davidcook

Posted by Grant Watson

https://fictionmachine.com/2025/09/10/review-yokohama-bj-blues-1981/

http://fictionmachine.com/?p=21018

A shambolic private detective descends into the criminal underworld when he finds himself blamed for his best friend’s death. One could be forgiven for thinking they were watching Robert Altman’s 1973 thriller The Long Goodbye, which was based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name. Instead it is Kudo Eiichi’s 1981 Japanese noir Yokohama BJ Blues, a loose unofficial remake that liberally soaks Altman’s version in a greasy patina of Yakuza criminal sleaze. The similarities are clear, but Kudo’s stylish riff on the material is more than distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Kudo’s career as a director started making jidai-geki samurai films including 13 Assassins (1963) and Eleven Samurai (1967). By the beginning of the 1980s, and with Japanese commercial cinema deep in a decade-old slump, he had shifted firmly into what were considered B-grade crime movies. Gifted with a strong personal style, Kudo by all accounts was directing films well above the quality that was expected. Thanks to boutique bluray distributor Radiance, English-speaking audiences have the chance to find out for themselves with this handsomely packaged, neatly restored subtitled release. It is well worth tracking down: 1980s live-action cinema from Japan never really got much exposure internationally, and releases like this are filling in the gaps in a lot of enthusiasts’ understanding of the period.

Matsuda Yusaka cuts a wonderfully ragged figure as BJ, a blues singer turned private eye. He is not particularly good at either job. He has a low-key laconic attitude that dictates the tone of the entire film: it is beautifully atmospheric, with a film grain slapped on like an oil impasto and a wonderful use of colour. It evocatively reflects the seedy underbelly of Yokohama and its varied collection of criminal antagonists. There is a striking sense of style throughout, particularly via its oppressively framed close-ups and selective use of long takes. The steely blues throughout the film prefigure a lot of American genre works by James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow.

It is this atmosphere that dominates the film, rather than the plot. For what is essentially a murder mystery there is a remarkable lack of urgency about BJ’s investigation. Kudo maintains a strangely relaxed, almost disinterested tone about the narrative – and it is strangely addictive. BJ comes across as someone that has simply given up – on life, on human nature, on his career prospects – and the same sort of weary resolve surrounds him from beginning to end. A homo-erotic seam runs throughout the film, in ways that feel both tender and exploitative in turn. Tanaka Koji is eye-catching as Akira, a young man whose mother has paid BJ to retrieve from a life in a criminal gang, and when the film ends it is a lot of his scenes that linger in the mind.

In this modern era of boutique distribution, it is a genuine pleasure to discover these sorts of obscure, previously unknown features and expand one’s understanding of cinema from around the world. Yokohama BJ Blues is a deeply original and surprisingly effective neo-noir: seemingly unique in tone, attractive to watch, and fascinating to watch unfold.

https://fictionmachine.com/2025/09/10/review-yokohama-bj-blues-1981/

http://fictionmachine.com/?p=21018

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/life-maybe-mars-unless-we-change-our-minds

There are some astrobiology headlines today around this paper from a large team working with the Perseverance rover on Mars. It’s all about a particular sampling region, a valley that has been carved into the wall of Jezero Crater. It’s even more focused on a particular outcrop in this area, nicknamed “Bright Angel” because of its distinct tone as compared to its surroundings.

Close examination of this showed it to be some variety of mudstone, a sedimentary rock made of up deposits of very fine silt and sand. This was as expected; that whole region looks to be made of such layered material. The floor of the crater is igneous rock (lava and so on) that has been altered by aqueous weathering in Mars’ past, and there’s a big “Western Fan” of deposits carried into the crater by long-ago water flow. This valley with latest outcrop was a feeder channel for that process, and the Bright Angel area is up near the crater rim. Similar rocks to the initially observed ones show up as outcrops further down this channel, as it turns out. Layers of different color and thickness in these are immediately apparent.

The mudstone ins this area has plenty of silica, alumina, and iron oxide, but it’s quite low in manganese and magnesium oxides, and that makes it quite different from the Western Fan material (which doesn’t show those latter two elements depleted). The interpretation is that those latter deposits were formed under oxygen-poor conditions. The Bright Angel rocks also seem to have had calcium-sulfate-bearing fluid migrating through it at a later point, and overall, you can see signs of deposition, transport, weathering, and erosion over its history.

A close examination shows that there are a lot of dark grains in the lighter rock, informally called “poppy seeds” by the team, that are colored dark blue to dark green depending on the light. These seem to be enriched in iron, zinc, and phosphorus, and their spectral properties indicate that they are some sort of iron phosphate mixture in various hydration states. There are a number of minerals known here on Earth that match this description and whose colors fit well with the observations too. But these Fe-phosphate nodules don’t seem to have been transported along with the original mudstone sediments (they don’t match up with the laminations in the rock) and they don’t seem directly related to the Ca-sulfate deposits that must have come later.

And another odd feature in some parts of the formation are what were termed “leopard spots”, which are around 0.2 to 1mm in size and are circular dark rings with light-toned centers (lighter than the surrounding mudstone, actually). These also don’t have the features of having been deposited that way, instead they look very much like chemical reaction fronts, something spreading out from a central initiation event. Their dark edges are very similar to the Fe-phosphate material of the “poppy seed” nodules and are likely the same sort of material. The lighter cores, meanwhile, are enriched in sulfur, iron, nickel, and zinc and appear to be made up of iron sulfides (and oxidized forms thereof).

So what’s all this add up to? The team proposes that all of this looks like phosphate has been redistributed into the nodules and leopard-spot rings over time, and the lack of association with aluminum-bearing species suggests that this happened at moderate pH and non-oxidizing conditions. Why don’t you see these things all over these rock formations? It appears that these dark phosphate zones are associated with organic matter, spectroscopically, and that would make sense for dissolution of Fe(III) species and reduction to Fe(II) phosphate with oxidation of the organic material. The red color of the original mudstone was therefore bleached according to how much organic matter was present.

Now here on Earth we have seen this sort of thing happening all the time. Such reduced iron phosphates (such as vivianite and others) and iron sulfides are formed by microbial reduction of iron and sulfates, and this Fe-S metabolism is considered one of the signs of early life in the fossil record. And “reduction halos” that resemble the Martian leopard spots are also well known in deep marine sediments and indeed in ancient rocks here, with one hypothesis being that the latter also have a biotic origin. The paper considers abiotic routes to such minerals and formations, but it’s difficult to come up with an abiotic source of sulfide that is consistent with the other minerals present. Abiotic sulfide is generally product under higher-temperature conditions (with production of hydrogen sulfide gas, as at volcanic vents). Abiotic reduction of sulfate to sulfide also takes much higher temperatures, and these rocks just don’t seem to have experienced them.

