While at work today, debugging a weird edge-case where some emails to Outlook have some unexpected padding, I learned something weird: Microsoft Outlook still (kinda) supports WordArt. Wait, what’s WordArt? If you’re too young to remember: when Microsoft Office ’97 came out, it shipped with a feature called WordArt. Basically, these were a somewhat-customisable set of on-demand clip-art-esque text styles that you could apply to your own text. Most of these were as unhinged as PowerPoint’s…

Dark Knights of Steel, Vol. 2 #3A Yasmine Putri Regular Release: Sep 16, 2026Cover: Nov 2026 THE KINGDOM OF EL ON THE BRINK OF RUIN? With the House of El’s queen, crown prince, and princess bedridden, Lois of Amazonia jailed, the Amazons expelled, and the threat beneath the waves growing with each passing day, Amanda Waller has everything to gain as she assumes emergency control of the Kingdom of El. Harley Quinn, the Els’ advisor, must recruit to her cause a young Barbara Gordon, for the aid…

Have you ever asked yourself why cats, and black cats especially, seem prone to keeping witches as companions? It's a fascinating question, and it turns out witches and cats have been drawn to each others for millennia. Cats are not the only ones, of course: the following image is the cover of The Discoverie of Witches, published in 1647. It shows Matthew Hopkins, self-proclaimed "Witch Finder Generall", incel extraordinaire and criminal agains humanity, in the process of investigating two…

Jacob Coxon's "whistleblowing" is a grift. The Hugging Face hack by OpenAI was because of horrendously and likely intentionally bad security practices and would have landed anyone else in prison. More real people are pushing back on data centers than even before. More companies are realizing that AI costs too much despite being massively subsidized, is horribly inefficient and even now, still largely produces shit results. To boot, open weight and open source models that cost far less to run…

Recent discourse from major AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic has increasingly centered on the existential threat posed by super-intelligent AI. These organizations are grappling with the daunting task of ensuring that a super-intelligence - an entity with cognitive capabilities far exceeding our own - remains “aligned” with human values. And sure, when a random job hopping employee gets prime time for claiming there's a 10% risk of human extinction within a few years what do you expect?I'm…

What's your favourite game you've played so far this year? Doesn't have to have been released in 2026, just whatever you played that you liked most.

For a discography as long and deep as The Cure’s, there’s surely going to be some missed gems but I’m quite surprised I’d never heard their 2001 single, “Cut Here” before it showed up in my algorithm recently. Okay, maybe not that shocking – I can’t say that I was paying much attention to The […] The post The Cure – “Cut Here” appeared first on Space Echo.

Here I list my favorite four new features for the upcoming Python 3.15 release. -- Read More

I’ve written three posts on cosine similarity lately. The first looked at interpreting cosine similarity. The second looked at an approximation related to the first. The third looked at how ranking according to cosine similarity works better than cosine similarity itself. Normalized word vectors are points on a high dimensional sphere, and geometry in high dimensions is counterintuitive. See the first post in this series for an explanation. The set of points within a given angular distance of a…

Likes H5P Community Day Sydney: Better Learning Together by H5P. The free event brought the H5P community together for a day of practical examples, product updates, thoughtful discussion and networking. Across the sessions, one message came through clearly: effective digital learning is not about adding more technology. It is about using the right tools with clear learning intentions. H5P is one of the features of Glow Blogs I’d like to see more of. I used it a lot, in the most simple of ways,…

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 53: Thinking back to the first year of the war, Hilde became almost wistful: “We had a lot of fun, and danced in bars like the Eden and the Roxy. Hans played jazz music when he was in a good mood. It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends. But then we had to walk through the dark streets to the S-Bahn…. That was not such fun.” The poet Jochen Klepper, who would later commit…

ADVANCED STEALTH BAT G.I. JOE AND THE TRANSFORMERS (COLLECTOR’S CLUB) “OLD SNAKE’s first attempt to harness a strength similar to the AUTOBOTS, that he once tried to capture, resulted in varied results. The hulking robot of Old Snake’s creation truly did possess brute force as well as great intelligence, however, the interference from former GENERAL CLAYTON “HAWK” ABERNATHY and the EARTH DEFENSE COMMAND caused the loss of any semblance of control over SERPENT O.R. Not willing to commit the same…

Goodness! 13 books reviewed in a month (nine in this installment alone!) is a record—perhaps never to be repeated. On the other hand, we're glad we did, for there are sweet treats to sample… by Jason Sacks Gather in the Hall of the Planets, by "K.M. O'Donnell" (Barry N. Malzberg) In which Mr. Malzberg kvetches … Continue reading [September 16, 1971] In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories (Galactoscope #2 for the month) → The post [September 16, 1971] In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories…

—John Garvey

Justine and Pablo offered "Hitschies" at Justine's party. I'd never tried them before, and they were delicious. Delicious enough for me to get weak and buy myself a whole pack. I really shouldn't have sweets at home because I know I can't control myself around them. I'm pretty good at controlling myself when it comes to not buying stuff I don't want to consume, though. So this was kind of a rare lowlight in my culinary adventures.

