Recently updated blogs

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you. Bali’s Tourist Tax is Live Valentine’s Day showed no love for foreign visitors in Bali: you’ll now need to pay US$9.60 to enter the once-bucolic, now-crowded island as of yesterday. As this …

If you’re looking to keep track of your net worth easily, you don’t need to download an app or sign up for a new service. If you’re an iPhone, Mac, or iPad owner, you’ll be happy to know that Apple conveniently offers a really great spreadsheet for tracking your net worth, and it’s free, bundled ... Read More

I wonder if Figma’s cofounder, Dillon Field, knew just how widely used and successful Figma would become. While Figma as a company has been around since 2012, it wasn’t until 2015 that they launched their closed beta — the basis for the design tool we all know and now love. Back then, it was a gutsy move, considering that Sketch was the go-to tool for most UI designers. But in …

If they cannot find the truth, what is our hope of justice? A prosecutor (Harrison Ford) is accused of murdering a colleague with whom he was having an affair (Greta Scaachi). Spoilers ahead! Hot off the heels of Anatomy of a Fall someone recommended this film to me, which I can’t believe I’d never seen given its collaboration between Harrison Ford, Alan J. Pakula and John Williams. I think it …

When I first saw Furnish Master on Steam, I hoped that it might give me that sweet spot of relaxation and creativity that so many simulation games promise yet often just miss. And did it deliver? Yes and no. Let’s walk through my journey from a newbie decorator to a, well, still a newbie decorator but with a slightly better eye for which rug really ties a room together. First …

Rereading Arthur Ransome's Great Northern led me to decide that it is perhaps the finest of the Swallows and Amazons stories. Yet when I read these books as a child I was not that found of it. Looking back I think that this is due to the tense final few chapters, when the Swallows, Amazons and Dick and Dorothy are pursued by multiple enemies as they seek to protect the …

Washington Post: Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation #GiftArticle Via

The Fold shelf is a place for storing stationery, papers, tools but also a nice place for displaying art and ephemera. Online / in store in 3 colours and two sizes.

In his series of books (Banking Across Boundaries, Rentier Capitalism, The New Enclosure, Our Lives in Their Portfolios) Brett Christophers has provided a forensic analysis of the fundamental plumbing of the global and (especially) UK economy. For example, the first of these identified the statistical construct of ‘financial intermediation services indirectly measured’ (FISIM) as an artefact inflating the apparent contribution of the financial sector to the economy and thus enhancing …

The Family Breaks Up, Living in the Bronx, and Summers in the Catskills Arthur’s mother had relatives living in the United States when the family decided to leave Europe for America. Her brother, Joe Klarreich, came to the U.S. shortly before World War II in an attempt to earn enough money to bring his wife and baby girl overseas, so they could escape the holocaust. Alas, it was too late, …

HadestownLyric TheatreThere are musicals that touch your soul and for me that’s Hadestown. I first saw the show in 2018, where I went in completely blind and came out gob smacked and awed. Tonight after the official West End opening night, I feel equally awed as well as inspired, moved, astounded, heartbroken and overjoyed. There really aren’t adjectives to describe how heartfelt and special this show is. Not only is …

The game designer Paul Czege has just launched a new newsletter called ‘Say We Do’. I can’t tell you to go sign up on Substack or Ghost because it’s not that sort of newsletter – it’s a PDF. And if you want to read it, it’s a dollar on itch.io. Say We Do is a “Paul Czege Broadsheet”. It’s my thoughts about games as I’m making them. It’s things I …

My friend Russell started a new project, and it’s well worth sharing. It’s called Haudoo (pronounced: how do), and it’s a collection of short, no-nonsense books on how to do something. Russell is great at presentations, so it makes sense the first book is “How to do presentations”. Russell is recruiting other people to contribute content for other Haudoo books, such as how to write a blog post, or how …

As you’ve seen from the site, I’ve been really into the forthcoming Elephant Stone LP, which finally drops tomorrow! While we initially got into the band with their psychedelic sounds, Back Into the Dream seems to be offering a glimpse at a band working their way into other musical realms. For me, while I can certainly hear the psych nods in the mix, there’s something about this that feels more …

Finished reading: Dark Needs at Night’s Edge by Kresley Cole 📚 My favorite Immortals After Dark book so far. A burlesque dancer becomes a ballerina, ends up a ghost, and falls in love with a vampire who is trapped in the New Orleans Gothic manor that she haunts. 🌹👻🩰