Recently updated blogs

Near the end of 2024 I decided it was time to replace the Thinkpad X270. I still think the X2{6,7}0 is Peak Laptop. Unfortunately, as software gets worse, I need more CPU. Everything on the market seemed inferior in one way or another to the X270. I considered: Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (used) Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 12 (used) Star Labs StarBook (new) Framework 13 (new) After about two …

Mid last year I bought a cheap Sonos speaker from Ikea and it was a huge upgrade to my home life. For the last decade or so I’d almost always listened to music only through headphones. Occasionally I’d airplay a bit through my TV but it sounded pretty terrible. One problem I’ve encountered is that fairly often the music would just stop and I’d have to restart apps and the …

And so they drifted along between dull brown distempered walls, arms in arms, what was left of Addison's reefer still hanging on his lips, while the two ladies continued to pass back and forth what was left of their own reefer.Addison had the distinct impression that he was floating, and that the ladies too were floating. His feet not only felt far away, they felt as if they belonged to …

Hercule Poirot excels at cold cases so he is intrigued when Carla Lemarchant turns up for an appointment with a murder from the past. When she was 21, she learned that her mother had murdered her father, Amyas Crale, a well-known painter. Caroline Crale was convicted and died in prison, a year later. She left her daughter a letter proclaiming her innocence and now that Carla is engaged, she wants …

Today, Daisyfield Viaduct is part of a greenway, affording spectacular views for walkers and cyclists. On one side lie the outskirts of post-industrial Bury, and on the other the River Irwell, making its way past open fields. The viaduct carried the Bury to Bolton railway line, created by an Act of Parliament in 1845. The […]

Saturday A fight. Three bodies: one is flat to the ground, another screeches by their side, a third holds the first one down with a heavy foot as they prepare to attack again. Behind them a rowdy crowd goads them on from the trees. I clap my hands loudly and yell at them to stop. Reluctantly they take flight: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for the birth of …

Free on my Substack: https://muffyaldrich.substack.com/preppysloane

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 …