The Hideous Summer
robert-levin
When you call your dog Maureen you're asking for trouble.
Reflecting Pools
Audrey Watters
Just a short newsletter this week, full of links to others' writing – apologies. Ideologies:Fred Turner argues in The Baffler that the California Ideology, as articulated by Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron in their famous 1995 essay, is no longer central to Silicon Valley hegemony. Instead,...
The Storyteller of Hamelin
robbycharters
Artizan – Organic Notte Forte
Alvin Bunk
Introduction This is a review of the Organic Notte Forte compostable coffee capsule for Nespresso Original Line machines made by Artizan Coffee out of Florida. The Notte Forte uses robusta beans from Guatemala, as well as arabicas from Brazil and Colombia. Each capsule has 90mg of caffeine when...
CURSO. Aprende a vivir mejor con menos
miquel-tort
"Aprende a vivir mejor con menos" es un curso diseñado para ofrecer ideas y herramientas concretas para cambiar hábitos y prepararnos para el futuro que viene, dentro de los límites del planeta. El curso propone un recorrido para comprender el decrecimiento, revisar nuestro consumo y alimentación, y transformar la manera en que nos movemos, trabajamos y organizamos nuestro tiempo.
Myth vs History: An approach to the worldbuilding in fantasy literature
mercedesdesantiago
The first thing is to distinguish between myth, legend, and history, because defining their meanings will allow us to better understand what we intend to achieve by building our world.
STQK: EP.8 (Duck..Duck..Goose..)
ancientshell
New to the ongoing blog series called STQK "Would you like to know more?" Hello there, We continue with the next episode in the Suldokar's Wake system. (Content Warning: Violence, Gore, Traumatic Events, Alcohol) Scene 1 The drones fly overhead getting a clear image of the intruders to the...
Offboarding
Nat
I can think of a number of times that Peanuts storybooks have been converted into board books, often with some shortening and simplification. And I can think of once or twice that the stories from board books have been included inside non-board anthologies of stories. But I can’t think of any case...
Highschool was the worse
Saturn
I would do a lot of things to be able to go to high school 10 years earlier. There are a lot of things I would sacrifice to be able to go to high school without the existence of instagram, tiktok, mobile smartphones. Having now taken the full step to not just delete the instagram app, which I did...
Nuclear fusion is in trouble
Sabine Hossenfelder
Normal
strongest
A message from the street to add a bit of perspective to our lives. Is the message trite? Perhaps, but a reminder is often necessary when the world narrows our vision. The traffic cone adds a new level of context as “under construction” is often a permanent condition. Chelsea, Manhattan.
What the Telemeter Measures
sergiogalanti
The outermost scale on Angelus’s new triple-function instrument was built to measure approaching danger. Fifty examples exist. None will ever measure anything.
Plot is fine, I guess
Andrea Badgley
When I think about the books and stories I appreciate most, the ones that really stick, plot is not typically the key feature. It has happened more than once that I’ve talked up a novel I love to someone, and they pick it up, get bored, and say, “Nothing happens in this book.” This is true of...
Touched by Creation Part 2: Never By Creation
tjschanaman
Sherwood Week: A jest of Robin Hood
Hunter Allen
ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS1993Directed by Mel BrooksWritten by Evan Chandler, J. David Shapiro, and Mel BrooksSpoilers: still inapplicableAs hard as it might be to comprehend today, for I do not comprehend it myself, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves really was a big deal; and, were we chasing down a...
Hellboy & B.P.R.D. – La Nuit du Cyclope Version Originale
Scott VanderPloeg
A comprehensive look into the art process of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Night of the Cyclops. This was a 32 page comic published by Dark Horse Comics in 2022. For this signed and numbered deluxe edition we have the full colour comic in French, followed by the complete scans of original art along...
What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
Ankur Sethi
Among tech and design folks of a certain vintage, there is a fondness for the design language used by Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.While you could argue that this is mere nostalgia, I've always thought there is more to it than that. The Windows 95 UI was famously the result of...
The Tyrant's Hand
Unknown
The Ruins of Fantasy Every fantasy RPG world I know, or more certainly every one I want to run a dungeon crawl game in is filled with huge ruins. Above ground, underground … that’s just an aesthetic choice… The question always comes up though about the source of these ruins. Why is a usually...
