Cycles Hyped No More on November 4, 2026 The American electorate has spoken. And it’s not just MAGA Trumpism which has been repudiated, but the unseemly reign of douchebag techbroism. Cycles Hyped No More is a monthly column by Jared White where he takes a critical look at “hype cycles” and the ways Big Tech attempts to steer public discourse towards its own financial goals and away from grassroots development of person-centered tech. No product or service is “inevitable” and we can choose the…

The Wonder: An Unofficial Television ArchiveYou sometimes hear jerks like me reminisce and rhapsodize about “the old, weird internet.” An algorithm-free digital wild west, untamed by search engines and social media. A vast landscape of oddball outposts, labors of love and questionable HTML skills. It wasn’t perfect, mind you. But it was ours! The Wonder, an unofficial website devoted to Television, was a great example of the old weirdness. Launched by Keith Allison in the early part of the 21st…

The New Yorker‘s 26 October issue carries a large profile/interview with James Daunt, head of Barnes & Noble, head of Waterstones, thus Foyles, Blackwells, Heffers etc., etc. and the biggest name in bookselling in the world. The piece is surprisingly badly written. Within the first three columns I was stopped by “Though less well-known than many authors . . .”; “the leafy parts of London” as location of his first store, Daunt Books; and “Outwardly, Daunt carries faint traces of the social caste…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 239-241: Even if we were to assume that the foreign policies of the pre-war European powers were formulated and managed by compact executives animated by a unified and coherent purpose, reconstructing the relations among them would still be a daunting task, given that no relationship between any two powers can be fully understood without reference to relations with all of the others. But in the…

Seth Godin on fake async: Over time, async creeps toward sync. It’s ironic that Slack messages, texts and email which succeeded because they were async, now create an expectation of real-time response. These are async tools used with sync expectations, so you get the interruptions of sync without its energy. Seth Godin https://seths.blog/2026/11/the-power-of-sync-2/ Personal discipline can’t solve this one. You can block two hours for focused work, but if your team expects an answer within…

I wonder how politic ad spending will look like 2 years from now.

Not sure where I found this one, but it’s been sitting in the hamper awhile and today’s the day. Time to give it a whirl. Nongshim Shrimp & Habanero Ramyun With Lime – United States Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Contains tuna, pollock, crab, and shrimp. To prepare, add soup base and fill to line with boiling water. Cover 3 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to enlarge). An instant noodle block. A sachet of soup base powder seasoning. Loose bits and…

I've been exceedingly cautiously optimistic this time.

Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design

Super duper late weeknote. Sorry for the delay, I was travelling back home and had underestimated how much time it takes to complete one weeknote entry! Life Back to hanging out with Kunwar Ever since Gunwant has left, I wasn't able to hangout with Kunwar as much. After the Wayanad trip, I left for my hometown and upon return I kept getting pulled into random plans every Sunday. And hence, I feel very happy that I could watch Resident Evil with him last week and then we could go to Manjeet da…

📷 291/365 - On the lookout.

The first night of Blink, the biennial celebration of light and art in Greater Cincinnati, was a bit challenging. Usually it doesn’t get dense until the weekend, but the sidewalks were already cramped this Thursday. Installations seemed fewer and farther between, light projections stacked artist animations one after another (which I think is great to show off more perspectives), and some of the works felt A.I. generated. There were no printed maps and the official website was frustrating to…

It’s a hoary old topic on this site, I know, but in this post I’m going to trail an article I’ve just published on the appropriately named GM Watch site called How not to feed the world: five questions for George Monbiot. I won’t repeat here what I say there. Instead, I’m just going to fill out a few points, hopefully in an interesting way despite the familiarity of the issue. First, some background for the uninitiated. In his 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet,…

I don't have a lot to say about the midterms, exactly, as I'm not a political expert. But the results are absolutely bananas. The current admin has absolutely crashed out despite getting elected with a LOT of support. And as a Wisconsinite, seeing the state legislature flip after over a decade of absolute idiots running the show, I'm looking forward for the first time in a while. The shift graph is astonishing. But I am especially heartened by the ste of firsts happening in unlikely places.…

UK Decca recordings compiled by Deram (Decca sub), complilation originally issued on CD in 1999.See details at discogs

A year and a half ago now, I wrote a post about using token sequences to iterate ranges. In that post, I talked about the overhead that certain range adaptors fundamentally have because they don’t neatly fit into the regular C++ for loop (particularly views::take_while and views::reverse), how Tristan Brindle’s Flux library addresses these limitations with its own for_each implementation that u...

