The Lamy Logo Tri Pen returns! This week we focused on bringing back some old favorites, including some that have been out of stock for a year or more. First up is the Lamy Logo Tri Pen, which is an excellent Lamy multi pen if you prefer a slimmer format. (Similar options include the Lamy ST and Lamy CP1 Multi Pen line.) We also have additional Lamy 2000 stock, including fine and extra fine fountain pens and 4-Color multipens. As we noted on Tuesday, we also received a large shipment of inks…

This morning’s soundtrack: The first seven songs from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour.

Omniscient Reader's Viewpointby Sleepy-C, singNsong, UmiGenres: Fantasy, Manga Pages: 240 Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #2 Rating: Synopsis: Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse is Dokja's favorite novel. Or it was...until it became reality. He barely survived the chaotic first moments of the new world thanks to his knowledge of the story, but the cruel Scenarios give him no time for rest. Isolated from his group and surrounded by horrific creatures, things look grim for…

This has been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to picking it up, but today I decided to sit down and read it in one go. It's very fun and I'm not mad about that decision at all. Paver is very good at low-key, slightly creepy horror (see Dark Matter and Thin Air for more), and she's excellent at epistolary horror. She does a really good job of capturing the voice of characters in their correspondence and diaries, and I really enjoyed how…

Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects. The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise, the way I made them was interesting, so i thought I would post about it. I started out by building an empty slide deck on Google Slides, each slide had a title and a few had a handful of words, they all…

Ah, it’s meteorological autumn here in the western hemisphere. Hot, sunny weather is making way for rain and cooler temps. It’s kind of nice – an generally the time I come out with a new USA top ten list. This list combines varieties made in the United States as well as ones made for the United States . Got varieties you’d like to see me review? Contact me! Make sure to check out the announcements at the bottom. Without further ado, here’s The Ramen Rater’s Top Ten American Instant Noodles Of…

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College) A sample of Little Red Dots observed by JWST’s NIRCam detector. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first looked at the darkest regions of the sky, it was able to see objects fainter and more distant than ever before. It revealed a few surprises about the early cosmos, and one of them was the discovery of Little Red Dots (LRDs). LRDs are reddish, point-like objects seen when the Universe was only a billion years old. Astronomers had no…

Awesome to hear Marc and Tom digging into comedy again.

× The cover image above is a “conscious” adaptation of Mustafa Suleyman’s cover for “A Warning About ‘Model Welfare’”, made with ChatGPT Image 2.5. I appreciate Suleyman’s openness in the article. He states his concern more directly than most people in this debate. If society starts treating AI systems as conscious beings with rights, he argues, the result could destabilize our political and ethical order. Worse, an advanced system trained to see itself as a moral patient might resist human…

A common maladaptive daydream I have is imagining that I wake up and I'm much younger again, spontaneously and miraculously, with all of my knowledge and understanding still intact. Magically, I find myself back at a specific age in my life, and I can redo everything all over again from that point on. For me, I always imagine awakening to find myself twelve and in grade six again. Back when I would walk down 17th Avenue travelling home after elementary school ended to take care of our four…

Mickaël Salaün an me will give a talk on recent Landlock developments at the upcoming Linux Security Summit Europe in Prague: Landlock gained a few interesting features to restrict more operations. We’ll explain unix socket restrictions, signal scoping, thread synchronization support, and UDP control. We’ll also walk through some lesser known Linux features that make such restrictions sometimes challenging to properly handle. Finally, we’ll talk about ongoing developments and the roadmap. 🌍…

Every now and then, I find myself fascinated by the concept of game glitches. For example, yesterday, I watched a video showing some unused content from the 2nd gen Pokemon games that. In this specific case, the unused content was a house with a woman (and a Pokemon in it). It still exists in the game's code, you just can't get there because the entry tile to the house has been moved to an inaccessible location and "turned off", so you can only reach the house by using cheats. Whenever I…

If you are going to bring your hit comedy to a close then you might as well do it by producing a screamingly funny series that leaves us wanting more and ensures a place in TV history and never even approaches anything like a shark jumping moment! I think what makes this show so good is the verisimilitude - the sheer lived-in reality of the lives we are looking at. These people argue and bicker, they talk over each other, fail to complete their sentences and make bad decisions. And we love them…

Faust and GretchenIt has been too long since I have posted. Such are the pitfalls of writing a book. Next to my desk are several books (nothing to do with Goethe) that I have been longing to read. No such luck. But a recent news story has caused such a fever among the public that it offers a comparison to the fate of Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust. I speak of course of the current legal affair concerning Lindsay Clancy and the murder of her three children.For those not familiar with Goethe’s work,…

