Update while writing: I started thinking about this yesterday, then got to write this post this morning, went to check how itch's dealing with the filtering and, would you look at that, they are already using this idea. I'll still post what I originally wrote and leave it on the internet because, unsurprisingly (maybe), itch is still a niche storefront, so I think the more people talking about this approach, the better. If you don't know what itch.io is, go check it out. I've been reading about…

Really great video from the Rabbit Room on Malcolm Guite and the making of his Arthuriad. I’m looking forward to starting the books soon.

In job ads for news writers, you’ll often see a reference to the ideal candidate having a “fast news metabolism”. It means: How much information can you cram into your eye holes and how quickly can you digest it all into a compact pellet of 400 words? (I apologise for taking the metaphor to its natural conclusion.) The question of whether speed should be the primary objective in science news coverage is beyond the scope of this post. (I will offer that, anecdotally, all my own worst “news…

You have a right to know who’s recording you when you leave home. – Proton Walled Garden (#1652) Australian politicians really believe the laws of Australia apply worldwide and can change reality: Australia’s government [apparently believes it can] sue Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube [into magically circumvent]ing t[he ability of] under-16s [to get around politicians’ attempts to control them]…The lawsuit is yet to be filed, but [a politician bloviated] that the [Lord High…

In October, YouGov published a small-multiple visualisation showing the popularity of regional names for alleyways in the UK. The maps in What else do Britons call an alleyway? are based on survey data. YouGov asked 39,224 Britons which words they personally use to describe an alleyway. The resulting maps show the percentage of people in each county or region who use particular terms.I thought it might be interesting to also map the different words for alleyways that actually appear in street…

How is it November already? It’s definitely getting colder (and wet) which has slowed down my use of the varnish spray, but it hasn’t slowed down other progress. We start this week with Stephen and his wonderful scratchbuilt Quar flyer. Sadly there aren’t any rules for flyers in Clash of Rhyfles yet, but when there are Stephen will be taking to the air. Next up and Mark J has painted up some more German armoured vehicles for an Arnhem game he is putting together. Moving on and Andy has made…

…I was on my way to Nashville here in Indiana and decided to find the Bean Blossom Covered Bridge on the way. That’s the car I drove then, through the bridge’s portals. What I didn’t know yet was that I was about to ascend a steep grade on a road made of loose dirt and gravel. My poor little car struggled and almost didn’t make it! Get more of my photography in your inbox or reader! Click here to subscribe.

New links to interesting stuff elsewhere… Some authors of articles published in philosophy journals are not disclosing that they used AI in writing them — and they should, says Amos Wollen It took a philosopher who was a medical doctor to argue for the social utility of vice. Why? — John Callanan and Blain Neufeld discuss Bernard Mandeville, “the wickedest man in Europe” “The technologies with which we are increasingly interconnected lack the complex interiority required for real intelligence…

"What's wrong with you boys?" My grandmother believed in honest inspection. At Thanksgiving she once pinched my brother's stomach, held the evidence up for the table, and informed him he was getting fat. No one appealed. The ruling stood, and so did the gravy. Then she turned to the larger problem. Three grandsons, and not one girlfriend among us worth setting a place for. "What's wrong with you boys?" she'd ask, as though we might have a theory. She had a point. My oldest brother held out…

Taken on the 1st and 3rd of October, 2026 City of Xi'An 西安, Shaanxi province

Share a track that has one of your favorite vocal performances of all-time. Took me a while to decide on a track for his prompt. Aretha Franklin was my immediate thought, I have a live album of hers that is just amazing. Her range, her control, and the power of her voice, always gets my emotions running. Eddie Vedder is another favourite voice, bringing me to tears when I saw them live and they opened with Release, his voice building and building… wow. But this track popped up in a playlist of…

Life Half term. Ηη went to a club that he seemed mostly happy with. Αα didn’t give us too too much of a hard time (bum worms notwithstanding). Darek and Wojcek failed to deal with the standing water in the bath and a drainage expert was engaged. The drainage guy’s first words were, “This looks like it’s just been bodged together”, thus confirming our suspicions that Darek isn’t a particularly good plumber. I’m hoping we can get an actual plumber to fix what needs fixing but I’m not relishing…

Here’s a TTRPG play-culture axiom I have been thinking about and consciously using, recently:Factions / characters whose values align with the values of your players should be caricatures. Factions / characters whose values clash with the values of your players should be presented with nuance.This balances out IRL player inclinations; helps moral conflicts within the game sing; and makes choosing who to side with a meaningful, gameable decision.+For the past year I have been running a playtest…

1991 Allan Phillips Platforms: ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Atari ST Comic Relief is a now-annual charity fundraiser featuring live TV events and, of course, Red Nose Day. Back in the early Nineties it was biannual, and 1991 was Comic Relief year. Intro screen for The Hospital, which was intended as a location for Comic Relief Adventure. At this time, there was a thriving independent adventure scene. Thanks to adventure coding packages such as The Quill, PAWS and Graphic Adventure…

Women’s rights and democracy had a good night in Missouri ✊

Replying to I got one I've been living with a foldable iPhone for more than a week now, and here's a quick list of things I've noticed so far: I love it. Seriously. It's my favorite iPhone in years. It's exciting, interesting, versatile, and just a lot of fun. It's harder to get out of my pocket. Years of muscle memory have trained me to expect my iPhone to be much taller, so now I have to reach a lot deeper into my pocket to get a grip on it. Having the tab bar turn into a sidebar is fine. The…

