Recently updated blogs

Director: Hiroshi AkabaneWriter: Ryuho OkawaYear: 2023 I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think about what, or how, I could have done things differently if my life was restarted. Sometimes I imagine I go back with the knowledge that have accumulated in tow. Every time knowing that will never happen. But it is a fun distraction. In this charming picture the main character, Masane Tsukayama, is given that exact …

My mate Paul collected collections. He wrote a book, ‘Recollections of a Collection Collector.’ It was never published. Lance Stater – Detectorists, Series #1 Episode 6 Back in 2019 I attended Boring IX, a conference dedicated to the “celebration of the mundane, the ordinary, the obvious and the overlooked”. As ever the day was anything but boring, with my personal highlight being the talk from Joyce Smith. Joyce spoke about …

What has Balaam to do with Josiah? Ancient stories are not always what they seem, and different biblical passages often intersect with each other in unexpected ways. In this article, I examine a speculative theory about an unknown king of Judah by investigating some problematic passages in the Old Testament. Problem #1: A War That […]

Driving their damaged vehicle down from the plateau, Contra-Disward towards the banks of the Styx, the Levellers soon spotted what they’d been looking for. At the bottom of a steep incline, run aground on a rocky bank, was a strange ship unlike any the party had ever seen before. Without sails or oarlocks, the galleon instead sported three curved masts – two of them out to the sides – each …

This doesn’t need much of an introduction, I’ve written about it before but to get up to speed this was a comic strip appearing in issues of DC Thomson’s (TV) Tops comics in 1982. A full colour series featuring the pop star alias of Stuart Goddard, Adam Ant. Adam travels through time, adventuring in various personas inspired by his glamourous stage presence. I’ve been trying to piece together the various …

Here's another relic from behind the iron curtain on the great Polish cassette label Anti-Musik Der Landsh that was founded by Mariusz Blachowicz in the small town of Łańcut. The label is another prime example of the hidden counter cultural expressions that were going on in the underground during the socialist times in Eastern Europe in the last century. In a nutshell, first there was state controlled cultural propaganda, then …

Hello everyone,Some of you already know that I'm currently taking a break from blogging. I've posted about it on Twitter, but the algorithms are fucked on there, so I don't actually know if it's been getting through to people. Anyway, I decided to make an official blog post for anyone who's wondering why I haven't been posting anything for the past few months. I thought I could just quietly disappear …

Also, how to style range inputs using CSS, including accent colors. So the PET 2001 emulator received a dark mode. This wasn’t exactly great news, nor worthy a blog post, if there wasn’t also something to be learned from every project. In this case, it’s about how to implement accent colors for custom styled HTML range-input elements, something, I haven’t found any hint on in the entirety of the Internet. …

Down on his luck Curt Blair is waiting out a rainstorm in a “ritzy hash joint” just outside of Hollywood, USA when he steals a fancy camel hair overcoat then flees intending to sell the coat. It’s how he makes his living these days – ripping off suckers' coats, rifling the pockets for treasures and cash, then selling the ransacked coat. But this time all hell breaks loose and he’s …

The stroke-dasharray attribute in SVG is more flexible compared to the dashed style in CSS. While there are numerous articles and examples about its usages, including Line animations, Pie charts, Circular progress bars, or even Hamburger menu icons, there's still something new to explore. Unlike CSS, stroke-dasharray accepts multiple values, which will be picked cyclically according to the stroke length. Imagine it as an infinite repeated value sequence, the odd-numbered …

At the beginning of the summer, I had the opportunity to join the team at Royalty Pharma for a great event at MIT (link here). It was an interesting time for me as I was thinking about the new role I was about to take at Bristol Myers Squibb. While I had certainly been “a leader” for several years now, I was pushing myself to think through and question my …

If you teach high school or introductory college physics (or just know the subject well), I wonder if you can tell what I’ve done wrong here: OK, well, I haven’t given you a lot of context. Early in our study of forces, I make sure students see a lot of examples of objects that are […]

Rather than posting my annual roundup of PulpFest reports here, you can find it over at the PulpFest website. As my final post here about PulpFest 2023, I thought I would highlight a walk through the dealers’ room that I uploaded to ThePulp.Net’s Youtube channel. In addition to this video, you can find more about […]

It's gotten cold out there! Autumn is finally here and with that comes cooler weather and the need to heat homes. Residential wood smoke from home-heating should be expected, especially at night and in the mornings when woodstoves and other wood-burning devices are regularly used. Temperature inversions and light winds can cause smoke to stagnate, especially in valley communities. This blog is intended to focus on wildfire smoke, but forecasts …

My new poetry pamphlet from Melos Press, The Dictionary Speaks, is now out and can be ordered post-free via this link.From the publisher’s blurb:-NICHOLAS MURRAY’S many books include poetry, two novels, critically acclaimed biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold, and studies of Liverpool, Bloomsbury, and British poets of the First World War. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and, with his …