I used to think healing would look different. I imagined some major moment where everything suddenly clicked into place. Waking up one morning and realizing I was no longer carrying the weight of the past, overthinking every conversation, no longer replaying old memories, or longer waiting for...
“The future is here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quotation, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, is often used to imply that some lucky few, particularly those surrounded by silicon gadgetry, live in some glorious high-tech promised land; while the rest of us,...
Formal training gives you a framework, but sometimes that framework becomes a cage. If you've ever caught yourself second-guessing a bold instinct because some professor's voice popped into your head, this one's for you.
Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first job and began by using company paper to describe the scrub on the slopes beside a motorway as seen from a car. I never got any further.No doubt the idea was...
A respectable man drinks a potion and becomes a monster. Then the monster starts showing up on his own, uninvited. Hyde was never a separate person. He was Jekyll, convinced he was someone else. "Fine, but that's fiction. A cautionary tale about a chemistry experiment gone wrong." Is it? Consider...
I’ve finally got the line-up of things that will be at the Peanuts shop at Comic-Con… but before I get to that, let me note that my Comic-Con plans have changed, and I will now be there only on Thursday. If anyone wants to mee with me, it can probably be arranged; drop me a line. It looks like...
A check on element placement as the story develops.At this stage of construction I'm adding in scenic details I have in mind, and am checking fit, spacing, and composition as I go along. The layout's so small I don't want a surprise near the end where I find I can't fit in things I want without...
Following the crowd isn’t a valid life philosophy. Plan your retirement accordingly. Learn more in this week’s terrific links. What should your allocation to stocks be in retirement? A Wealth Of Common Sense The best upgrade is realizing you have enough. Seth’s Blog Should you look into a Mega...
It’s been pretty quiet around here for the past couple of weeks. I’ve had my head down, working on projects for the 9-5 gig, and it’s been too goddamn hot to be outside doing much of anything. The dog is going mental because for various reasons she didn’t get a morning walk for most of last week....
It has been a strange and smoke-filled week, including one night that found the sky and the downtown landscape quite apocalyptic, especially as we made our way Thursday to a back alley freight elevator accessed production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in a West Loop art space, which was a whole lot...
Infinite, context-aware generative zoom DYSTALGIA lets you travel infinitely deeper into an image while preserving the meaning of the original scene. Traditional upscalers enlarge existing pixels. DYSTALGIA does something fundamentally […] The post DYSTALGIA : Infinite, context-aware generative...
Well, my impulse purchase of Damien Wilkins's Max Gate turned out to be a good one. Since I last mentioned it, I have finished reading it (at my usual snail's pace), and found it thoroughly enjoyable (apart from a few jarring anachronisms – 'Okay', 'in denial', 'basically'). It's actually the...
A micropoem
If pieces of youbroke pieces of me, and you failed toacknowledge my pain,I will be a different MEto YOU; one you’ve never seenAnd will NEVER seeagain.
When Setting up Stalwart v0.16.x as a Docker container behind a reverse proxy, I ran head-first into one its security features, Autoban. Because every connection to Stalwart goes through Docker, everything seems to come from a single IP address, which at some point will trigger Autoban and add...
For the past two weeks, we've had a solitary ant in the kitchen. I've thought it odd--ants don't usually travel alone.This morning, I'm wondering if it was a scout ant, sent ahead to find a good homestead. This morning, we have ants all over the kitchen.We rarely have bug problems in this house...
sighThere are two miters that slipped by each other. This corner is the worse and the one I had noticed yesterday. It would seem that using my fingers to keep the bottom flush didn't work worth diddly squat.almost perfectThis scrap of pine was left over after making the bandings. It is one frog...
I once believed that home was the place offering the greatest number of possibilities. I now suspect that home may be the place where a man finally stops imagining his life somewhere else.
For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry. His father Jorge Rodolfo Genaro Hopley Woolrich Sandoval...
Captain Harry Phillips, a British officer, is a prisoner of war in a German-controlled hospital in Romania. It’s 1918 and while Germany has gone from near-victory to an unsuccessful Spring Offensive on the Western Front leading to eventual defeat, its army and military intelligence are still...
Muchas personas descubren las ideas del decrecimiento, leen libros, escuchan conferencias o siguen divulgadores, pero terminan preguntándose lo mismo:
¿Qué puedo hacer yo?
A beanfield full in blossom smells as sweetAs Araby or groves of orange flowersBlack-eyed & white & feathered to ones feetHow sweet they smell in mornings dewy hoursWhen seething night is left upon the flowers& when morns sun shines brightly oer the fieldThe bean bloom glitters in the...
The swashbuckling classic THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH (1954) has just been released on Blu-ray by Universal Pictures.I don't use the word "classic" lightly; like Curtis's earlier SON OF ALI BABA (1952), this film is a joy start to finish, '50s era studio entertainment at its best.The movie played...
