...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…

In the last few weeks, the kids have been kids again — and were driving me up the walls with their shenanigans. They are 6 and 4, a fact my brain tends to ignore when I call them out on their bullshit. God, I wish they were older.1 And sometimes I wish they were more like me. And then again, sometimes I wish they were a bit less like me. Ultimately I want them to be better than me. I’m alright with what I’ve achieved and I’ve found my place in society, but I had to go through some tough times…

Outlier: "A person or thing, away or detached from the prevalent bodies or systems." Recently, a fellow Bear-writer post conveyed and explained that ubiquitous doesn't mean required. I will simply add to it. Outliers will always exist. It's a feature of Life to not put all its eggs in the same basket. Outliers often thrive in ways that the people who inhabit the bell curve don't see or understand. In any community, good and sustainable changes almost always come from outliers, very rarely from…

In early October I watched the new beers arrive on the Craft Central website and counted 17 variants on pale ale in the chronological list before there was something else. That something else was Into The Abyss, a Festbier by Whiplash. Sold! It boasts of decoction, which is a nice piece of beer nerdery, whatever you think of the process itself. 5.8% ABV is a proper feisty Festbier strength, and there's an edge of amber darkness about the colour. It smells rich and wholesome, the cake-like malt…

Vertical tabs are becoming ubiquitous, and they’re coming to Safari in the next update, so my decision to stick with it will soon pay off. Can’t wait.Now, if only we could get rid of those ugly bubbly buttons, I’d be happy. 🔗 https://iamgregb.io/blog/ios-27-3-and-macos-27-3-add-vertical-tabs-adaptive-dark-mode-and-more-to-safari

The early web was a playground. We hacked table layouts, sliced images, and spent hours on rounded corners. The tools were limited, but we made things anyway. Constraints fueled our creativity. That spirit is the web's most important legacy. In this talk, we'll trace an arc from Netscape-era hacks to modern web techniques, showing how creative abuses of technology can become the standards of the era. Along the way, we'll push today's newest features in ways they probably weren't designed for.…

November 4, 2026 Our heroine spends a lot of time looking at her favorite painting – obviously! One day, she shared it with one of her closest friends… STRETCHING THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR PALETTE “I recognize all of the soft, muted colors that you usually wear. But have you ever considered wearing that copper color that’s tucked up against the trunk of the tree on the left?” Well… This is our heroine’s current wardrobe and accessories. Muted is definitely the way I would describe it! Her friend’s…

The people finally had enough- and it sure took more than long enough!!! Wish I could say they finally saw the evil in all this and commenced toward the light, but it was little more than their own screamin' pocketbooks, alone and at the mercy of their favorite six bankruptcy "businessman." Will the Dems now make the most of it and fight back as hard and bare knuckled as anything goes, no rules MAGA? Or will they go into the business as usual, try and get along mode they concede to so…

Michael Grabowski asked after a possible comic book adaptation of the 1980s Dune movie, which had featured Sir Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Gurney Halleck. And yes indeed there was! Marvel published Marvel Super Special #36: …which was also reprinted in a three-issue mini-series: In case you were wondering, that is indeed Bill Sienkiewicz art on the covers, and his art is on the inside as well (with script by Ralph Macchio). To wit — this page with Stewart’s character on display: Here are a…

I have a small batch of 120-format slides that leave something to be desired; usually the larger size means that you also get a sharper image, but these are a bit soft. And the color is weird! But all in all they're still OK, really. This first one is oddly-composed - the photographer didn't point the camera at the passing monorail or nuclear submarine, but more toward the Monorail station in the distance. These were undated, but one of the slide shows the Douglas Moonliner, and the round…

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)

There are few directors alive who have spent more time in Shakespeare’s rehearsal rooms than Gregory Doran. After a lifetime inside these plays, culminating in his tenure leading the RSC, it feels entirely fitting that his Romeo and Juliet for Bristol Old Vic Theatre School begins not in Verona but in a rehearsal room. A floor marked out with tape. Costume pieces waiting to be claimed. Young actors circling one of the most famous stories ever written, trying on characters in the same way they…

Back in 2017, I discovered the work of Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, a Russian author from the 1800s who was well known and respected in her time but had fallen completely out of view. She was one of three sisters sometimes considered the Russian Brontes, and I reviewed her “City Folk and Country Folk” for Shiny New Books in a lovely Columbia University Press Russian Library edition. The story of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters is fascinating, and I must admit I was intrigued, as well as being keen to see…

Here is how to make any sports fan angry. Basketball is just a bunch of grown men bouncing a ball and throwing it into a basket. Football is a bunch of grown men running on grass trying to kick a ball into a net, yes that football. And baseball... Oh boy, baseball. I've used these lines many times to piss people off and to justify my complete lack of athletic feats. But the counter-argument I always get is that football is a multi-billion-dollar industry, or that a specific player makes more…

I wanted to add some whimsy to my blog, and what better way to do that than pretend like it's the mid 2004 and this is MySpace. At various times of the year, my blog will now apply some additions to the theme. hope it makes you smile! The themes 🐣 Easter (Good Friday – Easter Monday): hunt for the eggs like in Stardew Valley! 🐟 April Fools: no spoilers! 🎃 Halloween (24–31 October) 🎆 Bonfire Night (1–5 November): active now! 🎄 Christmas (1 December – 6 January) How it works The theme is picked…

Just amazing.

