I’m continuing to buy issues of Comics Buyer’s Guide lethargically whenever a really cheap lot shows up on ebay. (It’s just a strange category of magazine — it really has no discernible value, so it’s not worth the work (for sellers) of putting them up for sale. So you almost only see people who are er somewhat...

I read with interest about the new EU packaging directive the other week — among other things, there’s stuff in there about using as little packaging as possible. That is, the box you ship stuff in shouldn’t be bigger than necessary, which I think most of us will like — I think we’ve all (at some point or another)...

I’ve always had a dream of having a proper workbench — a place where all the tools are in a handy drawer right next to me, and the bench being totally solid and not wobbly at all, and not having to be careful about the surfaces, and being able to just have a place to let half-finished projects just sit there and not...

Music I’ve bought in September. I almost didn’t buy anything this month (after the bumper crop last month). Let’s see… The biggest news is, of course, that Team Dresch have a new album out! Almost 30 years after the previous one! And it’s good! And I finally got around to buying the new Charli XCX album. And… I love...

Yes, exactly — it’s “Green Birds”! Ordering this fabric sample has really helped me with my decision as to whether to buy this fabric to use as curtains here, Svenskt tenn. Thanks! A lot! (This is what the fabric looks like if you’re not only interested in the birds’ legs. Perhaps they assumed that I was a bird leg...

I get annoyed with something, and then I go “I’ll buy/build this gadget, and that will make me less annoyed”. Which is true — I’ll be using the gadget for a while and almost every time I use it I’ll think “well, this really fixed that annoyance”. Success! But then the gadget invariably breaks down, and I have to fix...

So for about fifteen years this has been my TV/movie watching sitch — I’m over here, and the computer that plays the stuff is over there *points at bookcase*. And I control this with this handy li’l keyboard. Now, when I first started this thing, I went through about half a dozen keyboards until I found this one....

I knew I had a Google Maps API key in a Microsoft Github repository publicly viewable, so I’ve been meaning to rotate it. Since 2017. Procrastination, eh? But it didn’t really seem that urgent because I had a $10 spending limit on the key, so eh whatevs — I have more important things to do. Like washing my hair!...

It’s the one to the right. But it didn’t work! It’s a mystery. Can you pinpoint the subtle problem? It’s subtle! The most shocking thing is that the bulb was made in Germany (a company called Ledvance).

I love this — this is what I’ve always been thinking, but said better: What’s important is what’s on the page (the prose with novels, the art and prose with comics), and the rest of the stuff is merely secondary. Which is why I find 97.4% of reviews so frustrating — they talk almost exclusively about plot,...

I was reading an old short story by Byatt yesterday, and I came across this — which is totally correct. It’s not that the people in the “Scandinavian North” (i.e., the north of Norway) are better at English per se — far from it — but the prosody of the dialects matches up with English much better than the sing-song...