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andrewducker at 06:39pm on 20/08/2025 under micropostmontecookgames_feed at 04:42pm on 20/08/2025Who are you? Where did you come from? Who relies on you—and who can you rely on? Here, hold this […]
The post Dig Your Own Grave appeared first on Monte Cook Games.
nwhyte_wp_feed at 04:30pm on 20/08/2025Current
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings
London Centric: Tales of Future London, ed. Ian Whates
A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson
Last books finished
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, by Paul Kincaid
Agent of Death: Memoirs of an Executioner, by Robert Greene Elliott
Inferno, by Gary Russell and John Ridgway
Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Dream House, by Lee Berridge
The Last Song of Penelope, by Claire North
There’s nothing like 24 hours on a ferry with patchy WiFi to boost your reading tally for the week. (And the month, come to that.)
Next books
Black Mountain, by Gerry Adams
Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
colossal_feed at 04:30pm on 20/08/2025
For one month only, an uplifting fundraiser makes limited-edition prints by global wildlife photographers available for purchase, with proceeds directly benefiting Conservation International. Since its launch in 2020, Prints for Wildlife has raised more than $2.1 million for conservation programs worldwide. As these initiatives face abrupt funding cuts and an uphill battle against the ongoing climate crisis, it’s more important than ever to make sure they can continue to protect the earth’s fragile, biodiverse ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
“In 2025, the crisis isn’t a virus—it’s a withdrawal of critical funding for wildlife and conservation,” says program co-founder Pie Aerts. “Prints for Wildlife is more than a fundraiser; it’s a platform for connection, consciousness and hope in a time of crisis.” Browse photos by more than 200 photographers on the fundraiser’s website starting August 21, and purchase prints until September 21.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article More than 200 Photographers Join Prints for Wildlife to Raise Funds for Conservation appeared first on Colossal.
nwhyte_wp_feed at 04:10pm on 20/08/2025Second paragraph of third chapter:
At his next visit, to the motor agency for which Victor Magill acted as representative, he drew almost as complete a blank. It was true that he did not expect to learn much. But as a matter of routine, it was necessary to see everyone who might in any way throw light on the case.
One of the very few novels with a Northern Ireland setting between 1921 and 1968 (see also: Odd Man Out, and er I think that’s it from my own reading in the last twenty-five years or so), this is a murder mystery published and set in 1930, in which an Ulster industrialist disappears on his way home after a long absence, and is soon found murdered. The Norn Iron bits are pretty much restricted to the East Antrim coast, though there are some nice bits of local colour, and there is also much exploration of the Scottish train line to Stranraer and the northwest English and southwest Scottish coasts.
The solution depends rather on an improbable set of motivations for the killing, and also an equally improbably carefully calculated set of timings for journeys by train, car and boat, to the point that the suspension of my disbelief became a bit eroded. But this was the high period of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and I guess it was what the market expected of a detective story. (There is even a reference to Hercule Poirot in the novel.)
I had read elsewhere that this book rather whitewashed the new-ish devolved Northern Ireland government, given the author’s Ulster Protestant background. (Stormont itself was still being built in 1930.) I did not find this charge firmly substantiated. True, there’s no reflection at all about the sectarian basis of the statelet; but as I said earlier, the Norn Iron settings are mostly along the coast Carrickfergus and Ballygalley Head, with a couple of excursions to Cave Hill and into central Belfast, and one to Bangor, which doesn’t really take you into contested territory. (The victim is reportedly seen on Sandy Row, which is described as ‘more or less working class’.)
On the other hand, I got a sense that the author felt the smallness of the interlocking circles of government and industry in the province could be a problem rather than a solution. And as for Dublin,
He [Inspector French] had not been over since the troubles [ie 1920-22] and he was impressed by the air of smartness and prosperity which the city wore. It seemed cleaner than before and the new buildings made O’Connell Street a really imposing thoroughfare.
Not exactly the sentiments of a raving Unionist!
The plot of the book has a couple of eerie similarities with the real-life murder of Patricia Curran twenty-two years later, the victim being from a prominent local family, the body found in the grounds of their East Antrim home, and a close relative suspected of the crime. The differences are fairly significant too of course, and I suspect it’s unlikely that the 1952 murderer, whoever that was, took any inspiration from Crofts.
Anyway, as I said, the book is of interest for the period colour, if not completely satisfactory as a murder mystery. You can get Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey here.
jaysbrickblog_feed at 02:40pm on 20/08/2025The LEGO Star Wars line has seen a pretty positive fan reception to its line of downscaled iconic Star Wars ships, allowing fans to get their hands on smaller, but still detailed, renditions of classic starfighters like the X-wing and TIE Fighter. 75433 Jango Fett’s Starship is a playset and smaller scale version of Slave […]
The post Review: LEGO 75433 Jango Fett’s Starship appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.
strange_maps_feed at 02:30pm on 20/08/2025
Thirty-five years ago, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its camera toward Earth and snapped a photograph from 3.7 billion miles away. The now-iconic image, dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot” by the author and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, shows our home planet as the faintest pixel against a vast black canvas, a stark reminder of how little space we occupy in the Universe.
This logarithmic graph does something similar, but for perception. It displays scales of space and time, ranging from subatomic sizes to cosmic distances, from fleeting instants to timespans spanning millions of years. Tucked within this sweeping range is a box labeled “human experience” — the sliver of space and time we can directly perceive.
The graph comes from EUREKA! Physics of Particles, Matter and the Universe (1997) by the late theoretical physicist Roger Blin-Stoyle. He described the graph not as a perfect scientific representation of the limits of human perception but as an approximation, one that highlights just how much of space and time lies outside our natural grasp.
For millennia, we could barely speculate about the extreme phenomena beyond our perception — what the cosmos looks like on the tiniest and grandest of scales. It’s only recently that we began to map it.
Evolution tuned our senses for survival. We can effortlessly hear the crack of a tree branch, perceive the slither of a snake in the grass, or catch the flash of doubt in a friend’s eyes. But phenomena like the flitting of electrons and the birth of black holes lie far outside our natural perception.
Only through our curiosity, reason, and invention have we stretched our inherited limitations to explore the edges of space and time. Blin-Stoyle’s graph provides a rough perspective on those boundaries.
