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Can’t get enough of bookandswordblog? This spring I will be teaching two short courses for the University of Victoria’s Continuing Education program. One of them is online on Tuesday 4 February from 6 to 8 pm Victoria, BC time. The price is CAD $35.70 (about USD $24). You can find more here. Ancient sieges were once familiar and alien. Armies struggled to take settlements, soldiers sweated in the grime beneath …

At the dawn of the new millennium, web-based technology was undergoing a transformative phase. Google, though well-known, was just one of many search engines vying for attention and far from the tech giant it would later become. Dial-up internet, complete with its unmistakable connection tone, remained a fixture in countless American households. Meanwhile, file-sharing platforms […]

While Drew played around in the snow.. Rey was focused on building a fort. That is, until Drew came by and knocked it over . The post Building Forts appeared first on @Kevuhnn.

A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view. Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW! Especially this bit: Suppose …

I took notes from Sean Voisen’s call for more hybrid tools. He speaks for a moment on generative AI and its inclusion into existing tools, but reading between the lines the insight I found was how our tools can trigger empathy for people and disciplines: One of the greatest goals we can have for [making] tools…is that in expanding all of our respective capabilities, we do not replace our human …

Perfume PosseMusc by Mona di Orio Hey Posse, yes we received the devastating news recently that the Mona do Orio brand has died a sad and lonely death. WAAAHH! I’m partly to blame. It’s been a long while since I bought a bottle from them. They… Continue Reading → Perfume PosseMusc by Mona di Orio

Tales of an Antiquary: chiefly illustrative of the manners, traditions, and remarkable localities of ancient London by Richard Thomson 1828 A view of Fleet Street and the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, circa the 1840s. I’m starting the new year with a new literary excavation project! Tales of an Antiquary (1828) purports to be the memoirs of an antiquarian named Sylvanus Beauclerk, who takes his readers on a literary tour of …

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 1 (Friday 10 January 2025)

Medicine Hat practices this week, in anticipation of Saturday's show. We're learning a new one which I posted about previously, and it's pulling us back together. Maybe we'll record it? Maybe we'll write more?

Original poster art for 'The Lost World' (1925).This weekend takes me to the fair city of Cleveland, Ohio, where I'll accompany 'The Lost World' (1925) at this year's annual Sci-Fi Marathon at Case Western Reserve University.It's the 50th annual edition of the Case Western Film Society's marathon, at which diehard movie buffs spend a mid-winter weekend watching sci-fi films of all types 30 to 36 hours non-stop. And next month, …

The days between Christmas and New Years Day are an annual gift I give myself, a peaceful pause in the march of days when no ‘to-do lists’ are allowed to intrude. Instead there is just a gentle drifting, a pottering and flitting between things that feel right at the time. We walk with Toby every day out in the quietly dormant countryside, and then it’s back home to warm up …

Speaking of titles that I played obsessively for a time, 2024 also saw the release of a new Creeper World game! But it occurs to me that I never posted about Creeper World IV here, so let’s talk a little about that first. Creeper World IV was the franchise’s foray into 3D, and it was fine. If you’re a fan of Creeper World, and you’ve wondered what it would be …

Icelandair’s first A321LR, TF-IAA, at a gate at Stockholm Arlanda Airport following its inaugural revenue flight from KEF Icelandair has, other than their domestic/feeder airline, long had an all-Boeing mainline fleet consisting of 737 MAX-8 and MAX-9, 757-200, 757-300, and 767 jetliners. That all changed on Dec. 10, 2024, when the airline placed an A321LR into service as TF-IAA, named Esia, per their protocol of naming aircraft after Icelandic volcanoes. …

I had a great conversation recently with Katie Wilde about the reliability space. (You can see or hear the conversation here). She made a wonderful observation about reliability work: all of the incentives in the reliability space are wrong. Doing the right thing in reliability is almost always the thing that isn’t rewarded. In the discussion, I found some lessons and techniques that I think are worth sharing, not just …

Everything old is new again and now that things aqueous and lightly transparent, with a mist of cool fresh air like Drop d'Issey, are making ripples, it's time for a comeback for those musky, airy, cool and dewy fragrances that defined an era. The presentation for Oxygène by Lanvin followed the trend for diaphanous or light blue (Light Blue anyone?) bottles that dominated the 1990s and