Under a biological scenario, the mixture of reactants available in the Bright Angel formation at the time of deposition could have provided raw ingredients for a set of biological redox reactions that drove Fe and S reduction, organic matter oxidation, and precipitation of Fe2+-phosphate and Fe-sulfide minerals. In this scenario, oxidized iron and sulfate would be used as terminal electron acceptors for organic matter consumption, promoting the formation of minerals through the release of chemical by-products: Fe-phosphate minerals in the case of iron reduction and Fe-sulfide minerals in the case of sulfate reduction. Where authigenic nodules were formed, the reaction would have shut off before additional reductive processes occurred. In the places where larger reaction fronts formed, the presence of sulfide-bearing cores suggests that sulfate-reducing metabolisms with lower energy yields could have taken hold once those regions of the rock had been depleted of available Fe3+, but had not yet exhausted organic carbon in the reaction front core.

So what we have is a situation where biogenic mechanisms (Life on Mars! At least at some point) would seem to fit the observations quite well, while abiogenic ones are harder to come by. But (as the authors note, and have to note) this does not constitute proof. We certainly do not know what other chemical routes are available without invoking biological redox processes, nor can we rule out their ability to mimic what we’d expect from such biological pathways. We definitely need to study these formations more and try to model them here on Earth, but what we need to do for sure is make good on the sample-return part of the Perseverance mission. Bright Angel samples and others are stored on the rover and at cache points on the Martian surface in labeled tubes for eventual retrieval, but the proposals for how to go get them are in a state of expensive disarray. Until we’re able to do that, no one will be sure. Results like these make that an even more important goal.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/life-maybe-mars-unless-we-change-our-minds

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/new-species-snailfish-mbari-suny-geneseo-ocean-life/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461901

Thanks to increasingly advanced imaging technologies, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), in collaboration with SUNY Geneseo, have an unprecedented ability to glimpse rare and previously unknown marine species.

In 2019, an encounter with an unfamiliar pink snailfish, which swam just above the sea floor, led to the documented discovery of a species not yet known to science: the bumpy snailfish. Detected in the deep ocean off the coast of California, this small, light pink-colored vertebrate is characteristic of a snailfish with a large head, jelly-like body, and a narrow, thin tail.

“Many snailfish species have a disk on their belly that allows them to grip the seafloor or hitchhike on larger animals, such as deep-sea crabs,” says MBARI communications specialist Raúl Nava. “Shallow-water snailfishes often cling to rocks and seaweed, curling up like a snail.”

MBARI researchers used a combination of microscopy, micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), and measuring techniques to collect detailed information about the snailfish. They also employed DNA sequencing methods to distinguish each of the three newly found fish from all other known species, confirming they’re totally unique. This also allowed scientists to determine their evolutionary position in the broader Liparidae family, to which snailfish belong.

Dark, bumpy, and sleek snailfish were all named by scientists in this new report. The bumpy snailfish is slightly pink and, like its name suggests, has an overall texture with loose skin that’s a little bumpy. The dark snailfish is fully black in color, and the sleek variety has a uniquely long body and doesn’t possess a suction disk. Sleek indeed.

Take a deep dive into MBARI’s recent findings, plus numerous other underwater discoveries, on the program’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 These Newly Discovered Snailfish Get Bumpy, Dark, and Sleek in the Deep Sea appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/new-species-snailfish-mbari-suny-geneseo-ocean-life/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461901

Behold, Vitruvian Ducker!

(Sophia was delighted to discover that she can give Gideon piggy backs and has now been doing them whenever she can. Which is impressive when they weigh basically the same.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/false-value-by-ben-aaronovitch/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63238

Second paragraph of third chapter:

His ID badge gave his name as Stephen Higgins, in black on a pink background, and his department as Magrathea – models, maquettes and concept art. He turned smoothly, shifting his balance and letting his hands fall to his sides in a deceptively relaxed manner. I remembered how fast he’d been back at the London Library and matched his pose.

As with Feet of Clay, I had been wondering if I would continue my project of reading through the Rivers of London books, though I was more inclined to keep going in this case as I have only two more to go after this. And as with Feet of Clay, reading False Value reassured me that I should follow through and finish the series. Here we have Peter Grant, cohabiting with Beverly, a very pregnant river goddess, and going undercover to investigate a software company which appears to be concealing occult secrets from the age of Babbage and Lovelace. I think I like these books more when they take the narrator away from standard Met occult policing into new territory, and this surely did while at the same time remaining firmly rooted in London. The Douglas Adams theme of the software company is excruciatingly awful and also all too believable. All good stuff. You can get False Value here.

Next (and so far, second last) on this list is Amongst Our Weapons.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/false-value-by-ben-aaronovitch/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63238

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/sergiu-ciochina-blue-series-oil-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461884

Cradling tiny homes, seated amid flowers, or asleep and dreaming in a garden, the figures in Sergiu Ciochinǎ’s paintings rest and interact in moments of poignant solitude and reverie. The artist’s Blue Series is a visual collection of his own memories, reflections, and moods, which he elaborates into atmospheric and sometimes fantastical canvases.

“For me, blue is the color of gentle melancholy, profound calm, and also a hidden hope,” Ciochinǎ says. Titles like “Don’t Eclipse Me” and “You Are Your Own Home” tap into our deep-seated desire for connection and a sense of belonging. They also hint at the nature of individuality within the context of our relationships with others, navigated in a series of dreamy scenes.

Ciochinǎ also creates glowing landscapes that capture building facades at sunrise or sun-dappled streets of historic European towns. Time and light play a significant role in his portrayals of anonymous figures, too, illuminating their skin with glowing details or situating them in the shadow of floral arrangements or verdant, dusky gardens.

The figures’ positions and blue tone nod slightly to Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period around 1901 to 1904, when the artist’s earlier, more realistic depictions of people and domestic spaces were largely rendered in blue and blue-green tones to underscore themes of despair and turmoil. For Ciochinǎ, dreams and emotions center in his mystical compositions.

“I wanted each canvas to convey a kind of breath, a calm vibration, almost musical,” the artist says. “Blue, for me, becomes a meeting space between reality and dream, between memory and the present—a bridge that invites the viewer to pause and contemplate.”

