Recently updated blogs

Dumb tax, bad tax… It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with a much-reduced majority, is unpopular but, somehow, the Tory opposition is even more unpopular. The Conservative party’s leadership campaign is about to begin. One of …

As this will be the last blog until 2025, I thought I’d make it a bit more substantive than usual. Normal service will be resumed in 2025. I started writing about how the UK and US under right wing leadership had become a kind of plutocracy in 2017, after the Brexit vote and the election of Trump. [1] That was relatively unusual at the time, because most of the discussion …

A lot of games pass through my doors every year. I think this is everything that arrived in 2024! And a peek at what I’m expecting to arrive in 2025 at the end. What a time to be alive and loving tabletop roleplaying. This is a very long list! Settle in with some eggnog or whatever else you’re drinking this holiday season. Best New Games Deathmatch Island: Okay, jeez, I …

ProjectHere is the O scale barbershop for my Fn3 Oahu Sugar Company layout. I removed the mullions from the Grandt Line Victoria Window to give the structure a more modern appearance depicting the 1940s. I used a photo off the internet for the interior which I printed on one label per sheet label stock by Avery and affixed to card stock from a stationary box. I found barbershop signs on …

Things I watched, read, played, got into, enjoyed, or did and would do again, in 2024.

When I set out to make Zinc I had a few goals in mind. A large portion of those goals were around engine ergonomics and “making happy developers,” but one very specific technical goal was “make it work on the web”. I didn’t know how to do this. I didn’t even really know how to approach the problem at the time, or even really understand how web builds would (or …

Everyone seems to have one of these – hope mine is useful to someone – I visited in November 2024. If you have backups running on your phone and a non-Japan plan, disable roaming before you get there or it’ll cost you. We got an eSim (I used Sakura) for £35 for 2 weeks for unlimited data. Internet works in tunnels and on the underground lines. Wheeee! If you have …

For years now I have had a boilerplate rejection notice for review requests from Elsevier journals. (See the Cost of Knowledge pledge for why.) I include it here, feel free to remix and reuse: As a publicly funded scholar, I prioritize reviewing for open access and not-for-profit initiatives. I cannot in good conscience devote my efforts to corporate behemoths like Elsevier, whose profit margins have exceeded those of Big Tech …

I mentioned in a previous post that doing exact UNORM or SNORM conversions to float in hardware was not particularly expensive, but didn’t go into detail how. Let’s rectify that! (If you haven’t read that post yet, please start there if you need an explanation of what the UNORM and SNORM formats are, as well as the basic idea.) Previously, I explained how for n ≥ 1, using the specific …

My mom died last month. Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book. The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history …

Michael Gene Sullivan’s version of Charles Dickens’ traditional “A Christmas Carol” is not about Scrooge, the miser who hates the holiday. Sullivan’s “A Red Carol” is “about everyone else,” a world unrepentant for its cruelties, said the 64-year-old resident director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, appearing at San Francisco’s Z Space Theater through December ... The post The play’s the thing as Michael Sullivan and the San Francisco Mime …

The Exodus (Part 2)

The fine folks of the airline industry work extra hard this time of year so that the rest of us can enjoy the holidays. As if that weren’t enough, some of them volunteer to help share seasonal spirit with people in need. As one example, United operates “Fantasy Flights” that bring children experiencing significant medical issues or other hardships to visit Santa at the North Pole. We were able to …

Sara Reish Desmond’s debut collection, What We Might Become (out now from Cornerstone Press), has been hailed as both “vivid” and “haunting.” Filled with complex and riveting characters, her stories will stay with you for a good while after you have turned the last page. Bloom sat down with Sara to talk about her journey and her process. Shabana Kayum: First, congratulations on your debut collection! Often, agents and others …

Who are you, and what do you do? I'm Kathy Reid, I'm currently finishing a PhD at ANU's School of Cybernetics, where I've investigated voice dataset documentation - like metadata and datasheets, from various angles, as a way to help create speech technology that works better for more people. I do a lot of reading and annotation of PDF files - most academic papers, and do a lot of writing …