How I got scammed into buying AI slop A few months ago, my best friend recommended me a new artist he had stumbled upon. We both love metal music and he knows exactly what excites me, progressive, djenty technical riffs well executed with great sound design. This new band hit all the right boxes. I instantly was drawn to most of their songs from their recent album. This does not happen often.

Went swimming with the kids for the second day in a row.

Almost three years ago, I had a go at capturing Saturn with a Canon EOS R mirrorless camera and a Canon RF 800mm F11 IS STM lens. The camera combined with that lens doesn’t exactly make for proper astrophotography equipment (the narrow ƒ/11 aperture is particularly suboptimal), and so it was just a bit of fun to see what I could capture given that I already had them in my possession. Since then, I’ve upgraded to a Canon EOS R5 Mark II and I bought an Extender RF 1.4x. I’d also like to think I…

Have you ever acted in community or professional theatre? We (yours truly) have never done so due to a lack of talent. Plus, we can’t be bothered memorizing lines. Our time is better spent in other ways, such as sampling pastries and shopping for books we’ll never read. However, we were able to live the thea-tah experience vicariously with the … Continue reading →

Another day doing my civic duty, finding time to watch Tabitha play hockey, and move my root canal treatment on a bit.260 words · 3 images

Drei Tage habe ich noch bis zum Kunstmarkt und davor steht noch die Reise ins Saarland für eine Hochzeit an. Also gilt jetzt der Titel dieser Notiz: Plots rausballern! Gerade konzentriere ich mich auf das Anfertigen von meinen Minis: Kleine gerahmte mathematische Kunstwerke von Fraktalen, Random Walks, Klassikern des Creative Coding und Mini-Ausgaben von meinen früheren Arbeiten. Dabei steht für mich nicht das Originelle oder Aufwendige im Vordergrund, sondern Menschen ein kleines Artefakt an…

I hit credits on Star Wars: Zero Company last night, the latest Star Wars title from some XCOM alums at Bit Reactor (& some other great folks who didn't work on XCOM, as I understand). The game is great. If you have any interest in XCOM-style turn-based tactics, this should go very high up your list. Hell, if you liked Baldur's Gate III and want something "like that, but sci fi" it should go on your list. It's very mechanically similar! Zero Company (aka ZCOM1) begins in the twilight months of…

Video: https://youtu.be/fBfJMNS0MnQ?si=mxBOzq0wXYGfLFsGThis is the best video I've ever watchedSimply amazing.

One of my favorite contemporary painters is a British painter who has been living and painting in the south of France for many years. In 2005, he became one of the earliest artists to adopt the practice of “Painting a Day”, (perhaps second, not long after the originator of that idea Duane Keiser). This calls for painting a small painting each day and putting it up for auction on his website, Postcard from Provence. I first encountered his work and posted about him in 2006, and I’ve posted a few…

Disclaimer Previously… Second Sight Conclusions The Good The Bad The Weird Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth,…

Don’t let your agents coast.More seriously: push back when an agent tries to hand the work back to you.

Self Tape – Uninvited First up tonight is a big tune from Sydney’s Stuart McNair, aka Self Tape. I’ve covered Self Tape a few times over the past couple of years, including twice this year, as he’s been releasing a series of singles in the lead-up to his second LP, Vibrations, out September 25th (that’s also my birthday, so I’m biased when I say it’s a great day for a release). The past two singles have also been club-focused, but they were both a little more left-field than this one, each…

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026. Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories: Australian history, children’s, young adult, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. A full list of recipients in all categories is here.

To keep my creative muscles in shape, I write 10 bad ideas every day. Here’s today’s list: #1. Stress weakens your immune system. A lesson from Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. #2. Use the XYZ approach when discussing with your partner or at work. #3. Reading regulates your nervous system. #4. To remember what you read, ask “What am I trying to achieve?” #5. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for a pile of unread books. #6. In a book date, you take your date to a bookstore, discuss about…

This week on the podcast: Apple’s 27 OSes are out, but a new beta is already overshadowing them. The guys talk about both, celebrate a huge milestone in Relay’s St. Jude campaign, and dream of future Apple Stores.