Ciochinǎ is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in Paris next year, which will include work expanding on the Blue Series. See more on his website, and follow updates on 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 Sergiu Ciochinǎ’s ‘Blue Series’ Explores Personal Memories, Dreams, and Moods appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/sergiu-ciochina-blue-series-oil-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461884

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wednesday-reading-116/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63591

Current
Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards & Dr Michael Brooks

Last books finished
Musings on Mothering, ed. Teika Bellamy
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch 
Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer
Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King 

Next books
Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway
Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd 
Final Cut, by Charles Burns 

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wednesday-reading-116/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63591

Posted by Tony Finch

https://www.metafilter.com/207777/Waffles-Revenge

https://dotat.at/:/PO622.html

• 2025‑09‑05 - Waffle’s revenge: classic 1 bit 8x8 tiling patterns.


• https://www.metafilter.com/207777/Waffles-Revenge


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/PO622


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https://www.metafilter.com/207777/Waffles-Revenge

https://dotat.at/:/PO622.html

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/carlos-javier-ortiz-inherit-america-photographs-protests-social-justice/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461817

Through his humanistic approach to photography and film, Carlos Javier Ortiz immerses us in dramatic protests, emotional ceremonies, and historical events that mark our current moment.

The Chicago-based photographer and filmmaker was born in Puerto Rico and makes work that critically examines life in urban centers, often through the lens of personal narrative. His practice is guided by a dedication to social justice and human rights, telling visual stories that help viewers comprehend current events and issues through both still and moving images.

Ortiz’s solo exhibition, Inherit America, opens at Riverside Arts Center this month. Curated by Laura Husar Garcia, the bold selection of images chronicles political activism and community portraits that shed light on everyday people’s fights for justice and equity.

“What makes Ortiz’s work so necessary is its resistance to spectacle,” Garcia says in a statement, continuing:

He does not chase moments of crisis. He stays. He returns. He photographs the waiting, the recovery, the daily life that continues regardless of headlines. That is where his strength lies—in showing us not just the event, but the system around it.

Inherit America highlights Ortiz’s art in its dual form as advocacy, sharing perspectives and stories that we don’t often see from large-scale, legacy media outlets. He builds trust with the individuals and communities he works alongside, recording the intensity of nighttime demonstrations, the inherent beauty of cooperation, or the quietude and reflection that follows major events.

Ortiz turns his lens to people, gatherings, and locations that reflect historically marginalized communities and people of color. We see derelict, abandoned grocery stores in urban “food deserts,” where underserved residents have access to fast food but no easy access to fresh produce or healthy food options. And he shows us momentous inflection points in recent history, like protests in St. Louis against Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson. Ortiz captures the moment 24 hours before Wilson’s acquittal by a grand jury, which spurred rioting.

“In an era when representation is so easily manipulated, Inherit America models a different kind of authorship—one that is reciprocal, ethical, and rooted in place,” Garcia says. “It asks viewers not just to look, but to stay in the tension. To wrestle with what it means to belong to a country still defining itself. This exhibition is not simply about the America we see. It’s about the American we participate in shaping.”

Inherit America opens on September 14 and continues through October 18 in Riverside—just about 25 minutes east of the Chicago Loop. Explore more on Ortiz’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 Carlos Javier Ortiz’s Photographs Invite Viewers to Be Participants in Social Justice Advocacy appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/carlos-javier-ortiz-inherit-america-photographs-protests-social-justice/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461817

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/10/mental-rng/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246485

George Marsaglia was a big name in random number generation. I’ve referred to his work multiple times here, most recently in this article from March on randomly generating points on a sphere. He is best remembered for his DIEHARD battery of tests for RNG quality. See, for example, this post.

I recently learned about a mental RNG that Marsaglia developed. It’s not great, but it’s pretty good for something that’s easy to mentally compute. The output is probably better than if you simply tried to make up random numbers; people are notoriously bad at doing that. Hillel Wayne explores Marsaglia’s method in detail here.

Here’s a summary the generator in Python.

state = 42 # Set the seed to any two digit number

def random_digit():
    tens = lambda n: n // 10
    ones = lambda n: n % 10
    global state
    state = tens(state) + 6*ones(state)
    return ones(state)

Related posts

• Mentally computing common functions
• Mentally multiply by π
• Mentally calculating the day of the week

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/10/mental-rng/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246485

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/10/new-symbols-in-unicode-17/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246486

Unicode 17.0 was released yesterday. According to the announcement

This version adds 4,803 new characters, including four new scripts, eight new emoji characters, as well as many other characters and symbols, bringing the total of encoded characters to 159,801.

My primary interest in Unicode is for symbols. Here are some of the new symbols I found interesting.

Currency

There’s a new symbol for the Saudi Riyal (SAR): U+20C1. This may be the most important symbol added in version 17. The rest are relatively arcane.

The riyal symbol looks like the Chinese symbol 北 (U+5317) which means “north.” However, according to the Saudi Central Bank the SAR symbol is based on a calligraphic form of the Arabic word riyal (ريال).

Note that the SAR symbol has parallel horizontal-ish lines, as many currency symbols do.

New math symbol

There was only one math-like symbol introduced in Unicode 17, and that is U+2B96, EQUALS SIGN WITH INFINITY ABOVE. I’ve never seen this symbol used anywhere, nor could I find any standard uses in a search.

I made the image above with \stackrel{\infty}{=} in LaTeX. If you flip the image upside down you get a symbol that was already in Unicode, U+2BF9, which is used in chess notation. I don’t know whether the new symbol is also used in chess notation.

I suppose the new symbol could be used to denote that two things are asymptotically equal. This would be more suggestive than the currently standard notation of using a tilde.

Asteroid symbols

Several asteroids already had Unicode symbols: Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Chiron correspond to U+26B3 through U+26B7. Also, Proserpina, Astraea, Hygiea, Pholus, and Nessus have Unicode symbols U+2BD8 through U+2BDC.

In Unicode 17.0, a new list of asteroids have symbols: Hebe, Iris, Flora, Metis, Parthenope, Victoria, Egeria, Irene, Eunomia, Psyche, Thetis, Melpomene, Fortuna, Proserpina, Bellona, Amphitrite, Leukothea. These correspond to U+1CEC0 through U+1CED0.

Four of these asteroids have alternate symbols add in the new version of Unicode: Vesta, Astraea, Hygiea, Parthenope have alternate forms in U+1F777 through U+1F77A. These alternate forms are listed under alchemical symbols.

Incidentally, not only a Pallas and Vesta the names of asteroids, they’re also the names of elliptic curves I wrote about recently.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/10/new-symbols-in-unicode-17/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246486

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/10/the-big-idea-t-a-chan/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57230

All is fair in love and war. But what if instead of a bloody battle, wars were games to be played? Author T. A. Chan brings us a near future world in which violent wars are a thing of the past, and games usher in a new strategy of fighting each other. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, One Last Game, to see how the cards play out.