A Barbarian in San Silibia: Intro
adventuringalone
A Visit to San Silibia is a journaling game by Jimmy Shelter (itch.io), where the player roleplays a visitor chronicling their time in the mysterious fantasy city named San Silibia. San Silibia is described as a city that is not found on any map, both a part of and distinct from our world. Over...
Blue trucks
J D Lowe
It's a small detail of course, but in my memory of the Pillsbury hoppers, if the truck side frames weren't blue as on the real ones I saw back in the '70s, then, well, it just wasn't right. After a little bit of colour matching, Vallejo Model Color Royal Blue 70.809 seemed to be the best match....
Summary: Breakneck - China's Quest To Engineer The Future
Ashish Bhatia
Explore how the US is run by lawyers, and faces challenges in innovation compared to China’s engineering-driven governance.Lawyer run state of the US The top decision makers in China have an engineering background. The US, on the other hand, is run by lawyers. Policy issues that are...
Thesis ~ The Strangest of All Attractors || Ch. 2, Pages 48-59
robotkinz
I went pretty hard on this one, and it's difficult to say if I'm happy about it. But it is what it is. I'm not changing it. Hell I've probably read and re-read this chapter so many times, I could just vomit. But I do think that this is a pivotal moment of sorts. This is more of a matter of not knowing what the bottom of the barrel looks like until you hit it. Only then can one find the will to change their situation in life. Reader discretion is advised.
Contemplating Eternity
stefanawakening
Old Hurst Zoo Incident: Police Confirm “White British” Suspect Due to Misinformation
Richard Bartholomew
From BBC News: A three-year-old boy critically injured in a zoo enclosure was attacked by a crocodile, the BBC understands. Cambridgeshire Police said a 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder had been bailed and was “unfit for interview”. He reportedly has learning disabilities...
The Quiet Loneliness of Being the Only One Working on the Relationship
beyondborders
There is a particular loneliness that comes when you are the only one actively working on a relationship. You care deeply and put in effort, while the other person seems content to keep things as they are. Here is how we can move through this with honesty and gentleness.
Stationarica Haulographica & Hobbies within Hobbies.
EI3LH
Yo dawg, I heard you like hobbies… Amateur radio is a bit of an oddity as a hobby. I mean, we’re not odd – much as those peering in from the outside may like to think we are. Rather, as a hobby it’s a bit like a Matryoshka Doll, containing hobbies within hobbies within hobbies […]
Activate Gemma 4 MTP
alper
Update llama first, tried with llama b9704 llama serve -m "..\gemma-4-12B-it-qat\gemma-4-12B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf" --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 2 --spec-draft-model "..\gemma-4-12B-it-qat\mtp-gemma-4-12B-it.gguf" Using MTP increases performance from 10 to 14.8 tokens per second....
Why be good?
A Good Reed Review
By Ande Jacobson I’ve long held that it doesn’t take faith for somebody to be good, or more to the point, to be a good person. What exactly is a good person though? Realistically a good person is one who treats others with respect and who sees beyond their own nose striving to do what … Continue...
Analysing 119,624 Musk Duck records on DuckDB
bencology
The Musk DuckFor starters it's a really cool duck. The Musk Duck or Biziura lobata, is a large aquatic duck found across southern Australia. They get their name from producing a strong odour from a gland on the rump. They have ashy, grey-brown plumage and a fan tail, that aids in their...
Our Collective Bike Shed Moment
Murat
In 1957, Parkinson postulated his "Law of Triviality" using a fictitious committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. The reactor design gets 10 minutes because nobody understands it, so nobody argues. The bike shed gets 45 minutes because everyone has opinions about the paint color.I feel...
Face, Fingers, and Feet: On Exposure and Coverage
michelleray70
Red Shouldered Hawk
ben
It was getting pestered by a couple of other birds flying too fast for identification, which only seemed to mildly bother it.
The appearance of wisdom
barelydiscernible
A, who waited up. The Greeks had one word, pharmakon, for both a medicine and a poison. The cure and the thing that kills you, named the same. Plato uses it in the Phaedrus, in a story Socrates says he heard secondhand, when he gets to the invention of writing. An old Egyptian god named Theuth...
Bobby Prince has died
ClassicHasClass
Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional...
