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January 13, 2024 Tip of the Week Why Lobbing is Good For You, Why Lobbing is Bad For You. Weekend Coaching I coached in four group sessions over the weekend, totaling 6.5 hours. I spent about half of them feeding multiball, half as a practice partner/coach. I think I blocked about 10,000 shots over the weekend! If I block like this in tournaments, I’ll never lose. I also had some …

YouTube fragrance reviewers drive me up the wall. They're the reason I’ll never start my own channel. Why bother joining the parade of mediocrity? With rare exceptions—Derek’s Varanis Ridari comes to mind—they’re lazy shills who couldn’t crack a walnut if you handed them a sledgehammer. They just parrot each other for clicks.Take their reviews of Amber Oud Carbon Edition. Across the board,

I picked up the entire series of the Universal Monsters Toony Terrors and I'm making my way through them, following up the Wolf Man with Frankenstein. Or Frankenstein's monster. Or just the Monster or the Creature. I received two of the Toony Terrors as Christmas gifts from my parents, Frankenstein and the Mummy, so it was a very Karloff Christmas at my house. Ready for an animated take on the …

“I don’t make a film because I’m against something. For that matter, I don’t make a film because I’m for something — don’t make propaganda. If anything, all the films[...] The post <em>Cruising</em>: The Boys in (Black and) Blue appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

There’s a scene in the Terra Ignota series where one character is talking about the 26th century equivalent of the Oscars and says “Oh, I love watching the Oscars,” then reveals that he/she cannot tolerate watching actual movies at all, and watches the Oscars as the closest possible alternative. The cause? Another character told him/her a fact that made watching movies … any movie … too painful (and told him/her …

A pattern variation. After writing the articles Collecting and handling result values and Short-circuiting an asynchronous traversal, I realized that it might be valuable to describe a more disciplined variation of the Impureim Sandwich pattern. The book Design Patterns describes each pattern over a number of sections. There's a description of the overall motivation, the structure of the pattern, UML diagrams, examples code, and more. One section discusses various implementation …

Top of my bedside reading pile just now is a gift from my daughter – the great essayist Joseph Epstein's new memoir, Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life. As I am another who feels he's had a lucky life, in all manner of ways (and is hesitant about saying so, for fear of tempting fate), I am naturally drawn to a book …

YouTube has so many interviews with great photographers these days. ↬ ∙ Tagged in Photography.

As expected the first week of the New Year for me back at work wasn't too busy with a lot of my colleagues still on leave. I've been spending the quiet periods between tasks seeing whether establishing an accessibility advocates network within the organisation is viable. It's slow take-up so far, and demanding much patience. I learnt just towards the end of the week of the recent tragic passing of …

from Stephen Downes’ novel Mural Photo-embedded literature—novels and books of poetry which use photographs as an essential element of the “text”—is a core interest of mine and has been something I have written about extensively on Vertigo since I started it in 2007. In 2024, I managed to see or be informed about a number of newly published examples of such books by writers from Australia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, Ireland, …

I'll see you in the beginning, friend. In two and bit hours I will will to became a guy who will have seen Tenet. I am starting this review with the last paragraph and the whole thing is a palindrome. 🎵BRRRRRRRRRRR🎵 The laser focus on the forwards-backwards time concept worked for me and I really enjoyed the film. That is to say, I enjoyed the film and its focus on …

2025 is here. Now that 2024 is complete, I can look and see how much I made doing things outside of normal employment. This will be the second year I’ve done it in the beginning of January instead of the end of December, and the ninth year of doing it in general. Here are the past eight income reports: 2023 End of Year Side Income Report 2022 End of Year …

This post was originally intended for the actual friends I share on Facebook, not necessarily the ‘added friends’ who I don’t know in real life. Over the decades, I’ve made many worldwide acquaintances; sadly, my only link to some is as a Facebook connection. This screed is about deleting my Facebook account, which means forever severing connections with some people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. This is not a …

If you’re going to be in northern Europe in December, you need to be prepared for the darkness. Every day gets darker than the last, and by early December, you’ll find yourself wondering just how bleak it can get. But that’s where the Christmas lights come in. And the markets. And everything becomes a little more bearable. Table of Contents ToggleDestinations VisitedDo You Want to Move Abroad in 2025?HighlightsChallengesBlog Posts …

The pet store near me is closing. First you need to understand by near, I mean walking distance. Like I once carried home twenty pounds of cat litter and I am not a person who regular walks more than a few feet with twenty pounds of anything other than myself if I can help it. My recollection was that it opened near the end of my cat Sabrina's life. I …