Recently updated blogs

Going after a few more of your questions today. Didn’t really mean to power through so many in short order, as I meant to space ’em out a bit, but it is what it is. You know, folks can still add more questions to that linked post above! Paul spooks me with “How would you reboot the Harvey Comics Universe to make it appeal to the youth of today?” That’s…a …

This year was my tenth at the Borefts Beer Festival, held at the De Molen brewery in Bodegraven. The Festival itself was celebrating 20 years of De Molen, with a theme of "Back & Future". 23 guest breweries from Europe and the Americans joined the hosts for the party over two days in glorious sunshine. How much fun this festival is is heavily weather-dependent for me. 2024 was a good …

Because things come in threes it is fortunate that we can now add Sandy Irvine's foot to Capitaine Legionaire Danjou's [wooden] hand and maybe Galileo's finger. But knock yourself out: Susie Dent has written a whole book on famous body parts Vital Organs . . . also on YT [45m].Andrew Comyn Irvine was last seen on The Blob in 2021. . . or with George Mallory near the summit of …

I knew Ann Staley as a student in one of my classes soon after I came to Stanford to teach over four decades ago. Over the time she was in graduate school, we ended up having many conversations about teaching, learning, graduate school, and life in all of its twists and turns. After leaving Stanford, she settled in Oregon and became a teacher and writer. She had taught in high …

Credit: Emma Humphries Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Oakland 2024-10-13T00:00:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is my first naked-eye comet since Hale Bopp back in 1997. I’ve seen others since then, but only through an eyepiece of a camera, binoculars, or telescope. Friday night the comet was in the glare and haze of the sunset. Saturday, at its closest approach to Earth, the view west was socked in by a …

Jiwon Please Please Please Born in New York City in 2001, Jiwon was raised against a backdrop of diverse music, his father’s love of bands like The Clash, and his mother’s focus on classical training. Having developed his skills playing the piano, cello, bass guitar, and drums, music became Jiwon’s principal form of self-expression. Jiwon’s music sees him draw on inspiration as diverse and Lou Reed and Jai Paul, with …

I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a shared benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web framework’s performance (or maybe even worth!). But like any metric, it has its flaws and …

“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth.” Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles …

You pad to the freezer in the middle of the cold, dark winter and take a homemade tv dinner out. You pop it in the oven and half an hour later your kitchen is filled with the smells of roast chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes and delight. This magical scenario is easiest if you have leftovers...Read More

BE THOU FOREWARNED: It's become necessary to switch this website to different software and hosting, effective as soon as I can make it happen.During and after the switch, there will undoubtedly be error messages and/or weird glitches for a while, and I'd appreciate your comments or emails letting me know what's right and wrong with the site. Thanks.The Lock Spot Cafe is so named because it's next

The Architectural Review Carbon contradiction: Spore Initiative headquarters in Berlin, Germany, by AFF Architekten The use of concrete in AFF Architekten’s building for a Berlin biodiversity non‑profit reveals the complexity at the heart of building sustainably The post Carbon contradiction: Spore Initiative headquarters in Berlin, Germany, by AFF Architekten appeared first on The Architectural Review. Reuben Brown

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a …

I'm thinking morose thoughts about the practical prospects for space colonization (ahem: stripped of the colonialist rhetoric, manifest destiny bullshit, "the Earth's too fragile and vulnerable to keep all our eggs in one basket", and the other post-hoc attempts at justification) and trying to sort them out in case I ever feel inclined to go back to writing the sort of medium term SF epic that Kim Stanley Robinson nailed …

John Baker reflects on a recent review on rates and risk factors of coercion in inpatient child and adolescent mental health services. The post Wide variance in the use of coercion in children and young people’s inpatient services appeared first on National Elf Service.