The four bracket winning teams from our 8th annual Team SPS Kubb Tournament!

Just another shameful chapter in 45/47’s abuse of public institutions and attempts to create idols of himself. Embarrassing. The central character refuses to allow needed renovations unless he gets his name on the building.

Anyone that knows me fairly well probably knows I have a passion for physical media, especially when it comes to things like video. I still have all my DVDs and Blu Rays, and while I have a few VHS tapes here and there, I’m sorry to say that I did get rid of most of them a long time ago in an effort to clear up some much needed space (trying to keep things tidy and also wanting to keep physical media sometimes are at odds with each other). And video stores in particular are something I really…

I went for a walk with 800 people in the middle of the night...

Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware or emulation (otvdm, DOSBox), sometimes paired with Wine. My new, exciting solution, Stars!VM, or Stars! Virtual Machine, embeds a custom 80286 emulator and a Win16 to Win32 bridge. As native…

I'm really enjoying the stuff Mike Monteiro is writing lately: [...] An LLM will never write it like you told it. It might give you a reasonable facsimile, and the most dangerous thing about a facsimile is that it will eventually convince you that it’s the real thing. It’ll eventually convince you that its voice is your voice. So while the temptation to use this shit is understandable, the price is too high. Eventually your LLM will write your child a note and their LLM will write a reply and…

I tragically ran out of fresh decaf coffee beans from our favourite roaster this side of the Bridge last night, as well as those surprisingly decent Muji decaf coffee bags. It’s tough being me. So I went for a walk to the local shopping centre in the evening to see what they had for my nightcap. My track record with supermarket decaf is poor to mediocre, but maybe by some fluke I could get something great. The supermarket in question did have some decent(ish) decaf coffee beans, but they’re…

★★★★☆ I’d heard good things about the horror-comedy Widow’s Bay, about a cursed New England island town whose new mayor insists on making it a tourist destination. What could go wrong? The season as a whole was hit and miss. But there were some really good hits. The episode with the creepy book and Patricia’s horrific party disaster, the flashback to the founding generation of the town (with Betty Gilpin!), and the season finale were all excellent. And the finale wrapped up just enough of the…

Earlier this summer, I published Extravagant Sehlkwen's Rumours of Treasure on DriveThruRPG. That was in response to Atlas Games running a contest in honour of their release of David Somerville's Planegea setting with an OGL. What I published, though, was a significantly scoped-down version of what I had wanted to start with... ...and the full version is now published! The Salt-Goddess and Her Wares is available on DriveThruRPG for $7.00 CAD. At time of writing, that's around $5.03 if you're…

OmFest is coming together quite nicely! The new website is beautiful and highlights some of the experiences available throughout the day. I think Om would be very impressed by the attendee list. We’re doing it at the Swedish American Hall, the same venue as the first WordCamp, where Om, of course, spoke about Blogs and Journalism. (The videos have been lost to digirot, unless anyone has some recordings? I’ve been looking everywhere.) Below is cross-posted from OmFest.co: September 29th is when…

I spent five and a half years at AWS before moving (back) to Microsoft, where I work today. At Amazon, many meetings began with silent reading. Instead of presenting a document, the author gave everyone time to read it before the discussion started. There was a small facilitation trick that made this work surprisingly well: when reading began, everyone raised a hand. When someone finished, they lowered it. The meeting started with all hands up and counted down to zero. At Microsoft, I found the…

Mathematician and genius Terence Tao writing on Mastodon about the role of childish curiosity, the optimization of goals, and AI: “Toutes les grandes personnes ont d’abord été des enfants. (Mais peu d’entre elles s’en souviennent.)” [All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Le Petit Prince.” An impromptu game of “who can name the largest number?” is an example I often point to as a way in which young children teach each other about…

We'll have more of Peacock's The Traitors US through season eight—maybe taking us into the next decade.

❚ MANY PEOPLE RECKON Manchester-born Johnny Marr to be one of the finest guitarists in the world. Not only did he spend 40 years buying the 73 guitars going for sale today at Christie’s the London auctioneer. He also provided … Continue reading →

It’s official in SF Standard: Stewart Brand sells his seaworthy Sausalito houseboat to tech CEO. Ahoy!

told you … Below HorizonDon’t Run Away From YourselfThe Waves Will Find You If I can keep my head above the horizon, I’ll be ok.And so will you. Asé Peace & Blessings,"Guided by the Ancestors"

