Recently updated blogs

A few days ago a New Jersey indiepop fan shared with me his discovery of a little known band from the UK: The Bed Bugs. At first I thought they were The Bedbugs, who I wrote about time ago. But no, these were different. Not only their name was different, with a space between bed and bugs, but they hailed from somewhere else in the UK, York. The Bed Bugs …

Cover design by Elizabeth Story. Cover art by Mike Mignola. The subtitle tells you everything you need to know about this new collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories from Tachyon. I designed the interior of the book, less floridly than some of my previous designs for Tachyon, and a little more abstractly than I’d usually do for a title such as this. All of the stories have been published before, …

The genocide in Gaza reached its one year mark without any end in sight. 365 days of indiscriminate bombing, the decimation of hospitals, targeted attacks on journalists and aid workers, and mass scholasticide. In the face of this destruction, rigorous analysis of Palestine's history and present has never been more important. That is why we are launching the Verso Palestine Pamphlets. These pamphlets are short, urgent interventions answering pressing questions …

Edgar Allan Poe died 175 years ago today, Oct. 7, 1849, in a Baltimore hospital under circumstances that no one has ever fully understood. He was en route from speaking engagements in Virginia to New York when he went missing in Baltimore. After several days, he was found the night of Oct. 3, the day of a local election, lying outside a pub that doubled as a voting precinct. He …

What’s going on, Internet? After reading Jay Hoffmann’s recent post on “Gift Of Code,” he recounts the moment Netscape ended and Mozilla Firefox emerged from the ashes. Caught in a death spiral, and backed by their employees, Netscape instead chose to gift their browser to the open source community and spun off Mozilla as a non-profit to take charge. For years, Mozilla retooled the codebase, piling rewrite on top of …

I grew up with the music of John Williams. It was and continues to be synonymous with blockbuster movies. There’s really no one who’s been able to achieve the musical legacy that he has and maybe never will be. He’s given the world a beautiful gift that we can never fully comprehend or repay. A few methods for how to sort the books on your bookshelves. I suppose also useful …

Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo The city of Drakgo, in Chinese Luhou, is located on the road from Tagong to Garzê, on the banks of the Xianshui, i.e. Freshwater River, which runs along the road. The name of the city seems to come …

Left: My build of E. L. Moore's Spumoni Club Coach | Right: BD Concepts drive unit with my base attachedIf you are a longtime reader here you may recall I've had it on my to-do list for quite awhile to motorize E. L. Moore's Spumoni Club Coach project. If you follow that link you'll see that back in 2016 I noted that what E. L. Moore, Lucious Beebe, and Charles …

In September, California enacted AB 2839. It seeks to remove certain types of politically themed “materially deceptive content” (including “deepfakes” ) during the election season, except for some labeled parodies and satire. The law provides a private right of action for anyone exposed to the inauthentic content. The law’s challenger goes by the name “Mr. Reagan” on social media, “where he posts (what he alleges is) humorous political content often …

Representing suffering—how to do it, when we should do it at all—has long been a subject of debate. At the center of that debate is the role of the audience: how do we, as readers and viewers, witness depictions of violence in images, films, plays, or literature? In On Photography, Susan Sontag suggests that the act of looking, from a distance, is self-regarding. For writer and photographer Teju Cole, this …

Tower Hamlets Black History Month Poster Retrospective Exhibition. Pic: Tower Hamlets Council The annual Black History Month, celebrated in the UK since 1987, has officially started. This year’s theme, Reclaiming Narratives, aims to shine a light on stories about Black people and Black culture that are often overlooked. Across the Eastlondonlines boroughs, there will be a range of events that echo Black History Month’s mission of empowering and educating through …

7972/20913 The animals have been staying with my parents-in-law until we were a bit settled in. Delighted not to have my cunty cats around (and a short stay of execution for the pigeon that lives in our new garden), but have missed Wolfie.Today she came home. To a house that wasn't her home. The cats didn't come. Best of all worlds. Wolfie was confused. She is spending most of the …

My youngest son's football team had a "bye" this weekend so I had some extra time Saturday and put together a few maps for our Horror on the Hill Shadowdark game. ("Horror on the Hill" refers to the old TSR-era adventure module B5 The Horror on the Hill).First up is Guido's Fort - a frontier stockade sitting across the river from the ominous "Horror on the Hill". I put a …

Last year, I introduced you to the Second Hour Sattelberg, a field watch inspired by a key Australian victory in World War Two. Today, I have in my hand the… The post Second Hour Sattelberg Mk2 appeared first on The Time Bum.

Love that command-shift-D means "Send" in Apple Mail and "Discard Draft" in Gmail.