T. A. CHAN:
Big Idea: Must there be consequences?
My 21st Century Anxiety-induced Roman Empire has consisted of two things the past couple years: 1) Knowing Earth is a ticking time bomb from irreversible climate disaster at the rate things are going and 2) The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and other international conflicts.
One Last Game was my attempt of channeling those dreads into a more hopeful future where the climate disaster has been resolved and international conflicts are settled in a non-violent play-by-the-rulebook sort of way. Despite my attempts of creating a grounded utopia, I have somehow ended up with a world that is both so much better (yay for eco-friendly civilization practices!) and also so much worse (nay for lethal board games!) than today’s state of affairs. And it all started with how “ethical warfare” might look like in the future…So welcome, and enjoy the ride!
Why are we so predictable? And I don’t mean “we” as in you and me and them on an individual level, but rather “we” as a collective human society and our habit of settling major conflict via some sort of warfare, whether that be of the economic, psychological, or conventional variety just to name a few. It’s almost like there has to be consequences for anything to be taken seriously.
For the purpose of this Big Idea, let’s focus on conventional warfare.

What makes war bad?
I mean, obviously the list is loooongggg — from destroyed infrastructure to loss of lives, from environmental damage to the trauma imparted on whole generations. And yet even over the course of thousands of years, we haven’t been able to escape using “war” as a way to resolve conflict between tribes/kingdoms/nations/etc when verbal communication fails.
In a perfect world, all global disagreements could be resolved with talking and votes and things of that nature.
But if history is anything like a crystal ball, a war only ends when the cost to continue the engagement can no longer be afforded and/or justified.

But what if we minimize the cost and harm of war?
Imagine this: The year is 2145. Through the desperate will to survive, humanity has painstakingly implemented eco-conscious measures over the course of decades and restored Earth back to its healthy, environmental glory. Having barely escaped extinction of the human species, there’s a very strong consensus that minimizing environmental damage and protecting existing resources is Good.
Thus, bombs are banned, chemical warfare is banned, scorched-earth policy is banned, hell anything that leaves a scratch on a tree is banned. Human-on-human interactions have been tempered as conventional warfare is done away. Debilitating injuries, famine, home displacement, and painful deaths are relics of a bygone era.
The outcomes of international conflicts are settled simply: with a gameboard and players representing their respective countries.

What’s stopping countries from disregarding the outcome of a silly boardgame?
Yeah, I get it. Letting a game of chess determine who gets territorial claim over a highly contested shipping route does seem rather ludicrous.
Even nowadays, international agreements and treatises are broken with the implication–and occasionally, execution–of consequences ranging from economic sanctions to retaliatory acts. See Exhibit A: Paris Accord and Geneva Convention.

And so, herein lies the heart of the Big Idea: Must there be consequences for anything to matter?
I’m inclined to say yes, particularly with a grounded spec-fic set in the near future. And the consequences must be universal enough that it carries weight, no matter what culture or class you come from. In the particular case of One Last Game, this translates to human lives. After all, human conflicts should only affect humans, right? And death is ubiquitous and serious enough that no entity would want to wage needless war when there are less drastic methods of reaching an agreement between states.
Imagine this: It’s the year 2145 and you’re surveying the aftermath of a battlefield that took place in a city. All the skyscrapers gleam under the sunlight, unscathed and standing proud. Verdant leaves unfurl from oak trees in the parks while squirrels argue with pigeons over a slice of cheesy bread that missed the compost bin. It’s quiet, but you know by the end of the week, the streets will once again be bustling with civilians going about their day. On the news broadcast, a reporter discusses how Country A has formally ceded control over shipping routes to Country B after its latest game loss–along with the lives of citizens unlucky enough to be in the randomly selected city.
Their deaths were quick and painless.
Just like falling asleep.

But is it ethical? Is this the best we can do? Must there be consequences?
In conclusion, I don’t have a conclusion to the question of “is there an ethical way to conduct warfare?” But I know we can do better.
Humans are messy and so the solution will be messy. And I have hope that the collective we will strive to understand and recognize an individual’s humanity in all its messy glory, and find a better way forward.

One Last Game: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/10/the-big-idea-t-a-chan/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57230

Posted by Tony Finch

https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-stevie-build

https://dotat.at/:/36DMB.html

• 2025‑09‑09 - The government approved Cambridge’s sewage treatment plant upgrade, then withdrew the promised funding.


• https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-stevie-build


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/36DMB


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https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-stevie-build

https://dotat.at/:/36DMB.html

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/lyric-square.html

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/lyric-square.html

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/10/im-traveling-today-so-here-is-a-new-mountain-goats-song-for-you/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57225

Fun fact: John Darnielle, the leader and songwriter of The Mountain Goats, went to high school in the same town I did (different schools, though) and share friends in common with me from that era. However, we did not meet each other in person until about a decade ago, at Nerdcon, run by John and Hank Green. What a strange, small and weird world it is. I am glad to know him now, of course. The above song is from the band’s upcoming album, which you can read about here. Enjoy the song, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/10/im-traveling-today-so-here-is-a-new-mountain-goats-song-for-you/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57225

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/unconnected-adjacent-stations.html

Brimsdown       0552  0608
Ponders End     0554  0610
Meridian Water  0557  0613

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/unconnected-adjacent-stations.html

Posted by Issac Young

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=59215

This week I’ve has been more of the same.

Balatro continues to be a good time waster, nothing new about it.

I haven’t played any Rainbow Six Siege this week, and I only played a bit of Project Zomboid.

I have been doing something more interesting this week. Playing random Itch.io horror games. Some of the highlights I can remember are Carbon Steel, a game where you are collecting samples from unknown monsters in a cage, using weird equipment.

CleaningRedVille, a game were you collect trash at night.

and DREAD FLATS, a game were you are playing as a paranormal investigator looking for ghosts in a well known haunted apartment building.

What’s everyone else doing?

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=59215

Posted by cks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWrittenPropertyHowItWorks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSWrittenPropertyHowItWorks

Posted by Grant Watson

https://fictionmachine.com/2025/09/10/review-the-long-walk-2025/

http://fictionmachine.com/?p=21054

There aren’t many writers so prolific that adaptations of their work could be seen as a genre in their own right. Stephen King had his first novel, Carrie, published in 1974. The Brian De Palma-directed film adaptation was released in 1976, and filmmakers have been adapting his novels, novellas, and short stories ever since.