Developer: PUNKCAKE DélicieuxYear: 2026Genre: ArcadeSystem: Browser I’ve been a fan of PUNCAKE for a while now, a collective that regularly releases smaller games in all types of genres, so it was exciting to see that their latest game was for the PICO-1K Jam 2026 because I also love PICO-8 and that game jam specifically. This is a take on the classic Snake game that I haven’t seen before. As you can see from the gif, you move around pushing numbers of the same amount together in groups and…

the words flowing into my mind stir what's already there tiny sparks lighting in the dullness of mere survival repeated cycles falling out of rhythm new connections forming colouring their way through something persistent on the verge of blooming

FKJ featuring Eryn Allen Kane “I Want U” Years ago my friend Sean T. Collins wrote a daily blog about the movie Road House because he realized he could find something interesting to say about Road House every day. (He did, and it’s now it’s a terrific book.) I feel like “I Want U” is so full of wonderful little details that I could potentially do the same for at least a month. Like, I’m not going to! But that’s mostly because I don’t have the music theory and production background to get it…

Serious good design in these Thai stamps.They are small works of art. Timeless style. They will enrich my future notes :)

Another trip to the mountains and one peak with a spectacular viewscape. Read More ... Continue reading The awesome view at PMags.com.

I am booting VMs via qemu (no libvirt) and sometimes they don't tell me what IP address they got when booted. To figure it out, considering I know the IP address, I can query the network via the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) I know they get address in sequence, so: ayoung@sut11sys-r112:~/devel/ampvirt$ arp -n | grep -i "52:54:00:70:0c:" 10.76.112.154 ether 52:54:00:70:0c:02 C virbr0 10.76.112.153 ether 52:54:00:70:0c:04 C virbr0 10.76.112.155 ether 52:54:00:70:0c:03 C virbr0

My heart fucking needed this. Released last month, here’s New Radicals with Michelle Branch with “The Game of Love”. You know this song. It was written by Gregg Alexander of New Radicals back in the day. There’s been an original demo with Gregg on leads floating around on the Internet for ages. Demos with Macy Gray and Tina Turner have been floating around as well; it was a made famous by Santana with Michelle Branch singing the leads. Back in 2002-03 this song was *everywhere*. This version…

Speaking of OIDC, I searched in my drawer and found all three security keys I own again. A YubiKey 5C NFC with firmware 5.4.3 (apparently not so secure anymore and not upgradable) and two SoloKeys Solo 2 (one USB-A and one USB-C, both with NFC) I funded via Indiegogo many years ago. Those have upgradable firmware, so I managed to do that with the accompanying CLI. After some research I also found a nice Linux app installable via Flatpak (keyroost) to manage the passkeys on the devices. I…

Big chunks of salt to go with this report from "Maxim Boldson" at gamegpu.com, but I believe the broad strokes. "Sony's next-generation portable gaming console, codenamed Project Canis and leaked as the PSP 3 Handheld, is slated for release in late 2027 and will feature full hardware support for PSSR 3.0 intelligent scaling and frame generation technology. The device is being designed specifically to support current PlayStation 5 desktop platform projects. The hardware platform for the new…

It’s time for one of those “look at all these new words making it into the dictionary” news cycles, and here’s Michael Levenson in the NYT with “Merriam-Webster Dictionary Is Wordsmaxxing With 1,400 New Definitions” (archived): Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary that traces its roots to a time before looksmaxxing and yacht rock, has added those words along with chili crisp, shapewear and cuffing season, to its comprehensive accounting of the English language. The company, based in…

I’m not writing this to be pitied. I just need to get the frustration out. Maybe show my naïveté.Why am I even talking about it?read more...

Last spring I gave myself a spring writing challenge, and now I think it’s high time for an autumn challenge! Feel free to join me! For this challenge I’ve created the following prompts: leaves clouds rain storm cardigan pumpkin coffee You can use these words as prompts for short stories, short memoir pieces, poetry, art or photography! The sky is the limit! If you’d like to join in, the hashtag for this challenge (only on Mastodon in my case) is #AutumnWriting I’ve cobbled together a simple…

Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus 1.28.9 (tr. W.A. Oldfather): And where can I go to escape death? Show me the country, show me the people to whom I may go, upon whom death does not come; show me a magic charm against it. If I have none, what do you wish me to do? I cannot avoid death. καὶ ποῦ φύγω τὸν θάνατον; μηνύσατέ μοι τὴν χώραν, μηνύσατε ἀνθρώπους, εἰς οὓς ἀπέλθω, εἰς οὓς οὐ παραβάλλει, μηνύσατε ἐπαοιδήν· εἰ μὴ ἔχω, τί με θέλετε ποιεῖν; οὐ δύναμαι τὸν θάνατον ἀποφυγεῖν.