Recently updated blogs

So this is the thing that I made. What's it good for? The Collection contains 30 magic items that I wrote up, more or less original. Some are weapons, some are clothes. Most are weird. Some are almost definitely cursed. The items in the Collection are grouped into five categories. When you need to quickly and randomly give your players some unfamiliar magic loot, roll a d6 a couple times, …

Madelaine Moore is a freelance theatre director and artistic director of female-focused theatre company The Thelmas with Guleraana Mir. Here, she answers five questions about their new production, Santi & Naz at the Soho Theatre, gender equality in theatre, what she likes to watch and what making theatre is like...

The ‘exotic’ yet homely Central Asian restaurant hidden in Queensway Market Although it’s not quite as common as it used to be, there’s a hoary old cliche found on restaurant menus across the land: ‘home cooked’. It’s obviously meant to evoke warm, fuzzy feelings of maternal coddling, but distilled onto a plate. Yet, at the risk of sounding unnecessarily ornery, contrarian or fuelling speculation about my dysfunctional parents, I don’t …

I've started editing/re-editing some family photos. Figure I'll post the images here as groups, and add to the posts as I get photos edited.These will be photographs related to Robert Call and Charlotte Joslin. Shared December 2024 I believe this is a Christmas card sent to my grandmother Evelyn Clara (Call) Hankins by her cousin Rosalind Daniels in 1941. She included photographs of two crayon drawings of their grandparents Robert …

'Once again, reading kept me going this year. I started the year recovering from an operation and seeking somewhere new to live. I was then made redundant in February and spent a good few months searching for work. Professional losses and personal losses have combined to make the year something of a tumult, and reading has been an anchor. Except when I read something I hated.'

Training classes can be an excellent opportunity for your dog to learn new skills, build duration and resistance to distraction, become proficient in working through various levels of difficulty and distraction, burn energy, gain confidence, and build your relationship. When looking into finding a class, the first question to ask is: What are you looking to accomplish? Are you looking to build new obedience skills? Give your dog an extra …

It's only a few days until 2025. That means one thing: it is time for my yearly tradition of reviewing… some of my year. I'll cover work, conferences, reading, writing and music. This will inevitably sound cheesy, but I am once again genuinely grateful for the opportunities I got… there were fun projects at work, I got to see some of my dearest artists live and I got to share …

Pattern recognition is extremely fun and we love to do it. When I was a kid I loved archeology and dramatic histories of science (think “The Microbe Hunters”) and also anything about unexplained phenomena and scientific hoaxes, like UFOs or people spontaneously combusting or the original Mechanical Turk. And now I am spontaneously combusting myself as I have just read the most ridiculous fable! Google “news” shoveled a fantastic “science” …

New baby! 327g. Working with such a thickness took me a few days of adjusting details. A few imperfections, more than usual. I had to do some parts of the process in two steps. But I reached the goal of much bigger spine compared with the pages (+29%). This will help to balance the thickness once the notebook is eating notes, experiences and sticked alien stuff. The pages will get …

On January 1, 1925, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC, astronomer Henry N. Russell read a paper contributed by a young astronomer named Edwin Hubble. In this paper, Hubble announces that he has been able, for the first time, to measure the distance to some spiral-shaped “nebulae” (nebulae were fuzzy things in the sky — their nature was an unsettled question, as was their location.) …

Further adventures of the Amiga port of Cecconoid! And this one's kinda crazy. Neil, from RMC, recently came across an Arcadia cabinet, Mastertronic's folly to make an arcade machine out of an Amiga 500. As part of the restoration, Ian decided to port Cecconoid over to it, and it is a thing of beauty. I got to play on it a couple of weeks ago, and honestly, wrestling the machine …

Curveball is a server-side webframework for Node.js. I’ve been working on it for 6 years as a side-project, but it wasn’t successful and it’s time to let it go. This is a hard thing to do, because I probably have 1000’s of hours into this project, and there’s a strong sense of missed potential. I’m writing this article because my psyche requires closure in order for them to not take …

Just a little ways away from our house sits a tiny movie theater, a cozy spot with just three screens showing both modern releases and beloved classics. Recently, I've seen "Stand By Me", "Being John Malkovich", and "Halloween" there. Last night the line for "Nosferatu" stretched nearly out the door, the busiest I've ever seen the place.The theater's history stretches back to 1948, its bright neon marquee still illuminating the …

Not quite in the league of Loafer's big rudd boat but sometimes in the winter a real bonanza of a place. I'd packed the chub gear from yesterday as well as the pin rod and getting to the carp park and seeing swimmers and all sorts nearly set off up the path but in truth I'd rather give it a go up there with some regular baiting and the small …