Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours Mark Richards explores the controversial work of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and her secret life as a Soviet agent in London during the Cold War Child staring into a bakery window, Whitechapel, 1935 (Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland) On a wall in a flat in Maida Vale hangs this small photograph. It is a window into a world of social unrest, poverty, espionage and insurrection. The photograph and the story behind it add weight to the…
GLÅUGUST HAS PASSED AROUND THE SUN HELLO. LAST TIME I RAN GLÅUGUST, IT OUTPERFORMED MY EXPECTATIONS AND I WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED. THIS GAVE ME CAUSE TO SUPPOSE THAT MY SUPPOSITION ABOUT THE CAUSE OF THE -- I'LL CUT OFF THE RAMBLE.IN SHORT, YEAH, AUGUST SEEMS TO WORK. HERE WE ARE AGAIN. CHALLENGES WORK LIKE THIS: THEY’RE 1d6 LISTS OF SHORT PROMPTS. YOU CAN ROLL 6d6 AND GET A SET OF SIX CHALLENGES TO COMPLETE. OR YOU CAN JUST LOOK AT THIS AND PICK ONE YOU’RE INTERESTED IN I GUESS.CHALLENGE 1…
June 11th, Jack in the Donuts opened in our train stationThe line was krazy (and still is on weekends) so I finally got to try them the other day We actually tried them awhile back in Akihabara so I was also leery because at that time it wasn’t too tastyCoffee Fashion...cake style old fashion with coffee glazeGalaxy Doughnut...the texture was like mochi donutsExcept look how "thin" they
Guardianby PriestGenres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Mystery, Romance Pages: 341 Series: Guardian #2 Rating: Synopsis: THE SLEEPING GOD STIRS As snow quietly covers Dragon City in the final days of the lunar year, patients writhing in pain flock to the hospital. Baffled doctors call upon Zhao Yunlan and his team for help. As the case unfolds, Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan discover that one of the Four Hallowed Artifacts, the Merit Brush, has appeared in the Mortal Realm. In the wrong hands, its power can…
I really enjoyed Daniel Kremer’s IT’S A ZABRISKIE, ZABRISKIE, ZABRISKIE, ZABRISKIE POINT, a doc/video essay that productively compares two sorta films maudit, while also stirring into the mix a bunch of other films about the American desert, from GREED to THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK: Some of this is illuminating — it certainly made me […]
by Nathaniel R Can Daisy & Esmé pull an Emma & Kate in the new version of SENSE & SENSIBILITY? With such a banner Best Supporting Actress season in the rearview mirror, how can the next race even dream of topping it? Who will be our next Madigan... our Wunmi or Teyana? Will we get another Inga & Elle twofer? Sight unseen the films of 2026 don't appear to be offering us a wealth of contenders. And yet, who can really know in the spring or summertime? Promos and buzz and rumors of greatness for…
Fable 5 is back today, baby! Premium subscribers have one week to use it within their subscriptions. First hit’s free. Then you pay by the token. Today’s post is still about Sonnet 5. I don’t know that there will be much call for Sonnet 5 for most purposes, given Opus 4.8 exists and especially now that Fable 5 is once again available, but this is what we do here, so sure, why not, system card time, including model welfare, after which we’ll do capabilities. Sonnet costs $3/$15 per million…
Until now, I've stored the irons for my wooden plow plane in a roll that gets put in a drawer. The roll wasn't some multiple-compartment, fancy leather gizmo; it was nothing more than an old kitchen towel. The irons deserved better, so I made a box for them.For whatever reason, I often get stuck on design. I looked online and found a few images of plow plane iron boxes. They typically were vertical boxes with a lid that hinged to the side and each iron stands on end in its own slot. While I…
Being lazy today, but feeling nice instead of guilty about it. Started feeling a little extra nice after I joked about moving into a friends household on discord, and started listing things that would make me a good roommate. It turns out that's a funny way to come up with nice things about yourself, even if it's in a mindset of being useful or unobtrusive. Like, I'm pretty decent about getting chores done, I have a job and a car, good hygiene, I wear a mask so I don't get sick, I'm good at…
Instead of the million productive things I should be doing, I spent a few hours making an extremely simple web toy to help make pangrams. To be clear: the actual code only took about an hour, and that’s with me not having touched Javascript in years and having to relearn how it handles the document model. The rest of the time was spent wrestling with WordPress block and CSS styles, and I eventually just gave up and used old-school CSS.1 Anyway, it’s “fun” if you’re a weirdo who loves…
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, 321p: I had fun reading this book. I've heard of it before. I knew it was a classic from Canadian literature. I had the chance to visit Prince Edward Island, so I decided that the trip was the perfect moment to read this book. The protagonist, Anne, is the joy of the book. She is always looking at the bright side of things, she inspires courage and joy. And she is such a relentless creative soul. I loved her vivid imagination and her curiosity. Overall,…
This post went to Patronizers in June and to the public in July. Not a Patronizer? You could be! I am now settled in a safe and clean apartment. After ten days of work, everything is unpacked and in a place. I’m not happy with all the places, but those can be adjusted and if things have a place the apartment can be kept tidy. My office is functional, including printers and wireless. I’m actually fairly content with how it came out. I loathe carpeting, but that’s what I could get. Going from a…
In his keynote talk at the first Perl conference, Larry Wall couldn’t get the Windows computer on the podium to behave. So he SSH’d into his own machine and said, with relief and joy: “Home sweet home”. Three decades on, software developers still live in the terminal, now more than ever as coding agents dethrone the integrated environments that held sway for so long. IDEs recede as we do less writing and editing, more reading and reviewing. If you watch developers at work today, you are likely…
For anyone interested… been tinkering with a fast way to insert the current date (YEAR-MM-DD) on MacOS (alas, Tahoe). After struggling to get an Automator Applescript to work, Shortcuts (I guess?) was the most elegant to do it. Sharing the shortcut here (it has hotkey, but you can edit).