Raging Blasters | Normal 1CC | PC
bcengine
I got my Normal mode 1CC in Terarin's Raging Blasters tonight. Really excellent game! Quickly became one of my favorite shmups I've played so far. It took me about four days of practice, and I loved that I could tell I was getting better and learning the stages. I had a pretty bad run where I was...
Last call
Adam
Surrounded by the plastic and newsprint that kept it over the winter, this 2025 GoldRush apple proved still good to eat in June of 2026. ¶ As things turned out, my eyes were bigger than my stomach when I squirreled away a score of these apples last fall to eat in...
Friday Talking Points -- It's Obvious Who Won This War
Chris Weigant
It's pretty easy to see who won Donald Trump's war of choice with Iran -- and who lost. All you have to do is look at the deal both sides just signed, which is obviously heavily tilted in Iran's favor. In fact, it is pretty much impossible to claim otherwise -- to claim that somehow the U.S. won...
CPU-bound sysbench on a large server: Postgres 12 to 19 beta1
Mark Callaghan
This has results from sysbench on a small server with Postgres versions 12 through 19 beta1. Sysbench is run with high concurrency (40 connections) and a cached database. The purpose is to search for changes in performance.Postgres remains boring, it is hard to find performance regressions.tl;dr...
Bonfires in the Dark: Ritual, Science, and AI. The Interfaces We Live By.
Bartosz Lenart
Old ritual was not bad science but a coordination layer running under hard constraints. A look at how ritual, science, and AI each carry the work of building a world model and binding a community.
Automating Firefly III budgeting
Frederik Baerentsen
I have been running Firefly III for personal budgeting for a while now. It is a solid self-hosted finance manager, but the wife-approval-factor is pretty low thanks to its double-entry bookkeeping system. The thing that bothered me most was this: importing transactions from the bank leaves you...
IndieWebClub #28
Ankit Gadiya
Today's session was led by Jatan where we discussed what is the most basic requirement for a blog. These are my notes about the session.
Fly over your city and watch it look after itself
Ahmed Nadar
A city looks after itself in a thousand small acts nobody sees. A drain gets cleared. A burnt-out light comes back on. A pothole somebody reported on a Tuesday is gone by Friday. It happens around you all the time, and almost none of it is visible to the people it happens for. I built something...
MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge
Yossi Frenkel
I’ve been accepted to read for a Master of Philosophy in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and will be joining Corpus Christi College as a corpuscle! I’ve been wanting to return to study for a good while now and it’s very exciting to see it materialise! At all inflection...
2026 Week 25 Digest
anarchaeopteryx
I'm sick and grumpy about it, been watching a lot of soccer and playing a lot of Zelda, plus mysteries and links. I am unfortunately sick again. Some sort of sinus / head cold / throat irritation / cough thing started on Monday and has just continued to be awful in new and exciting ways every day...
My 11ty experiment has turned into a time travel story
Mark Rogers
I took another stab at creating an 11ty site, and this time succeeded. Not only that, but I’ve decided to grow the Neocities blog I made into a work of fiction complete with story and character arc. There are many 11ty tutorials, but the one that caught my eye was this one from Flamed Fury: Create...
#FYIF
everything benbrown
DEAR INTERNET, Somehow it is already the middle of June. I am having some issues processing that information. It is hot as hell in Texas. We are one week into our new timeline where all of humanity has always ever and only ever worked on our singular goal of making it possible for Elon to fuck in...
further and further
Susan Stepney
Another day, and the moon and Venus are even further apart.Venus just visible on the far right. Photo taken with a Pixel 10 camera; 22:14 BSTThis time we were ready with the SeeStar telescope, although, of course, it couldn't get both in the same frame! The moon looks better with the right focus...
No hero worship in this 'Robin Hood'
Robert Denerstein
There's revisionism, and then there's revisionism writ so large that its undermining of expectation becomes a distraction. That's how I felt about director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood, a movie that shreds the Robin Hood myth while asking us to acknowledge the gulf between reality...
Fixing the cgit configuration of git.slackware.nl
alienbob
In an earlier article here on the blog, I documented how I have setup cgit to create a browseable web interface to my git repositories, most notably git.liveslak.org and git.slackware.nl. That configuration has worked just fine for years, and you could clone a branch of a repository using the...
Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIb: Officials, Contractors and Professionals
Bret Devereaux
This is the second half of the second part (I, IIa, IIb) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope this will be of great interest to the history nerds out there, I’ve opted to...