Zombicide has been around for quite some time. I have never been a zombie fan, so I never got around to trying it until recently, when I played the second edition of the game. This is a cooperative game. Every player controls two characters. You try to survive in a zombie apocalypse. The game is scenario based, and every scenario has a different set of winning conditions.

I recently wrote about Jev, a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions: the answers to a set of user-provided multiple-choice questions. This means it’s nowhere near as flexible1 as a traditional LLM like ChatGPT, but in return it’s consistently fast. We don’t know exactly how Jev works. I’ve seen people say diffusion, or various tweaks to the Transformer architecture, or some entirely new type of model. But that doesn’t matter. Like I argued here, it isn’t hard to turn any…

The title track of the second Heartless Bastards record played in my head earlier today. I saw them play once, a lively little set at Montreal's late, great Green Room, a showbar I hated until I loved it. I must have interviewed one of them ahead of the show because we all went out drinking afterward. I remember wanting Erika Wennerstrom (vocals, guitars, keys) to think I was cool because she was cool and I wasn't. After a few beers all of that stopped mattering. All that mattered after those…

Frank Lloyd Wright at The Met – New York, New York I have a fondness for Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the most famous American architect. I’ve visited several of his buildings over the years, including his original studio in Oak Park, Illinois, in the suburbs of Chicago, and more recently Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Seeing his work at The Met was an unexpected surprise. The room you see here is an authentic Frank Lloyd Wright room removed from an actual house and reinstalled at The…

I've been thinking too much about Star Wars lately. I reread the J.W. Rinzler trilogy of 'Making Of' books. I think they're fantastic, as someone who used to inhale as much special features DVD content as I could get while that kind of thing was still being produced. They are coffee table-sized books with a small set type, and are exhaustive accounts of the creative, legal, and financial journey those movies took to be completed. I finally watched Battle of Algiers, a phenomenal movie. There…

See the intro post Progress reportI had meant to get to writing earlier in the evening, since I finished my walk right around 8pm, but I got distracted and ended up not getting to it until 9:45, which means another late night for me. But I wrote about 500 words, crossing the 3k mark and setting up the first obstacle for Roselia to overcome as she tries to work out what happened while she was unconscious. Lots of things happened, but there’s only so much she can access at the moment, and some of…

A few months ago I wrote an article on De Programmatica Ipsum about Keza MacDonald’s awesome book “Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play”, and as I was reading the book I took some notes; here they go, in their entirety, and without any editing, and with the page numbers appended at the end of each for reference. Hard to make a “Corporation” entry about Nintendo, being a secretive company. And not catering particularly to developers per se. Overall theme:…

A dinnerplate dahlia is defined as one that ranges from 8"-12" across the bloom. Smaller blooms you would expect to be referred to as appetizers or lunchplates. But the dahlia world is full of unexpected things that don't make sense. Like the AC Paint dahlia. A white or pale pink dahlia that has magenta splatters...Read More

Sorry, everyone. This happens every year. September is my busiest month, and it's hard to justify playing games. I try to build up a head of steam over the summer, but my cached posts usually run out by mid-month. This year, they ran out sooner because I was traveling the last two weeks of August. Quirkz gave me a series of entries finishing Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989) where I left off, and I'm going to try to get them posted while you wait for a new entry from me, but editing…

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS In "Silo" (2023), a gripping psychological thriller, a woman unravels deep secrets within a mysterious government facility, spiraling into a maze of power and truth. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (4.5/5 stars)** Episodes: 10 | Aired: 07-02-2026 The whole season was fantastic. I was worried about the series after Season 2. Season 2 was necessary, but it was a little slow. Again, Season 3 was fantastic. There are full spoilers below, so if you don't want to know more, please…

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: FULL SPOILERS In "Silo" (2023), a gripping psychological thriller, a woman unravels deep secrets within a mysterious government facility, spiraling into a maze of power and truth. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ (4.5/5 stars)** Episodes: 10 | Aired: 07-02-2026 The whole season was fantastic. I was worried about the series after Season 2. Season 2 was necessary, but it was a little slow. Again, Season 3 was fantastic. There are full spoilers below, so if you don't want to know more, please…

At the beginning of the 20th century, ideas about heredity and human improvement were being presented as modern science. Across Britain, the United States, and other industrialized countries, eugenics gained supporters who believed society could be improved by encouraging some people to have children while discouraging or preventing others from reproducing. The photographs from this […]

