Recently updated blogs

G+ died in slow motion. There were redesigns people hated. Tweaks and changes throughout its life, as Google tried to make it work the way they wanted. The site was shuttered in April 2019. The social network was never the hit Google wanted, but it was a weirdly popular RPG space—certainly the epicentre of the best parts of the OSR for a period of time. People never stopped posting, right …

Watched the penultimate performance of Elektra in Brighton this afternoon, before it transfers to the West End. Dense dialogue compensates for the short running time and an abrupt ending, yet the play is undermined by needless and nonsensical gimmicks (effect pedals, a random blimp, ink guns). Larson gave a forceful performance though, and was an absolute pro dealing with a mid-performance interruption (a cup fell from an upper circle).

Yesterday, I published two pieces,"Severance, The Substance, and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves" in the New York Times, and "If You Ask "Why?", You're a Philosopher and You're Awesome" / "The Penumbral Plunge" in Aeon. If you receive The Splintered Mind by mail, apologies for hitting you twice in quick succession. The Aeon piece remixes material from The Weirdness of the World and some old blog posts into what one reader …

We visit the the coldest body in the solar system to have its temperature measured on location.

Continuing the series of critics wrong-footed in real-time, here's Rolling Stoner Stephen Holden on Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns - which he finds overly detached, blandly jazz-ified, and deficient in melody (!)A classic LA album for a not-so-classic time in LA's life.... the title even has a water supply / keeping vegetation lush and non-combustible association... the hissing of said sprinklers at night is one of the distinctive …

*Clearly this is a “robotics system,” but not of the traditional, and everything has been reframed in NVIDIA’s large-model tech.The term-of-art here may be “world model,” so what does it do when it gets up and walks?

For many viewers, The Mrs Merton Show sprang fully-formed onto BBC2 on the 10th February 1995. But things are never quite as simple as that. And with Caroline Aherne and Mrs Dorothy Merton, the story is even more complicated than most. Regional television can get short shrift in the history of comedy; regional radio even more so. Very little in-depth has been written about the origins of Mrs Merton in …

The original: Di concetti difficili e stravolti Non fabbricare a te sfingi e chimere: Cerca modi spediti e disinvolti, E non far, come i dotti di mestiere, rime col tiro a secco, o versi sciolti, Che vanno avanti a calci nel sedere. Ma pensa e di’ le cose tali e quali, pensatamente schiette e naturali. \ Many of Giusti’s most famous poems are political and satirical in nature, and thus …

IT’S HERE – The Film and Furniture Video Podcast has landed! We’re thrilled to announce the launch of The Film and Furniture Podcast—a project that’s been months in the making and is now live! If you’ve ever wondered about the magic that happens when film meets design, this podcast is for you. Whether you’re a dedicated film fan, a design enthusiast, or someone who loves both worlds, we’re bringing you …

Faithless Reverence Get It At DiscogsMaxi Jazz, the maestro behind Faithless, is well titled as "the grand oral disseminator." The tales he spins make this album a manifesto, religious experience, sexual escapade, and 24-hour rave all rolled up into one tightly constructed package. As Jazz explored hip-hop through the 1980s and his path converged with dub superstar Jah Wobble, the ultra funky Jamiroquai, and the Soul II Soul amalgamation (among …

Nikolaus Tuczek is one of the most acclaimed shoemakers in history, with an almost mythical gloria around him. Wrongly so. The Tuczek story is not about one brilliant man, it’s about several generations of a hard working family who had to fight and overcome many challenges, until a pair of slippers finally took them down. Bespoke shoemaker and shoe historian at his leisure William Efe Laborde is here to unveil …

From 1949, when President Truman appointed my father to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs, to 1981, when my father retired, his career depended upon the whims of the American electorate. When a Democrat won (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), he received a diplomatic appointment; when a Republican won he had to find something else to do. That understandably gave him an all-consuming interest in the outcome of the …

🎨 Impressions Short disclaimer: I’ve read this book in its original German version, so the passages I highlighted will also be in German. But since the book was simultaneously published internationally in many different languages, I’ll keep this blog’s and podcast’s main language to English. The autobiography of former German chancellor Angela Merkel, writing together with her longtime assistant and confidant, Beate Baumann. She has often been called the most …

Album of the Week, January 18, 2025 It had to be recorded quickly, and it couldn’t be recorded in England. Both essential points of how the Police’s third album came to be were symptoms of their burgeoning success, which had exploded ever since Reggatta de Blanc and “Message in a Bottle.” They were now touring constantly, reaching out to and building up the fan base, not just in the US …

One of the great things about microbrands is that they are small. Your average micro consists of no more than a handful of people, often just one or two, with… The post SēL OmniDiver Xos 42 appeared first on The Time Bum.