I really love the front cover design for Taipei Story though I’ll say the typeface used is a bit plain. The jacket design is by Ploy Siripant. Jacket and digital edge illustrations by Whooli Chen/Central Illustration Agency. But their Chinese was no better and no worse than mine. I had also used the Integrated Chinese textbook. I, too, knew Wang Peng. We were on the same itinerary so that we could fill in the same gaping lack, and the only thing that would resolve this was the passage of…

Ahmad Shadeed explains how to vertically align an icon with the first line of text, even when the text wraps.

In 1996, a corporate chief executive could sign a purchase order for $40-a-seat Netscape Navigator licenses, install the software across thousands of office desktops, and proudly inform the board of directors that the company was now an internet-native enterprise.It was a golden era for shrink-wrapped software. Enterprise customers routinely wrote six-figure cheques so their staff could browse the World Wide Web, while retail shoppers walked into high-street electronics stores to buy cardboard…

I don't believe anything coming out of frontier model CEOs mouths. Their stakes are extremely high, and they have incentives measured in $ trillions to lie, blow out of proportion, or hide information. We are in the middle of a misinformation war. Assume everyone is lying.

Danmei Web Novel Review: Qiang Jin Jiu by Tang Jiu QingThe StoryThe novel opens with 16 year old Shen Zechuan imprisoned. He’s being tortured and interrogated about his father's actions. The man may have betrayed the Kingdom. While commanding an army Shen Wei retreated several times in a row. They say that he didn’t defend his post and that the manner in which he retreated was improper. This made it easy for the invading force to rampage through the country killing both civilians and troops…

The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing. We are likely to see LLMs integrated into every part of computing as infrastructure, not just as a product, in the next year or two. We are likely to see LLMs running locally at current frontier-quality on commodity hardware in the next 3-6 years. Starting very soon, we are likely to see quality and access become the limiting factor to AI 1 use, not sheer number of…

I've been wanting to run Tegel Manor for a few years now, I keep thinking of it as a Halloween one-shot, but that just never panned out. So instead I am running it for my partners and their kid, as our previous family game, Copperopolis, kind of died out months back. Since I did not want to deal with rulesets and since the kid struggles with them anyway, we are doing Primeval 2d6, or something of that ilk. Inspired by reading about Havoc's Arden Vul Weasels game. Each of the players get 3…

Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Justinian I (482 - 565) saw a tumultuous week in 532. The catalyst was a little earlier, when in 531 the city prefect, Eudaimon, arrested some citizens in connection with deaths that took place after a chariot race.As we see today in the USA, after an intense sporting event there may be brawls that take place between fans of the opposing teams. From Ancient Rome to the time of which I speak (and beyond), the supporters of chariot-racing teams were very…

If it annoys you, automate it!

Poketcg-art is doing a TCG redraw event for every Pokemon generation and I have been waiting for the Unova slots to open just so I can do a TCG redraw of my beautiful baby girl DARUMAKA! Original card by Tomowaka Click to reveal original card

This morning, I came across an article which the official Hackaday fediverse account linked yesterday: "Rosy Retrocomputing." And... no hate. Albert has a good point. As much as I enjoy the rosy-colored glasses myself, there are some real pain points to retrocomputing, or as we called it when I was growing up, "computing." 😄 If you don't believe me, download the original Commodore VIC-20 manual here and pop open the VICE emulator in VIC-20 mode in another window (or run this lightweight…

Sugar gliders may look like someone crossed a mouse with a flying squirrel and then equipped it with enormous night-vision goggles, but these remarkable little mammals are neither rodents nor squirrels. They are marsupials—pouched mammals belonging to the order Diprotodontia and the family Petauridae.The true sugar glider, Petaurus breviceps, lives in the forests and woodlands of eastern

A pair of short films connected more by technique than content, being playful arrangements of stock footage accompanied by music. A Movie (1958) was the first film made by artist Bruce Conner, and is usually described as being one of the first films to draw attention to the medium itself. Film-makers have been foregrounding film techniques since the silent days but Conner pulls apart established conventions: putting title cards in the wrong place, mixing comic montages with scenes of real death…

If you’re one of those people who gets irritated by the specter of pumpkin spice — or, gasp, Halloween decor — on an 85-degree week in September; if you understand that there are what will feel like infinite months left to spend shivering and longing for stew, and there’s no reason to beckon them any sooner; if you find yourself gritting out “but there’s another week of summer!” at your screen when confronted with ads for wool coats and other things you simply refuse to acknowledge before you…