Recently updated blogs

I have been wanting to read Joe Hill’s N0S4R2 (or N0S4A2 in the US) for so long! I got this second hand in a library sale…maybe last year. Definitely not this year as I’m 11 months into a book buying ban. Possibly 2022! I put this book off for a couple of reasons; 1. I… Continue reading Trying to Find a Scary Book

Having read Jason's entire output, I've found that his most interesting comics are those that follow his current cultural influences into ridiculous flights of fancy. The Left Bank Gang (imagining the Lost Generation writers as cartoonists) and Goodnight, Hem (imagining Ernest Hemingway as a sort of real-life action hero) are two of his best, but I've also enjoyed the way he's managed to insert the immortal Musketeer Athos into a …

Marine Beaufils is a French embroidery artist whose meticulous work draws on the analogy between pixels and needlepoints, as she translates scenes from her favorite video games, movies, or scientific imagery from screen to embroidery canvas. This process freezes a fragment of a larger narrative, converting backlit scenes into a familiar medium that evokes a homey feeling and a vintage aura. The embroidered scenes thus bear an ambiguous quality as …

Yet more exciting news from the LEGO® Pick a Brick online development team! The ability to upload a wish list, which premiered in North America recently, has now been rolled out to the UK and Germany... with even more new features included than before.Continue reading »

Version numbering is hard, and there are lots of popular schemes out there for how to do it. Today I want to talk about a system I’ve settled on for my own Django-related packages, and which I’m calling “DjangoVer”, because it ties the version number of a Django-related package to the latest Django version that package supports. But one quick note to start with: this is not really “introducing” the …

Hearst didn’t even feel the object in his coat pocket anymore. He’d gotten used to it, there on his hip at the right side, making the fabric bulge a little. If it wasn’t there, it was in his hand or on a table beside him, and never anywhere else. He walked down the street, telling himself to notice things, and to think slowly. It was a kind of self-care to …

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! One of the greatest weapons modern social platforms have against us is something called FOMO - the Fear of Missing Out. We are inherently social creatures and we want to belong to a group, and to do so we feel like we need to be aware of everything that is going on. We fear we’ll miss out on something important and will …

“Dark Wave,” hosted by Slicing Up Eyeballs' Matt Sebastian, explores the darker side of classic '80s alternative, including vintage goth, post-punk and industrial.

Suppose you want to migrate to another star, taking your entire civilization with you. Not an easy task given our technology today, but let’s remember that in the 13 billion year-plus history of the Milky Way, countless stars and their planets have emerged that are far older than our 4.6-billion year old Sun. If we imagine an intelligence that survives for a billion years or more, we can hardly put …

(1999) Written and directed by James Marsh; Based on the book, Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy; Starring: Ian Holm, Jeffrey Golden and Jo Vukelich; Available on DVD Rating: **** “…I was looking for stories that cut across 100 years and resonated with contemporary anxieties about guns, or religion, or drug-taking. I thought that was an important way of making the film more contemporary in its concerns.” – James Marsh …

After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out. Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode …

What’s up, Internet? This conversation came up randomly in the 32-Bit Cafe’s team chat earlier this month and I had fun with my contribution to the conversation. I then saw the WeblogPoMo AMA challenge pop up on Mastodon with the same theme and figured I could get in on the challenge with this cheeky response. As per usual, here it is weeks later 🤣 This is a reply to Tyler …

When Emily Calandrelli launches on her upcoming suborbital space mission, she'll be carrying a pocketful of plants.

I started running a game with my neighborhood gang for Horror on the Hill, a classic module from the 1980's. Meanwhile, my high school group voted to do Curse of Strahd. The high school gang was formerly "The Pillories", the party that played Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the past year and recently wrapped their campaign. Originally we were going to do a Call of Cthulhu next, but I …

There is value in reasoning by first principles and there are different approaches you can take to discover the first principles at play in a given situation. I will leave that for future posts. Here, I want to briefly cover a foundational truth about this. What does it mean when you determine those first principles? What is the nature of that? The first principles you find are, themselves, a mental …