We played the twenty-first session of our Dungeon Module B1: In Search of Unknown AD&D 2e game last night. You can read past play reports here.The roster for this session was as follows:Llombaerth, CG elf thief 4 (Adam)Mirkle, N human fighter 2 (Maya)Rory the Small, LN human fighter 1 (David)Egbert, human necromancer 1 (NPC)A barbarian warrior (NPC)Wilros Wackledeckle, gnome (NPC)Bilodeau, man-at-arms (NPC)Graves, man-at-arms (NPC)Brazile, halfling porter, and his dog, Ripper (NPC)Ejiofer,…

image by AI; not my prompt Talk to anyone who’s been involved in AI design and they’ll tell you: What AI bots are, in a nutshell, are mimics. They have, of course, a vast repertoire of apery data at their disposal. So they can be pretty good mimics — entertaining, educational, time-saving, and capable of tossing out lots of interesting unoriginal ideas that might be useful to you. But the truth is that all this extravagant, expensive, resource-wasting technology boils down to a black box that…

“The Center for the Art of Translation and The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn co-present Day of Translation 2026! Featuring 3 free provocative panels on translation and a ticketed keynote by Emily Wilson. Register to attend in-person or via livestream.” The button in that copy of the image will not work. If you want to register please go to the Center for the Art of Translation’s website. Coincidentally (or not) the Brooklyn Book Festival takes place next week too, from 20 to 28 September.…

Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to get an outside wireless access point set up at the house. Earlier this year Jen bought a BirdBuddy and struggled to get it to connect quickly or reliably; we get great reception and all rooms of the house from one router, but because our house is covered in thick sheets of Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, the effect is that of a Faraday cage: wireless signal doesn’t penetrate the outside of the house easily. I’ve done a…

July 31, 2026. It's been a couple years since my last Gear Roundup. I can make all sorts of excuses for the long delay - the Tacoma living in Las Vegas during the winter, an overall setup that works so well that there haven't been many changes, the fact that we're spending more time on trips - but we all know the real reason: laziness. Still, I think it's important to take stock now and then, both to ensure that I'm purposeful about how we're camping and to share my experience on what works and…

What you should be thinking of as you consider search + retrieval roles

Jackson, Michigan – shot on the Canon EOS M6 and EF-M 28mm f/3.5 macro.

IntroductionOne of the things that I find really fascinating about the early history of the hobby is the way in which characters existed outside the specific campaigns they played in and could travel between them fluidly. I would have my dungeon, and my buddy would have their dungeon, and our players would swim back and forth between the two tables with the same characters and this was fine, probably, unless you were Gary Gygax (who was allegedly so upset about characters who leveled up to high…

I looked out of my bathroom window the other day and noticed two things. One was this Green Anole on the Ti plant by the side of the house. The other was that the Ti plant had grown so tall, it was now blocking the view from the window. Later, I went out and chopped the Ti plant down to a more manageable size, checking beforehand that the anole was no longer in residence!

Life size Folk Art Carving of Man in a Derby Hat. Circa 1940 Collection Jim Linderman / Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Having spent a week with a holiday group in a foreign country, I've come to realise something that should have been obvious. No-one is looking. No-one is staring No-one is pointing No-one cares Everyone is wrapped up in their own world and they haven't got much headspace for people who don't fit their vague definition of 'slightly outside the expected' Yes, I've got man-boobs and I need to wear a bra for comfort. Get over it! If that's a problem for you, then it's not a problem I'm going to…

By definition, celebrities are the most visible, widely recognized, people who make art. They work in entertainment, and their work and lives fit into the show business model. (I consider fine artists who work in the gallery business model as part of this group. Local fame counts.) There’s also a message that you might receive: you need to be recognized and chosen in order to make art. You need to be extraordinary, like a superstar celebrity, to make something beautiful. That’s an imaginary…

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #40 (1985)Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky•This issue, entitled "Hydrofoil", involves a couple of introductions from the toy line, including one I have been waiting for. That would be the introduction of Shipwreck, one of my favorite characters from the cartoon (That was where he first appeared, in 1984's "Revenge of Cobra" mini-series, and then Hasbro released him as an action figure in 1985). Here we see his first appearance, and he seems awfully grumpy,…

I really need to get back to Stream for Mac. It’s at a point where I’d like to release it, but I do have a couple things I’d like to fix before doing that. Then I need to take a long hard look at the iPhone Duo. Hoooo boy. 😳 That’s gonna be a bit of work. I already have so much I’d love to do with Stream. Least of which is supporting a new iPhone layout, especially one that’s changed the APIs. I’m sure it’ll be fine and will make for a better app, but there so much I can do to make Stream the…

I give up too quickly. A couple weeks after I wrote to the address that I found for 1956’s Peanut of the Year Ruth Figi, I reckoned the note had not reached her. The internet has a lot of out of date addresses for people who have since moved or died. Or perhaps she had just chosen to ignore the answer. So, I published my blog post about the Peanuts of the Year contest. Ruth Figi (center) and friend at an arts event, 2023. Courtesy Ruth Figi, all rights reserved, not for reuse. It turns out that…

Make Some Noise is one of many fantastic improv comedy shows on Dropout. I noticed one of the ongoing themes is “tech gone bad,” so I compiled a short list below. I just find these really funny. Video call with shitty wifi: Logging in with 30-factor authentication: A cutscene in a video game that’s glitching out: In case you’re curious, the improv actors are: Zac Oyama, Josh Ruben, and (occasionally) Brendan Lee Mulligan. (If you’re a Dropout member, these are the original, slightly longer…