Let’s start with its Y-axis, which shows a timescale ranging from 10-23 to 1017 seconds. The former is an infinitesimal unit of time. It’s shorter than a zeptosecond (10-21 seconds) but longer than a yoctosecond (10-24 seconds) and represents the temporal realm of transient quantum interactions.
The largest unit on the graph’s timescale is equally mind-bending. It’s longer than a petasecond (1015 seconds), which already rounds out to 31.7 million years. The Universe is approximately 435 petaseconds old. That doesn’t sound like much until you express it in more conventional units: 13.8 billion years.
The X-axis relates to physical distances. At the lower bound is a femtometer (10⁻¹⁵ meters), or about the diameter of a single proton. At the upper end lies a unit of length longer than a yottameter (1024 meters). Yottameters are large enough to measure the observable Universe, which is approximately 8.8 yottameters in diameter.
As extraordinary as the upper and lower bounds of this graph are, they don’t push the extent of what we can measure in the Universe. The Planck length, named after the German physicist Max Planck, is the smallest unit of length currently used by physicists. It comes in at an astonishingly tiny 1.6 x 10-35 meters. The graph also simplifies things by placing space and time on their own axes. This matches how we intuitively experience them. Yet Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity reveal that space and time are linked into a four-dimensional metric called spacetime. The two intertwine in ways our senses can’t detect, further complicating the reality of the Universe beyond our perception.
We live in Einstein’s Universe, but our everyday experience is more like how Issac Newton saw the physical world. Space and time seem fixed and separate, objects have absolute positions, and causes reliably lead to effects. Our senses are confined to this more instinctive view of reality. While this blinds us to the weirdness playing out on the cosmic and quantum scales, it also helps simplify reality.
Just consider how we perceive time. Our brains can process visual information in as little as 50 milliseconds. We process sounds much faster and can distinguish between two sounds occurring just about a millisecond apart. (That’s pretty quick, but nowhere near the speed of a zeptosecond.)
These varying perceptual speed limits concerned engineers during the early days of television. What if, they wondered, people couldn’t adequately synchronize the picture with the audio? “Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop,” the neuroscientist David Eagleman wrote in his 2009 book What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. “As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers’ brains would automatically resynchronize the signals.”
Today’s video games run significantly faster than yesterday’s TV programs. With the proper setup, a video game can easily reach a frame rate of 120 frames per second or more (most movies, for comparison, are shot at 24 frames per second, meaning 24 individual images flash past your eye every second). However, research suggests that people can’t discern differences much beyond 60 frames per second, which we can think of as the lower limit of the temporal “human experience” on Blin-Stoyle’s graph.
The upper limit to our temporal experience is less precise. It extends to a lifetime — maybe 100 years, “if we are lucky,” Blin-Stoyle writes in EUREKA! But how we perceive that lifetime depends largely on memory, external cues, and situational context. In 1962, geologist Michel Siffre spent just over two months in an Alpine cave to test the effects isolation had on time perception. When he emerged, he estimated 35 days had passed. Siffre’s self-experiment highlights how perception isn’t a passive recording of time; it’s a story the brain constructs.
When you strip away clocks, sunlight, and human contact, the scaffolding we use to mark time’s passing crumbles. Even what we think of as the present is slightly behind, delayed by the split seconds it takes for our brains to process and unify sensory signals arriving at different speeds. Awareness is always a beat too late — our minds stitching together a rough approximation of what exactly happened.
Our perception of space is just as narrow. Blin-Stoyle suggests that if we’re “being generous,” humans have a sense for things as small as 0.1 millimeters (10⁻⁴ meters). That’s roughly the width of a strand of hair or the thickness of a piece of paper. The edges of our spatial perception could be argued to expand to the diameter of the Earth (12,756 kilometers), but now we’re being extra generous since our intuition falls sharply once distances stretch beyond the horizon.
From a human perspective, space and time are baffling and can be utterly frightening. They flatten us with the sheerness of their dimensions. So perhaps it’s cosmic justice — or rather, cosmic mercy — that we don’t directly perceive the scale of existence all the way to its extremities.
But while evolution tuned us to the scale of the everyday — the objects we can hold and the danger and rewards within sight — our curiosity and reason have allowed us to develop the tools necessary to broaden that scale.
Microscopes have revealed cells and microbes. Particle accelerators have cracked open the strange world of bosons and quarks. Telescopes have mapped planets and galaxies. Even though our senses evolved to operate in the narrow band of space and time we call the prehistoric savannah, our minds have pushed far beyond it, building bridges from the tangible to the infinite.
Where perception and technology end, imagination pushes forward. Einstein famously imagined what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light — a physical impossibility, but a mental leap that helped him develop the theory of relativity and transform our understanding of space and time. He couldn’t perceive such a thing, but he could imagine it.
Herein lies the difference between the Pale Blue Dot picture and this graph of our perceptual horizon. The darkness separating Voyager from its home planet in that famous image feels cold and deadly. But on the spacetime graph, the hatched area outside our tiny experiential box is beckoning. Our minds can travel freely where our bodies can’t and ascend from the zone we can perceive to the one we can only conceive. Time and space can be joyful playgrounds.
The Romantic poet William Blake understood this well when he wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
As humans, we paint small strokes on the vast canvas of existence. Our eyes cannot pierce the subatomic veil nor trace the farthest threads of the cosmic web. For all the efforts of scientists and poets to elicit truth from those strange, most obscure corners of the Universe, there remains much more to learn and experience.
But even if we cannot live between distant stars or among the nanoscopic particles, we can still imagine ourselves there. We are the brevity that seeks the eternal. And perhaps this is our place: not to encompass the whole but to reflect it.
This article Mapped: The boundaries of human perception is featured on Big Think.
dotaturls_feed at 03:04am on 20/08/2025colossal_feed at 02:03pm on 20/08/2025
If you’ve ever studied the rainbow-like mineral rings of petrified wood or observed light filter through the striations of a slice of agate, you’ll understand Jessica Drenk’s fascination with geology. The New York-based artist upcycles objects like junk mail and pencils to create elaborately layered, sculptural pieces evoking banded crystals and colorful sedimentary stone.
Drenk’s forthcoming solo exhibition, Elemental Form at Galleri Urbane, continues to plumb the relationship between ephemerality and eternity. The gallery says, “Building in layers, Drenk renders erosion, sedimentation, and crystallization human-made.”
