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Amazing how close these Sweetsong demos made by Mike Chapman are to the finished record. (you'll want to skip ahead past the early abject bubblegum pap to the "Wigwam Bam / Little Willie" onwards stompy stuff.)Particularly on the level of the vocal inflections, the campy ad libs, the whole pitch of hysteria - almost all of it was worked out in advance. Eventually the dummies assimilated the implanted style - …

When this post is published, I should have been traveling with friends in Japan for just under a week. Hanging out with friends is always awesome, but the whole traveling and waiting around at airports and packing all your things and lugging bags around and managing inventory is not. It is also exhausting. I don't have my weekly step total yet (as I am writing this before my week ends), …

When we were up in Northumberland a few weeks ago I walked Lucie through the parish church graveyard first thing in the morning. As always a long established village has a lot of old graves and this one with the lichen growing on it caught my eye. Now one of the interesting things about these quiet places is the local history that is there, you can read the carving on …

by Rutger Claassen and Ingrid Robeyns Let’s establish an upper limit on the personal wealth any individual can possess. This is the core principle behind ‘limitarianism’. Limitarianism represents one of the more radical proposals in the debate on wealth inequality. Over the past few years, one of us has developed the philosophy of limitarianism (first in the academic realm, and then more recently also in the public sphere, as regular …

This has been an unusual travel year for me. I’ve had two adventures that were – wildly against type – organized within weeks of going. My Alaska cruise was booked only 10 days before I left while I had a comparatively leisurely three weeks to organize my fabulous visit to Chicago. But what I did have planned from very early in the year was a restorative two week trip to …

There is relatively little of note this week, since work creeped into a couple of evenings and I tend to finish the days too tired to do anything too contrived–plus I’ve been lacking inspiration to write. Still, a couple of things came to pass: I managed to install Proxmox on the Terramaster NAS I got a couple of weeks ago. I am still trying to scrounge together enough cash to …

Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks. Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes): Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too. It worked …

It’s our office Christmas party soon. The dress code is black tie. I’ve managed to avoid tux-based events for some time, but I didn’t realise quite how long for until I dug my old suit out of the cupboard. I now feel like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride.

Tune in at 12:45 pm Pacific for LIVE splashdown coverage of Apollo 12! by Fiona Moore Once again, greetings from London. The big news this month is that Britain is now a space power! Yes, thanks to the launch of the Skynet 1-A satellite, we now have our very own presence in orbit. Can regular … Continue reading [November 24, 1969] The Wind That Shakes The Snottygobbles O: New Worlds …

YBAM organised a game design competition this year, and several local designer friends and I participated. The prize-giving ceremony was 24 Nov 2024. The results were only announced that day. There was a public play event in the morning, and the ceremony itself was in the afternoon. The event was at Pearl Point shopping mall. There were tables where the public could play any of

Settings and control of the heat pump at 16WW. #heatPump #controls #DHW #spaceHeat

There are only eight episodes of the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas, produced between 1971 and 1978. That’s not enough. Here are some suggestions for where to go next. First, let’s address a technicality: the 1968 adaptation of M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ directed by Jonathan Miller was a standalone film in the Omnibus strand. It inspired A Ghost Story for Christmas and is …

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Polish-born Lee Wallace (1903-1989) was the head of public relations for Macy's in New York and therefore the boss of the store's hugely famous Thanksgiving Day Parade. In fact, 2024 is the 100th anniversary of this incredible parade!The Parade always took place around the time of Lee's birthday, November 24th, so I doubt she had time for any personal celebrations. Lee was my …

For those who don’t know, Kirkus is one of the major publishing trade magazines, and a starred review means that they are holding out your book as one of special note. And guess what? Kirkus gave When the Moon Hits Your Eye a starred review! (You may have already surmised this from the headline, mind you.) I am delighted, of course. Moon is a little different from most of my …