Bubbles
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This time around the included adventurer’s journal opens with a letter written by an amusingly exasperated man named Rolf, trying to catch up with my party in a well-meant attempt to come to our aid. Our heroic exploits in Pool of...
Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing. A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon....
When you build a storage engine in Go, sooner or later you need to answer a very plain question: “How should the code read bytes from files?” This sounds too low-level to matter. A database has bigger ideas: partitions, blocks, indexes,...
Books fall into different categories. Some are more suitable for reading over the summer than others; it is hard to define exactly what makes a book a "summer read," but I think it involves a combination of storytelling, world-building,...
6th July 2026 Just to let you know about my new Substack for lore and cultural things – that is stuff which is not directly about law and policy. The new substack is called the Busy Town, as opposed to this Empty City blog. My first post...
What makes merino different from many other types of wool is the fineness of its fibres. Finer wool fibres are closely linked with comfort and softness, while the opposite is true for thicker wool fibres. However, wool quality varies...
I was writing about hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor a peculiarly desirable meadow flower parasitic on grasses. Digging a bit revealed that it was part of Family Orobanchaceae. Dang! that rings a bell I thought . . . but a distant one. The...
Some caption I love a good beat 'em up movie. Seeing the protagonist face off against dozens of indistinguist minions as they make their way to their objective. I feel that this movie does a great job of establishing the story and...
It's hard to believe that it's been close to a dozen years since I reviewed the COME LIVE WITH ME (1941) DVD released by the Warner Archive Collection!In addition to reviewing the DVD, I also previously posted a brief review of the film...
Took the whole crew on a geocaching adventure
JSON is not a good data-interchange format. This article is part of a series called Worse is better, in which I muse on technologies and techniques that became popular despite superior alternatives. Think VHS versus Betamax. In this...
Some notes:The generator is stupid. It won't assign a color or colors, so mentally replace the "M"s in its casting cost and activated abilities with whatever makes sense. It won't designate creatures as artifacts or legendary, so use...
Got up at 9.30 a.m. The wind is still cold. Nell went to Neston and got a doll’s cot for Jane. I went to see Cyril in the afternoon. Busy working on his house.
On Saturday we woke up passing the Westermsnn islands - parsley populated volcanic rocks to the south of the Icelandic mainland. Dramatic wildlife havens for the main part. As these receded into the distance life on the ship settled into...
...is Deep Sea Adventure, by Oink Games. It's an extremely simple, extremely short game, where players choose how much of a shared resource to risk in order to gain individual rewards. It's not quite "prisoner's dilemma: the game," but...