Many of Drenk’s wall pieces are made solely of paper, while some new pieces, like the Slice series, incorporate plaster. Redolent of the way marble is sliced from quarries in neat slabs, “Aggregate Triptych” or “Flow” look as though they have been hewn directly from some much more expansive deposit. Panning out, we might see streams and oxbows amid a vast natural landscape.
Drenk emphasizes flow in the sense that earth, water, and our perception of time can be fluid, as can be the nature of art-making itself. Creatives often strive for moments in which they experience being in “a state of flow.” From the perspective of both making the work and the way it is viewed, the artist describes this guiding ethos as “an aqueous sensibility.”
Elemental Form runs from September 6 through November 8 in Dallas. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Junk Mail and Found Papers Undulate in Agate-Like Wall Sculptures by Jessica Drenk appeared first on Colossal.
johndcook_feed at 11:54am on 20/08/2025I was skimming through a book [1] the other day and saw the following three equations:
log 1.3712885742 = 0.13712885742
log 237.5812087593 = 2.375812087593
log 3550.2601815865 = 3.5502601815865
The sequence of digits is the same on both sides of each equation, except for the position of the decimal point.
The book said “The determination of such numbers has been discussed by Euler and by Professor Tait.” I don’t know who Professor Tait was, but I’ve heard of Euler. I’m curious why Euler was interested in this problem, whether it was idle curiosity inspired by looking up logarithms for some calculation or whether it was part of some larger exploration.
Evidently the logarithms above are taken base 10, and you could formulate the problem as finding solutions to
log10 x = 10k x
for integer k.
For a given k, how many solutions are there?
We could rephrase the question by looking for solutions to
log10(log10 x) − log10 x = k.
A plot shows that the left side is always negative and takes on every negative integer value twice, so there are no solutions for non-negative integers and two solutions for each negative integer.
So, for example, when k = 3 there are two solutions. One is given at the top of the post. The other is x = 1.0023105706421267.
Would it make much difference if you were to generalize the problem to solving
logb x = bk x
for an arbitrary base b > 1?
Using the fact that
logb x = ln x / ln b
and a little algebra we can formulate the question as looking for solutions to
ln (ln x) − ln x = ln (ln b) + k ln b.
The function on the left hand side takes on the value −1 once and it takes on every other negative integer value twice. The function on the right hand side is positive for positive k, which means no solutions exist in any base b > 1 when k = 0. There is one solution when k = −1 and b = e. Otherwise there are two solutions for negative integers k for each base b.
[1] A Scrap-Book of Elementary Mathematics: Notes, Recreations, Essays by William Frank White, 1908. Available on Project Gutenberg.
The post When log(x) has the same digits as x first appeared on John D. Cook.andrewducker at 12:00pm on 20/08/2025 under ai, babies, clothes, death, doom, europe, immune_system, kenya, links, maps, money, pandemic, photography, society, sun, viaswampersdotaturls_feed at 11:45pm on 13/08/2025I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?I have received no response.
I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.
That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.
Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.
Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.I got this response:
1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.
2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.
3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".
4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.
5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.
6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.
7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
Hi Siderea,Several observations:
Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.
To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.
I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.
Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.
If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.
All the best,
[REDACTED]
dg_weblog_feed at 07:00am on 20/08/2025
twentysidedtale_feed at 04:01am on 20/08/2025This week, once again, has been more of the same.
I played some Balatro. Finished unlocking all of the jokers, and I just have to find two vouchers to complete the collection.
Other than that, just a bit more Rainbow Six Siege. I’m doing my best to try different operators, but trying new things without getting killed is quite the challenge. I did find that Glaz is quite fun, which is good because I didn’t have any go-to attackers.
How is everyone else doing?
cks_techblog_feed at 03:19am on 20/08/2025Suppose, not hypothetically, that you start up some program on your Fedora 42 Cinnamon desktop and it helpfully tells you "<X> requires AppIndicator to run. Please install the AppIndicator plugin for your desktop". You are likely confused, so here are some notes.
'AppIndicator' itself is the name of an application notification protocol, apparently originally from KDE, and some desktop environments may need a (third party) extension to support it, such as the Ubuntu one for GNOME Shell. Unfortunately for me, Cinnamon is not one of those desktops. It theoretically has native support for this, implemented in /usr/libexec/xapps/xapp-sn-watcher, part of Cinnamon's xapps package.
The actual 'AppIndicator' protocol is done over D-Bus, because that's the modern way. Since this started as a KDE thing, the D-Bus name is 'org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher'. What provides certain D-Bus names is found in /usr/share/dbus-1/services, but not all names are mentioned there and 'org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher' is one of the missing ones. In this case /etc/xdg/autostart/xapp-sn-watcher.desktop mentions the D-Bus name in its 'Comment=', but that's probably not something you can count on to find what your desktop is (theoretically) using to provide a given D-Bus name. I found xapp-sn-watcher somewhat through luck.
There are probably a number of ways to see what D-Bus names are
currently registered and active. The one that I used when looking
at this is 'dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus
/org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames'. As far as
I know, there's no easy way to go from an error message about
'AppIndicator' to knowing that you want 'org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher';
in my case I read the source of the thing complaining which was helpfully
in Python.
(I used the error message to find the relevant section of code, which showed me what it wasn't finding.)
I have no idea how to actually fix the problem, or if there is a program that implements org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher as a generic, more or less desktop independent program the way that stalonetray does for system tray stuff (or one generation of system tray stuff, I think there have been several iterations of it, cf).
(Yes, I filed a Fedora bug, but I believe Cinnamon isn't particularly supported by Fedora so I don't expect much. I also built the latest upstream xapps tree and it also appears to fail in the same way. Possibly this means something in the rest of the system isn't working right.)
piratesobg_feed at 12:07am on 20/08/2025Ahh yes, where would the anime world even be without light novels with, ahh, questionable premises?
Yes, that’s a rhetorical question, feel free to answer it in the comments anyway (you know you want to). 
Anyway, anime (and light novels in general) does surely seem to love the incest or incest-adjacent storyline, and the example here is the latter. My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: Irido Mizuto and Ayai Yume had a sort of “first love” relationship in middle school, broke up over communication issues…and then met again when Mizuto’s father and Yume’s mother married each other.
