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"Being Alive Is Hard," 2025, by Connie Sun. Ink & watercolor on paper.Life can be unimaginably difficult. Whatever is hard for you at the moment, I wish you strength and solace. May the days ahead be kind. - Connie--Since relaunching my cartoon blog, I'm back on Ko-fi, Instagram, and you can sign up to hear from me directly. Thanks for reading.

Casio brings PAC-MAN to your wrist with four new digital watches. The collection marks 45 years of the iconic arcade game through designs that blend gaming elements with Casio’s classic digital watch styles. Two models, the A168WEPC ($79.95) and F-91WPC ($59.95), feature PAC-MAN and all four GHOSTS – Blinky, Inky, Clyde, and Pinky – on their faces. These watches use bright neon colors that pop against the display. The A168WEPC …

I run some lightweight privacy-respecting self-hosted analytics for my blog, so I know what my most popular posts were in 2024. It's hardly surprising that many of these were also published last year, but they include one from 2013 and another from 2018. Having a quick peek at my stats reminded me that the blog content that is most appreciated, shared and read is often not what you might think …

Chris Armstrong, advocating for a digital garden over a blog structure: A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. Robin Rendle linked to Armstrong’s post recently and reading it reminded me of my 2011 post The blog format is ready for disruption. In that post, which is now nearly 14 years old, I argue that the structure …

Two years ago, Ian Scott created the picoGUS card that uses ISA sound card emulation using the RaspPi’s Pico’s microcontroller. My July 2023 post was the first post to mention the card and I’ve had it on my radar ever since. Last summer I received my own copy and tried assembling it into the trusty 80486—except that that didn’t work out well because the card was… too small? After fixing …

it is 2025 and i can’t tell you what I’ve really been watching on youtube recently because you will think I’ve lost the plot, so instead, here are the things I can tell you about: knitting with paint knitting with yarn music, not knitting and a laugh to end the post

I was reminded of this book while reading the short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, which was reprinted in Trigger Warning. I realized I’ve read very little of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, and I thought I should fill this void a bit. Given the crazy amount of stuff he wrote, I would have been troubled to choose. Likely, this one has …

This year we got a new Solar Pons collection from Belanger Books that finally takes him to the United States: The American Adventures of Solar Pons. Edited by David Marcum the collection features a dozen stories by various authors. I’ve posted on Solar Pons before, recently doing a re-reading of both the original stories by […]

Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville Kate Grenville tells her grandmother’s story; family history and historical research enriched with a storyteller’s gloss. I loved it. Author’s page: Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville

I had been lacking books from the Snoopy Museum in Tokyo, so when I saw one one for sale on eBay, I chunked up some money and ordered it. It was a bit more than I like to spend on one book… which is why I was so happy when it turned out to be two! It isn’t a boxed set per se, because what they were in was open …

DMFT is significantly less perplexing than HMRC Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy. This week, I’ve made another contribution to the OEIS (currently in review) about the excellent puzzle #23 from Scroggsvent that Matt has written up here. I’ve also written a blog post I’m unusually pleased about: when Michelle Kwan skated last at the 1995 Figure Skating Worlds, …

koko-mochi:I was talking to my dad about renewable energy and he was like “the only problem with solar farms is they take up so much space.”And it made me think about a city and how much sun exposure all the rooftops in a city get and…why not just make the city it’s own solar farm by putting solar panels on every rooftop?

Our January 2025 edition of Now Playing features music that changes the way we think and write, shows to sink into, and great winter reads, all from our contributors!Sasha BrownI've been listening to Daniel Bachman's apocalyptic banjo drone music while I write. It was the soundtrack to Catching Babies. The album is perfect to write to: instrumental, spooky, uncomfortable. Bachman made some of the instruments on it himself. When he's …

Two weeks into 2025 and I'm only now starting in on my first novel of the New Year... and so late in the day!I've wanted to read The Weird World of Wes Beattie for some time, but forays through the used bookstores of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia brought frustration. Exhausted from the chase, I resorted to online booksellers, which explains how it is I ended up with …

1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that 'I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them'. It took me nearly 16 years, but over the end-of-year …