I think one of the reasons for King’s immense cultural stature is the distinctive tone of his works: folksy, grounded in small towns, and liberally soaked in an earnest sense of Americana, they typically portray aggressively mundane and ordinary characters thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They generally fall into the horror genre, with a number in crime or fantasy, but for me at least the essential “Kingness” of the writer at his best is his handle of ordinary but interesting people in harrowing and imaginative situations.

The best screen adaptations of his works follow in the same vein: those that focus on and embrace the richness of his characters stand out, while those that focus on the fantastical or horrific elements tends to fall by the wayside. A select few can be considered to be genuine film classics, and the thing that unites them is their emphasis on King’s strongest gifts as an author. Obviously opinions will vary, but if pressed to name the very best Stephen King adaptations the list would ultimately go like this: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986) and Misery (1990), and Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Green Mile (1999), and The Mist (2007).

To that list of six films I would now add a seventh. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk, adapting King’s 1979 pseudonymous novel of the same name, is an outstanding achievement. As a bleak dystopia it seems flawless. As a confrontational thriller it feels close to traumatic. As historical allegory and cultural satire it is smart and intensely relevant. Most of all, as a showcase of King’s classic ordinary characters in extremis it is a bona fide masterpiece. I do not typically apply star ratings to my reviews, but rest assured this is five-star stuff. This is the feel-bad movie of the year.

In the aftermath of war and economic depression, America holds an annual ‘long walk’. Each year 50 volunteers, all young men, are selected to march down a deserted country road. They must continue walking, at a minimum pace of three miles an hour. If they drop behind, they receive a warning. Failing the third warning results in a bullet to the head. The last boy to finish wins a fortune in money and an unlimited wish. The other 49 boys are dead.

There is a boldness to Francis Lawrence’s adaptation in that, a few key flashbacks aside, the entire film consists of the walk. The boys start walking within minutes of the film beginning, and the end credits rolls within minutes of its end. A lesser director might flinch, fearing that without changes in character and scenery the film would be boring. Lawrence smartly trusts the source material and his cast, and the result is something that is both riveting to watch and emotionally rich. You never leave the characters, and that enriches the effect their ordeal has on you.

An interesting combination of characters are spectacularly brought to life by a hugely talented cast. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson share the lead as Ray and Peter, who meet and befriend each other during the walk, and are an enormously engaging double act. The other walkers are all fascinating and unexpected characters played impeccably, whether Garrett Wareing as the moody Stebbins, Ben Wang as the amusing Olsen, or Tut Nyuot as the faith-driven Baker. Charlie Plummer stands out as Barkovich, a character whose narrative shifts in unexpected and troubling ways as the film progresses. Judy Greer stands out in a small but pivotal role. Mark Hamill delivers something iconic as the anonymous “Major” who oversees the walk. Always a smart performer, he zeroes in on his character’s purpose and identity and delivers something that is right on the money.

It is a blunt and horrifying film. The violence punctures the film at regular intervals, and is deliberately bloody and confronting. It needs to be. It informs the characters and drives the plot. It emphasises the underlying allegory at work. King clearly had a social context in mind when he wrote the novel, and JT Mollner’s screenplay observes it. The film is also wide open for new and contemporary interpretations, some obvious and others more subtle.

The Long Walk has taken a long, difficult road to the screen. It took two years for Carrie to become a film. It has taken 46 years for The Long Walk to join it, but rarely is a film so worth the journey or the wait to see it play out with such depth, careful observation, or humanity. This is must-see cinema; don’t wait for streaming.

https://fictionmachine.com/2025/09/10/review-the-long-walk-2025/

http://fictionmachine.com/?p=21054

Posted by VaderFan2187

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/lego-75419-ucs-death-star-review-part-2-the-minifigures/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77905

Continuing on with my review series of the LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Collector’s Series 75419 Death Star, the most expensive LEGO set of all time carries a similarly expansive lineup of minifigures. 38 minifigures accompany the colossal Imperial battle station: some new, some exclusive, and some repeats. UCS sets often only include just one or […]

The post LEGO 75419 UCS Death Star Review Part 2 – The Minifigures appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/lego-75419-ucs-death-star-review-part-2-the-minifigures/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77905

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/butterfly-exploring-the-world-of-lepidoptera-book/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461784

Since time immemorial, we have been awed by the ornate patterns, metamorphosis, and migrations of butterflies and moths. Their uncanny life stages and spectrum of vibrant colors and textures—both as caterpillars and as adult insects—endlessly inspire wonder.

Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera, a new book forthcoming from Phaidon on October 1, celebrates these distinctive winged creatures throughout art history and science. From portrayals in 4,000-year-old Egyptian artworks to pioneering entomological studies during the Enlightenment to contemporary explorations, the volume surveys our enduring fascination with the insects.

So far, scientists have documented about 20,000 species of butterflies in the world, but there are likely more. And in the order of Lepidoptera, which includes moths, estimates of the total number of species range from a staggering 180,000 to 265,000. The largest is known as Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, with a wingspan that can reach up to one foot. And when it comes to moths, a similarly sized wingspan can be found on a Southeast Asian species known as the Atlas Moth.

Artists have long captured the likeness of butterflies in a range of media as a way to symbolically represent transformation, rebirth, beauty, and purity. More than 250 entries fill Butterfly, including sculptures, photography, paintings, illustrations, textiles, and more, which tap into the myriad ways in which these marvelous bugs pollinate not only our fragile ecosystems but our imaginations, too.

Pre-order your copy now in the Colossal Shop.

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 ‘Butterfly’ Explores 4,000 Years of Our Fascination with Lepidoptera in Art and Science appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/butterfly-exploring-the-world-of-lepidoptera-book/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461784

Posted by Tony Finch

https://slcyber.io/assetnote-security-research-center/a-novel-technique-for-sql-injection-in-pdos-prepared-statements/

https://dotat.at/:/8HUAA.html

• 2025‑09‑09 - A novel technique for SQL injection with PHP PDO’s prepared statements.


• https://slcyber.io/assetnote-security-research-center/a-novel-technique-for-sql-injection-in-pdos-prepared-statements/


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/8HUAA


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/8HUAA.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/8HUAA.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://slcyber.io/assetnote-security-research-center/a-novel-technique-for-sql-injection-in-pdos-prepared-statements/

https://dotat.at/:/8HUAA.html

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/09/mandelbrot-fat-tails/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246484

The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers c such that iterations of

f(z) = z² + c

remain bounded. But how do you know an iteration will remain bounded? You know when it becomes unbounded—if |z| > 2 then the point isn’t coming back—but how do you know whether an iteration will never become unbounded? You don’t.