Oops. How embarrassment.
I don’t think we ever explicitly find out what happened to Yume’s father, but Mizuto’s mother died early – if it weren’t for the photo in the obligatory family shrine in their house, he wouldn’t even know what she looked like.
One thing that’s established early in My Stepmom’s Daugher is My Ex is that Mizuto and Yume are absolutely determined to not mess this up for their parents Mineaki and Yuni (respectively) – whatever issues they might have with each other, they definitely want their parents to be happy together, and actively work towards supporting it.
This isn’t particularly hard – Mineaki and Yuni do seem to be happy together (and, yes, this is a show where the parents are actually present in their children’s lives as characters, at least sometimes) so even an outward show of getting along is about all that’s needed here.
But having that be an explicit goal for Mizuto and Yume does help establish them as sympathetic characters, so it was good to see.
In terms of the tone of My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex, I think it says something that hearing Cold Chisel’s Flame Trees last night at the gym is what finally impelled me to write this review:
Beyond the usual hijinks and antics that you can expect from anime, some of which are quite amusing, the core of My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is both Mizuto and Yume reflecting on what went wrong, why it went wrong… and why they want to try again to get it right. Much of that introspection has a bittersweet, melancholic tone to it, which is why Flame Trees resonated with me last night.
Well, when Mizuto and Yume aren’t fighting about who should be called the older sibling (technically it’s Mizuto, he was born a few hours earlier on the same day). See “hijinks and antics”.
It’s not all good – there’s a lot of fanservice in this show, some of it (especially in the first episode) quite disturbing, and I do remember wondering at times why I kept watching.
I would absolutely understand if someone bounced off the first episode (if you know, you know but I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen it), but for those who do persist, the character work does make it worth it.
Especially once Mizuto and Yume do actually start talking to each other, rather than at each other. For a relationship that foundered on bad/mis communication, these two certainly seem to have learned their lesson, and (eventually) start doing a lot better at it. Well, when they’re not fighting or arguing that is.
Enough so, that I kind of want a second season to see how things progress when they’re kinda sorta back together but probably need to hide that from their parents. All sorts of comedy potential there.
Fundamentally, this is a show with surprisingly solid character work and growth for surprisingly well realised characters. If you can tolerate the fanservice, it’s definitely worth at least one look.
Question of the post: Have you read the light novels? If so, do you think that there’s enough material there to justify a second season?
fictionmachine_feed at 11:37pm on 19/08/2025There is a point during the brilliant documentary But Also John Clarke where no less a comedic authority than Ben Elton comments that what Clarke used to do on Australian television – a series of rather Brechtian political sketches with creative partner Brian Dawe – was more or less unique in the world. It is a moment that stands out in particular, because it more or less encapsulates the reason why the documentary exists. John Clarke was a comic, an actor, and a writer, but ultimately he was more or less a unique figure in Australia and New Zealand’s cultural landscape.
Clarke – a comedian to the end – died of a sudden heart attack on Mount Abrupt. Prior to his death he had been participating in a series of interviews by his daughter Lorin. It is these interviews, recorded over a long period onto cassette tape, that form the spine of Lorin Clarke’s spectacular new documentary. It covers his childhood, his career, his family, and his friends. It palpably zeroes in on why he was such an immense comic talent, and why he has left such a strong legacy today.
You have seen this kind of documentary many times before. Its biographical focus is fleshed out with archival footage of old performances, and ‘talking heads’ interviews with friends and colleagues. It is that eerie amount of narration by Clarke himself that makes it jump well above the typical quality of these sorts of films. As for its director, she keeps herself visible throughout: scenes of father and daughter larking about or sharing a joke give the film a liveliness that stretches beyond a simple career overview.
The overview is there, of course: his popular Fred Dagg persona that made him a household name in New Zealand, but then shackled him unwillingly to a formula. His iconic supporting turn in Australian classic Death in Brunswick is prominently featured, as is his superb comedy series The Games – which managed to stretch beyond a simple Olympics satire to be something quite profound. His use of actor John Howard to stand in for the former Prime Minister of the same name and deliver a televised apology to Australia’s stolen generations remains the single-best thing Clarke ever did.
Then there were the political sketches with Brian Dawe. First on commercial television, and then revived for the ABC, these weekly faux interviews were remarkable in how precisely Clarke and Dawe skewered their targets, and in how year in, year out their delivery never changed. It turns out the bluff and mealy-mouthed avoidance of politics never changed either.
As with all biographies of popular entertainers, But Also John Clarke is absolutely a film for his pre-existing fans. It profiles him wonderfully, however, with a combination of love, precision, and faithfulness. It covers all of the career bases and still finds room to be an honest love letter from daughter to father.
This film is joy. And a little sadness, but mainly joy.
But Also John Clarke premiered at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.
jaysbrickblog_feed at 10:45pm on 19/08/2025Great news for those who enjoy TT Games‘ trademark LEGO video game adventures, and even better news for the LEGO Batman fanbase who’ve wanted more playable thrills in Gotham City – LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight was just announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live in Germany, and it’s coming to PS5, Xbox Series […]
The post LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is an open-world game spanning Batman history, coming in 2026! appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.
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guardian_learning at 07:17pm on 19/08/2025 under ba | 吧, fǒu | 否, kǒu | 口, qián | 前, yǎn | 眼, 一天一橘, 部首 | radicalsscalziwhatever_feed at 10:02pm on 19/08/2025
A few days ago, I got a text from Bryant saying that he had kittens under his car, and that I simply must come see them immediately. So I booked it over and lo and behold there were two kittens underneath his car! There was a calico and a tuxedo, and both were very shy and very hungry. It was so hot outside, and Bryant’s car was one of the few spots of shade in the area, so I can see why they’d hide under there.
I had a sneaking suspicion that there were more around. Where there’s two kittens there’s five, or something like that, anyway. Sure enough, it wasn’t long after feeding the two skinny kitties that another came running, seemingly appearing out of thin air. This one was a diluted tortie, and she parked herself right next to her siblings underneath the car. I could hardly believe three kittens had spontaneously appeared, but I was so thankful that it happened to be under the car of one of the biggest animal lovers I know.
