Bubbles
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The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA. Are you a robot? They are not robots. But...
The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA. Are you a robot? They are not robots. But...
Something different for today: a one-hour episode of a podcast A Life Well Wasted from 2025. (I can’t link to it directly, but it’s the most recent episode, called “Game Over.”) It’s a human story whose beats might be familiar to some of...
When your friendly neighborhood employee gives you the secret whisper tipoff that the heavy, cardboard something-or-other you’re carrying is about to go on sale, you know what to do. Stop, drop, and come back tomorrow. AWESOME! Ready for...
Three Sisters is a traditional companion planting technique where corn, climbing beans and winter squash (e.g. pumpkins) are planted together, and each of them provides benefits to the other two. The game Three Sisters is a...
Ikebukuro is a pretty big commercial and transportation hub in north-western Tokyo - it has the third-busiest train station in the world (only behind Shinjuku and Shibuya). I've managed to get the hang of Shinjuku station's sprawling...
What’s the best way to really settle into a new house? Finish a sewing project of course! I started working on the Matchy Matchy Sewing Club Collage Gather Top way back in February, but had to set it aside when class work took over my...
★★★★★ I remembered The Prestige was good. I’d forotten just how good a movie it is. By now we’re all used to Christopher Nolan playing with time and narrative structure, and he uses it to great effect here not just for thematic...
Beryl sent an email in July, to which I’m only just getting around to replying because I’m a terrible person: Hi Ruben! I hope you are doing well. A very random question, I have noticed that you seem to use light mode in most of your...
Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They...
I do a fair amount of stuff. Some of it ends up on this blog, but most of it just lives on in my memories and tetanus shots. This weekend it took me two days and two trips to Canadian Tire to remove a stuck hose from my community garden....
During a period in 1924 and 1925, many stories in Weird Tales bore a headingthat tightly integrated title and illustration in a rectangle as hereBack in 2020 we read four stories H. P. Lovecraft produced in collaboration with C. M. Eddy,...
We have started our Fall marathon-of-marathons a little… early… this year. First up: Gilmore Girls. An uneven show for sure, but I’ll never turn down something with such excellent dialogue delivered so well. Bonus trivia: Star’s Hollow...
Food at La Barra – New York, New York As planned, we had dinner at Mercado Little Spain, a food hall with Spanish food at Hudson Yards. We opted for a sit-down restaurant instead of one of the kiosks. While we had table service, I was...
I hate to ask people for favors, or for anything really, but if you're read and enjoyed Ornamental Women, it would help me out tremendously if you rated or reviewed my novel! You can do so on Amazon, Goodreads, and Storygraph. Or make a...