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After spending countless hours trekking across Ryan Laukat’s more expansive landscapes via Sleeping Gods and its sequels, Primeval Peril and Distant Skies, Creature Caravan is a throwback to his earlier titles not only in terms of setting, but also time commitment. It doesn’t quite hit the twenty-minute duration of Eight-Minute Empires, clocking in at closer to an hour, but Creature Caravan shows Laukat in fine form, pressing his craft forward …

This is a piece of advice that I found myself giving to many early career researchers, students, and colleagues supervising and advising those as well. For years, actually. A mathematician, the joke says, is a blind man, in a dark room, searching for a black cat that isn't there. I don't know about that, but I think we can still agree that a researcher, in most fields, is sailing a …

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw. Here it is in a big plastic bowl in the kitchen — shown this way to emphasize its mundanity. And here is the wing closer up. This is …

Earlier in the summer, the Democratic party and its supporters faced a difficult decision: should they gently but firmly sideline President Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket? There were plenty of reasons to agonise over the decision: loyalty to Biden; the daunting practicalities of the switch; fear of the chaos that might ensue; nervousness that the likely replacement, Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris, wasn’t up to the job. But such nerve-racking …

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Martial arts mayhem was still ruling unsurpassed in Britain, this week in 1974, with Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting retaining the singles chart pinnacle it had claimed seven days earlier.However, there was change - of a sort - atop the corresponding LP listings, thanks to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells having now snatched …

If you’re coming from the JavaScript world or even if you’ve worked with modern JavaScript briefly, you might know the importance of npm and its package ecosystem. The context The npx of PHP In closing The context You can install packages from the npm registry and use them in your projects. But sometimes, there might be some packages that you might need to install globally to use them in your …

If, like me, you missed out on A Day at the Races, the Letterheads meet hosted by Peter and Sue Anthony in June, this short video from the Horton Arts Centre is a tiny sampling of what went down.Letterheads 2024 on YouTube.This extended playlist then has more from some of the folks that travelled from all over the world to attend this major gathering in Epsom, Surrey.Letterheads 2024 playlist on …

I didn’t post the wood inlay Mastodon logo pins I made a couple years ago but, they came out so well that I periodically think of other things that would make good pin designs. In the spirit of the season and, since I rarely get around to the “spooky season” projects I envision these days, I made some skull pins inspired by my old Godar Blot design.There are two variants: …

Moon Window by Jane Louise Curry, 1996. Joanna Ellen Briggs (usually called JoEllen or Jo) lost her father five years ago, when he died in a car accident. Since then, it’s just been her and her mother. Jo has adjusted to the loss, and she and her mother have been happy together. At least, that’s what Jo keeps telling herself. Now, her mother is getting remarried, and Jo feels like …

I spoke with Brian Stout over at popMATTERS about New Freedom Sound. One way to approach making music is to make a sound that’s reminiscent of something you love, trying to play in a genre. Another is to try to make music that sounds like what we aren’t yet able to hear, to be the guy who comes up with something we haven’t heard. New Freedom Sound is a chance …

We specialize in introducing foresight to people and organizations to foresight at the University of Houston Foresight program. We’ve been on a somewhat maniacal quest to find ways to improve the applications and results of foresight work. In the feedback we get about our work, we often hear something along the lines of some participants […] The post The Comfort Trap in Foresight first appeared on Hinesight....for Foresight.

Present and Correct is not just a meticulously presented stationery store, but also a fantastic old school blog, a curatorial treasure trove of the kind that was practically extinguished by the rise of social media. A must visit / see … Continue reading →

Trying to keep track of everything happening in the Langlands program area of mathematics is somewhat of a losing battle, as new ideas and results keep appearing faster than anyone could be expected to follow. Here are various items: Dennis Gaitsgory was here at Columbia yesterday (at Yale the day before). I don’t think either lecture was recorded. Attending his lecture here was quite helpful for me in getting an …

I often hang a Little Trees air freshener in my car called "True North," and after a long workday, I find its crisp, snowy, slightly piney aroma soothing. It’s one of the longer-lasting Little Trees scents and smells more authentically pine-like than the classic green tree, which always reminds me of a rubber Halloween mask. Whenever I catch a whiff of "True North," I wonder if it’s cold, foresty

The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s …