We weren’t really sure how best to handle this situation, and while we were thinking it over, the tuxedo ventured out from beneath the car and ran behind the apartment into the woods. We decided to follow him and see if we could catch him now that he was out from underneath the car.
While we followed him down the trails of the forest, getting eaten alive by bugs, wouldn’t you know it, a black kitten appeared:
Had the three from under the car originated from the forest? Or had the black one been under the car with the other three originally and ventured to the woods like the tuxedo ended up doing, too? Either way, I was shocked to see another one, and thought surely that this was the last one of the litter.
This new one was different from the other three. While the calico and diluted tortie were absolutely terrified and skittish as hell, and the tuxedo wasn’t much better, the black one was incredibly friendly in comparison. In no time at all, the black one was following us around like a shadow, and was even willing to be pet and purred the whole time. Shortly after, he was even okay with being picked up and petted like any normal household cat. It was like he wasn’t even a stray, really.
We had the food set out by the car still, and wanted the black one to come get food, so we had him follow us back around to the front side of the apartment, where he reunited with his siblings under the car.
In the couple days that they have been at the apartment, we’ve been working on figuring out a rescue plan. I called multiple rescues in the area and asked if they can send someone out to collect them, as we are not certified kitten wranglers and don’t want to hurt or scare them, but none of the rescues offered that type of service.
For now, they are being fed and watered consistently, and there have been pretty impressive strides with how close the kittens have started to get. Still, the only one that enjoys being pet and actively seeks out affection is the black one, but the calico and tuxedo are becoming much more acclimated to human presence, it seems. The diluted tortie is without a doubt the worst case, still extremely skittish and frightened.
Even though it would be super easy to catch the black one, and even the tuxedo, the other two still seem uncapturable for the time being, and we don’t want to separate them. We figure the best course of action is to keep trying to get them comfortable enough until all of them are snatch-able.
I had an idea to try and hand feed them with tubes of food, like I’d seen so many times in cat rescue videos on Tik Tok. I figured it would help them trust us, and make it so they’re within hands-reach to make for easier snatching. Other than the black one, they preferred to eat it only when we squeezed the contents out onto the ground for them to eat at a further away from us distance:
Look how close the calico was! This was huge progress:
THEY’RE SO CUTE I LOVE THEM SO MUCH:
We want to rescue these babies so badly, while still keeping them together. We just aren’t experts, but we’re doing our best and making sure they’re fed for now, at least.
I expect some questions about logistics and whatnot, so here’s some pre-answers:
The car that they’re under is Bryant’s car, but it hasn’t moved from that spot in three years. He drives a different car, so don’t worry about him having to like, move the kittens’ shelter. It ain’t going anywhere.
Bryant is the only tenant at his apartment, there’s no neighbors to inform of these kittens, only the landlord, which he did.
I’m not sure which of the many rescues in the area would be best to take them to when they’re eventually caught, so please let me know if you have recommendations for kitten shelters in the Dayton area!
Aren’t they so cute?
Which would you love to take home with you (I want all of them)? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
colossal_feed at 10:32pm on 19/08/2025
Paradise for some, Hawai‘i is a place of ecological contradiction. The islands are known for their beautiful beaches and lush forests, and yet, they’re also home to the largest threats to avian populations. Dubbed “the bird extinction capital of the world,” Hawai‘i has witnessed its forest species decline from 50 to just 17 today.
A vivid series of paintings by Kaneohe-born artist Jon Ching zeroes in on the magnificent beauty of six endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers, rare creatures found nowhere else on Earth. Ching is a 2024 Conservation and Justice Fellow for the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), an organization dedicated to supporting wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. Teaming up with Birds, Not Mosquitoes, ABC has been working to combat non-native mosquitoes on the islands, which have decimated populations with avian malaria.
Like much of Ching’s work, these paintings are hyperrealistic, portraying the subjects’ soft plumes and scaled claws with impeccable, otherworldly detail. Many are set against flat, graphic backdrops reflective of different aspects of Hawaiian culture. The artist writes on Instagram that the ‘Akeke’e has a “specialized crossbill that helps them open up ‘ōhi‘a lehua buds in search of insects,” adding about the work of the same name:
I made a patterned design of the ‘ōhi‘a lehua, almost as a contemporary wallpaper or textile design, but have the flower and leaves transforming from 2D to 3D as the birds perch on them. In this way, their presence gives life to this important native tree like it cares for it in the wild.
Find more about Ching’s work with ABC and the fellowship program on the organization’s website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Jon Ching Advocates for Six Endangered Hawaiian Birds in Vivid Detail appeared first on Colossal.
dotaturls_feed at 02:33pm on 10/08/2025
I've not been out this late since Gideon was born, but when my
music-obsessive photographer friend Kenny told me I had to come see
Fantastic Negrito at the Fringe I decided to make an exception.
The support band (Megan Black) was better than most support acts. The
main act, on the other hand, is just, well, fantastic. Maybe even
worth missing the kids bedtime for.
Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
send_more_paramedics_feed at 12:44pm on 19/08/2025dotaturls_feed at 01:25pm on 08/08/2025scalziwhatever_feed at 05:50pm on 19/08/2025
Escapism through reading fantasy is something we’re all familiar with, but is it always the best idea to ignore the rest of the world and to some extent, yourself? Author Michelle Knudsen explores this idea in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Into the Wild Magic. Come along to see how Knudsen weaves a message of morals throughout the magic.
MICHELLE KNUDSEN:
I never really know what a novel is about when I start writing it. I usually begin with a scene, a couple of characters, and the vague knowledge that something magical or horrible or supernatural will happen. Sometimes I write the scene and it goes into the metaphorical trunk. Other times, I feel that tingle of yes that makes me want to keep going. In this case, I wrote a scene between two girls in a schoolyard. I didn’t know anything about them or what their story would be, but I knew I wanted to know more.
Those two girls turned out to be Bevvy and Cat. Bevvy is lonely and bullied and longs to escape into her fantasy books. New girl Cat, we soon discover, has the ability to open portals into another world. She avoids using her power, for Reasons, but is soon forced to open one of her portals, dragging Bevvy through with her. The story has all the exciting things I love to put in my novels: magic, monsters, adventures, battles, strange creatures, complicated people, dangerous situations. It’s about the girls, their various secrets and fears, and their attempts to get back home. But underneath all of that, it’s about connection: about what it means to have a friend, and to be a friend, and how to find connection when it seems forever out of reach.
