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Much of the recent discussion about the bonnets in Little House on the Prairie has centered on whether they are “correct.” Before we can answer that question, it helps to understand that not all bonnets served the same purpose. A fashionable straw bonnet and a cotton sun bonnet were different garments, designed for different occasions. […]
I HOPE HE MADE IT TO MONTANA: Sam Neill passes, aged 78. (Classical reference in headline.)
And at his touch, the black oil of his thought passed from one mind unto the next until all served unto his image and his purpose. And where the Touched went, so the mind and might of Kihomenethoth followed. This lorebook collects various pieces of knowledge regarding the Galchutt known as Kihomenethoth, the Writhing One. THE ONE WHO SLEEPS APART: In many of the texts, Kihomenethoth is referred to as the “One Who Sleeps Apart” – “not banished from the Throne of Shadow”,...
A warning before we go anywhere: this essay meanders intentionally. It will digress, double back, and occasionally stop to look at something shiny at the side of the road. Consider this your early consent form. Follow me into the weeds — there’s a payoff, but we’re taking the scenic route to get to it.I should confess my credentials up front, since they are not the credentials of a grammarian. Long before I owned a copy of Fowler, long before Google existed to correct me,...
Hallstatt Salt Mines, Austria / Permian Salt Diapir The Hallstatt Limestone is the world's richest Triassic ammonite unit, yielding specimens of more than 500 ammonite species. Along with diversified cephalopod fauna — orthoceratids, nautiloids, ammonoids — we also see gastropods, bivalves, especially the late Triassic pteriid bivalve Halobia (the halobiids), brachiopods,
Do I play 40K? Not anymoreDo I have space orc minis? NopeIs there a single reason I should be working on a Killa Kan for a game I don't play, to go with minis I don't have? Yes, Gork and/or Mork inspired me. And with that, I grabbed an old GW paint pot, and my boxes of trash crafting supplies, and got to work.I sawed off the threads of the lid, and cut out a cardboard disk to close up the hole. Then I used more cardboard, the clasp of a zip tie, and some tubing to make the...
Everything old is new again, I guess? New to me anyway.The LIFE Ramune Notebook is relatively new, launching in the past year or two. But the old part is what’s on the inside, which is LIFE L Writing Paper, which we first reviewed back in 2018.I didn’t think much more about it then because this paper was packaged as a letter writing pad. Wide lines, fancy borders on some models, traditional lattice pattern paper, etc. Great performance for fountain pens, to be sure, but...
I have much to say about what it was like to live in Costa Rica for six months. So, just warning y’all, I’ll probably be talking about this for the rest of 2026. The first thing I realized is that I have been worshipping at the god of excess, personally and collectively. PERSONALLY When I moved abroad, I had prepared to be away for at least a year. I sold my car and gave a lot of belongings to charity. I arrived in CR with two suitcases, and a backpack. Dassit. As time...
Or as we like to call her, "Tripod."(That was the most family-friendly joke I could come up with. HI, MOM.) If you write online a lot, then this next one is for you.The problem with ordering via e-mail: Now, everyone laughing, go ahead and explain it to the rest of the class. Sarah sent in her wedding cake as a "missed mark" wreck, but to be honest, I'm a lot more interested in her choice of table decor: Please tell me you cut the cake with the Klingon bat'leth, Sarah....
There's a photo in my library from years ago showing my computer running AIM. A wave of nostalgia washed over me, as expected. Then, yesterday I read Here's how I host my own AIM server and I had to try it. Read Veronica's post for everything you'd need, but basically all I did was... Run the server binary on a VPS with the IP configured as a listener Installed AIM 5.1 via the AIM installer from archive.org using wine (on Linux) Changed the AIM config to use my server IP....
As I mentioned yesterday, I started organizing (and cleaning) my Emacs config. What may have seemed like an annoying and boring task has proven to be fun and addicting (reminds me of this, which is part of this video 😂). I’ve already discovered a couple of new improvements to my current config as I was researching individual settings and why I have them, and as I said I do plan to share it. For now though, one important section I added to my config is a quick org-mode...
