Recently updated blogs

I disappeared again – I’m sorry. I’m trying to decide whether I’m done with this whole blogging malarky – there are aspects I miss – but I get overwhelmed with the effort it takes me now. So, if I do stick around, I might need to change the kinds of posts I publish and focus less on the long review posts I used to write, and would prefer to write …

Today I have another 3d Print – this time it’s a replacement for the simple “prison tower” tile from the standalone Prison Outbreak expansion. As with the Black Plague Trapdoors from the other day, this one was a free STL that I found online – this time on Cults3D. Painting was pretty straightforward. I wanted the whole thing to be an overall dull grey, no red brick or tiles, no …

"Will Nikon introduce a global shutter camera?Yes.The only real question is "when?" I've been following Nikon patents for three decades now, particularly ones pertaining to digital imaging. Nikon has quite a few patents in the global shutter arena, with one of the most interesting one being a hybrid global/rolling shutter patent (just resurfaced by Asobinet in Japan). In that updated patent, the original of which is now eight years old, …

We just closed down Relay’s 2024 St. Jude campaign. Thanks to your generosity, we were able to raise $1,078,348 to further St. Jude’s mission of finding cures and saving children. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. This is an incredible achievement that we share as a community.

Science had always predicted that it had no intersection whatsoever with faith. In the end, the one was the bridge to the other — at least up to a point. As our knowledge peeled back layer after layer of reality, digging ever deeper into the fundamental truths of the universe, the beauty and strange inevitability of its workings seemed to show that spirituality was just wishful thinking; ignorance dressed in …

I have finally managed to finish my 15mm (1:100) Weimar Republic Schupo Sonderwagen of 1921. At least one of these armoured cars was still trundling around Berlin when the Soviets took the city in 1945.The STLs are available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/daimler-schupo-sonderwagen-1921/Later on...Unditching rampsI've added a separate STL for the wooden unditching ramps that could be carried over the port rear wheel.However, due to the limitations of the STL format's floating point …

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 …