Recently updated blogs

By Luisa De la Concha Montes We all spend too much time on our phones – there is no doubt about it. So, how can phone addiction be explored, in 2024, without relying on redundant tropes? Phone, a play written and directed by Sam Taylor explores our overreliance on digital media through the distant, yet loving relationship between four siblings: Helen, Issy, Harvey and Luke. They find themselves in a …

Here are some useful tricks for getting the most out of random encounter tables. Roll Twice Roll twice on a random encounter table and mix the results together. Maybe the characters find two groups fighting each other. Maybe they find one who just wiped out another. Maybe the two groups are allies. Mixing two groups together adds significant and meaningful complications to what otherwise might be a single boring encounter. …

This blogpost is about The Albanese morphism for hyperelliptic varieties. If you just want mathematics and not some of the backstory, you can click the link to immediately get to the preprint. Background Back in March 2023, Andreas Demleitner and Pedro Núñez gave seminar talks at the University of Luxembourg, with the talk by Andreas being on hyperelliptic varieties (the talk by Pedro, whilst interesting, has no relevance to this …

The last two, three years of the reprint renaissance have been especially kind to the legacy of Christianna Brand as Green for Danger (1944), Suddenly at His Residence (1946), Death of Jezebel (1948) and London Particular (1952) appeared back in print – reissued in the British Library Crime Classics series. Death of Jezebel came in as an incredibly close second in the 2022 Reprint of the Year Award, before going …

I read a post that was, to sum up a more nuanced thing, about how rest is not resistance, it's a privilege not afforded equally in capitalism. Now I am not linking, because this is not intended as a dunk. But having read Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance, that was kind of the point. Capitalism makes rest hard, (again summing up an entire book here, go read the book). So …

I joined Freja with Redox to talk about the state of US politics and white supremacy following Donald Trump’s second election. It’s partly in Danish, but my contributions are in English. Have a listen!

Who? You might be more familiar if I write Eoghan Ruadh Ó Néill as Owen Roe O'Neill. But I won't because he was Irish, not English. Although there is some confusion if he was Eoghan Rua or Eoghan Ruadh. I'll stick with Eoghan Ruadh.Now please bear with me, as there's rather a lot of Ó Néills running around Ireland in the 1640s.Eoghan Ruadh had at least eight brothers and four …

I couldn’t sleep this morning, so I got up sometime, ate, exercised, showered and finished my ATProto/Bluesky integration in GoBlog. You can now follow me there too: @jlelse.blog. But I think I will only use it very passively and only post my links there automatically. Interactions & Comments

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

When I was younger, I thought DDR was a game exclusive to arcades but how wrong I was! planet clue examined DDR controllers throughout gaming history, from PS1 to a DVD “game” that doesn’t actual require any of your inputs (planet clue rages about this in the video).

Our Edinburgh bookshops purchases: (yes, I am very behind in databasing new books, but hoping to catch up soon!)Amusingly, on that one morning we bought two different books, in two different bookshops, by two different Daniel Chandlers. Neither appears to have a disambiguating middle name.

The New Moon is Sunday December 1. In the evening Venus leaves Sagittarius behind and is close to the thin crescent moon on December 5. Mercury is lost in the twilight. Saturn is in the north western sky coming closer to Venus. Jupiter is now visible in the evening sky along with Saturn and Venus. In the morning Mars and Jupiter continue to draw apart. Mars is close to the …

Planets Align in ShifnalShifnal has been on my destination list for ages, and today, everything fell into place. My monthly scan of Ramblers Group walks revealed the Shrewsbury Group was heading there—perfect timing. That’s the beauty of the Ramblers: one subscription grants access to countless walks and groups, each filled with fascinating people.In today’s group, I met a man who very nearly ran the best steak pub in the county …

I suggested the idea of a “links initiative” as a way to kick-start the more daunting task of building a front-end resource directory.Basically just blog your favourite dev related links and maybe they can be collated to bootstrap a directory. I started listing and then a client project landed and to my shame I totally forgot about the idea. Until now!So finally, without further ado — BTW I have no …

It was so typical. Just his damned luck. Alan forced himself to unclench his fists, knowing that his anger had no productive outlet, and would only make the situation worse. These things happened; that was life. And it was only a tablet computer. Thousands of miles from home, on the last day of a holiday trip, and he’d dropped the damned thing. It had all his photos, and his work, …