When I first set foot on Japanese land, in October 2011, it felt strange in an unexpected way. The country itself is of course "different" by Western standards, but I already knew that. The truly strange part for me was that it didn't feel nearly as strange as I thought it would: there were no major surprises or "whoa" moments (though there were many small ones!); I experienced no culture shock at any point in the months and years that followed; and I could understand the language, spoken and…

Logging on to a website in 2036: Username. Password. Emails a magic link … click link. Now your Passkey. Verify this is a photo of your child right now as captured by satellite. SMS code. Your child has been taken hostage by the authenticator app until you turn this graphic to the correct spot where it matches up with the other spot. Your password has expired, please enter a new password. Cut off a piece of your hair and insert it into your Mac’s HairID port. Enter the number that answers this…

NIGHT TIME WALKING Walked 20.12 miles today, a nice way to top off 115 days straight of walking / running 10+ miles per day. Someone asked me today if I’m on GLP-1, and I just told them, “nope, just walking and eating less snacks.” I’ve always seemed to find time to look at my phone for 3+ hours a day, first thing in the morning, while warming up my coffee, in the evening – all those moments just add up, just like jetting outside for a half-mile walk here and there.

The Traitors New Blood episodes 1 and 2—a two-episode premiere!—gave us traitors, a murder, a banishment, and several new twists, including traitor accomplices. Here's my snarky recap!

We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era. For my purposes, the key distinction here is that the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture. The pre- era is…

This morning, after taking my scheduled meds and supplements, I was feeling well enough to do the morning cat feeding. Which meant, of course, I stayed out to check on the garden. There is definitely cold damage on a lot of things, but most might actually have survived. The winter squash on the chain link … Continue reading A really excellent day – except for Damocles being weird again

I’ve been noodling on this post for a while; I appreciate Lex Friedman for publishing Streaks Considered Harmful and convincing me to hit Publish. I shamelessly stole his title, because I don’t have a better one.

Delicious Black Krim tomatoes from my friend Eric. 🍅

Extending your streak one more day won’t make Jesus love you any more. Consistent, faithful, daily Bible reading can be a great thing: it feeds your faith, fixes your mind on God, restores your soul, and trains you in righteousness. The danger arises when reading the Bible morphs into maintaining your streak. Streaks and dated reading plans apply that pressure in different ways. A streak gives you a number to preserve. A dated reading plan gives you a backlog to maintain. Both make the calendar…

Cedric on deadpan photography (square framing, flat light, uniform focus) as a style that doesn’t claim neutrality so much as perform it, machinery left on display. The caveat lands well, the same refusal to editorialise reads very differently when the subject is suffering rather than water towers.

[ day in progress... ]

John Clary Davies on a 3 A.M. bear at his kitchen window and a record year for human-bear conflicts in Colorado. There have been over 7,000 incidents by early September. A dry winter and drought pushing bears toward houses and a whole town trading stories about cubs on the bike path.

Writing 480 rules for only matters if the rules actually get checked at every point where code changes, not just the one moment I happen to be staring at the editor. So this round wasn't about growing the rule corpus further, it was about making sure the same rules apply everywhere code shows up: w…

MELODIE JOHNSON HOWE – The Mother Shadow. Claire Conrad & Maggie Hill #1. Viking, hardcover 1878. Penguin, paperback, 1990. I was looking forward to reading this one, mostly because of the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin connection made on the back cover. I can see the connection, but sorry to say this is a book I’m going to have to think about twice before I can even tell you if I’n going to keep it or not. Maggie Hill plays Archie. She’s a secretary whose employer makes out a new will, gives her…

Settings → Users & Sharing → Aliases → + New alias → Show advanced preferences Enter alias address Under Deliver to, click x beside your address to remove it then enter the external address in its place → Add Add an optional Description → Save

The adaptation of a video game franchise can be a difficult thing. The 90’s and 00’s were littered with adaptations that sort of brought the experience of the original material to the big screen (Street Fighter (1994, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the original Mortal Kombat movies), but in recent years, the needle has been moved in the other direction: perhaps too accurate to the source material. This choice ends up with mixed results, as we’ve seen this year. Either you’re a 1:1 comparison to the…

It was a long day today. I’m looking forward to the weekend. Selfie a day for a year, day 29: Sep 17, 2026 edition.

installation view, Gerhard Richter, 180 Farben/180 Colours, 1971, restored and shown at Museum Abteiberg in 2014 Sorry, did you say something? I didn’t hear you; I was too engrossed in the Museum Abteiberg digital archive. Did you know that in 2014, when the museum loaned its permanent installation of 8 Graue Bilder from 1974 to Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Beyeler, Richter made a special loan of long-lost works to fill the space? And so far as I can tell, the only account of the…