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This week: Amazon’s return to office mandate; and local LLMs are getting good thanks to Meta. You must be a member to read the rest of this article. (Already a member? Log In.)

I like to keep an eye out for cool shapes during my walks and use them as inspiration for my #SidewalkFriends drawings. It’s like my version of hunting for Pokémon. We just got back from a fun vacation in Hawaii. While we were checking out the awesome murals in Kaka’ako (near Honolulu), I spotted these interesting cracks in the sidewalk. I started this sketch by drawing a face, but then …

September was such a bad reading month for me. I had so many books that were 2 stars or lower; I don’t remember smashing any mirrors… So I’m super excited to draw a line under September and move onto October reading. It surely can’t be worse! Please! I am hoping to flip between spooky, creepy… Continue reading October Reading Goals

The immigration officer looked up at me sternly, “Your student visa has expired June 10, 2024!” What!? There must be some misunderstanding. I applied last October for a one-year extension. It has been granted. Look here under visa expiry date. It says 10/6/2024. “In India, the month is the second digit. That’s June 10th. I then realized what happened. 10/6/2024 was the expiry date of my passport when I entered …

What dawned as a lazy and rainy Friday heading into what was to be an uneventful weekend, suddenly turned upside-down. It all started when I was on a mundane Zoom call at work to discuss budgets. While some bean-counter had shared his screen filled with a spreadsheet that was giving me a headache, I looked […]

The latest in Mister Stormy's Monday Selection (Occasional Series - Acts of Random Archive Rummaging) is Eyes Wide Open recorded at The Tracking Room in Nashville, on July 22, 2002. Click here to download. Eyes Wide Open is one of those KC ballads that moves gently enough and yet still gets under the skin. In this specially created rendition, Alex ‘Stormy’ Mundy has taken an early rehearsal run-through and aligned …

So I asked you for questions, and you delivered! I’m not going to be answering these with every single future post ’til I’m done, but I’ll dip into these as needs must. And those needs must today, so let’s get crackin’! First off, it’s Customer Sean with this “I wonder if Stan Lee was a fan of All-Star Comics during the 1940s–as a newspaper article from ‘The Daily Bugle’ appears …

Tomorrow I'm flying off to this place. It's my first visit in six years, and I'm hoping to find it in rather better shape than when I left it. It is, after all, the most beautiful city in the world.

Black Ends - Pretend 2 Be (Protect Me) Seattle scene stalwarts, Black Ends describe themselves as "gunk-pop" which does quite well to pigeonhole a sound that pulls the rug out from under post-grunge (hey, Seattle, we were bound to fall into that one) and watches it fall into a menacing, vaguely jointed heap leading into an "anthem for the paranoid and the hopeless". Psychotic Spew by Black Ends Dayflower - …

GO GET THAT The post No Bells, Issue 1 is available for pre-order now appeared first on No Bells.

Punk Planet issues 25-31. 2024 marks 30 years since the start of Punk Planet, the magazine I ran for 13 years. Writing a single essay to summarize 80 issues—thousands of pages, hundreds of interviews, infinite amounts of hope and effort—is impossible, so I am writing 13 posts over 13 months, each one about a single year of the magazine. Each one dedicated to a year of learning, a year of …

Your brain, fueled by books and augmented with simple tools, is your best resource for preparing and running awesome tabletop roleplaying games. Many GMs and players say they find a lot of value out of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools like Midjourney or Dall-E. Who am I to tell them they’re not finding them as useful as they say they are? But there's a …

Morning folks.Well, another post about film and I'm not even a hipster.Nor am I using the truly ghastly Ilford colour film either - a film that reminds me of the free stuff you'd get every time you got your holiday pics developed at Snappy Snaps (et al).Nope, this bad boy was fecking expensive, but lovely nonetheless, Kodak TMX 100 - and FRESH too, which is unusual for me as I …

Within culture which could be loosely labelled as Southern Gothic or Gothic Americana there is often a mythical take on the American South which has parallels with work in the UK that has come to be labelled as wyrd, otherly pastoral or weird Albion-esque. Both often have deep roots in the land and folklore, which is accompanied by a sense of the landcape being layered with hidden or unknown stories, …

When I handed back my work laptop a few months ago, it occurred to me that I needed a new computer. My 2015 MacBook Air is still going strong but it’s many, many years old, and I knew it would struggle with streaming or playing games. So off I went and merrily started pricing new MacBooks when I suddenly wondered… maybe I don’t actually need a laptop?! It was a …