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Humor, honesty, and kindness. Those are the character traits I value most in my fellow human beings. Funny, honest, and kind. That's how I, and those who knew him, would describe my dad. Today marks three years since he passed away. Even though it feels sad that he's no longer with us, it's with joy and warmth that I remember him. Thank you for everything, world's best dad ♥️
I have seen all kinds or people in all kinds of ways, both sick and deceived and lost, searching, waiting, and hoping that somehow the answers to their questions will either come to light or be left elsewhere and unobjectionable.I have watched good people undergo changes and become so unrecognizable in either a more spiritual or physical sense and in the end, they died as someone else to me.I spent too much time searching for a cure. And no.I am not alone. I spent what...
I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm surprised: the weather was spectacular, with fierce vertical rain, lurid sheet lightning, earth-shaking thunder, and the lower-lying parts of Beacon Park under water. And that morning onslaught wasn't the end of it – back it came in the...
Matt Moring of Steeger Books posted on Facebook this morning that Will Murray died earlier this week. Will was 73. I’m in shock. Will had been a staple of pulpdom since at least the early 1970s. His was one of the first names I saw among those writing about the pulps and pulp characters at […]
I have posted about a few literary societies here and felt a post on several of these would be a good idea. By “literary society,” I mean a group of fans of a particular author or character who have come together in an organization that publishes a journal and/or newsletter, possibly organizes meetings, and maybe […]
I was rather surprised by this statue in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The work, made in 1873 by Howard Roberts, a native of Philadelphia, seems an odd way to represent Hypatia of Alexandria, the fifth-century Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. It hardly looks like a jacket picture for the author of a commentary on Diophantus’s 13 volume Arithmetica, or on Apollonius of Perga’s treatise on conic sections. Strikes me as more of a “Hello...
Back in June I posted a couple of real-time updates about how our truck’s front frame broke after a fuel stop, leaving the truck sitting at a service road intersection, with our coach dragging the bumper and tow base plate. This blog is usually a couple of months behind real-time, and now the posts have caught up with that and are back home after that incident. So this seems a good opportunity to recap those adventures, and give an update. We were in Fort St John, British...
Working on getting a job, more mysteries and sci-fi, more Traitors, some music, and some Persona. This weekly digest may end up short again due to more job stuff showing up at the last minute to occupy my time. I am writing this on Wednesday. On Tuesday morning I had a virtual job interview and then work that night and on Thursday morning I have an in-person job interview for the same job that I am not super keen on but will take if I have to. On Friday I have another...
The people who run oldgame.cz (English link) emailed me and outright asked if we’d link to them. Imagine that, an honest request without any exchange of money involved! Someone just offering to give me something to post about today. It’s a thing of beauty, it is it is. Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but...
Today marks the 110th anniversary of Jack Vance's birth. Back in May, I covered his Dying Earth books for my Witches of Appendix N. Today I want to look at the RPGs of the Dying Earth. There are essentially two published ones, Pelgrane Press' and Goodman Games for Dungeon Crawl Classics. I will consider both today.Games at The End of the WorldI have been spending quite a lot of time lately thinking about dying worlds.Not post-apocalyptic worlds necessarily. That is...
Alnashetri cerropoliciensisSlip back 90 million years and wander the sun-baked floodplains of Patagonia, where the giants get all the glory—but it’s the tiny, fleet-footed oddballs that hold the real secrets.Meet Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a delicate little dinosaur with a big story to tell. We’re talking under two pounds soaking wet—lighter than your average house cat—but armed with clues
Earlier this year, I shared how excited I was for a direct service between Amsterdam and Hamburg by GoVolta. This rail link could have also provided a hop to Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, especially as it lined up with GoVolta’s expansion plans. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long and the service to Hamburg was cancelled only three months after starting. According to Thibault Lapers from mobilithib in an interview with GoVolta’s co-CEO, Hessel Winkelman, the route...
In our previous post, we compared the assembly of cruise ship cabins to the Docker ecosystem: Docker Images are the pre-made cabins: complete snapshots that include application code, dependencies, tools, and settings. They work as reusable blueprints. Docker speeds up builds by caching layers and only rebuilding what has changed. Most people pull ready-made images from Docker Hub or the GitHub Container Registry (GHCR), so a full environment can launch in seconds. Docker...
I found a fairly fast way to convert strings representing Base 10 numbers to strings that represent Bijective Base 10 numbers. That’s a string-to-string conversion, no integer type is involved. What happens if you have an integer type variable and you want a Bijective Base 10 string representing it?
Here is Dan Kaufman arguing, among other things, that "AI enthusiasts reject the social dimension of philosophy." Some first reactions: I'm sympathetic to Kaufman's view that many philosophers vastly overrate the truth-finding aspect of philosophy, which is "much more like literature" than many professional philosophers think (or say) it is. But one can accept Kaufman's picture of philosophical value and also embrace generative AI for some things. Indeed, I at least...
Yesterday, after a few meetings and such, we embarked on an end-of-Minnesota double-header — the Fair and a Saints game! Beatrix was with us for the Fair but ended up bagging out on the Saints to pack, which was likely wise.I've never seen it so crowded on opening day, which is usually kind of chill!But we did get there when there was still free lip stuff left, and saw the stunt dog show.Beatrix likes showing off pull-ups to military recruiters like it's NBD:And she won a...
Originally Published March 24th, 2004 REVIEWING THE NOVELS I think a very strong argument can be made that George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the finest work of epic fantasy since J.R.R. Tolkien first defined the genre with The Lord of the Rings. And that’s pretty much the only comparison which can be made between Martin’s emerging masterpiece and Tolkien’s classic. Where Tolkien is a romantic, Martin is a realist. Where Tolkien is evocatively poetic, Martin is...
What’s your favorite song about patience? I am not patient. I am more patient than I used to be for sure, but my default is not to wait, is to do the thing. Unless there is thinking involved, in which case I have a tendency to over think things. I’m also better at NOT doing that too. A lot of my patience has been found through meditation, and learning to be in the moment and, if that’s a struggle, finding a way to accept that things will come when they come. Tomorrow is...
I’m helping to train AI on what is and isn’t AI writing, for free, in the hope that they might give me more of the same for beer money. I put it through AI.
The sign that reads FISH LOGS cannot be erased.Currently Listening: Phoebe Bridgers “The Governor's Waltz”Reply via email
The journal responds, appropriately, here. Folks should be a lot more cautious before throwing these accusations around!
Last weekend we had our annual allotment show. I always enter a few things. This year I had high hopes for my giant marrow and my lovely sweet peas. I’ve been watching and watering both for a few weeks. The sweet peas grow up some string beside the potato patch: the lovely raspberry rippled ‘ pandemonium’ and a plain but highly scented variety, tangled together: On Saturday I got down to the plot in good time to see what else I might enter. It takes a while to sort out all...
Recall/warranty notices for a vehicle you own are never good. As the owner of one of the affected vehicles mentioned here, I’m glad to know Honda is taking the matter seriously, but reading some of the comments on that thread, I’m now more worried than before. I have always had excellent luck with the Hondas I’ve driven and owned (a ’78 Accord, ’86 CRX, ’00 Civic, ’06 CR-V, ’09 Accord) but this gives me pause. We are in no position to swap our car out for a Toyota, but if...
link in English and Spanish here ![Uploading IMG_4243.jpeg...]
It’s been a shit week, y’all. First Dolly Parton passed away on Tuesday, then we