A website devoted to oneself has been described — by my own Father, no less — as the greatest act of hubris. Welcome aboard!
Movie written, directed, and starring Mark " Markiplier " Fischbach, released 2026 Based on a game by David Szymanski, published 2022 New work meeting background just dropped! Invited to view the movie at Pop's with Phil and Sarah, I crammed the game it was based on from start to finish the night before, with Zander watching disdainfully over my shoulder every step of the way. I gave SCP-354 ,…
Code in Place 2025 has ended. I participated as a Section Leader, tutoring a small group of beginner programmers through learning basic coding in Python. We covered fundamental programming - variables and loops and conditionals and data-structures, and used them to cajole small on-screen robots into moving around and performing tasks, and to draw some graphics with lines and filled shapes. The…
by Richard McGuire (the 304 page graphic novel, not the original 6 page comic.) If you dug Understanding Comics then you will probably like this. Every panel is a view of the exact same space, occupied by a modest living room in our time, but the frames span a vast time period, and are presented in a chaotic, overlapping, non-chronological way that heightens the drama of several stories that…
by Connie Willis, 2010 Blackout and All Clear are two novels, planned as one, but which grew out of control. They form the latest and most ambitious entry in the delightful Oxford Time Travel Series , in which Oxford University historians of 2060 perform routine observational field work in the distant past, often for weeks or months at a time. I've positively loved several of these. The initial…
In this house, we use the metric system. Released in 2024 by Suspicious Developments. I was toying with the idea of advancing the kiddo's videogaming curriculum into a turn-based tactics phase, maybe starting with the genius of 1994's UFO:Enemy Unknown , on which I spent endlessly fascinated evenings of my youth, or maybe one of the better of its numerous sequels and offshoots. Somehow I was…
I've been doing some programming tests and puzzles while job hunting lately. One quick challenge was quite nice, reminding me a bit of Project Euler questions, and I nerd sniped myself into doing a 2nd pass at it here. Question Produce a Python function which takes two integers, numerator and denominator , and returns the result of their division as a decimal fraction in a string. E.g: divide ( 1…
Inspired by a woodland hike under the first blue skies we've seen this year, I got home and showed the kiddo how to draw an SVG tree with recursive functions in Python. At first the generated shape looked kinda lumpy and uninspiring, but it did demonstrate the principle. We were thinking of calling it a day, but I did a little bit of tweaking on parameters to control how each branch differs in…
So. Looking Glass's seminal 1998 PC game Thief: The Dark Project spawned an active and long-lived modding community, who created hundreds of fan-made extra levels, many of which are extremely artful and creative. One group of particularly obsessed loons spent seven years crafting an extraordinary set of such levels, forming an entirely new single-player campaign for the game, named The Black…
Released in 2023, played on Linux in 2024. spoilers Mush your dog sled across cruel Arctic wastelands, driven onwards by a brisk and intense companion, who hired you to take him back to some remote spot, where it becomes apparent he had some sort of revelation, or maybe a breakdown. The low-res, dithered presentation conveys the harsh, blinding conditions, as you struggle to make out details…
Loving the new keyboard, an Epomaker Galaxy80 with Feker Marble White switches. I compiled an improved manual for it here , which merges the English section of the official manual with other sources, rearranging the info in a way that makes sense to me. My requirements are pretty much the same as last time I bough a keyboard: Tenkeyless layout, or TKL as it's known, i.e. without a numpad. The…