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A Stephen King town is always damned long before the vampires, werewolves, ghosts or cursed cars reveal themselves. King — a survivor of small town life — always understood the beating heart of little villages to be cruelty, racism and generational abuse. In his stories these problems exist alongside the few poor souls trying to be righteous in the land of the wicked. However, King had pages and pages and …

…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 …

I was not a happy Bunny last Friday. I was all geared up to go to the Rapido Railex with Allan, but the weather was so wet and cold I didn’t fancy it, as I still can’t get a coat on over my shoulder. It was a top-quality show by all accounts. I think I’d seen all the layouts there but they were all ones worth a second look. Still …

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 …

Pike-Time - first day targeting pike on The Wye, sunrise to sunset. And I think it's going to be tough; I've seen a lot of otters over the summer and although the pike population does seem to be increasing overall on the river I wonder how many are still in the sections I'm fishing? I expect a few blanks - so I was delighted when my float bobbed and slid …

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 …