Recently updated blogs

…is a celebrity chef in South Korea. He also owns multiple restaurant franchises with thousands of branches mainly in korea with some splattered all over the world. I first knew of him not through tv but through his restaurants which opened in Singapore a few years ago, and I got slightly annoyed that his face was being plastered everywhere (I know, I am easily annoyed). He’s now probably getting more …

The next Austin Philips story is up on Dark Tales Sleuth. This one is a quiet little crime story with a twist, from The Strand Magazine, July 1909. In “The Telegram,” Florence Earle is a naive young telegraph operator, who may just be making a big mistake. Since I don’t know any British Post Office history, I had to check: when telegraph services came to the UK, they were originally …

To the eye the zodiacal light looks like an enormous, wedge-shaped pillar of diffuse light slanting upward from the eastern horizon and extending halfway up the sky.

After years of having Campari in cocktails I’m finally getting accustomed this this bitter Italian liqueur, so much so that I actually like the taste of a classic Negroni cocktail and am really digging the riff that replaces gin with Jamaican rum. New York bartender Joaquín Simó first made this cocktail in 2010, using the potent overproof Smith & Cross Jamaica rum as the featured spirit. I sure do love …

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an …

Artist: Infern Album: Turn of the Tide Year: 2024 Genre: Death Metal Web: https://youtu.be/_X5S_oQX5yg / https://infern.bandcamp.com Country: France Quality: 192 Kbps Tracklist: 1. Undertow 2. Phineas Case 3. Tormented Paranoid 4. Burning Fields 5. Archetype of Brutal Aggressor 6. Gaining Ground 7. State Puppet Theater 8. March of the Grotesque 9. To the Extreme 10. Buried Alive Witness: -[*]- Here is yet another killer release for 2024! I have been …

With everything going on in Lebanon, it’s super hard for me to get excited about everyday things that I would typically get excited about. Life’s mini milestones. They all seem super trivial now as I continue (like millions around the world) to watch disaster unfold and not a single powerful country out there to step in and do what’s right. The world feels like it is completely morally bankrupt and …

We’re exactly one month away from November 5, the last day we can cast a vote for the 2024 election. I hope you all have your plan to vote, and if you can spare any time at all, that you are taking some kind of action to make sure other voters cast their ballots, too! Good News We got really good economic news: Fresh employment data for September showed that …

Getting timely posts out there in the open is becoming a bit of a challenge, it seems. Nonetheless, it’s still early October, so here’s my overview of stuff I’ve hauled back from last month’s internet spelunking. I’m also lagging behind my RSS reads so this haul is not as big as it could have been, but hey, it’s not exactly a contest. Previous month: August 2024. Books I’ve read In …

I seem to have experienced a run of bad luck recently when it comes to household systems and technology, and just when I thought my troubles were over, up crops a new issue. Since June there’s been a problem with the central heating system - necessitating the replacement of a motorised valve, a toilet cistern that wouldn’t refill after flushing, and Matthew’s shower scaled up and non-operational. There has also …

Is game design hard? That depends. Is understanding other people and seeing the world through their eyes hard? Because that’s game design. You’re putting yourself in the shoes of the players, imagining what experience they would be having at each part of the game compared to what experience you want them to be having, and then sculpting and crafting a text that encourages them to do that. And on top …

. What do you expect of a book? A book on culture and critical theory would generally assume a certain readership, but an author-writes for what they can see – an imagined reader, not any really existing person who has actually bought the thing, if any. What do you expect a book to say? Assuming books can talk, what might this one say about an obsessive critical theory rethink of …

Pro wrestling, at its essence, is a kind of carnival theater improv based heavily on audience reactions. Every emotion must be over the top to reach the person sitting in the last row. Every aspect of the story should be told in the ring itself, through the choreographed violence. There's a reason why so many former theater kids become wrestlers these days; the line between burlesque, drag, musical theater, and …

Hello everyone! I am still diligently working on the historical fiction novel that I started writing back in February of this year and announced that I was writing in June. Writing the novel has been my main preoccupation for the past few months and I have been spending at least ten hours most days working on it, which is a major part of the reason why I haven’t made many …

Cyclamen hederifolium in one of the courtyards at the music school. An invaluable coda for the shade garden by virtue of flowering in early autumn rather than spring. Tolerant of deep shade and drought. Hailing from the southern Mediterranean it will naturalise when it likes the conditions as is the case here. Known as the Ivy-Leaved Cyclamen the leaves do indeed resemble Ivy albeit smaller and variegated. When C. hederifolium …