Democrats, Liberals and folks who like to claim they are enlightened and modern are celebrating this morning in the U.S. at their blue wave victory. It's fucking hilarious. Why? Because these people actually believe the fantasy that these Democratic politicians are their saviors. That they are the solution to the all the fucked up problems in the U.S. That the scourge of Republicans and MAGA will now be eradicated. Oh children, how soon you forget. Let's just be clear. These are politicians.…

Megalodon teethA megalodon tooth is a wonderful thing to hold in your hand. The broad crown, thick root and finely serrated edges give us a sense of the animal behind it, even when the rest of that animal is missing. Some of the largest teeth approach 18 centimetres in length. That is a substantial piece of dental equipment, especially when we consider that whales were among the animals on

If you ended up here just looking for a Cabin Air Filter for early model Tacoma, 4Runner, Tundra, or Sequoia trucks and don't want to read the story of its development, you can pick one up here: I've been working on a thing. When I first got the Tacoma that I still drive today - brand new, off the lot at the very end of 1999 - I didn't even know what a cabin air filter was. And, for the first 16 years of ownership, I never gave it a second thought. I drove around on pavement, mostly in the…

Ley Line HuntingAlfred Watkins wrote the first book on Ley Lines. Published just over 100 years ago, his academic study in The Old Straight Track noticed that ancient landscape features - churches, stone circles, hill forts, ford crossings, etc - often line up in a dead straight line.The Man..... and his workThe book is a game changer for those that like exploring outside. It's highly dubious that Ley Lines actually exist. He argues in the book against popular counter arguments - such as the…

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by Douglas Adams and featuring Tom Baker (dressed at one point as a Neanderthal). What a find! The concepts explained in it will be old hat to modern viewers, but it’s fascinating to see a vision of something not quite like the Web in a programme made just before people knew about the Web (which existed in 1990, but only really for a relative handful of people around CERN; Tim Berners-Lee published the HTML spec in 1991). I was amused by its mention…

Having returned from Devon on the Saturday, I was already contemplating what mischief to get up to on the Sunday. There was a small river tempting me with the prospect of a gentle rove, a bit of wandering about and perhaps the odd fish if the aquatic residents could be persuaded to cooperate. A rather different proposition to the sea fishing we'd just been enjoying, but variety, as they say, is the spice of life. Although, in fishing terms, variety often means finding several different ways of…

Last year, I posted on the first in a new series of stories with Barry Reese‘s New Pulp hero The Peregrine, but written by other authors. It’s not clear if these are all considered canon in his timeline, as I only see one of them included. As posted before, the Peregrine, originally named The Rook, […]

PROFESSOR X X-MEN: THE MOVIE (TOY BIZ) “Charles Francis Xavier possesses the most powerful mind on earth. The mutant telepath also known as Professor X can read the thoughts of others, impose his own will to take over other people’s minds or erase their memories. This visionary has dedicated his life to fighting for his dream of peaceful co-existence between man and mutantkind. To aid in this crusade, he founded a school for gifted youngsters to secretly train young mutants to control their…

We went for a scenic drive to Lake Cushman and across the Hood Canal Floating Bridge.Here’a an interactive map of our route, heading clockwise from Shelton:We stopped at Twin Totems Grocery & Deli in Skokomish, to grab some jojos and picnic lunch:Lake Cushman Recreation Area:Cushman No 1 hydro power dam:Hood Canal Floating Bridge, the longest floating bridge in the world located in a saltwater tidal basin, and the third longest floating bridge overall:

A neopagan visual archive meant to rival the iconic power of the Christian West.

My feeds have been full of the polar vortex this week. Weather accounts post maps of a swirl over the Arctic tearing in two, with captions about the "earliest sudden stratospheric warming on record". Scientists post more careful versions of the same maps. Then the question comes from friends and family: does this mean a cold winter? I work on short-range forecasting, so the stratosphere is not my usual territory. Still, this is one of the few links we have between what happens 30 km up and the…

The two-year-old said to me, "If you eat this food you can have ice cream." She placed a plate in front of me on which she had positioned a glob of purple play dough. I said, "What is it?""It's healthy food.""What kind of healthy food?""You just have to eat it.""I'll need a fork.""I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She dug around on the shelf until she found a plastic one. "Here's your fork, now eat your food."I pretended to take a bite. Sometimes when kids want me to taste their imaginary…