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Yesterday I visited the Home Building Association Bank in Newark, Ohio, a Louis Sullivan jewel box bank built in 1914. It’s currently owned by the Licking County Foundation (oh, grow up), which restored it at considerable cost over several years and reopened it to the public last fall. As you can see from the photo above, the Old Home differs from the other jewel box banks in that its exterior is clad entirely in terra cotta—it’s not mostly brick with terra cotta accents. But the accents still…
On this week's episode: Love Island and Big Brother have a history of casting hot dummies who sometimes turn out to be people who behave badly. How do they find them? We'll dive into two parts of the casting process.
Working out some more equations and a first start of a proof.
Why I Replaced .Count with Measure-Object in My PowerShell Code. I tried the .Count and it kept returning 0 when I knew there was more than one in the count. This caused problems when I needed to count if there was great then 0 or 1 items, and .Count was unreliable. Moving to Measure-Object was, and this is why. Recently, I made a small change throughout some PowerShell code that looked like this: "CriticalIssues" = ($issues | Where-Object { $_.Severity -eq "Critical" }).Count and changed it…
Sony’s Sid Shuman: As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. […] Also Sony’s Sid Shuman: After nearly two decades of supporting the PS3 console generation, we wanted to let you know we…
Dr Eleni Frantziou, Associate Professor in Public Law and Human Rights, Durham Law School, and Dr Sylvia de Mars, Reader in Transnational Public Law, Newcastle Law School Photo credit: Samuel Lennox, via Wikimedia Commons Introduction Is there anything left to say on the direct effect of EU law? Yes, according to the UK Supreme Court, which handed down its much-awaited judgment in Dillon et al on 7 May 2026. The UK reference above is not a typo: despite Brexit, aspects of the EU/UK Withdrawal…
View from Cariboo Dam: Partly sunny with a decent breeze blowing. It’s Canada Day and you know what that means! That’s right, people go out on the trails and wave tiny Canadian flags. Well, maybe not the flags, but there were more than the usual number of people out for a Wednesday morning, but the weather was pleasant and the people were, too, so it was all good. I changed my mind for my second post-surgery run and rather than re-run the same route as Monday, I opted to go clockwise and to not…
Mathew Ingram: So what, I can hear you thinking. I don’t know or care what anyons are, or how gallium arsenide works. Me neither! The interesting part of this story for me is that Microsoft — a company that has a market value of $2.7 trillion and almost single-handedly created the personal computing industry — has repeatedly claimed that its Majorana processor uses these particles, and that its new version is a thousand times more reliable, and yet some other theoretical physicists have called…
Old Dutch bringing out the summer party box — their classic Rip-L potato chips tricked out to imitate a juicy lucy cheeseburger. I applaud midwestern innovation of this kind.
Replied to [No title] by Rodrigo Ghedin (Manual do Usuário) Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting. Any plain text editor will do. The rest is just fluff. Rodrigo Ghedin published a short “hot take” on markdown: “[I]f you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting.” I largely agree, although I personally use using KDE’s Ghostwriter, which displays some markdown formatting and has some…
In an effort to increase my income in these difficult times, I have opened a store for A Shroud of Thoughts on Zazzle. Like the blog, it is dedicated to popular culture. Of course, due to copyright restrictions, I really can't have any times based on movies, TV shows, or books that are not in the public domain. Fortunately, there are a lot of popular books that are in the public domain, so I have created a series of products such as T-shirts, key chains, and coffee mugs using quotes from…
Remember when Marie Kondo was telling us all to ask if things "spark joy"? And we all lost our damn minds folding our underwear into perfect rectangles and arguing over whether we were allowed to own more than 35 books? Good times. Anyway, I got a new one for you. I decided to tackle the basement Room Where Stuff Goes When I Don't Want to Deal With It Anymore But Also Feel Like I Can't Get Rid of It today. Does everyone have this room? Lots of people have this room. Or this closet. Or a box.…
My EU age verification post triggered a long debate on lobste.rs. Here are the points I found most worth engaging with. I’ve probably missed some, the discussion was really long, and I’ve also received feedback though other channels. I will post again if I feel there’s more to share on the topic. Favoring the incumbents A point I missed the first time. In the EU design, an authority issues me an attestation that I'm of legal age; it lands in my digital wallet. When a site needs to check, the…
Catalina coast…
June 29The last day of this last trip by us via motorhome to the eastern half of the country!We left the Sylvan Park COE campground at 0645 CDT and arrived home at 1247 MDT.We're very glad Uma, the VRRV gave us no further issues since the small scare involving the air filter in Wentzville, MO. We unloaded Uma and started in on the post-camping trip chores Some of the lessons learned:Anything east of the Rockies is hot and humid in late Spring/Summer. Sure, it's hot here in Colorado but way…