Recently updated blogs

I'm a listener to the "Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast" put on by Bedroom Battlefields. It's delightful show with a variety of interviews, musings, reviews, etc revolving around indie wargaming, oldhammer, miniature painting, etc. On the show's discord various in-person gatherings have been organized. I threw my hat into the ring and hosted a little event at my home on November second. I organized it like a Mini Convention for Discord …

Explores the construction of the psychiatric category of eating disorders in the 1970s through an analysis of the archive of psychiatrist Hilde Bruch.

It’s now been 2 months since I set out to work full-time on 750 Words for 9 months and try to make it something that could sustain permanent full-time work. October’s report is here. The goal remains: to find a way to grow from ~4,500 paying members to 8,500 before the summer of 2025. To do this in a way that keeps 750 Words feeling simple, non-annoying, and focused on …

Brief story of my perfect storm. I finished reading Normal People for the second time. In between, I saw the TV series. It seems I couldn’t let go of Marianne and Connell, some aspects of their story so similar to mine. It’s not the first time I feel so emotionally involved in a fictional story, and hopefully it won’t be the last. I don’t buy into the argument that Normal …

The Solace is ambitious, creating a toy in an underserved niche and miniaturizing a fucking machine to a bit bigger than a chunky loaf of bread. Unfortunately, the tech is not there yet, but it’s a good try and incredibly impressive for what it is. If you are an early adopter, or get off on the aesthetics of machines themselves this could be a great fit. However, there’s a few …

0x0000000 accounts are so last season. Now it’s all about vanity tx prefixes. In this blog post, we will learn how to impress your Etherscan followers and fry a few CPU cores along the way. Vanity txs It all started from this X thread. Apparently, there’s a bigbrainchad.eth bot, that extracts the MEV in style. All his txs hashes start with the 0xbeef prefix: I immediately got jealous and also …

Jalal Al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) is a complex poet. His frequent use of flamboyant, often sensual, metaphor to express mystical thought can both confound and illuminate. But Rumi’s Sufism denominates his spirituality as being derived ultimately from a monastic versus an eremitic tradition, or perhaps rather from an intellectual or artistic source given his poetic propensities. Rumi approves of that necessary solitude that equates to occasional or routine spiritual practice or …

“My brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” Brilliant and important piece from Shannon Mattern about burnout, but more importantly, about how systems of exploitation and abuse are created and recreated. Mattern is writing about academia, but as is so often the case, I think the experiences she describes are likely familiar in many other contexts. The whole thing is worth reading but I’ll call …

NetNewsWire 6.1.7 for Mac is available through the standard ways — check for updates or download it directly. Changes: Fix bug clearing refresh progress Fix bandwidth bugs with downloading web pages to find feed icons and favicons Update default theme with enhancements by John Gruber Space out requests made to openrss.org Send user-agent with platform, version, and build to openrss.org (and only to that site) Note — we are working …

There are lots of models that are as good as OpenAI's Sora now.

I want to go back over something from Part 11, but in a more systematic and self-contained way. Namely, I want to prove a wonderful known fact about random permutations, the Cycle Length Lemma, using a bit of category theory. The idea here is that the number of kk-cycles in a random permutation of nn things is a random variable. Then comes a surprise: in the limit as n→∞n \to …

It’s that time of the year again! You: a discerning reader of books about unconventional information technologies (unusual marks of punctuation, say, or pocket calculators). Your friends and family: the same, naturally. But what gifts to give them this holiday season?Read more →

In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to …

Happy end-of-2024! It’s been a pretty good year overall. I’m thankful. There’s no way that I’ll be able to remember and carve out the time around New Years to write this, so here’s some end-of-year roundup, ahead of schedule! Running This was my biggest year for running on record: 687 miles as of today. I think the biggest difference with this year was just that nothing stood in the way …

22 December 1935William Henry Harris, London’s Oldest Man.He Invented “Tinsel”1837-1939 A short stroll from Ladywell chapel, just past grave of Edward Ernest Dowson. lies the family grave of William Henry Harris.William was born in Deptford, on the 3rd of February 1837. His parents were John Harris (a coal porter) and Martha (nee Bartley). He was baptised at St. Paul, Deptford on the 2nd July 1837, being born in the reign …