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This Christmas, Entertainers, one of the UK’s leading entertainment producers debut their first Christmas show; Step Into Christmas. The show embarks on a 35-date tour and arrives at the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow on the 11th November. Step Into Christmas is a festive, feel-good show that brings all the magic of the season to life, with all your favourite Christmas songs including All I Want for Christmas Is You, Last Christmas, …

A year or so ago I was playing through Disco Elysium again, trying to see what I could break through hacks. I upped all of my version of Harrier DuBois’s skill points to well over maximum, gave him a nice little stipend with which to pay for his room at the Whirling-in-Rags, and set him loose in the dilapidated ruins of Revachol—the superest of Super Cops. What I found was …

I've had a really bad cold that thankfully on the way out as I'm in Spain next week for some chill 😎 time, a couple or three lemsip hot toddies sorted me out throughout the day. So from a sore throat, to a cough, to a streaming nose, a painful cough and losing my voice for 24 hours, a proper one this one, the end is in sight. As I'm …

David García Goñi released a new version of Elektroid, a sample and MIDI device manager for devices by Elektron, Arturia, Eventide, Moog, and Novation. The project started out as a FOSS alternative to Electron Transfer, then the developer merged code from from his other projects, MicroDude (Arturia MicroBrute librarian) and phatty (Moog Little Phatty librarian). Arturia MicroFreak support This paraphonic synth by Arturia is 5 years old, but it still …

Photo courtesy Boston Globe We’re doing Mahler’s 8th Symphony this weekend. It’s the first time for me since 2015 and only the second since I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus 19 years ago. (I wrote about that experience performing with James Levine, the late great Johan Botha, Deborah Voigt, and Heidi Grant Murphy (the soprano in the rafters) among others, at the time). The work remains galactic in its scope …

Carl Becker told his fellow historians in 1931 that we are not dissimilar from “bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been Read more The post Kollin Fields on Daniel Wickberg’s *Thinking the Modern: A History of American Thought, 1860-2000* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.

Big Fish (2003) Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10) Alien: Romulus (2024) I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. …

Here's my weekly update with a few interesting random findings that I came across the last week or two. I am going to try to make sure they're here in time for you to enjoy with your morning coffee (or beverage of choice) every Saturday or Sunday, and include some of my thoughts around them.The Latest Drippings ☕️I've said it before - I love the Apple Watch. Not only has …

It is October! Time marches relentlessly forward, and 2024 nears its end. My Week I had a busy week, lots of medical errands and paperwork and end-of-month things to attend to. I think I had to go the hospital on 3 out of 5 weekdays during the week, mostly for paperwork stuff, but also to get some test results we've been waiting for and have been really anxious about and …

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

We’ve really entered autumn this week, it’s cold, it’s grey and the leaves turn yellow and red. And somehow it’s also the weird, weird moment of the year when not everyone realized that the warmer times are over – just now I went for a walk, nicely wrapped in my puffy jacket and with a hat and there were people around with only a t-shirt. My good man, it’s 8°C! …

It was almost exactly ten years ago when I last saw June Tabor and Oysterband at the De La Warr Pavilion, my first time visiting this stunning piece of 1930s architecture. I wasn’t even living down here yet but a friend had a spare ticket going and I came down for the weekend. So, when Oysterband announced their ‘Long Long Goodbye’ farewell tour with June Tabor, once again, as their …

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Open Graph images are what websites such as Twitter choose to display when showing a preview to a page. There are plenty of ways to generate these dynamically - like using Netlify Edge Functions, for one. But recently somebody posted a plugin they’d built the Eleventy Discord server, which gives the ability to create (fairly simple) Open Graph images at build time. Installation Installation was pretty straightforward: npm i --save-dev …

PolemicistOut 27th September, self-released The paradox of well known phrases is that, by virtue of wide usage, their meaning becomes unknown. The commonplace phrase goes unexamined. Melodic black metal is one such example. Prima facie an obvious, self-explanatory subgenre. But one that has thus far avoided re-appraisal or revision since the subgenre’s solidification in the mid-90s, leaving it vulnerable to misapplication. Polemicist, through their patient, focused study of classically minded, …