Kevin M. Levin: “Why Lindsey Graham Abandoned the Confederate Flag” kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/why-lin… “What the Confederate battle flag’s slow exit from South Carolina reveals about his entire career”
Pigeon coming in the door (photo from Wikimedia) 13 July 2026 There’s a famous problem that humans get wrong almost all the time but pigeons get right. It’s called the Monty Hall Problem, named after the TV host, co-creator and co-producer of television’s Let’s Make A Deal. It works like this: There are three closed doors, one with a prize behind it, two with goats. Suppose you and the pigeon both pick Door #1. illustration for Monty Hall Problem at Wikipedia You still...
London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They’re more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They’re always eating out, and when they’re at home they don’t cook the way they did ten years ago. They’re all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by. Doris Lessing (1919-2013), interview, The Progressive, June 1999
A pair of shoes, a shirt,a known article of clothingand a memory that serves you wellin your future life. I watched something pure happen.I saw a father and his son at the beachyesterday.They were looking through the shallowscollecting shellsand digging for sand crabs. I saw them and felt the stingof missed opportunities.I saw why youth is wasted on the youngand how this as a recollectionand an understandingthat of coursethere is no such thing as the futureto a kid . . ....
John Stossel's latest column is eye-opening for three reasons, perhaps the least being the astounding safety record of Waymo's driverless cars:Waymo claims its cars are 10 times safer than human-driven ones. I wouldn't believe that if insurance companies, with their own money at stake, didn't agree.Reinsurance News reports Waymos had an "88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.""We have the data," says Adam Thierer,...
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s novel Wisdom Corner, a standalone sequel to Winter Counts, offers an impressive depiction of reservation life. BookPage wrote of the book:...
In Kidz Fun Art, I recently increased the resolution of images by two, letting young artists draw at much higher quality (important for my 10 year old who was hitting the limits of the program, she’s amazing). However this introduced an annoying crash on Safari where, after loading four or five images to edit, it would reload the browser from scratch. Not a great user experience. The Problem It turns out that too many Canvas DOM elements were not being cleaned up by the...
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Stefan Zweifel shares how he reorganized his dotfiles into a minimal setup, split private config into a separate repo, and streamlined setup and Brewfile syncing with a few small scripts. Read more
Basement dehumidifiers seem to be treated as disposable appliances. You buy one, run it for a year or two, and then replace it when it stops pulling water out of the air. I was hoping to escape that cycle when I bought an AlorAir Sentinel HD55 (paid link) from Amazon in September 2022. It was marketed as a commercial-grade dehumidifier. I expected that to mean it would be more durable than the usual big-box-store models, or at least more repairable if something went wrong....
There’s something about knowledge and understanding that is fascinating. With all the technology at our disposal, knowledge is readily available. But understanding is not. I think of math classes in school where I felt this the most. Because there was a score tied with how well I could grasp the concept of the week. Learning the steps alone did not make it click in my head. Some concepts would click a week too late when we’ve moved onto the next topic. After graduating and...
I've been posting my stories and poems to this blog since February 2024. My latest posts have titles like The Book of Temples Chapter 22 and The Moonskull Verses Canto 43. These lengthy tales might be a little overwhelming to new readers. I figured that it is time for a recap of what I am doing and how to read all of these tales. I was running a tabletop roleplaying game called Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. We were playing in my homebrew world. After the players had...
I’ve posted the monumental totem of N. E. Galloway before (shown also) but I have also learned he.was quite the woodcarver. Here’s a carving he made from a tree adorned with a snake and owls! I’m not sure the size, but appears to be a massive tree with a snake with a bunch of owls. It’s on costers allowing it to be wheeled around, so It must be be huge. N. E. Galloway wood carving postcard 1930s - 1940s and press photo of his totem pole. Both collection Jim Linderman /...
text by Bridgit PhillipsDo your own research:Strange online behaviors often mirror patterns long present offline, amplified by digital platforms. Phenomena like Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) faking, while a bizarre and excessive symptom of internet life, enacts familiar social logics long observed in historic expressions of the hysterical, including the performance of culturally intelligible distress, the formation of intense social bonds, and the contestation of...