This post will focus mainly on Composer 2.5 in Cursor. These problems may not be present in opus-5.5 or gpt-6.1-sol-pro-max-ultra-thinking-fast. But gpt-6.1-luna, for example, has all the problems listed here. I’ve also encountered many of these problems before in gpt-5.5 and opus-4.6. I don’t know whether they’re present in the newer AI models released recently.What I like about Composer 2.5: its usage limits and speed.For comparison, let’s take two $20 subscriptions, one for GPT and one for…

I've written about Impairing in Mythic Bastionland, but what's the plan with this tricky little mechanic in Intergalactic? Well first let's go back to the start.Impaired was born in Into the Odd as a catchall mechanism to make somebody's attacks worse, reducing their attack to a mere d4 damage. Its opposite was Enhanced, which increases the attack to d12 damage. There are a few key points that make it a good fit for Into the Odd:Attackers generally roll a single die in combat, with most weapons…

I finally stopped lazying around and decided to create a new theme a try. I didn’t want to create a new theme on this site with the risk of destroying things in the process, so I decided to create a new test site on my Hostinger account free of charge. These are the tools that I’ve been using: Plugin: Create Block Theme Plugin: FakerPress Since I don’t have any plan to put this theme out there for the public/WPORG theme repository, I’m using pictures and gifs that I got from Tumblr. Basically,…

PAYROLL (1961) is a very good new-to-me heist film which is part of the Brit Noir Collection III from Kino Lorber.Johnny Mellors (Michael Craig) and his gang of three other men (Tom Bell, Barry Keegan, and Kenneth Griffith) plot with Dennis Pearson (William Lucas) to steal the payroll from the factory where Pearson has an office job.The factory has just started using a special armored truck to transfer the money from the bank to the company, but that doesn't stop Johnny, who engineers a brutal…

Why would read a book about the Camino de Santiago when you can go it yourself GIY? Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Why start a Blob with rhetorical questions? I was that desperate for e-reading and earbooking material on Borrowbox that I downloaded To Walk the Way - One Pilgrim's Camino (2026) by Mike Timms. I did not take it because Timms is a retired Director of the Centre for Disability Studies at University College Dublin and lives in Bray Co Wicklow. But there were nevertheless a few…

Just read Welcome Home, Debian by Thoughts of Widdershins, and thought I could write a bit about my distro of choice. Believe it or not, but I am quite tech interested as well. You might also be able to tell that I'm more interested in the backend side of things based on how bare this page is. I've been runing Linux in some capacity for the last ten years, and I've run it singlehandedly for the last five. I've never been much of a distrohopper, I started with Mint, dabbled with Ubuntu, went…

Arriving at the end of steel where the ribbons meet the sea and embraced by the mountains of the most familiar of islands will forever be a tonic for the restless soul…Where models transcend their origins and help us paint a picture that evokes such emotion - Lochdubh exists in the curious dreamlike state between miniature and model railway. Its trains moved only by my hand but its ability to move me goes beyond the physical movement of electric motor driven models along nickel silver track……

For the Daily Dish on Day 4 of Noirvember 2026, I’m taking a look at Favorite Uncommon Noir Performer. What does this mean, you may ask? It’s those actors and actresses who made a mark in noirs, but who you don’t normally think of when you think of film noir. You know, like Mickey Rooney or Marilyn Monroe or James Stewart. I’m going to go with Esther Williams, who turned her skills as a champion swimmer into a successful Hollywood career, becoming the queen of MGM’s lavish aquatic musicals in…

It went better than we thought.Certainly, my predictions -- which still had Democrats taking back the House and Senate! -- were far too conservative.The final tallies are still in the air. But even with what we know so far -- boy howdy.Democrats don't just win the Texas Senate seat -- they win essentially every contested statewide race there is. Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Railroad Commissioner, four Supreme Court seats -- it's a wrecking ball.Ohio? Flipped. South Carolina?…

There’s a fundamental gap in C++ that trips up everyone who reaches for it: you can’t pass a constexpr value through a function boundary and have it remain constexpr on the other side. The value is known at compile time, the function is constexpr, but the parameter inside the function body is not a constant expression. This forces workarounds - template parameters, tag types, std::integral_cons...

This morning I read “Slow Living” post from Requiem. I never considered this. Me as a child and now watching my own grow, expecting fast learning. Now 40, I think about the many years it has taken me to properly read, write, draw with colour, speak fluent Dutch, interact with strangers, even think... A journey to reshape myself since I was 23. I began to pass time, try things, some stuck, some did not; but in the end I'm the result of slow deliberate and constant effort. I also knit and skate,…

There for the Crimbo and New Year months so lets explore undenting the universe plus moving slow and fixing things. Even though it’s a family / friends focused trip am open to the usual creative collaborations in the following arenas: FIRESIDE.RS WORKSHOP From my new venture fireside.rs, which focuses on unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively. This unique offering is a 90min workshop designed around the simple idea that how we gather matters, and as been delivered…