So in practice, software to draw Mandelbrot sets will iterate some maximum number of times, say 5000 times, and count a point as part of the set if it hasn’t diverged yet. And for the purposes of creating pretty graphics, that’s good enough. If you want to compute the area of the Mandelbrot set, that’s not good enough.

A reasonable thing to do is to look at the distribution of escape times. Then maybe you can say that if an iteration hasn’t escaped after N steps, there’s a probability less than ε that it will escape in the future, and make ε small enough to satisfy the accuracy of your calculation.

The distribution of escape times drops off really quickly at first, as demonstrated here. Unfortunately, after this initial rapid drop off, it settles into a slow decline typical of a fat-tailed distribution. This is not atypical: a fat-tailed distribution might initially drop off faster than a thin-tailed distribution, such as the comparison between a Cauchy and a normal distribution.

The plot above groups escape times into buckets of 1,000. It starts after the initial rapid decline and shows the fat-tailed region. This was based on 100,000,000 randomly generated values of c.

To estimate the probability of an iteration escaping after having remained bounded for N steps, you need to know the probability mass in the entire tail. So, dear reader, what is the sum of the areas in the bars not shown above and not calculated? It’s not like a normal-ish distribution when you can say with reasonable confidence that the mass after a certain point is negligible.

This matters because the maximum number of iterations is in the inner loop of any program to plot the Mandelbrot set or estimate its area. If 5,000 isn’t enough, then use 50,000 as the maximum, making the program run 10x longer. But what if 50,000 isn’t enough? OK, make it 100,000, doubling the runtime again, but is that enough?

Maybe there has been work on fitting a distribution to escape times, which would allow you to estimate the amount of probability mass in the tail. But I’m just naively hacking away at this for fun, not aware of literature in the area. I’ve looked for relevant papers, but haven’t found anything.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/09/mandelbrot-fat-tails/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246484

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/degunkification

The journal Organic Process Research and Development has been running some really enjoyable “lessons learned” papers, and this one will resonate with an awful lot of folks who have done bench-level organic chemistry. As befits the journal, it’s all on a much larger scale than many of of will have experienced, but yes indeed, the title alone will be enough to bring on grimaces of recognition: “Recovery of a Peptide Intermediate from a Reaction Mixture Contaminated with a Large Quantity of Silicone Oil Coolant”

Yeah, see, I told you! Many will have experienced the thrill of watching a poorly secured container going into a bath of heating oil, or dropping a solution of your sample all over the bottom of your hood (or onto a not-all-that-clean floor). When I was a summer undergrad student I came in one morning to see the grad student I was working with stuffing a bunch of paper towels into the top of a big separatory funnel, and being a curious sort I asked him what he was doing. He responded that he didn’t quite feel like going into the details right then, or something to that effect, but in the fullness of time I too had a chance to experience this same situation. That is, frantically sopping up ones precious product along with floor wax, layers of dust, silicone grease, gunk that had been stuck to the bottom of people’s shoes or miscellaneous gorp that had been spilled in smaller amounts across the bottom of the hood over the last couple of years, all coming together in a yellowish brew with stuff floating around in it, from which your product will have to be purified somehow. It’s a lovely sight, trust me.

What happened in the case of the above paper was a “telescoped” sequence gone awry. That term refers to a multistep process that takes place in one vessel without taking anything out for purifications along the way, and you can see how this is a preferable way to do things on scale when you can get away with it (quenching along the way and removal of a bottom aqueous layer and carrying on to the next step, etc.) Unfortunately, a check near the end of this process showed that the material was contaminated with silicone oil, which was the circulating coolant around the jacketed 50-liter glass reactor. Cracks were found in the inner wall, and they had been there the whole time.

There were about 2.5 kilos of the desired product in the mixture, along with enough liquid to take things up to about 55 kilos overall. But only about 32kg of that was the 2-methyltetrahydrofuran solvent, while the remaining 23kg was dimethylpolysiloxane oil, oh joy. In case you’re wondering, the silicon oil was under pressure, so it leaked into the reaction vessel rather than the reaction contents leaking into the circulating oil, which overall is probably what you’d rather deal with if Satan has in fact decreed that you have to experience this at all. Later investigation found that it was the too-rapid cooling of the initial reaction to -20C that led to cracking in the inner glass - having the chilled silicone on one side and the room-temperature reaction mixture on the other was a bit too much for the vessel.

The initial hope was that the silicone gunk would be nonpolar enough to be cleared out by simple phase separation, so a sample was removed, the initial solvent was evaporated, and the residue was partitioned between acetonitrile and heptane. But even after multiple extractions there was plenty of silicone residue left in the product layer, which strongly suggested that the cooling oil had been partially degraded to more polar silicone species that were more resistant to heptane extraction.

After taking that unwelcome news on board, the team investigated extracting the reaction mixture directly with a weakly acidic solution (not strong enough, though, to mess with any amide bonds or to strip off a t-butyl ester in the material) and extracting the resulting aqueous layers with a mixture of 2-methyl THF and heptane. A multistep extraction process starting this way and continuing through flipping the pH back with sodium carbonate to throw the product back into 2-methyl THF, with further aqueous extractions of those layers seemed to do the trick. The total silicone levels went down to 0.02% with very high recovery of the product, surely to everyone’s great relief. The final material was actually cleaner than it had been in previous isolations due to all that extraction.

So one big lesson out of all this was to go easy on the temperature changes, because you never know if the jacketed reactor you’re using will decide it’s had enough of this lifestyle. Another is to do regular inspections of such equipment to make sure that trouble hasn’t already begun to develop - cracks tend to start small and grow over time. And it would also be a good idea to look for things like coolant contamination much earlier in such runs before you’ve had a chance to pump the thing full of 23kg of extra silicone oil. . .

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/degunkification

Sophia is having her evening snack while sitting on the window ledge watching the world go by.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

Posted by Grace Ebert

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/pat-perry-teacher-volcano-mural-wisconsin/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461827

In a rural Wisconsin city of just more than 1,200 people, the hyperlocal and the universal converge in a new mural by Pat Perry (previously). “27 Schoolteachers and a Volcano” is just as its title suggests: the large-scale piece depicts snow-capped mountains with an explosive volcano at its center, while small portraits of local educators line the top and bottom borders.

Commissioned by Princeton Art Collective, the mural captures the vertiginous experience of life today, particularly as we consume more information than ever before and must confront seemingly endless disasters and devastations around the globe. Perry wanted to highlight how we can “find meaning in ordinary life while constantly witnessing things happening in the world beyond your control.”

