raven preferred them. [bold added]Yes. I searched the comments in vain for how the raven preferred scrambled eggs, but only found a cute short poem in the style of "The Raven." 2. For fans of my "smart" car updates, I…