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I was looking forward to playing UFO 50.An anthology of 50 fictional 8-bit-style games, it sounded like the perfect thing to dip in and out of between the longer, more demanding games that seem to eat up so much of my time these days.I consider anything over 15 hours to be long and demanding, and am right to do so.Anyway, I'm not playing UFO 50, and that's because it's currently …

Welcome to Scouts Then and Now, an Aaron on Scouting blog series. The premise is simple: We share two photos of the same Scout or Venturer — once in his or her early Scouting years (Cub Scout, younger Scout, younger Venturer) and again in his or her later Scouting years (Life Scout, Eagle Scout, older Venturer). Find Chapter 31 below. And click here to learn how to submit your photos. …

In This EDC Knife: Spyderco Yojimbo 2Tool: Knipex Cobra XSTool: Big Idea Design TPT SlidePen: Big Idea Design Ti MiniTool: Vero Engineering Fulcrum MiniFlashlight: Reylight Pineapple Mini TitaniumMulti-tool: Victorinox Deluxe Thinker with custom scales from Knife LoungePen: Big Idea Design Bit Bar InlineOther: Coin from local EDC groupKnife: Knafs Lander 2 About This Everyday Carry An eternal Nomad running the world with Titanium.Being constantly traveling, my EDC allows me to …

When I first saw the title of Kate Summerscale’s new true crime book, I wondered if it dealt with the Thompson/Bywaters murder case, the subject of A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse. Then I saw the subtitle and knew this was a book about a different crime – the John Reginald Christie murders at 10 Rillington Place in London. However, I was partly right, because Tennyson …

Fuck Time Fuck Space by Spooky Jaguar

I've recently been thinking about a switch to the Fairphone 5, but after some research, I'm not sure it's worth it? I ditched Android around 6 years ago now, and since then I've been very happy with iOS, but over the last couple of months, I've been thinking about a move back to Android, specifically the Fairphone 5. The rationale here is that phones are extremely expensive, they don't last …

JFI’s Financing the Energy Transition team has published a new series, including an interactive map and report, on the global distribution of minerals critical to the green transition, and on the potential for the countries that produce those natural resources to capture their value. View the series here, or go directly to our interactive version of the report. The post New series: Mineral Wealth and Electrification appeared first on Jain …

This December there are more than six dozen calls for submissions. All of these are paying markets, and none charge submission fees. As always, every genre, style, and form is wanted, from short stories to poetry to essays.I post upcoming calls for submissions shortly before the first day of every month. But as I am collecting them, I post them on my page, Calls for Submissions. You can get a …

For Aftermath, Luke Plunkett praised Ajax’s new logo change, going from the well-known minimalist version to a more traditional and ornate style: […] This has been a great and rare triumph in modern football branding, and is something that other fields–I’m looking at you, fashion, with your endemic “blanding”–might do well to remember as well. Modernising and simplifying a logo might sound like a great idea across a boardroom table, …

Spin ices are magnetic materials in which geometrically frustrated magnetic interactions between the spins prevent long-range magnetic order and lead to a residual entropy similar to in ice (solid water).Spin ices provide a beautiful example of many aspects of emergence, including how surprising new entities can emerge at the mesoscale. I think the combined experimental and theoretical work on spin ice was one of the major achievements of condensed matter …

Favourite stage direction: “The Three Flats, Bow, East London. Canary Wharf and the financial buildings of the City are visible in the distance yet out of reach, like another country on another shore.” (Beru Tessema’s Wolves on Road) The post Wolves on Road appeared first on Aleks Sierz.

I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible …

Two nights ago I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem Autumn Journal. It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines. The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised the government but passionately supported the appeasement of Hitler—because they remembered well the slaughter …

I hope the first thing you say is not, "Look how sharp that heron is! You nailed focus right on that heron's eye!" (click to enlarge)It is my sense that if you watch a lot of photography related videos and listen carefully to what photographers say ‘first’ about their own images as well as what they most often say ‘first’ about other photographers’ images, you might be surprised. When I …

It’s been an unusual autumn so far. A very notable lack of sun from the end of October into November was followed by an early cold snap before Storm Bert brought flooding chaos to parts of south Wales, the West Country and elsewhere. Just before the beginning of every winter I have a crack at predicting what winter will be like; the results often being very mixed. However, on looking …