“Even in a small rural town, you’re not insulated from the immense forces that shape the world. History happens. Economies rise and fall. Wars begin. Continents drift and mountains erode. One day, the sun will expand and swallow the Earth. Most of us don’t get much of a say in any of it,” he says.

To conceptualize the work, the collective helped to contact and secure permissions from the teachers pictured, and with the exception of the woman in the red floral garment at the bottom of the piece—she’s the artist’s mother and a retired educator—all work in the area. And why teachers? Perry explains:

Day after day, people find purpose. They wake up early, show up with intention, and try to make sense of things—not just for themselves, but also for others. Teachers do this every day. Not for recognition, and rarely for much pay. It’s a repetitive act of maintenance that holds things together.
Choosing to shoulder that task, even while standing at the edge of something vast and indifferent, is a quiet act of defiance. Amidst overwhelmingness and uncontrollableness and unanswerableness, teachers—and all custodians of human affairs—keep meaning in the world by steadily and stubbornly tending to it.

“27 Schoolteachers and a Volcano” is located in Princeton, Wisconsin. Find more from Perry on his 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 In Rural Wisconsin, Pat Perry Connects the Various Forces That Shape Our World appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/pat-perry-teacher-volcano-mural-wisconsin/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461827

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/09/bech32-encoding/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246483

Bech32 is an algorithm for encoding binary data, specifically Bitcoin addresses, in a human-friendly way using a 32-character alphabet. The Bech32 alphabet includes lowercase letters and digits, removing the digit 1, and the letters b, i, and o.

The Bech32 alphabet design is similar to that for other coding schemes in that it seeks to remove letters that are visually similar. However, the order of the alphabet is unusual:

    qpzry9x8gf2tvdw0s3jn54khce6mua7l

I’ll explain the motivation for the ordering shortly. Here’s the same alphabet in conventional order, not the order used by Bech32:

    023456789acdefghjklmnpqrstuvwxyz

The Bech32 algorithm does more than represent 5-bit words as alphanumeric characters. The full algorithm is documented here. The algorithm is applied to the output of a RIPEMD-160 hash, and so the number of bits is a multiple of 5.

The Bech32 algorithm includes a BCH (Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem) checksum, and takes its name from this checksum.

Note that the BCH checksum is not a cryptographic hash; it’s an error correction code. It’s purpose is to catch mistakes, not to thwart malice. Contrast this with Base58check that uses part of a SHA256 hash. Base58check can detect errors, but it cannot correct errors.

I’ve had a surprisingly hard time finding the specifics of the BCH(n, d) code that Bech32 uses. Every source I’ve found either does not give values of n and d or gives different values. In any case, the order of the Bech32 alphabet was chosen so that mistakes humans are more like to make are more likely mistakes that BCH can detect and correct.

Related posts

• Most legible font for wallets
• Probability of typing a wrong Bitcoin address
• What is a HD wallet?

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/09/09/bech32-encoding/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246483

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/feet-of-clay-by-terry-pratchett/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63227

Second paragraph of third section:

Blood ran in a trickle across the pages of a rare volume of religious essays, which had been torn in half.

I was a bit disappointed with the last Pratchett that I reread, Men at Arms, but this turned out to still have the old magic for me. The core of it is a double magical murder and attempted murder mystery, with Vimes resolving what’s fairly obviously a golem going rogue combined with an attempt on the life of Lord Vetinari; certain circles want Nobbs to be put in as a figurehead replacement ruler, though Nobbs himself is notably not keen on the idea. There are a lot of humane reflections on power, freedom and basic decency; and there is the new Watch recruit, Cheery Littlebottom. There are some very good lines which have been collected here. I had been wondering whether to continue with my Pratchett reading project, but now I will. You can get Feet of Clay here.

This was my top unreviewed Discworld book. Next on the pile is Thief of Time.

The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/feet-of-clay-by-terry-pratchett/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=63227

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/09/the-big-idea-sharon-shinn-4/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57219

It’s never too late to tell a good story. Author Sharon Shinn has returned years later to her Twelve Houses series to bring you a fresh novel in a familiar world. Follow along in her Big Idea for Shifter and Shadow to see how she’s breathed new life into a finished series.

SHARON SHINN:

Sometimes I write a book with a grand theme in mind. I want to explore issues of racism, maybe, or cultural diversity, or colonialism or religion or grief. But sometimes I just want to follow a couple of characters around. I just want to tell their story.

That’s the case with Shifter and Shadow, a new short novel in my Twelve Houses world. I wanted to explain what happened between two characters, Kirra and Donnal, whose relationship had unfolded off the page between the end of the second book and the beginning of the third. During the seventeen years since I had published the last book in the series, many of my readers had asked for their story, and I finally decided to write it.

But the idea was a little daunting. First, I had to come up with a storyline that would be a bit more interesting than a reconciliation and a declaration of love. There was no real suspense involved, because anyone who had read the whole series already knew that Kirra and Donnal ended up together. So what plot could I devise that would slot neatly in the gap between those previous books? What obstacles could I throw in their path, what surprises could I manufacture, what tension could I generate from surrounding circumstances? 

Even more difficult, how could I believably bridge the gulf that had always existed between the titled noblewoman and the peasant’s son? What could possibly move Donnal to openly admit his feelings when he had spent, oh, fifteen years trying to conceal them? How could Kirra convince him she returned his love when she had spent the entire second novel involved with another man?

Finally—seventeen years later—how successfully could I recapture the tone and rhythms of the earlier books and the personalities of the main characters? Kirra is one of my more irrepressible heroines and a lot of fun to write, but Donnal is significantly more reserved. Would I be able to tell a story from his point of view?

The questions about this particular book just added complexity to the task of writing a series, which can be challenging at the best of times. Simply keeping track of characters’ names, ages, heights, eye colors, and random personal details can be a monumental chore. (I keep a running file where I add pertinent details as they come up, but if I forget to update the file during the editing process, I end up doing a lot of searching through works-in-progress. “I thought he had two brothers, not one.” “Did she say she’d never been to the royal city?”) I find myself frequently rereading whole books in existing series every time I want to write a new one, hoping not to make a continuity error.

There’s also the ongoing problem of how much background material from previous installments needs to be reprised in the current manuscript. To some extent, an author writing any science fiction or fantasy book has to balance world-building with plotting, avoiding the infamous “info-dump” while still offering enough detail to bring an imaginary place to life. But in a series, it becomes particularly important to remind readers of pertinent events or relevant magic. One of my fellow authors says that there are always certain touchstones that readers expect to see and that the author has to include because they’re what make the books in a particular series familiar and unique. 

