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The Best & Worst of:2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010I bought a GameCube this year. It's orange.I also bought and played things that aren't twenty years old. New things. Whether I was pumping dozens of hours into the latest blockbuster, discovering a charming indie, revisiting an old favourite, or …

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

Just in time for the holidays, Colleen Robichaux and I wrote this paper on positivity of Schubert coefficients. This paper is unlike any other paper I had written, both in the content and the way we obtained the results. To me, writing it was a religious experience. No, no, the paper is still mathematical, it’s just, uhm, different. Read this post till the end to find out how, or go …

The Eiger Sanction (1975). This action thriller, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, follows a former assassin who is coerced into one last mission. There is some talk about recovering a germ warfare formula, but the mission is really about revenge. Two bad agents kill one of ours, so a shadowy U.S. agency wants them sanctioned--which is apparently code for eliminated. Eastwood's ex-killer now teaches art at a college (!) …

This year we enjoyed around 40 events, including monthly pub meet-ups at the Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. There were our hardy annuals such as the Big Pub Quiz, Annual Lecture, Picnic and Life Members’ Lunch; among the rest, highlights have to be our visit to Berry Bros & Rudd, the Gas Lamp workshop, the Kennel Club […]

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! Happy Holidays! I have four new links to read while you recharge your batteries from dealing with end-of-year stress or recovering from overeating. They’re either introspective or retrospective, as is the theme this time of year. Care Doesn’t Scale, by Steven Scrawls This is such a good article that resonated very deeply with me. As someone who wished could do more to …

You Can't Rebrand a Class War. This is about America, but the Labour Party seem intent on telling everyone the system has failed over the past decades that it's not possible for it to improve, and will then be shocked when the populist fascists get more votes for their lies that they will improve things; just as happened with Brexit. When the current situation is broken and one party is …

I dual-boot my desktop between Windows and Linux. Over the past few years, Linux would often crash when I tried to sleep my computer with high RAM usage. Upon waking it would show a black screen with moving cursor, or enter a "vegetative" state with no image on-screen, only responding to magic SysRq or a hard reset. I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took …

It’s always a special feeling to say good bye to a year and welcome a new one. When you look back, you realize how fast a year passes by, but also how much you’ve done and been through. For us, New Year’s Eve 2024 will be extra special. Not only are we saying good bye to the year 2024, we are also saying good bye to our apartment which we …

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...

For last year’s check-in, I foreshadowed a year of changes for ol’ Dave Rupert and boy was I not kidding. New job, new car, new pets. But before we get into all that – for accountability’s sake – let’s check in on my resolutions from last year and see how I did… Activate an active lifestyle - Nope. Write more shitty sci-fi - Nope. Draw more - Nope. Write for …

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.'