Recently updated blogs

Nonfiction The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World, by Shelley Puhak, published 2022. It’s about Brunhild and Fredegund in the late 500s and all the crazy and frequently violent political machinations throughout their rise to power. Quite good. I really liked it, even if the going felt slower at times because of the less familiar names. I hadn’t realized the royal name Louis (Louis XIV etc., …

I wish Slack would spend half as much time on improving core functionality as they do on these obnoxious, enterprise-grade notifications for features I don’t need. This one is particularly dumb: It’s from a Slack workspace with exactly two users – me included. All our communication there happens in channels.

Searching for VictoriaLogs on search.nixos.org gave me no results, so I ran victorialogs from Docker. But at some point I did search for victorialogs on nixpkgs and realized that the binary is built with victoriametrics.

7 January 2025 - working notes AI is here to stay. And AI is famously compute-intensive, which means it’s energy-intensive, which means its carbon emissions are a worry. I think the emissions are likely to come from initial training of the model, running the model (inference), data centre stuff (mostly energy use), and lifecycle emissions associated with hardware production and disposal. What’s being done to measure and reduce the emissions? …

Back to H.L. Mencken and his book The American Language, he says in Supplement One (1945) that one of the Britishisms “that deserve American adoption” is “‘pub-crawl’ (a tour of saloons).” I’m pretty sure my readers don’t need that definition, so familiar has the phrase become on this side of the Atlantic. But it definitely had British origins. It sprang from more more specific sorts of alcoholic “crawls.” The OED‘s …

"On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me Twelve Drummers Drumming. . ."Ok, I think I'd rather pass on that particular gift. I'll take the 3 french hens, the 5 golden rings, the 6 geese a-laying (my chickens are on their winter strike right now, so any laying birds would be useful), or even the 8 maids a-milking (Although since all of my goats are currently …

The trends I got right—and wrong—reveal a pattern. Where do they point for the baby name future? Making predictions is fun. Facing up to the results, though, can be humbling. In the past, I’ve held other people’s baby name forecasts up to the reality mirror, notably the economic-class-based predictions of the book Freakonomics. Now it’s time to face the music myself. I recently came across a list I created back …

Regular readers will have previously seen the lock and wheels etc. upside down in A Vardo – Part Four, but now that I have it all painted (figure 1), it’s constantly in the way and easily damaged. I decided, therefore, to lift the vardo up and install the lock in its rightful place (figure 2). Fig. 1. Carefully assembling the painted lock and wheels. Fig. 2. Bugger! Now I need …

This blog began twelve years ago and it began as a result of a walk in Tower Hamlets where I live. We were struck by just how much of what we saw was built by local government. That was true of housing most of all; unsurprisingly in Tower Hamlets where at peak in the early 1980s something over 80 percent of households lived in social rent homes. But there was …

4-5 January 2025London, UKOmen Star£90 (some £40 subsidised tickets also available) Last week I visited The Smoke, a two-day international chamber larp festival in London, organised and run by Omen Star. It’s very similar to the Immersion festival in Turku, Finland I wrote about last year. I wasn’t planning to do a full writeup of The Smoke because I am trying very hard to focus on the book I’m writing, …

In Scope of Work, Spencer Wright rides along with New York Times photographer Christopher Payne, on his visits to the MTA’s repair shops. The factories he visits are complicated, complex, kludgy. Factories take knowledge away from craftspeople and turn it into bureaucracy and institutional anxiety. Factories pollute our waterways. Factories take razor-sharp lathe swarf and try to convince us it’s jewelry; factories enlist workers to help someone else fulfill their …

First of all, I hate making mockups! But they’re essential for a good fit of the garment. I usually have to make more than one mockup before I’m finally satisfied with the fit: especially for form-fitting garments like corsets and tailored garments like jackets. ‘Two fittings for a simple garment, such as a house-dress, a plain shirt-waist, or a skirt, should be sufficient, if the garment has been properly prepared …

Though the standard narrative of 90s alternative hinges on the explosive success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Gen Z pop star Olivia Rodrigo is known for having a different take: as she told the LA Times at the end...

First up – Happy New Year to everyone! I haven’t painted anything from my Dungeons and Lasers Woodhaven Kickstarter pledge in some time now. These pieces in fact were painted in November or December, and are in the round-up I recently posted, and so for the sake of my own completeness, here they are. These were originally started as part of Dave’s Season of Scenery challenge, as supplemental pieces to …

Wouldn’t you know, Orson Cart has been whittling away at his mobile home.