I am a better person without my phone. In fact, I would go so far as saying there is a negative correlation between the amount of time I spend on my phone and the likelihood you would want to be around me. Last Saturday it was hot outside. I was bored and in a state of malaise. So, I picked up my phone. I used my browser to check a few news sites. Then I "surfed" over to X to see how "people" felt about current events. As if I couldn't predict. I spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling.…

Wow, what a ride the last few years have been. 😬 The Amish aside (straw hat tip), it feels like almost nobody on the planet can escape hearing about AI multiple times a day at this point, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Act I: “Tar Water” (Balliol College, Oxford) [*] Adam Smith was enrolled in Balliol College at Oxford University from July 1740 until August 1746. During his Oxford years, the young scholar wrote to his mother on several occasions.[1] Although most of these letters are mundane,[2] two of them are worth taking a closer look at, for Smith self-diagnoses–not once, but twice!–a peculiar health condition: “laziness”! In one letter (dated 29 November 1743), for example, Smith informs his mother, “I…

We’re excited to launch Stage 1 of the Lean Kernel Challenge, a multi-stage competition to improve the performance of verified computation in the Lean 4 kernel that the whole community can benefit from. The Lean Kernel Challenge brings the community together to develop faster algorithms and better representations for verified computation. Through these collective contributions, the competition aims to support Lean’s development and benefit Lean users worldwide. Verified computation uses the…

A museum wall label brings its own quiet. A Rothko earns a hushed, reverent pause. The label beside it gets a politer one: the glazed-over pause a reader gives three sentences about provenance and pigment while thinking about lunch. An article on writing exhibition texts noted most gallery visitors spend under thirty seconds on a wall text. Time yourself sometime. Thirty seconds starts to feel generous!Museums know this. MuseumNext's guide for label writers recommends keeping text between fifty…

Today’s recording starts with the end of Newsround and a trail for Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab. Then it’s Dinosapien – The Underworld, although Media Centre thinks it’s “The Underground”. Fewer bad biblical connotations for the young ones? Lauren is practicing her gymnastics while Eno watches. Then he has a go. I thought Chris and Lauren and Kit had settled their differences, but Chris is back to being a dick and complaining about Lauren. To be fair, Lauren is supposed to be helping her mum…

Too much to read. Too much to do. Harvest season has arrived. _ Reply via email

How can something that “just works” be so annoying? situation We live in Cambridge off a little road down a drive in shared ownership between us and our neighbouring houses. All the utilities are buried under this drive, including the phone line. anticipation Over the last few years we have been canvassed repeatedly by CityFibre saying that they can deliver fibre all way to our house. I saw them digging trenches and leaving tails of purple fibre cladding along nearby roads, ready to hook up all…

“With A Heartbeat” is a kind of concept LP. It has a central idea at its core. It finds legendary bassist / producer Bill Laswell operating on his preferred border of dub, jazz and non-Western musics, with a circle of friends, who also happen to be celebrated virtuoso performers: saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, cornet player Graham Hayes, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, with Jeff Bova on keys and Trilok Gurtu on voice and tabla. None of this is out of the ordinary for the perpetually prolific Laswell,…

by Cláudio Alves The human figure against the grandeur of the natural world has obsessed visual artists for centuries, if not millennia. In A Long Winter, his latest film and follow-up to the highly popular All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh follows the footsteps of those that came before him and delivers what can only be described as an exercise in landscape cinema. It’s perhaps his work where shot composition and the blocking of actors have most to say. At the same time, the text barely raises…

Trying to build a function a_or_an(word) proves hilariously challenging for English, surprising no one. The author catches one dialectal land mine: herb begins with a vowel sound in American English and an /h/ sound in British English. But I see at least two more ways English can ruin your afternoon: The name of the letter H itself varies by dialect. Most Americans say aitch, beginning with a vowel sound; plenty of British speakers say haitch, beginning with /h/. Thus even the letter whose…

Twelve Caesarsby Mary BeardGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 384 Rating: Synopsis: What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the…

nighttime is sneaking in,eager to beat thestreetlights. children gang up inthe hallways of my building. the belly of the firstfloor swells to a size t h r e e t i m e swhat it was before.soon, the neighborhood will give birth to autumn,and everyone willfall into comfort, sweater-weatheringtheir lives away fora season.

Zach Cregger, the director of such respected horror films as Weapons and Barbarians, has grabbed the Resident Evil reins. Cregger's fans may wonder why a director known for giving horror a comic twist would take on a franchise that has its supporters but hasn't garnered much critical favor. Working from a screenplay he wrote with Shane Hatten, Cregger acknowledges the series' video-game origins, presenting the movie's unlikely main character with escalating challenges. That may sound familiar,…