This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies are recruited, equipped and paid for. In particular, as we’ve seen so far, the structure of...
dynomight recently wrote an article calling for bloggers to state publicly whether and how they use AI. Here are ways I currently use AI in ways that might show up on this blog: I use AI to find papers and explain bits I don’t understand (generally vocabulary), and generally tutor me. I...
Last week, Erin and I were back in Maine to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We had honeymooned on Mount Desert Island and in Boston in 1996, and when a special trip to Portugal seemed too hard to shoehorn into this summer’s busy schedule of Oliver at summer camp, a big landscaping project, and...
I had a comment in a C++ codebase explaining why a particular cast was written the way it was. The comment kept growing… and eventually it was longer than the code it was documenting. So I did what seems like the obvious modern move: I asked Claude.ai to turn it into a blog post I could link to...
I admire them stubborn readers, whose reading goals aren't centered on juggling and finishing as many books as possible but about maintaining focus, one book at a time. I only have a small sample, of course. The few I've met and got to know, it's like they chose a book to read as the one thing to...
Rahm Emanuel has apparently launched his 2028 presidential bid. A wonky story about him appeared prominently in today's Washington Post, on the subject of his ideas for fixing education in America. He also recently tossed out a different provocative idea during a recent speech, which further...
Odds and ends in town today, let's start with a new tick, Flight Club:Behind the modern frontage is an antique-style bar on two floors. Dark woodwork, leather upholstery and even a fake brick arch create a pleasant ambience. The quirky lighting strips add to this.At half one on a Friday there were...
I started the other day berating myself over the time it’s been since my last post. Maybe I’m still exhausted from the Merlin Mustang story – it’s not over yet, by the way – and it’s not like there aren’t more stories in the pipeline… In fact, the current iteration of my schedule includes a...
"To all who come to this happy place, welcome!"Those words were said by Walt Disney on July 17, 1955, and today thus marks the 71st birthday of one of my very favorite places, Disneyland USA.As is the case most years, I was blessed to be able to spend several hours at Disneyland on its anniversary...
Twice in the past year, installing an update from the Arch User Repository (AUR) could have handed your machine to somebody else. In July 2025, three fake browser packages were uploaded which pulled in a remote access trojan (Chaos RAT). They went up on July 16 and were removed on July 18; about...
So I've spent most of the mini-time over the past week building the Armageddon set minis that I want to use for the new (ish) Dark Angels force. I built the Captain, the Ancient, and half of the Intercessor squad. I also started digging through what I have floating around various marine armies in...
I added browser push notifications recently. Then I replied to one of my own posts from my phone, looked at my laptop, and saw nothing. The reply was on the site, everything else worked, like the inbox badge, notification email, etc. Just the browser push notification did not. It's a timing thing....
Your best people aren't lazy, they're just too busy to think. They settle for "good enough" because they have no time to pause. Here's the habit one company built into every single meeting to fix it.
Born Nigel Neill in 1947 in Omagh, Nth Ireland to an English mother and a New Zealand father serving in the British army. His family moved to Christchurch N.Z in 1954 where Sam went to school. He became Sam because there were several Nigels at school, saying “I moved more easily as a Sam”.Sam...
Of course, one of them — the Tom Holland we know better as Spider-Man — has a vested interest. And the other Tom Holland is an enthusiastic classicist, and co-host of my fave podcast, “The Rest is History.” The latter is particularly a fan of The Odyssey, and had been looking forward to Chistopher...
Aye gods what a flick. So much to unpack here and despite the jokes about spoilers for a several thousand year old story — that most of us were taught in school — there will in fact be spoilers in this review. First, I joked with a friend before seeing this movie that if Sir Christopher...
Round 3 ResultsDie Roll: 4 Cards: 4 Diamonds, Queen Spades Prompts: Long Overdue, Letter From a City Official This is a bit of a shorter one this time around. I may update this post with the next entry, I'm not sure yet. Character SheetName: Jon Smithson [x][ ][ ][ ] Day 16: A Letter from the...
Words: Chris ArnsbyJakki Brambles: “Hello, good evening and welcome along to Top of the Pops on BBC1 and you can hear us in stereo on Radio 1FM. Well, it’s an all star line up on tonight’s show. We’re starting off with a lady who’s knocking ‘em dead on both sides of the Atlantic. Will you welcome,...
Erika Tracy is a Los Angeles art star. Just ask her. As played by Olivia Wilde, Erika becomes the driving force in I Want Your Sex, director Gregg Araki's satirical look at a conceptual artist who hires a floundering 23-year-old college graduate (Cooper Hoffman) as a studio assistant. Delighted to...