Recently updated blogs

Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning. It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders. (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, …

After over a year of work, our very first stable release of ESM-friendly 3.0 is now available: Eleventy v3.0.0 🎈🐀 We are very excited to see this ship and look forward to what y’all build with it 🏆 Eleventy v3.0.0: Possums ❤️ ESM (includes full release notes, features, upgrade guide, and thank you notes!)

What follows is an unusual story of perseverance. We start with a conjecture and after some plot twists end up discussing the meaning of truth. While the title is a spoiler, you might not be able to guess how we got there… The conjecture The bunkbed conjecture (BBC) is a basic claim about random subgraphs. Start with a finite graph G=(V,E) and consider a product graph G x K2 obtained …

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me. Again. Not in Faifley, but Oslo. To be precise this happened on a walk with fellow archaeologist Ingrid Mainland in Ekebergparken, on the south side of the harbour fjord of the Norwegian capital city. The park is better known for a stunning …

I’ve been casually playing Palia on my Switch for the past couple months. I’d heard it described as a “cozy” game, and I’m all about the cozy. You are a human in a fantasy realm, and you build a little house and farm. You hunt; you craft things; you cook food; you go fishing. There are some quests and puzzles along the way, but you don’t have to do those …

I recently took a trip to the Yukon (and two days in Alaska) with my partner Elaine. The trip was mostly hiking focused and generally enjoying the nature. We took almost two weeks which was a good amount of time for us. Enough to not rush and soak in a lot of nature but not so long that our legs really started hurting and we started missing the comforts of …

49. QUAD CITY DJ’S – “C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” (1996) There was a bit of chat the other day when Pitchfork released its list of Top Tracks Of The 2020s So Far; as is often the way it was sparked by the site’s practice (a tale as old as time) of taking regional scenes, or in some cases national scenes, and anointing one track from among them. There’s …

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a fascinating story for GQ about Galaxy Gas, a flavored nitrous oxide product that's all the rage and whose cute packaging recalls Alco-Pops in its kiddy appealOooh and talking about giddy pop thrills - quick update, they come so thick and so fast these days, here's another KPR piece, a tribute / memorial to the "lost promise of hyperpop". For Pitchfork.where the

Björk on benches- two photographs by Kevin Cummins. Top: San Francisco, August 16, 1988. Bottom: Primrose Hill, London, April 1993.Here’s a bonus second image from the Primrose Hill shoot.I’m curious which exact San Francisco park this is. My guess is the Presidio, but it might also be Bernal Hill. The background trees aren’t really enough to give it away, and although Getty Images have a colour picture from the same …

Late summer up on the Long Pound has morphed into autumn, with some lively gales stirring up the canal and turning the hard-baked towpath back to mud. It's getting time to be dropping down through Devizes and into the Shire, where the gales don't blow quite so harshly and they offer the occasional blown-down tree as compensation; as long as they don't land on your boat, they can be a …

After a magnificent summer the days are getting cooler, the leaves are turning and there is a definite autumnal feeling in the air. Perfect weather for long tours on our...

There’s a New York Times headline that says “You Won’t Stop Thinking About This Clam Chowder,” which sounds like a fucking curse.But I'm still thinking about reverb. Last night, it struck me that reverb is my Tannhäuser Gate, both there and not there, a threshold between the zones of shape and fog, definition and possibility. Sort of like my brain during the first hour of the day.Here’s the routine: Wake …

In this week’s blog, Dr Martin Spychal, Senior Research Fellow on the Commons 1832-1868 project, discusses his new book Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act. The book is part of the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series and has been published by the University of London press. It is available now to download free in open access, or to purchase in paperback and hardback. In …

I like the stripes on this one: the contrast between the vertical stripes on the bodice and skirt, the horizontal stripe on the skirt, and diagonal of the bias-cut sleeves. The maker even made the effort to align the stripes on the cape and bodice at the center front.Dress, cotton, c.1825. From LACMA.

The release of the Lost Art Press “Make a Swedish Tool Chest with Whitney Miller” video course coincided with an expansion of my free time. And so, it was an easy decision to take this on as a new project. (And before you ask “what about the boat??”, yes, I am still working on the boat. I’m still doing final finishing on the mast, which is rather tedious. And the …