Mark ValentineJohn HowardPeter BellColin InsoleSarob PressFour ‘all new’ long stories (or novelettes) imbued with the mystery and otherworldliness of place and of landscape – strange, secret, mystical, and ancient.Sarob has been doing these lovely little books for a while now, featuring Mark Valentine and John Howard, who, this time out, are joined by two others, Peter Bell and Colin Insole.Here we have 4 stories themed to the title; Mark's, 'Roman Masks', is a story of a happening and a…

DMS 2.1 Stormborn duxlabs.dev DMS 2.1 "Stormborn" is here, two weeks after 2.0. It adds an interface density setting, the DMS Classic style, a reworked media player and system monitor, video wallpapers, new on-screen displays, Fedora Atomic support in the Dux installer, updates across Dux Files, Dux Calendar, Dux GOP, Dux Search, and Dux Greeter, and deeper niri, Hyprland, and mangowm support. I use DMS on my laptop with CachyOS. I like it a lot, but customized things to be slightly less round.…

I've decided to try to stop judging the extent to which things are good or bad. Many things just "are". There are lists but they're incomplete. I'm cultivating a "numb" attitude, just so I can understand and get by. There's an information pool that may deepen or just drain away. It's a slowly evolving learning process. Apropos next to nothing.When you register a death, you make an online appointment. You pay a small fee with a card and get an order number. At the allotted time, a person with a…

1967 unfinished Napoleonic naval fiction, eleventh and last written and fourth by internal chronology. Hornblower leaves the Hotspur and proceeds back to Plymouth, but as always complications ensue.

Spawn #21 Date: May 1994 Publisher: Image Comics Cover Price: $1.95 2013 Price Range: $1.00 - $9.00 Stats: 22 color pages plus "The Spawning Ground" letters page, Image Info, fan art and ads Story & Art: Todd McFarlane Other Artists: Mark Pennington, Tom Orzechowski and Steve Oliff Notable Notes: Um... low print run? The End of Spawn for Me! Years ago I sold almost all the issues of Spawn that I owned. I only kept 4 issues that I thought might be valuable some day. Over the last few months, as…

Another week, another my mid-life project entry. I. Body Ouch! The joy of having cats is that sometimes they forget they carry weapons and you’re a sensitive, weak human. My hands get so many scars because of them, some of them permanent. II. Objects Egg Over the last 5 years or so, my breakfast has been an egg. Eggs are great: fat, proteins (important when you’re vegetarian), and 0 glucose. They don’t raise your blood sugar, so when you’re diabetic they’re perfect. Well, apart from the fact…

Thoughts on reading: Solnit, R. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. Penguin. Solnit begins this essay with the statement of blue being the “lost light.” A continuation from the first essay. I stopped many times reading to capture my thoughts. I do not intend to quote her verbatim, but to preserve my thoughts as they emerged while reading this beautiful essay. “The lost light,” another concept I never considered. For me, blue was a constant. Puerto Rico is blessed with permanence of cerulean…

Sweet chestnuts give this stuffing a soft, nutty richness, balanced by crisp apple and plenty of sage. Cooking the chestnuts in stock keeps them ... Continue The post Chestnut, apple and sage stuffing appeared first on Eatweeds.

If you want to know what happened in yesterday's midterm elections, you should probably start with The Economist's Swing from 2024 map. The map is paywalled, but the screenshot above tells the story rather well: almost the entire USA (perhaps with the exception of South Dakota) swung towards the Democrats. The Guardian has unpaywalled maps of both the Senate and House results. The House results map is a neat cartogram, in which each House seat is shown as 'the same size regardless of its…

Eine Mesusa am Hauseingang in Antwerpen, dicht gedrängte Grabsteine auf dem Alten Jüdischen Friedhof in Prag oder eine Synagoge zwischen den Einkaufsstraßen von Enschede: Jüdische Spuren in Europa begegnen Dir auf ganz unterschiedliche Weise. Manchmal suchst Du sie gezielt auf. Manchmal entdeckst Du sie unterwegs und möchtest plötzlich mehr über einen Ort und seine Menschen erfahren. Nach unserer Spurensuche in Deutschland führt dieser Beitrag in weitere Länder Europas. Gemeinsam mit anderen…

Double Maths First Thing dislikes fireworks Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in mathematical thinking and practice. This week I am mainly rehearsing my Big MathsJam talk and seeing what I can trim out to get it down to five minutes. In likelihood, I’ll do that and find that it takes three in the end. I’m talking about row 0 of Pascal’s triangle and what its graph looks like. Links Big news from the OEIS: they’ve decided what should be…

...as a blue tsunami swept over America yesterday evening, marking the beginning of the end of the most heinous brand of politics in recent memory. And Michiganders sent the first Muslim to the U.S. Senate. Alhamdulillah!

I have been fascinated by numbers for as long as I can remember. I have very strong memories of enthusiastically solving simple arithmetical problems at the age of four in my first year at primary school. Rushing through each exercise to get to the next one. Later as I got older I would leaf through an encyclopaedia teaching myself to count to ten in different languages. I never lost that fascination and Grahan Flegg’s Numbers: Their History and Meaning (Andre Deutsch, 1983) and the, by him…

6 months ago, I started this blog to lock in and get fit. I'm a skinny female with very little muscle mass and I wanted to dedicate myself to working out consistently and to view strength training as a necessity rather than something to put off. I made a post a few months ago about the first routine I started with. It was a very simple full-body 3x week routine with 3 compound exercises per day. While it did the job, a few months into the routine, I really wanted to get my first push-up, so I…