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This post was written as a walking thought and it’s not quite well structured. I’m just trying to put my ideas into words. Come back to this blog post in a few years and see if this was right or wrong. Introduction Today before taking a walk, I observe my phone and I received a notification: you mail has been leaked. I was like, “Well, that’s not good”, to just …

OpenAI (who owns ChatGPT) released a new model today. It is called o1. The main difference between models like 4o is it inherently performs chain of thought reasoning when producing an answer. What is chain of thought reasoning? Well, it shows you how it came to the result it did. This makes the model more accurate and also shows you how it got to where it did with its answer. …

Humour, however, belongs very much to the world. Life is suffering. As Shakamuni pointed out long ago, we cannot have what we want, and we must have what we don’t want, but humour is not escapist. It overcomes the world, not by ascending to heaven, but by laughing at the paradoxes of life. We overcome the world by laughing at it; we overcome it in so far as we laugh …

by Zahid Fayyaz Now a very popular Netflix sitcom, Kim Convenience reverts back to its theatrical roots for a second run in the current London theatre season. Previously at the Park Theatre, Ins Choi’s production is now on at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios. With Choi playing the patriarch of the family, ‘Appy’, this is a family drama with both humour and pathos in equal measure. At a tight 75 minutes, this …

We no longer have to either suffer with the corporate Internet created by big tech or walk away entirely. The small Internet provides another option.

Was everyone who was searching for the 'Second Summer Of Love' looking in entirely the wrong place?

Following the global success of mega-hit Six was always going to be a challenge. Why Am I So Single? is the new show from Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, a “big fancy musical” that celebrates… More

A digression and some advice: Instead of writing a post about burnout or any complaint you might have about your job or AI or people's terrible taste, go outside. Take a walk.Take a drive to your nearest city. Go to a public park. Walk in a neighborhood you've never visited before. Sit at a coffee bar. Eat at a cafe. Read a book in public. Talk to a stranger.* Go …

The back story… Recently I replaced an electric water heater with a manufactured date from 1992. You might be asking yourself how the hell a water heater survived that long to begin with. Long story short, my wife and I purchased a farm which belonged to my great-grandparents in 2021. They had passed about 15… The post A Water Heater Breakdown Was the Best Thing for My Utility Bills! appeared …

Caravan SandWitch is a new open-world exploration game in the style of titles like Sable and Jusant (the latter being more of an aesthetic similarity than a mechanical one) from French developer Studio Plane Toast. This looks like it’s their first game, and it’s pretty captivating. I’ve only cracked the surface (played through the second chapter and associated side quests) and there’s a pretty startling amount of meat on its …

Ridgeline subscribers — A little over a hundred-and-one years ago, on September 1, 1923, Tokyo shook. Well, all of Kantō shook. Especially Yokohama, which shook something extra terrible. Since the start of the Meiji Restoration (1868) Tokyo has been reconfigured a few times. Ideologically / existentially by Perry’s forced opening of the country’s ports, the ending of the 265 years of (pretty peaceful) isolation. Later, during WWII, in the 1940s, …

I am very sceptical about the current trend of “generative AI” and pretending that they represent anything like intelligence. (Previous posts: one, two, three, four, five, six.) But recently I stumbled across a mistake so lovely that I wanted to immortalize it here. It’s on Quora, a Q&A website where people ask questions and other people answer them. In this case, someone asked: What does “Indeed much more rational, but …

This month’s Inspirational Spark is The Power of Place, one of the five themes AASLH has identified in its Making History at 250: The Field Guide for the Semiquincentennial. The concept of “place” can work for any organization, whether your site has a distinct tie to the Revolutionary War era or not.… Continue reading 250th Spark: The Power of Place →

(1924) Directed by Paul Leni; Written by Henrik Galeen; Starring: Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauss, William Dieterle and Olga Belajoff; Available on Blu-ray and DVD Rating: ***½ “Ivan was a blood-crazed monster on a throne, who turned cities into cemeteries. His crown was a tiara of mouldering bones, his sceptre an axe. His council-room was a torture chamber, with the Devil and Death as chief ministers.” – Intertitle for …

If I really want to make a Werewolf Metroidvania, a Game Design Document seems a good first step