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Plucked this guy off my shelves at random, it's spooky season, right? The inaugural title in the long-running anthology series launched by specialty press Dark Harvest in November 1984, Night Visions 1 was intended as being a showcase for the best original short stories by the leading figures in both horror fiction and dark fantasy. Charles L. Grant was pretty well-established already as an

Review from: Imperial Theatre, New York; 8th October 2024 Based on Sara Gruen’s novel of the same name, the musical[…] The post ‘Water for Elephants’, book by Rick Elice, Music and Lyrics by PigPen Theatre Co, Directed by Jessica Stone appeared first on The Circus Diaries.

I'm breaking my blogging silence to do two things: Alert readers to the fact I am still writing reviews of architecture books under the title A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books, but over at Substack, not Blogger.Put a new post at the top of this blog so I don't have to look at those photos of me every time I come here to find an old post that I want …

Writing this blog has been full of slap-upside-the-head, "D'oh!" moments over the years. There was the time someone mentioned making a stock from leftover corn cobs. And another time when I discovered how simple it was—not to mention how much more delicious it tastes—to make your own peanut butter. (Got five minutes and a blender?) I'm constantly asking myself: How could it have taken me so long to figure this …

“Fast” enumeration of partial assignments in SAT problems Published 2024-10-15 In my last post on SAT problems I noted that you can remove a single variable from a SAT problem using the technique I outlined. That is, you can build a SAT problem over the remaining variables that is solvable iff there is some assignment of the removed variable that satisfies the original problem. This will only sometimes run in …

For the past week, I've been working on a command-line tool to generate images from css-doodle source code. If you're familiar with command lines, try installing it with npm: npm i -g @css-doodle/cli After that, you'll be able to generate images with one line of command. cssd render code.css -o result.png If the code includes animations, you can also generate a video by using the .webm or .mp4 extension for …

I love waxworks. When they are good they’re very, very good and when they’re bad they’re even better. I’ve been hooked since experiencing the famously terrible Louis Tussaud’s House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, and never miss a waxworks if there’s one to visit.The National Wax Museum Plus in Dublin is a mix of waxworks and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not-type exhibits. Believe it or not, this is footballer and …

Before we moved to New Mexico, one of our favorite places to see the fall leaves was Missouri. Every year, we’d head to the Ozarks to soak up the vibrant reds and golds of the changing leaves. But now that we live in the Southwest, we’ve found even more reasons to love autumn. The fall here isn’t just colorful—it’s magical. With golden aspens glowing against red-rock cliffs, cool mountain breezes, …

This will be a talk for the (In)determinacy in Mathematics conference at the National University of Singapore, 20-22 November 2024 Abstract. I shall discuss the question whether we may regard determinateness of truth as flowing from determinateness of objects in … Continue reading →

– Well, it looks like we’re here in another US election year already. As Advanced Mustachians, we already know that the ongoing battle of Harris vs. Trump should not be consuming much of our time. Sure, we do our research and cast our votes but after that we move right on to focus on other things within our own circle of control. But out of all the things the politicians …

I do love me some video-games. But one genre I have loved since almost the beginning of my hobbyist career has been racing games. And any keen reader here will note that I almost always have a racing title in my most played of a month (or week, when I did that to myself).I also have a beefy PC that I a built at the tail-end of Covid. In part …

(Skippable Backstory) A few months ago, Tammy Winter published a thread of advice for precocious young people. My addendum to it was the following: Build a technical foundation. Opinions differ, but I’ve found it very hard to develop deep technical skills later in life: responsibilities eat into the necessary huge...

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so I’m out at Squam, eating delicious food and spending time with family. When I was living on the west coast that wasn’t really in the cards, so we’d host our own, which was a delight, but it’s nice to do the big family one again. Styling RSS I’ve mentioned before, I use Vienna as my RSS reader. I like it generally, but I wasn’t satisfied …

Crouched, hunched, bent-double on a floor, wooden, carpet, concrete. One input, one output, mediated via a BOSS ME-50 multi-effects pedalboard. Looping, delayed, pitch-shifted, crunched. Over the last few years, I’ve performed occasionally as Snails in Joyland, an improvised noise act which prides itself on being simple and crunchy. I say occasionally, because it works out to be at a frequency of about once per year. I like taking Snails to …

2024 Ok I’m still playing catch up. Many of these I read some months ago. I’m unsure in which order but I start off as usual with a re-reading of: Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald Which I enjoyed more than ever and indeed am now convinced that this is his greatest novel. I loved the opening prose so much that I picked it up a few weeks later …