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In today's episode, I read one of my favorite poems from Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers (254). Source
A timelapse of driving our RV, a Tiffin Allegro Bus motorhome, just 46 miles / 74 km, about one hour of driving, from Mile 0 Park in Dawson Creek to Fort St John, British Columbia, Canada… where our truck’s front frame failed, causing the tow base plate to break free from the coach, while leaving a fuel stop. So we stopped for the night at Rosco’s RV Park.
I recently received the 14th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines, now into its fourth year of publication. This is one of the issues I’ve been looking forward to, as they focus on “Bigfoot.” As a kid in the 1970s, Bigfoot was everywhere. The Six Million Dollar […]
1. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Archimedes’ Antikythera Mechanism, a way to chart the position of the planets dating back to the ancient Greeks; here’s a video telling what it is and showing a working model [7 minutes]) 2. Computers don’t have to be electronic (Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Difference Engines; here’s a video about it [5½ minutes], with some clips of one in operation) 3. Computers don’t have to be electronic (The Digi-Comp 1 kit from 1963,...
Do you love PBR? Oh sorry, not the beer - I’m talking about precariously balanced rocks.Earth is a big place with lots of rocks, and so many of them are precariously balanced that there’s an entire Wikipedia page about them.Among the most famous of these PBRs are the balancing rocks of Zimbabwe, which are so popular that they appear on the southeast African nation’s banknotes. Here are the balancing rocks on the Zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar note:Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe,...
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS: Tommy John, whose surgery blazed a trail for countless players, died over the weekend at 83. The pitcher was the first to receive the procedure later named for him, replacing a torn elbow ligament and allowing him to return to baseball for an extended career.
I almost didn't want to write this review. John of John has had a huge amount of hype attached to it for months now, and the people who love it seem to really love it. So it's not exactly fun to sit down and admit that I didn't get on with it. But I didn't. This is the eleventh book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and it's comfortably my least favourite of the lot. I've been deciding which book to read next by picking them out of a cup at random, so it's...
Before we get to any actual story content, a quick note. As I mentioned in Hello Worlds, I wrote a few books back in the ‘90s. Those were the days of dial-up internet—AOL, CompuServe, PowerPCs running Mac OS 8, and Windows 95/NT 4. For my first two books, I used FrameMaker on the Mac, paired with a fancy grayscale beast of a monitor and a dot-matrix printer. The last two books, written in the late ’90s, were done in Microsoft Word using a custom markup system—that’s how...
The global rush to the Moon this century is catalyzed in major part by the presence of water ice, soil rich in oxygen and metals, and other such resources. The long-term bet is that extracting resources in-situ on Luna, using oxygen and hydrogen as rocket fuel, and manufacturing things there itself will ultimately create an independent enough planetary economy that’s no longer completely dependent on Earth for at least the most basic supplies needed by humans and bots...
I have a couple of writing projects I’ve started, and I’m just avoiding them thoroughly. Inching around the file. I can’t get near the page. Much of my avoidance is, I think, due to my overall discouragement with the publishing part, the effort it takes to take a finished product to the reader. It’s a bit cart-before-horse-y, I know, to think about publishing something I haven’t even completed. But there it is, the dark cloud of grim possibility, lurking down the road. YES...
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis is the tenth book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and at this point I don't think I can talk about any of these books in isolation any more. The longlist feels really cohesive this year, in a way I don't think I've noticed before, with the same handful of preoccupations turning up again and again across wildly different books. For me this one sits alongside May We Feed The King, The Renovators, and even The...
Hey, I haven't created a sandbox on the blog in a while. I just finished up Pokémodule B1: In Search of the Unown, an Into the Oddish conversion of Dungeon Module B1. I made a sandbox for my version of B1 (which I've been running in AD&D for a few months now), so why not make one for the Pokémon version?Now, I could just take my existing sandbox for B1 and convert it to Into the Oddish, but that's no fun. I love making sandboxes, and am always looking for an excuse to do...
Our Monday softball game was rained out for the 2nd week in a row, but I finally hit another home run on Tuesday! A straight shot to CF, after hitting the top of the fence in the same spot the previous at-bat. Guess I am consistent sometimes. Happenings 🏋️♂️ I'm trying out Crono Coach to jump-start my weight loss goals. Due to circumstances outside our control I don't have my usual scale this morning so can't say how the week has gone with much accuracy. 💤 Overall my...
Something that's struck me about a few of the books on this year's Booker Prize longlist is how they feel plucked out of a different era of fiction entirely. Missouri Williams is clearly going for an 18th century Gothic vibe with The Vivisectors, and M. John Harrison's The End Of Everything reminded me, when I reviewed it, of early 90s New Weird. The Palm House gave me a similar sensation, except here it felt like a classic Booker Prize literary novel, the sort of thing...
…at The Atlantic, and worth reading.
It is time for the faithful to take back their churches from the usurper priests and pastors who divide and disempower the congregation. Its time to stop the state from shifting power, control and resources to subjects at the expense of the church, and this with the complicity of the ecclesiastical authorities. It is the saints who have the rights to the nation and to the other political jurisdictions, not the ecclesiastical authorities and not the state. It is the saints...
In case you were wondering, my wife and I are unaffected by the flooding that happened in Indianapolis over the weekend. We live far enough west of the White River in this city that the rising waters couldn’t touch us. We live on a tributary to the White River called Williams Creek. I walked out my back door Friday afternoon (before peak water level) and made this photo. This is as high as I’ve ever seen the creek — but it’s still probably 25 feet below us in a ravine....
Martin Freeman is one of my favorite actors to have come out of the last
Wow, it's the site's 54 millionth hit. These "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log: 3.235.215.92 - -...
The reason I post so many quotes from literature is to show that the desire to escape is neither uncommon nor certifiable. On the contrary, it’s perfectly normal and has been with us since, oh, around the time of the industrial revolution. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Here are some diary entries from 1909, written when W. N. P. Barbellion was but 19 years old. He wanted to escape the career chosen for him by his father (“journalism,” which actually meant the...
Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 27th April 2026 I know we go on and on about Chile on this blog, but to be honest Costa Rica might be our next big obsession, given the glut of excellent bands appearing from this tropical little paradise of death. The latest offering is the debut full length from Candarian, called ‘Trepanación’, and it is out now through Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Memento Mori. It promises much in the way of deathly, bestial and filthy death metal,...
How many posts do you think it takes to qualify as a series? If it's just two, then I guess we could consider this post the second in a series in which I check out extremely popular manga only to find out that it's not really for me, following last month's post on Blue Lock. This time it's Sumiko Arai's The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, AKA "the Green Yuri", based on its distinctive green covers and Arai's use of that same particular shade of green as an...
I noticed the commenting feature was broken on my last post, but I've fixed it now. So, did I accomplish everything I set out to do yesterday? Let's see! Take my digicam out on a walk and try to snap some photos of interesting things I see. - I unfortunately didn't do this because it was just too hot outside. I forgot that we're in the middle of a heat wave, and it was 95 degrees (F) here but felt like 104. I did take Ranni to the park around 9:00am, but even then it was...
I looked up to see a familiar face. For a moment, however, I couldn't place it, but then recognized my friend who I'd not seen since he was five-years-old."I recognize you!" I blurted before his name came back to me. He was standing with his mom, pressed into her legs shyly, a posture I didn't recall from a couple years ago when we had seen one another almost every day. But, of course, he would feel that way. For a young child, two years is a very long time, long enough to...