Like (I assume) many speculative fiction writers, I lived in fantasy and science fiction as a kid to escape the realities of middle school and high school life. I wasn’t Bevvy; I was lucky to have some really good friends, but I definitely also had times where I felt very alone, like there was some reason I wasn’t able to connect with others, like there was maybe something wrong with me. It was fantasy and science fiction that got me through. Not just because of the fantastic or futuristic elements (although yes, those too!), but also because of the characters who existed in those incredible worlds and the larger-than-life struggles that brought out their truest (and often best) selves.
I still believe that a lot of what I learned about being a good person came from the books I read back then. They were fun and full of adventure and magic and robots and spaceships but also they were stories of people facing danger to help or save those they loved. They contained characters who showed up for each other in extraordinary ways, who loved each other despite none of them being anything close to perfect. They brought me hope that there were lots of ways to connect with other people in the world.
I write stories for all ages, and in my picture books as well as my novels, I find myself returning to themes of friendship and unconditional love and finding a place where you belong. Sometimes that place can be a person. Or a lion. Or a group of bunnies you thought you had nothing in common with but then you all bond at the monster truck show and you realize with unexpected joy that you now have a tiny, fuzzy friend-family for life.
Part of the secret is always finding those who get you, who see you for who you are. But the other part is being able to see yourself, to accept that you are worth the love and friendship of other people (or lions, or bunnies).
Bevvy starts this story wishing for a friend: just one. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that she finds one, but more than that, she learns to be friends with herself. The magical world she encounters is way scarier in person than in books, and she has to navigate her new relationship with dodgy, difficult Cat while running for her life, facing danger, and getting swept up in a magical war. Even more frightening, she must make some hard moral choices that could mean losing the friendship she so desperately wants.
Bevvy has to figure out who she really is and attempt to arrive at the place I hope all of us can eventually get to of deciding we are worthy of love and affection. And that we deserve to surround ourselves with others who feel the same way.
Into the Wild Magic invites middle-grade readers to escape into a fantasy-world adventure, but I hope it also helps some of them think about the kind of person—and friend—they really want to be. (And also that they love the dragons and the tree magic and the kitten and the dog and the giant moths and everything else!)
Into the Wild Magic: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Lofty Pigeon Books (for signed/personalized copies!)|Kobo|Libro.fm|Audible
Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Facebook|Newsletter
Read an excerpt.
in_the_pipeline_feed at 02:00pm on 19/08/2025I wrote here years ago about how many natural product scaffolds had not been modified with single-atom-replacements (nitrogen or oxygen for carbon, for example), largely because of synthetic chemistry barriers. And a few years later I noted that there are some people out there making some of these compounds, starting out with natural products and dinking their structures around on the hypothesis that there might be more active compounds there than you would get from chance. That idea is borne out by the sorts of activities seen in the mirror-image enantiomers of active natural products as well, and it’s occurred to many people over the years.
So I was glad to see this recent paper on a single-point-change in the morphine skeleton. The authors take that ether oxygen atom in the middle of the structure and just change it to a CH2 methylene group, and they mention that “very few synthesis campaigns have been undertaken to vary the core atoms” of this molecule. This was believed to have a strong chance of changing the binding at the mu-opiod receptor, and so it did! The resulting “carbamorphine” was not horribly difficult to prepare, but neither was it easy: 15 steps from a commercial indanone starting material, and 3% overall yield (which works out to 79% average per step, which is certainly respectable). Several of these steps had to be rejiggered from the original plan, as is damn near inevitable in any new chemical synthesis of any reasonable length. It’s as good or better than the known methods of making morphine from scratch, for example, not that anyone does such a thing when the opium poppy is growing right over there. But no plant makes carbamorphine - until now, nothing that we know of has ever produced carbamorphine.
Its activity is suggestive. As very much contrasted to morphine itself, both enantiomers of this new compound are active at the mu-opioid receptor, although to be sure they seem to have different binding poses when modeled. And this activity seems to de-emphasize the respiratory depression activity of morphine (which is common to opiod analgesics in general) compared to those analgesic effects. In addition, it shows lower “conditioned place preference”, which is considered an animal model of addiction (or at least of strong liking!) Like many such behavioral assays, that one is tricky to run in such a way that other factors don’t interfere, but this result is certainly an interesting starting point.
So overall this work suggests that it may be possible to change the classic morphine scaffold in ways that preserve pain-relieving activity while lessening some of the known harmful side effects. That’s definitely worth more research, and I hope this leads to more weirdo synthetic variants. What happens if you put a chiral methyl group (or a methoxy) at that new carbon? Or a gem-dimethyl? Or what if you have a CF2 instead of a methylene there? These will all take some work to realize, but it would be really interesting to see what can be accomplished in this part of the molecule. Let’s make some.
colossal_feed at 05:00pm on 19/08/2025
From glowing portals that open up in swimming pools to an oversized cat sipping from an ornamental fountain, Masha Foya celebrates wonder and imagination in her dreamy digital illustrations. Based in Kyiv, the artist has previously collaborated with clients like Adobe, The New York Times, Sierra Club, Scientific American, and more, and her personal work continues to explore gauzy, surreal scenes of reflection and solitude.
“Despite the difficult times we live in, I still try not to forget to notice the beauty around me: from mysterious summer shadows to incredible water reflections,” Foya says. See more on her website, Behance, and Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Dreamlike Scenes Unfold in Masha Foya’s Ethereal Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.
nwhyte_wp_feed at 04:03pm on 19/08/2025Second paragraph of third chapter:
These are the things the poets say she shall dream of.
Second of Claire North’s excellent Penelope trilogy, this time narrated by the goddess Aphrodite, with our heroine still waiting for her husband (who is dallying far away with the nymph Calypso), and also dealing with the desperately ill Orestes and the greedy Menelaus, kings of adjoining cities on the mainland whose quarrel is being played out in Ithaca. There is also a locked-room murder mystery for Penelope to solve, with the help of Helen who is vividly sketched as a character.
