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Julie Czerneda ★★★★★ More like the Species Imperative trilogy or In The Company of Others than Czerneda’s more recent Night’s Edge series, To Each This World is a hard science-fiction story featuring multiple alien biologies, space colonies, polymorphic artificial lifeforms with a sense of humor, quantum-entangled tech-mediated telepathy and disposable avatar bodies for the astronauts who try to negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from...
This is the fifth client I work with this week who’s auto-replied to an email I sent with this: I am currently on leave returning on the 17th of August. I don’t think I’ve ever had two clients from disparate companies share leave, at least outside popular holidays like Lunar New Year or Xmas. And now five people have? MAMBO NO. 5!? What’s going on? Is there some awesome event going on now to which I wasn’t invited? Do they know something we don’t? If a massive new zero day...
Our dishwasher is dying. Why does it make me emotional? The death of an appliance. It's been acting strange recently. Over the past couple of nights, it's revealed a new sound that it can make... like a performance. The last chance for it to say what it needs to say before departing this earth. It's been a good dishwasher to us, for the most part. Well, it's ruined many of our bowls with its rusty prongs on the top rack. But maybe it was just teaching us to not place too...
TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data...
TL;DR: Play, Yattee and Unwatched all refuse to let YouTube pick your next video; each builds a feed from your subscriptions instead of Google's ranking. Play is free to download with the channel-following features behind Premium at $2.99/month, and it's the only one of the three that isn't locked to a single backend. Yattee runs through public Invidious and Piped instances, which Google has been blocking since 2024. Unwatched pulls from YouTube's own RSS feeds and Data...
I was talking with Clara about the new Anthony Bourdain movie coming out, and it… Wait, hold on a moment, Vim is telling me I misspelled the word “movie”. Really? Yeah, look at that, “movie” has a red box around it. Huh. Who’d have thunk it? Wait, Vim has “thunk” but not “movie”? Anyway, I digress. I was talking with Clara about the new Anthony Bourdain movie coming out, and it went something like this: Me: Did you see the news about the Anthony Bourdain bi-opic? Her: I...
Previously, on njms.ca: [[ Studying computer science at the end of the world ]] [[ Studying computer science at the end of history ]] At midnight on June 13th, 2009, analog TV broadcasts were suddenly terminated across the United States. By this point, most people had switched to digital, but the moment still represented the end of an era. A moment captured in this absolute relic of a video: Last Day of Analog TV Broadcasting - June 12, 2009 (Elviskid90) A number of...
Poison Dart Frog from Central America. I don't understand why the Texas Discovery Gardens has almost nothing from Texas in it. I'm also not entirely sold on the idea that looking at an animal in a plastic box is educational. I wonder if, in the future, zoos will be AI-controlled holograms. That way, you could walk among the tigers and not get eaten, and no real tigers would become depressed weirdos who live in a pen for our amusement. I mean, education. Polka Dot Begonia...
Interior, The Shops at Hudson Yards – New York, New York I’m not familiar with all of these stores, but I recognize some of them, so I know this is the high-end section of the mall. It was on the first floor, just as you pass through the main entrance. If you need more evidence of their upscale positioning, peek through the windows and appreciate the level of interior design. Beyond the level of finishing, I’ve discovered a simple rule in retail. The less merchandise...
I planted my garden this spring from seeds. I've got a nice big garden space in raised boxes that gets lots of sun. I decided to try to grow some zucchini. I'm a bit of a hands-off gardener. I try to water regularly, but I also forget, or wait for the rain. I weed, sort of, but sometimes the weeds reach a certain point that it's a bit overwhelming and then I just.. don't (that's this year right now haha). So I planted a few zucchini plants, figuring that they wouldn't all...
I recently watched Codie Sanchez’s video on 10 upgrades to make once you have more money. It reminded me of a 10-idea list I wrote. Here it is. Healthcare. No more ER waiting lines. Shoes, mattress, and chair. No more back pain. Diet and food. No more cheap fast foods. Library. No more ebooks or pirated books. Dedicated reading room. No more reading on the couch. Air conditioning in common areas. No more heatwaves in summer. Workspace. No more virtual backgrounds hiding...
The weather kinda nuked my one plan for the day, and I really didn't find my footing for the rest of the day. The stormy weather kept me from going out, and I just haven't done anything since. It was nice before my partner left for work, but other than that I've kinda just laid around doing nothing, and now I'm at the point where I know I need to get to bed for work tomorrow, but the idea sucks. I dunno, just feels like I wasted my day off. I'm sure it'll be fine, but I...
…the discomfort with temporal uncertainty that manifests as false certainty about the future has, I’ve come to realize, an equivalent in the unease about ambiguity, complexity, contradiction, and opacity that manifests as the urge to stuff reality into airtight categories. Categories are inevitable—language itself is a collection of categories—but their leakiness and limits should be recognized…Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a...
I started this a few times. It’s been some months since we have gone anywhere here in Cambodia. For a long time we did the quick trip to Battambang but we have gone so many times I got bored with the whole thing. I can’t really leave Cambodia until after October when I get a new retirement visa. Must have passport handy to go. Hotels and guesthouses here may take my online version if my wife prompts them. Going outside like to Vietnam is a no. So I think we wait for...
I realized I hadn't posted this yet. This is the map I made of Braelin, the starting town of the current Krevborna campaign.
The United States has marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence this year, a nation in decline, which includes the infamous line of the unalienable rights given to all people: "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" [1] But what does it actually mean to pursue happiness? It means to chase, to run after. You are free to try to reach, but you are not promised the destination of happiness itself. And, sure, I could explain that the idea of the founding...
Good morning, afternoon, or whenever you read this. It's been a tumultuous few weeks since our dog's last back flare up(which can be read about here.) He has completed his laser treatments and finished one of his meds. His liver markers were quite high when we visited the vet, which could have been exacerbating his back pain apparently. However, when I brought him to the vet for his follow up late last week, all things looked positive. His liver was still elevated, but...
Everyone in tech is running the same playbook. This is about the people who refuse to - and why conviction, not consensus, is the only real moat left.Chapters00:00 — How Starbucks became a coffee com… Read more
It's been a rough week, but in some ways things are starting to look up. I'm doing a slightly better job saying "no" at work, and have managed scale back my hours slightly. Granted, things are still not where I'd like them to be, but this week has been a vast improvement over the last couple months where my balance has been seriously out of wack for reasons that are neither interesting nor justifiable. The end of summer always presents a certain amount of added stress, as...
the oasis is dryLiterally the first time trying to draw water. A B M
Safari broke tap to top for tabs (say it three times fast), and Bear added two-fingers gestures. Ivory – a Mastodon client for iOS – tries a different approach in a slightly different setting. The normal tap to top gesture works as expected, but tapping the top again returns you back where you were before: I believe this is meant to be a small gesture of help if you tap to top accidentally, yet I am not entirely sure it’s effective. Would you, in a moment of panic, decide...
Ten times the result, and less work than doubling. I read 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy1 expecting motivational arithmetic but got something of an argument about subtraction. You can reach 2x by doing more of what you already do. More clients, more hours, more of the same. It is a volume problem, and effort solves volume problems. That is why 2x is exhausting rather than difficult. 10x will not yield to volume. Nothing you are currently doing,...
The three-LP box set Guitar Music from ECM, released in 1981, was conceived by ECM’s French branch as more than a sampler. Coordinated by Hans Wendl and Gérard Desfoux, it gathers seven guitarists whose six- and twelve-string vocabularies had already helped make the Munich label resistant to category. Just over a decade old, ECM had nearly sixty relevant albums from which to choose, so the six sides became an exercise in severe abundance. Each selection is both evidence...
Flash games have been added, found under the Games tab! More to be added in the future!
Tuesday night, I was watching a YouTube video where someone mentioned that they've went for a run every day for the past ten years1. When the YouTuber said that, I thought, I wish I could be that kind of person. Then I thought, How do I become that kind of person?, looked up "how to start running for beginners", and began my research. I'm incredibly sedentary for a couple of reasons. First, I work from home and have the kind of job that is micromanaged enough that I need...