I knew writing the book would be tricky. But I had characters I loved and a plot that I found intriguing—one that fit nicely around the romance. And anyway, there were already some built-in grand themes, because the Twelve Houses world always incorporates issues of bigotry, persecution, and fear-based hatred. In Shifter and Shadow, many of the secondary characters are forced to examine their own biases—and maybe overcome them, maybe not. They also have to make hard choices, weighing deep personal risks against powerful rewards. What can they live without? What can they never give up?

I’m not an artist, but I’ve always thought that painting a picture must be similar to writing a novel. I might spend a week on one scene, two days on another, but neither scene is meant to stand alone; each one should merely be part of one seamless narrative. Similarly, I imagine that an artist might spend hours getting the folds of a gown just right or capturing the precise way sunlight illuminates an ocean wave. But that particular section of the canvas will ultimately be viewed as part of the overall picture, something that is taken as a whole.

Ideally, I think, the background effort that goes into a creative endeavor should be largely invisible. The artist might be calculating angles and the implementing the rule of thirds; the writer might be strategizing about plot and pacing and strategic disclosures of information. But the hope is that the audience just enjoys the finished work. At least, that’s what I hope when someone is reading one of my books.

I recently saw a meme that first showed the front of a completed piece of embroidery, a beautiful piece of artwork with clean lines and lovely imagery. The caption reads, “What the reader sees.” Beside it is shown the back of the same piece, with all the threads chaotically crisscrossing and all the knots and trailing ends making a glorious mess. This time the caption says, “What the author knows.”

My goal in writing Shifter and Shadow was to keep track of all those threads and balance all those conflicting imperatives in ways that the reader would never notice. All that’s left, I hope, is the story. 

Shifter and Shadow: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/09/the-big-idea-sharon-shinn-4/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57219

Posted by Tony Finch

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3371126

https://dotat.at/:/EL56O.html

• 2025‑09‑05 - The type theory fire triangle: how to mix substitution, dependent elimination, and effects.


• https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3371126


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/EL56O


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/EL56O.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/EL56O.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3371126

https://dotat.at/:/EL56O.html

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/cheng-tsung-feng-sailing-castle-tainan-taiwan-pavilion/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461802

Through the study of time-honored craft techniques, Taiwanese artist Cheng-Tsung Feng envisions contemporary installations that connect us not only to the past but also to nature and our present surroundings.

Working across sculpture, installation, craft, and design, the artist draws on what he describes as “ancient and gradually forgotten oriental culture,” translating traditional motifs and methods into new works that nod to the continuum of East Asian art and ingenuity. One might even position his practice within the realm of storytelling, tapping into collective cultural memories and overlapping histories.

In his installation “Sailing Castle” in Tainan, Feng evokes the sails of wooden ships as a visual metaphor for the urban landscape, “where clusters of buildings resemble vessels gathered in harbor,” he says. Symbolizing movement, discovery, and societal progress and expansion, he creates a dialogue between architecture and advancement, along with memory and the present moment.

The beams and sails are inspired by a number of actual buildings in Tainan like the Confucius Temple, Fort Zeelandia—built by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century—and Chihkan Tower, another Dutch outpost also known as Fort Provintia.

Called Formosa in the mid-1600s, Taiwan was under colonial rule by the Dutch, whose trade interests centered predominantly around Chinese silks imported to Europe, where they were prized for their luxury and highly sought after. Situated at the Anping Shipyard historical site, amid the canals of the West Central District, Feng wraps the area’s maritime heritage and four-centuries-long legacy of shipping into “Sailing Castle.”

“The overlapping sails evoke both the gathering of ships along the waterfront and the simultaneous anticipation of departure and the arrival of returning voyagers,” he says.

Using primarily wood and canvas, Feng’s pavilion is a cross between artistic intervention and functional meeting space, complete with small surfaces jutting out of the posts on which visitors can sit. Cruising, as it were, through a green park and illuminated at night, “Sailing Castle” sparks a sense of awe at the same time as it encourages us to slow down for a moment or two of contemplation and rest.

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 Cheng-Tsung Feng’s ‘Sailing Castle’ Cruises Through 400 Years of Taiwanese History appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/cheng-tsung-feng-sailing-castle-tainan-taiwan-pavilion/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=461802

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-41843-family-christmas-tree-and-10361-holiday-express-train-2025-winter-village/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77994

LEGO has finally revealed the 2025 Winter Village set, 10361 Holiday Express Train and a surprising new set, a massive 3,171-piece 41843 Family Christmas Tree! Both sets have a release date of 1 October 2025 via LEGO Insiders Early Access and will be available exclusively from LEGO.com. These 2 massive additions bolster the already festive […]

The post LEGO reveals 41843 Family Christmas Tree and 10361 Holiday Express Train, the 2025 Winter Village set! appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-41843-family-christmas-tree-and-10361-holiday-express-train-2025-winter-village/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77994

Posted by Tony Finch

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400

https://dotat.at/:/T93W8.html

• 2025‑09‑06 - Dealing with cancel safety in async Rust.


• https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/T93W8


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/T93W8.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/T93W8.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/400

https://dotat.at/:/T93W8.html

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/review-40769-sega-genesis-controller-gwp/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77984

LEGO continue to court retro gamers with the 40769 SEGA Genesis Controller (or Mega Drive if you grew up in Japan or in a PAL region), a brand new SEGA/Sonic the Hedgehog-themed gift with purchase (GWP) that’s available now from 8-17 September. You’ll receive the 40769 SEGA Genesis Controller gift with purchase for free when you spend […]

The post Review: LEGO 40769 SEGA Genesis Controller GWP appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/review-40769-sega-genesis-controller-gwp/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77984

1. New Banksy mural appears at Royal Courts of Justice

(tags:protests graffiti UK law viaSwampers )

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/purfleet.html

"At Purfleet, on a byroad, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It was surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust. The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is four sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass."

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/09/purfleet.html

Posted by Kieron Verbrugge

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-partys-achievements-reveal-minifigure-habitats/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77969

First announced during Summer Game Fest earlier this year, LEGO Party! is nearly upon us. Headed to consoles and PC on 30 September 2025, it’s a brick-filled multiplayer party game where players make their way across exciting Challenge Zones, competing in an assortment of wacky minigames along the way. With the game coming very near […]

The post Exclusive: LEGO Party!’s Brick-Built Achievement Icons Pay Homage To Minifigure Habitats appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-partys-achievements-reveal-minifigure-habitats/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77969

Posted by cks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotWrittenProperty

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSSnapshotWrittenProperty