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Back in 2014, when I pulled out some old Bratt miniatures and painted them anew, I didn't imagine that it was the start of a Confrontation obsession that has lasted twelve years. In that time, I have reacquired some old Confrontation favourites, hunted down unreleased miniatures and build a nice little collection of original Confrontation artwork. The scavvy king is the last of the 83 'official' miniatures products for Confrontation by Citadel or Marauder. You could argue...
Last week, Kevin Powell posted on Bluesky about the most common typo you make when writing CSS. Kevin Powell @kevinpowell.co One of the questions I’m asking is the most common typo that you make when writing CSS, and several people have listed gray/grey… except, they both work so I’m confused ? August 13, 2026 at 8:33 AM View on Bluesky I have two very common ones. The first is with font-size: .element { font-szie: 1em; } I tend to get the “i” and the “z” in the wrong...
Hey people! Earlier this year, I shared the fourth movement – “Fugue” – from Benjamin Britten’s Suite for Harp, played by Lavinia Meijer. I thought today I could share another movement from this same suite, but played by a different artist – and also one who has already appeared on My Inner Mishmash before, for example here; Welsh harpist Catrin Finch. She released this suite as part of her debut album, 1999’s “Harp Recital”, which she recorded at the age of 19. She’s done...
I have been using Claude to help me build maps for a few months now and I have been very happy with the results which I think have been improving. I keep hearing about Claude Code and wondered what is the difference? The answer: a heck of a lot! Using Claude Chat (or any of the other chatbots) you can prompt the AI to write files for you, to write scripts and guide you in running them. That’s how I have been working up till now. Once you have given Claude Code the...
A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set. # Use of Chatbots Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor. Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use...
FAIR WINDS AND FOLLOWING SEAS: Actress Hayden Panettiere, known for roles in ‘Nashville,’ ‘Heroes,’ dies at 36. While she’d had issues with alcoholism over the years, releasing a memoir back in May about her struggles, no cause of death has been initially disclosed. I never got into Nashville, but Heroes was a favorite when it was airing.
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 […]
A few weeks ago I attended VCF West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. One of my favorite talks was Making Games in the 1980s by David Crane and Garry Kitchen about the unique constraints of programming for the Atari 2600. Crane mentioned one hack in particular from his game Pitfall! that inspired this blog post. Pitfall! is a platform game in which you control a character named Harry through a jungle filled with crocodiles, logs, ladders, and, of course,...
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...