I was reading this at the same time as Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (review coming soon) but actually my mind kept turning to Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, told from the point of view of Nicostratus, Helen’s son by Menelaus who accompanied her to Troy at the start of the war. Nicostratus is a key character here as well, but North has him as Menelaus’ illegitimate son, full of resentment and an all round bad guy who is at the centre of the murder mystery. North’s characterization is very memorable, even of names who have been talked about for millennia.
You can get House of Odysseus here.
colossal_feed at 02:45pm on 19/08/2025
From glazed ceramic, coated cardboard, wood, and acrylic paint, Steve Keister summons mythical beings and enigmatic animal-human hybrids. The artist’s current exhibition, Split Level at Derek Eller Gallery, is a survey of work made during the past eight years, glimpsing the artist’s ongoing exploration of Pre-Columbian art and architecture.
Keister’s mixed-media sculptures initially emerged from experiments with salvaged styrofoam and cardboard packing cartons, which evoked the bold, blocky forms of Mesoamerican architecture like Aztec stone carvings and Mayan step pyramids.
Through ongoing series like Bio Meso, Batz, and Masked Figures, Keister merges painting, sculpture, and craft techniques into three-dimensional portrayals of what the gallery describes as “bespoke deities that pay homage to Pre-Columbian myth.” Some creatures, like “Xoloitzcuintle,” represent real animals—in this case, a species of hairless dog.
Hybrid creatures like “Standing Bat II” and “Coyote Man” tap into oral histories and belief systems that span North America. Bats are historically emblematic of the boundary between life and death. And Coyote, a potent character in the folklore of numerous Indigenous North American peoples, is variously a magician, creator, glutton, and trickster.
Keister’s compositions range from wall reliefs to freestanding, monument-like sculptures to sprawling floor pieces. “At the core of his ethos is a profound interest in human and animal consciousness,” the gallery says. “Keister extrapolates his subjects from Central American mythology to develop a complex ecosystem of mystical fauna.”
Split Level continues through August 22 in New York City. Explore more on the artist’s website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Steve Keister Conjures Mythological Creatures from Clay, Wood, and Cardboard appeared first on Colossal.
dotaturls_feed at 03:59pm on 18/08/2025
montecookgames_feed at 01:07pm on 19/08/2025Games, obviously, are meant to be fun. And yet we still put up with a lot of things that many […]
The post Cypher Design Diaries: Taking Out What’s Not Fun appeared first on Monte Cook Games.
james_davis_nicoll at 08:59am on 19/08/2025 under review, what's the worst that could happen?
dotaturls_feed at 05:24pm on 17/08/2025johndcook_feed at 11:22am on 19/08/2025Today’s exponential sum, like all the exponential sums on the site, is formed by drawing a line between consecutive partial sums of a series involving complex exponentials. The exponential sum page makes an image each day by putting the day’s month, day, and year into a formula.
Here’s today’s image
based on the sum
I use American-style dates—month, day, year—because that increases the day-to-day variety of the images compared to using the day in the first denominator.
The post Connecting partial sums first appeared on John D. Cook.After work yesterday, I went to bed and slept for about 10 hours, plus another hour of fading in and out. I'm finally awake now, about 2 hours before I start the work routine again.
I had been exceptionally short on sleep for the past two nights, so it was good to catch up. The first night, it was my own fault for playing a computer game for too late and getting about 4 hours of sleep before work. The second night, it was another fire alarm going off for no reason. It interrupted my sleep 3 times that night and then I couldn't get back to sleep. Thankfully it hasn't misbehaved again, but I promised myself that I would personally disable the device the 4th time it goes off. These new 10-year fire alarms are not as good a deal as I originally thought. At least the ones with disposable batteries can be disconnected. These "permanent" alarms, though, can only be permanently disabled.
Before waking up this morning, I caught the end of another dream.
I was some kind of investigator, and I was pursuing a political-religious cult. I tracked them to large warehouse near a farm. I walked around the building with no windows. The building was shaped like the letter "L", and at the inner bend of the building, I could hear voices. Somebody was using a circular saw, and in between the loud noises of the saw, the people were yelling loudly, which I could hear through the cinder block walls. I don't remember now what they were saying, just that I could hear their voices.
Somehow, I had a pet cat with me (on a potentially dangerous investigation?), and it was sniffing around that corner too. I saw a pickup truck heading toward me. I had been spotted by their informal security, apparently. The guy driving the truck was unhappy with me being there. I said I was just following along with my cat who was exploring, and we'd be moving along when it was done. He was very unhappy but continued driving past me on his route around the building. I looked behind me, and my cat was actually a rabbit instead. Okay, I have a pet rabbit in this dream.
The rabbit and I continue along the edge of the building toward what seemed to be the front and a parking lot. Three people were walking toward the front door from the parking lot, and my rabbit dashed ahead near them to wait for me to catch up. When I caught up, then it dashed ahead toward our car. I think I opened the back hatch on the car, and the rabbit jumped in.
There was some more to the dream, driving between small towns on the road, stopping at a gas station somewhere. Then I woke up.
I have about 2 hours before I need to get ready for work again. Time to make the donuts. (YouTube)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
1sentence, choose from 1 of the 6 theme sets, and make your claim - then, write 50 one-sentence fic inspired by the prompts to share on the comm! This is an ongoing activity, open to writers for all fandoms, as well as original characters. Claims are good for three months, and you can get an extension of one month if needed.1characterdotaturls_feed at 05:35pm on 13/08/2025dg_weblog_feed at 07:00am on 19/08/2025fictionmachine_feed at 06:44am on 19/08/2025First broadcast 7 May 2011.
Three episodes into Season 6, and the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who lands upon its first properly mediocre episode. “The Curse of the Black Spot”, from writer Steve Thompson and director Jeremy Webb, is by no means an awful hour of Doctor Who. Instead it is simply what it is: a simple, self-contained combination of pirate stereotypes and science fiction. There have been worse episodes in this period of the series – “Victory of the Daleks” remains actively awful – but there have certainly been many that were much better. All in all, this one simply sits in its place. One might watch it. They might skip it. I cannot imagine anybody will care either way.
The TARDIS arrives in the hold of the 17th century pirate ship Fancy, captained by Henry Avery (Hugh Bonneville). A mysterious siren is marking each of Henry’s crew, one by one, before they fall into a trance and vanish. The Doctor (Matt Smith) is intrigued by the siren, but the situation grows urgent when Rory (Arthur Darvill) is marked – and becomes obsessed with reaching the siren himself.
It is a peculiar jump from “Day of the Moon” to this. That was all time paradoxes and narrative puzzles, building question upon question until it was actually rather difficult to make sense of it all. By contrast “The Curse of the Black Spot” is maddeningly simple and straightforward, and almost entirely self-contained. It was originally scheduled to come ninth in the season, but was moved forward to provide an amount of whimsy following the two-part premiere. In retrospect it was perhaps a little too whimsical. It ultimately gets a bit lost between the Silents and Neil Gaiman’s high-profile “The Doctor’s Wife”.
There is a neat little science fiction idea at the episode’s core, in that what seems to 17th century minds to be a supernatural siren is actually a highly advanced alien medical technology. In itself it is a fairly clever stuff, but it simply does not feel like enough. The guest characters are all very thinly drawn, and the closed-off setting of a sailing ship in the doldrums is never fully exploited for any sense of suspense or claustrophobia. Key guest star Hugh Bonneville seems oddly miscast as well – he seems too amiable a person to convince as a violent pirate.
It is also frustrating that after “Day of the Moon” introduced so many seemingly urgent narrative threads, “The Curse of the Black Spot” largely puts those threads on hold. There are a few references dropped in to keep the various questions in play, but no forward momentum of which to speak. It all feels like filler: good enough to justify its existence but nothing more, exciting enough so as not the wait the audience’s time but not so interesting one would bother to watch it twice. Not even the prospect of a small link between this – featuring Captain Avery – and 1966 serial “The Smugglers” – featuring his old crew – amounts to much.
cks_techblog_feed at 03:06am on 19/08/2025When you use DMARC, you get to specify a policy that people should apply to email that claims to be from your domain but doesn't pass DMARC checks (people are under no obligation to pay attention to this and they may opt to be stricter). These policies are set in DNS TXT records, and in casual use we can say that the policies of subdomains in your domain can be 'inherited'. This recently confused me and now I have some answers.
Your top level domain can specify a separate policy for itself (eg 'user@example.org') and subdomains (eg 'user@foo.example.org'); these are the 'p=' and 'sp=' bits in a DMARC DNS TXT record. Your domain's subdomain policy is used only for subdomains that don't set a policy themselves; an explicitly set subdomain policy overrides the domain policy, for better or worse. If your organization wants to force some minimum DMARC policy, you can't do it with a simple DNS record; you have to somehow forbid subdomains from publishing their own conflicting DMARC policies in your DNS.
The flipside of this is that it's not as bad as it could be to set a strict subdomain policy in your domain DMARC record, because subdomains that care can override it (and may already be doing so implicitly if they've published DMARC records themselves).
However, strictly speaking DMARC policies aren't inherited as we usually think about it. Instead, as I once knew but forgot since then, people using DMARC will check for an applicable policy in only two places: on the direct domain or host name that they care about, and on your organization's top level domain. What this means in concrete terms is that if example.org and foo.example.org both have DMARC records and someone sends email as 'user@bar.foo.example.org', the foo.example.org DMARC record won't be checked. Instead, people will look for DMARC only at 'bar.foo.example.org' (where any regular 'p=' policy will be used) and at 'example.org' (where the subdomain policy, 'sp=', will be used).
(As a corollary, a 'sp=' policy setting in the foo.example.org DMARC record will never be used.)
One place this gets especially interesting is if people send email using the domain 'nonexistent.foo.example.org' in the From: header (either from inside or outside your organization). Since this host name isn't in DNS, it has no DMARC policy of its own, and so people will go straight to the 'example.org' subdomain policy without even looking at the policy of 'foo.example.org'.
(Since traditional DNS wildcard records can only wildcard the
leftmost label and DMARC records are looked up on a special
'_dmarc.' DNS sub-name,
it's not simple to give arbitrary names under your subdomain a DMARC
policy.)
nnozomi in guardian_learning at 08:56pm on 18/08/2025 under gēn | 跟, kǒu | 口, ma | 吗, xià | 吓, yān | 烟, yě | 也, 一天一橘, 部首 | radicalsjohndcook_feed at 08:31pm on 18/08/2025A couple days ago I wrote about how you might go about trying to recover a seed phrase that you had remembered out of order. I said that the list of seed phrase words had been designed to be distinct. Just out of curiosity I computed how similar the words are using Levenshtein distance, also known as edit distance, the number of single character edits it takes to turn one word into another.
A lot of the words—484 out of 2048—on the BIP39 list differ from one or more other words by only a single character, such as angle & ankle, or loud & cloud. The word wine is one character away from each of wing, wink, wire, and wise.
Edit distance may not the best metric to use because it measures differences in text representation. It’s more important for words to be conceptually or phonetically distinct than to be distinct in their spelling. For example, the pair donkey & monkey differ by one letter but are phonetically and conceptually distinct, as are the words live & olive.
Some pairs of words are very similar phonetically. For example, I wouldn’t want to have to distinguish or cannon & canyon over a phone call. The list is not good for phonetic distinction, unlike say the NATO alphabet.
For ease of memorization, you want words that are vivid and concrete, preferably nouns. That would rule out pairs like either & neither.
The BIP39 list of words is standard. But other approaches, such as Major system encoding, are more optimized for memorability.
It’s hard to make a long list of words distinct by any criteria, and 2048 is a lot of words. And the words on the list are intended to be familiar to everyone. Adding more vivid or distinct words would risk including words that not everyone would know. But still, it seems like it might have been possible to create a better word list.
The earlier post discussed how to recover a seed phrase assuming that all the words are correct but in the wrong order. It would make sense to explore sequences in order of permutation distance, assuming that small changes to the order are more likely than large changes.
But if it’s possible that the words are not correct, you might try looking at words in edit distance order. For example, “You said one of the words was race. Could it have been rice?”
sovay at 04:02pm on 18/08/2025spatch remembers vividly because it was not the library across the street from one of his childhood homes but the one about a mile up the road. The dates on the card are well within the span of his family's residency. It would be nice to imagine that one of his parents took it out, or at least browsed through it, sometime. The punch line of discovering Lampell as an author is that while I did not in the least recognize his name, I would recognize his voice because along with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers. It was only later in his career as a screenwriter that he was blacklisted.| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
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