SETI’s Search Ends With Two More Game Awards
Oct. 28th, 2025 07:53 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
opinionatedgamers_feed★ Thoughts, Observations, and Links Regarding ChatGPT Atlas
Oct. 28th, 2025 07:45 pmdaringfireball_feedOpenAI, one week ago:
Today we’re introducing ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core.
AI gives us a rare moment to rethink what it means to use the web. Last year, we added search in ChatGPT so you could instantly find timely information from across the internet — and it quickly became one of our most-used features. But your browser is where all of your work, tools, and context come together. A browser built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals.
A few minutes into the 22-minute introduction video, Ben Goodger,1 engineering lead for Atlas, says:
“We wanted to make sure that Atlas didn’t feel like your old browser, just with a chat button that was bolted on. But instead, we made ChatGPT the beating heart of Atlas.”
After giving it a try over the last week, to me Atlas feels like … Chrome with a chat button bolted on. I do not see the appeal, at all, despite being a daily user of ChatGPT. Atlas offers nothing to me that’s better than using Safari as a standalone browser and ChatGPT’s excellent native Mac app as a standalone AI chatbot. But, for me, my browser is not “where all of [my] work, tools, and context come together”. I use an email app for email, a notes app for notes, a text editor and blog editor for writing and programming, a photos app for my photo library, a native feed reader app for feed reading, etc. My web browser is for browsing pages on the web. Perhaps this sort of browser/chat hybrid appeals better to people who live the majority of their desktop-computing lives in browser tabs.
The main interface isn’t a combo search/location field, but rather a chat/location field. Instead of getting search results for a query, you get a chat response. If I wanted this I’d just ask my prompt in ChatGPT. Oftentimes — usually, even — I really do want a list of search results, and I want them fast. ChatGPT responses in Atlas are not a list of web pages, and are — compared to Google Search or my preferred search engine, Kagi — very slow. ChatGPT is many things but a good search engine replacement it is not. But that seems to be the entire premise of Atlas.
Atlas offers an agent mode where it actually surfs the web for you. One of the demos from their launch video involved getting a list of ingredients from a recipe on a web page, and then allowing Atlas to buy all those ingredients for you. That seems crazy to me. Do not want.
Atlas is a Chromium browser, supports Chrome extensions, and but currently is only available for the Mac. It’s not particularly Mac-like though, as Michael Tsai notes:
Alas, it doesn’t support AppleScript and has System Settings–style preferences.
System Settings-style preferences are certainly better than Chrome-style “settings in a web page tab”, though. Also, in my testing, Atlas doesn’t make good use of Apple Passwords for autofill.
ChatGPT is running a promotion that offers users increased rate limits if they make — and keep — Atlas their default web browser. I’ve never before seen a web browser offer any sort of incentive like this for making it your default. This promotion strikes me as simultaneously clever and icky.
Simon Willison’s initial thoughts echo my own:
I continue to find this entire category of browser agents deeply confusing.
The security and privacy risks involved here still feel insurmountably high to me — I certainly won’t be trusting any of these products until a bunch of security researchers have given them a very thorough beating. [...]
I also find these products pretty unexciting to use. I tried out agent mode and it was like watching a first-time computer user painstakingly learn to use a mouse for the first time. I have yet to find my own use-cases for when this kind of interaction feels useful to me, though I’m not ruling that out.
Lastly, Anil Dash’s assessment is rather scathing, “The Browser That’s Anti-Web”:
In the demo for Atlas, the OpenAI team shows a user trying to find a Google Doc from their browser history. A normal user would type keywords like “atlas design” and see their browser show a list of recent pages. They would recognize the phrase “Google Docs” or the icon, and click on it to get back to where they were.
But in the OpenAI demo, the team member types out:
search web history for a doc about atlas core design
This is worse in every conceivable way. It’s slower, more prone to error, and redundant. But it also highlights one of the biggest invisible problems: you’re switching “modes”. Normally, an LLM’s default mode is to create plausible extrapolations based on its training data. Basically, it’s supposed to make things up. But this demo has to explicitly walk you through “now it’s time to go search my browser history” because it’s coercing the AI to look through local content.
Chat is a great interface for, well, chatting. People love texting. And it turns out that chat conversations are a very good user interface for interacting with LLMs. We humans enjoy texting with other humans, and we enjoy texting with LLMs. But typed-out text commands are not a good user interface at all for browsing the web. We had an entirely text-based Internet before the World Wide Web, and the point-and-click visual metaphor of the Web won out.
Dash, later on:
It’s no coincidence that hundreds of people who work at OpenAI, including many of the most powerful executives, are alumni of Facebook/Meta, especially during the era of many of that company’s most egregious abuses of people’s privacy. In the marketing materials and demonstrations of Atlas, OpenAI’s team describes the browser as being able to be your “agent”, performing tasks on your behalf.
But in reality, you are the agent for ChatGPT.
During setup, Atlas pushes very aggressively for you to turn on “memories” (where it tracks and stores everything you do and uses it to train an AI model about you) and to enable “Ask ChatGPT” on any website, where it’s following along with you as you browse the web. By keeping the ChatGPT sidebar open while you browse, and giving it permission to look over your shoulder, OpenAI can suddenly access all kinds of things on the internet that they could never get to on their own.
This jibes with my impression after giving Atlas a try. The point of it doesn’t seem to be to provide a better web browser for me to use, but rather, to provide ChatGPT with the personal context of my digital life that it otherwise couldn’t get.
That last point raises the question of just how stable we should consider the Apple-OpenAI partnership for ChatGPT-backed Apple Intelligence features. Apple’s goal for a “more personalized Siri” — the whole thing Apple promised at WWDC 2024 but had to postpone for a full year early this year — is for the ecosystem of native apps on Apple platforms, particularly iOS and MacOS, to serve as the personal knowledge context for personalized AI features through App Intents. That’s the basis for the “When is my mom’s flight arriving?” type of interaction that Apple has promised, but still has not delivered. The premise of Atlas (and its brethren AI-integrated browsers like The Browser Company’s Dia and Perplexity’s Comet) is that you should live your entire desktop computing life inside your browser, which in turn will give the AI agent that is integrated with your browser the contextual knowledge for your entire life.
OpenAI’s ambitions are clearly at odds with Apple’s.
OpenAI’s advantage here is that ChatGPT is the most popular LLM chatbot in the world, by far. Apple doesn’t even have an LLM chatbot of its own, let alone a good or popular one. But Apple’s advantage is a big one: most people don’t live their digital lives on desktop computers, where it’s an option to do most things in a web browser. Most people’s primary computing devices are their phones — and even for people whose primary devices are desktop computers, their phones are much-used satellite devices. And on both iOS and Android alike, people live their mobile digital lives through native apps, not websites.
-
Goodger is a titanic figure in the web browser world, having helped create Mozilla Firefox in the early 2000s, and then joining Google in 2005 to help create Chrome. I noted last year that Goodger leaving Google for OpenAI was a pretty clear sign that OpenAI was creating its own web browser. ↩︎
A Mini-Vacay In Columbus: Part 2
Oct. 28th, 2025 07:28 pmscalziwhatever_feed
For my and Bryant’s second day in Columbus, we had to start things out right by going to brunch. Much like Monday, Tuesday is a rough day to eat out because a lot of restaurants are closed. This is even more true for brunch places, as many of them are only open on the weekends. Plus, a lot of restaurants that normally do lunch and dinner also tend to do brunch only on the weekends. So, we had somewhat slim pickings for brunch, especially if we didn’t want to go somewhere that was just pastries and coffee.
We finally settled on Simply Honest Cafe, which is open everyday from 8am to 2pm. Perfect brunching hours! It’s in German Village, so we actually drove because it was just a bit too far of a walk for us, but it was a very short drive down. Fun fact about Simply Honest Cafe, they actually partner with other small businesses in the area. Their coffee is from Roaming Goat Coffee Co., also in Columbus, and get some of their produce from Yellowbird, a Columbus foodshed.
Simply Honest Cafe is a casual-style eatery, where you order at the counter and they bring the food out to your table. The inside is pretty open and spacious, and they even have a cute patio with string lights. Inside, there’s tons of plants hanging around, which I thought was a nice vibe. It wasn’t very crowded, so I took a picture of the interior:
When we walked up to the counter to order, there were so many options! The menu was honestly huge, and it was a bit overwhelming because I felt like I had to choose right away even though there was no one in line behind us. Which was no fault of the employee taking our order, she actually assured us that we could take our time, so it was just my own weird anxieties that made me feel that way.
First thing first, we just had to try their iced cookie butter latte:
These looked absolutely scrumptious, with a cookie butter drizzle inside the cup and on top of the whipped cream, plus one whole Biscoff cookie on top! This latte was so sweet, creamy, totes delish all around. These were six dollars a piece. They also have a Dubai chocolate latte I’d really like to try if I go back sometime soon.
For my main dish, I got their sweet potato hash, with crumbled turkey sausage, roasted sweet potatoes, caramelized onions, citrus kale, avocado, smoked gouda, a fried egg, cilantro, and arbol chili mayo:
This sweet potato bowl was ridiculously good. It tasted so fresh and healthy, it was really light without sacrificing flavor. The sweet potatoes were nice and soft from being roasted, the avocado was perfectly ripe, and even with the chili mayo it wasn’t too spicy at all, just had great flavor all around. It was very balanced and filling. I feel like I made a great choice with this dish, and it was fourteen dollars.
Bryant really wanted some good ol’ pancakes, so he got a stack:
This is their buttermilk pancakes topped with a whipped honey cinnamon butter. They say on their website that their buttermilk pancakes are made from scratch, so that’s nice. Bryant was nice enough to share, so I tried a bite and they were warm and fluffy, honestly you can’t go wrong with pancakes. I also liked that the strawberries were really fresh. If you’re craving a stack, these are pretty great, and only eleven dollars. But if you just want one, you can get a single pancake as a side for four dollars.
There was one more thing I was really craving: biscuits and gravy. But I didn’t want to have it all to myself, so I asked Bryant to share with me. He agreed so I went ahead and ordered their biscuit and gravy breakfast, which comes with two eggs and a side of potatoes:
For fourteen dollars, I felt like this was a really good portion of biscuits and gravy. I loved that it came with eggs and potatoes, as I can honestly think of no truer breakfast combo. I’m glad we shared this because those biscuits were very filling!
I thought the service, though casual, was very friendly. The guy that brought our food out complimented Bryant’s sweater and even asked him where he got it because he liked it so much.
We had a super pleasant experience at Simply Honest Cafe and I’d really love to go back. It’s quick, affordable, and has really good food and coffee. Apparently they do catering, too!
After brunch, we decided some shopping was in order, and went to a Barnes & Noble. It’s been awhile since I’ve perused a bookstore, but lately I’ve had a stronger desire to read than I have in recent past, so I’m glad Bryant suggested it. We decided we’d each pick out a book and then swap when we were done with them. Here’s what we decided on:
Perhaps when I finish mine (or both) I’ll report back on how they were! I also bought a Lego set because I’m weak-willed and can never say no to another set. I got the Great Wave Off Kanagawa set, and it is taking me for-flippin’-ever to build. But it’s gonna be awesome when I’m done.
The Barnes & Noble was next to a Sephora, so I grabbed a couple items I needed to restock for my skincare routine. The stores were also next to a World Market, which I was very curious about, so we went in there and I was blown away by all the different stuff they have. I don’t know what I was expecting from a place called World Market, but they had so much stuff that just felt completely random like tons of chairs and rugs and furniture, cooking ware and dishes, holiday items, so much foreign foods and snacks, soaps and bathroom items, even alcohol! A lot of alcohol, even! It was absolutely wild and I spent way too much time looking around and convincing myself to not buy everything I laid eyes on.
They even had my favorite chips, Honey Butter chips from Korea. Man I love those things.
Anyways, after going back to the Airbnb and chilling, it was time to go to our (rather early) dinner reservations. I made 4pm reservations at Lindey’s, because we were going to be attending the Stardew Valley concert at the Palace Theater at 7. Bryant actually got us the tickets a couple months ago, and I planned this trip completely around the concert. If he hadn’t gotten the tickets, we wouldn’t have even gone on this fun excursion to the city!
I was so excited to dine at Lindey’s. I follow so many Columbus-foodie type accounts on Tik Tok and everyone always rates Lindey’s as their number one spot in the city for fine dining. I have heard nothing but endless praise for Lindey’s and was so happy to finally be trying it.
I can tell you right now I’ll probably never go back.
Lindey’s opened in 1981, and is located in the German Village, so there’s lots of street parking or they have valet. I decided just to park on the street like a block or two away. Lindey’s is located on a corner, and there’s a step up from the brick walkway to a concrete slab to get through the ornate wooden double doors.
Immediately upon entering, I thought that Lindey’s looked very familiar. It looked a lot like Smith & Wollensky in Chicago. A dark, wooden bar, white tablecloths, and that exact same shade of green bar chairs and booths.
We were the first people there other than two gentlemen at the bar, and we got seated at the one table that was directly next to the front door and host stand, and the waiter’s station was directly behind the host stand as well. This was an unfortunate place to be sat, as the door opening consistently was very chilly and loud, we heard every single person that walked in say “reservation for X” and talk to the host, and the waiters were also like, standing directly next to us throughout the whole meal because they were busy at their station putting stuff into the computer, putting dishes they picked up off tables into the dish bin, etc. It was honestly very distracting and overstimulating, especially because our seat was under a speaker and the music was pretty loud.
Just like Smith & Wollesnky, Lindey’s decided to make their menus huge, cumbersome, floppy paper menus (and in green!):
Even the drink menu was just as huge:
Considering how small the table is, I truly don’t understand why they would have such large menus. With just our two menus they took up the whole table, let alone if we actually had four people at our four-top table.
Aside from the regular dinner menu and drink menu, they handed us this daily special:
The special being on a paper menu is completely fine, but I expect nicer menus from a fine dining place than giant paper.
After looking our options over, we decided not to get a starter, but I did opt for a cup of lobster bisque.
The cup was ten dollars, and came with creme fraiche and shrimp on top. I’ve mentioned before that I’m very picky about lobster bisque, and thankfully Lindey’s passed the test. I quite enjoyed this lobster bisque, it was creamy and piping hot, and had sizeable pieces of lobster in it. I do think ten dollar is a little much for a smaller portion, but it was pretty good.
Bryant stuck with water throughout the meal, but I decided to try a cocktail, and got the Sugar Magnolia:
Watershed chamomile gin, St. Germain, lemon juice, lavender syrup, eucalyptus tincture, and Barcina Cava. It was light, bubbly, not overly dry, and looked very pretty. I liked this drink but I don’t know that it was worth the eighteen dollars. Admittedly, it is one of the more expensive cocktails on the list, so I could’ve chosen a cheaper one if I really wanted.
Our waitress brought out some bread for the table:
While Bryant and I both really liked the crunchy seeded crisps, I do feel like the butter and bread was lacking. The butter was unsalted and unflavored, so it was just kind of bland and underwhelming. Plus the bread wasn’t warm.
For my entree, I decided to keep the lobster train rolling and picked the Maine Lobster Risotto:
Wow, now these plates are looking awfully familiar. It’s almost like they look exactly like Smith & Wollensky’s plates that are white, have a green line around it, and say the name of the restaurant at the top of the plate in green cursive.
Back to the food, I was honestly disappointed by this risotto. The gulf shrimp on top were overcooked and tough, and awfully fishy. The asparagus was toothsome and the risotto was bland. I just was not impressed, especially for the price point of thirty-seven dollars.
Bryant picked the Chicken Scarpariello:
The menu says it’s pan-seared chicken with ricotto gnudi (I thought it was gnocchi, to be honest), Italian sausage, peppadew peppers, wood grilled mushrooms, with roasted tomato sauce and lemon oil. So I found it strange that there were peas on the plate. It wasn’t listed on the menu, anyway.
I thought the presentation of this dish was kind of… not good. It looks haphazardly thrown together and messy. Bryant liked it, but I thought it was just okay. The gnudi was fine but kind of bland, the peas seemed like they’d been blanched so they were rather firm, the sauce was lacking. Again, I just wasn’t wildly impressed. This was thirty dollars.
Thoroughly unimpressed so far, I was definitely looking more forward to dessert.
I hate when paper menus are dirty. If one gets dirty, you should throw it away since they’re just paper. Dirty menus are seriously unappetizing in my opinion, but maybe I’m just being nit-picky.
Anyways, Bryant didn’t want a dessert because he was full, but I saved room and got a box for my risotto. Which the waitress boxed up for me! Love to see it.
I ending up picking the basque style cheesecake, as it seemed like the most unique thing on the menu:
An ube basque cheesecake with a mango passionfruit glaze and whipped cream. Y’all. Y’all. I was going to tell y’all to pass on Lindey’s, but I change my mind. Go to Lindey’s, sit at the bar for like fifteen minutes, and just get this cheesecake. It is so good, my mind was honestly blown by this cheesecake. It’s perfectly sweet and creamy with just the right amount of ube flavor, and the mango passionfruit glaze is bursting with fresh, tangy, tropical flavor that contrasts the cheesecake amazingly. This slice was twelve dollars and it was worth every penny. This is a prime example of why I say dessert is the best part of the meal. Holy cannoli.
After all that, we still had some time before the concert, so I got a pot of tea to sip on since it was so dreary and rainy out. Listed on their dessert menu under specialty teas, I opted for their chai, which was $4.50 and came like this:
Our waitress also brought out some sugar packets for me, as well. I enjoyed the tea. The tag said it was Hubbard & Cravens. It was nice to sip on while we waited for the check.
Before we left, I decided to use the restroom. I almost never mention this in my posts over restaurants but I secretly judge the heck out of a place by its bathrooms. Anywhere that offers free menstrual products automatically gets bonus points.
Anyways, I asked where it was, and the waitress said it was up a small set of stairs and to the left. So I went up there and when I went through the door, I noticed it was really narrow. Like awkwardly so. And then I noticed that there were two stalls, neither of which were handicap accessible. Hmm.
When I got back to the table, I asked the waitress if there was a different bathroom that was handicap accessible. She said no, and that their building isn’t ADA compliant. To even get in the front door is an obstacle to those in a wheelchair. I was shocked to hear this. How could a fine dining establishment in Columbus not be handicap accessible? She said that it’s because it’s considered a “historic building” they’re not allowed to change any of the structure. It has to remain intact the way it is to preserve its historical-ness or something.
That is so totally bogus, man. I don’t care how historic a building is, y’all can find a way to make it accessible for everyone. That is truly unreal to me.
All in all, I did not care for Lindey’s. I thought it was tacky instead of classy, middling food for high prices, and has incredibly ugly dishware and menus. The best part of our experience was our waitress, who was an absolute peach and a wonderful server. She was extremely friendly, and even complimented my hair! The service and cheesecake really improved Lindey’s score in my mind.
Moving on from dinner, the Stardew Concert was something I was really looking forward to. Bryant is actually the one that got me into Stardew in the first place, so I have him to thank for my sporadic obsessive playing and love of the game and music. If you’ve never played Stardew Valley, it is a truly wonderful game, with an awesome pixel art style, super fun and unique music, and so much exploring, foraging, crafting, cooking, fishing, combat, oh man it’s seriously loaded with tons of different stuff to do, you’ll seriously never get bored of it.
For the concert, we were quite a few rows back but right on the aisle, so it was a pretty clear view straight ahead to the stage. There was an absolute monster of a line for the merch table, but you could also just scan a QR code and buy your merch from their online shop. Granted, it took like a week for it to come in and you had to pay for shipping, but I figured that was better than waiting in that line and then having to hold everything awkwardly the entire time.
There were quite a few people in cosplay of the characters from the game, and I even saw a really good Emily and Clint couple (which I also kind of hated because I hate Clint and he doesn’t deserve to be with Emily!).
The orchestra played the songs alongside a screen that either showed gameplay, or showed fanart-type backgrounds of locations from the game, like the farm and the traveler’s cart.
Honestly, the music was rough. The pianist continuously messed up in every single song, and was also the loudest and most prominent part of the orchestra. She fudged up the notes constantly, and the banjo was no better. Some of our favorite songs were just kind of butchered by the piano alone. There was one song that was strictly string instruments (not the banjo) and they absolutely nailed it. The violins were perfect and beautiful and I wished there were more songs that had just them.
The conductor mentioned that all the musicians literally showed up at the venue that day and they barely got any practice in beforehand, and it was apparent.
Also, the person DIRECTLY behind me was coughing up a lung the entire time and I was not only extremely annoyed, but I was also having health anxiety and fearing that I was going to get COVID or something from her, so that was unpleasantly distracting on a number of levels.
Plus, we parked in a lot right next to the theater, which only had about twenty spots total, and was twenty bucks to park in. Only to come back to the the car and see that we (and so many others) were trapped in their spots because they had people parked to the gills in this dang parking lot, with so many cars parked everywhere that everyone was blocked in by other vehicles. Rows and rows of blocked in cars! So we had to sit in our car for like twenty minutes before everyone finally made it back to their car and everyone was able to actually move their cars and leave. It was insanity. How are they allowed to do that (“they” being the parking lot operators that told everyone which spot/where to park)?!
If you’re wondering what merch we got, I got the Void Chicken keychain and Bryant got the White Chicken keychain, and then I got the poster and of course I had to get the Junimo t-shirt. Shit was expensive.
Anyways, by this point we were very full and very tired, so it was another decently early night. Second day in Columbus in the books!
Are you a big fan of brunch? Have you heard of either of the books we bought? If you’ve tried Lindey’s before, did you have a better experience than us? Do you love Stardew Valley? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
The Decline of Deviance
Oct. 28th, 2025 03:35 pmnotetoself_feed
Why do coffeeshops, book covers, office buildings, and YouTube thumbnails all look the same? “People are less weird than they used to be. We’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing.”
Tags: #samey #data-visualization
Undersense
Oct. 28th, 2025 08:25 amaworkinglibrary_feedJames Hillman does not want you to interpret your dreams:
Analytical tearing apart is one thing, and conceptual interpretation another. We can have analysis without interpretation. Interpretations turn dream into its meaning. Dream is replaced with translation. But dissection cuts into the flesh and bone of the image, examining the tissue of its internal connections, and moves around among its bits, though the body of the dream is still on the table. We haven’t asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is.
Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 130
That is, to interpret the dream is to exploit it, as a capitalist exploits a vein of coal, transforming those fossilized remains into a commodity, something that can be measured, evaluated, bought and sold. Hillman is demanding that you not turn the dream into something else but that you let it be what it is, that you approach it as keen and attentive observer, not trying to transform it but accepting it, acknowledging it, living with it.
(As I read this, I had a sharp image of Rowan in The Lost Steersman, dissecting the body of a creature from the outer lands, finding organs and tissues whose purpose she could not fathom but could—and did— describe in intricate detail.)
There’s an attitude here that I think can be expanded to any work in which observation, noticing, witnessing what is before us is privileged over trying to make it into something else. There is a fundamental humility to working in this way, to acknowledging that our understanding of the world around us is always incomplete. This is an incompleteness without judgment: not incomplete as inferior or flawed but incomplete as open-ended, infinite, wondrous.
We can move in this direction by means of hermeneutics, following Plato’s idea of hyponoia, “undersense,” “deeper meaning,” which is an ancient way of putting Freud’s idea of “latent.” The search for undersense is what we express in common speech as the desire to understand. We want to get below what is going on and see its basis, its fundamentals, how and where it is grounded. The need to understand more deeply, this search for deeper grounding, is like a call from Hades to move toward his deeper intelligence. All these movements of hyponoia, leading toward an understanding that gains ground and makes matter, are work.
Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 137
Work is the making of matter, the movement of energy from one system to another. The work of making sense, of digging for undersense, is work that matters. I take undersense to mean, in part, a kind of feeling or exploration, of reaching your hands into the dirt, of tearing apart the body of the dream with no preconceived notions of what you will find.
And not only dreams. The search for undersense is worthy also of the waking world, the world of daylight. In a world in which the creation and persistence of knowledge is threatened and fragile, we need undersense more than understanding, the exploration and observation that gains ground and makes matter. There’s an argument here for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. Knowledge that is steady, solid, rooted in the way roots hold tightly to the earth, defended from rain and flood, from being washed away with each passing storm.
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my friends think they’re doing me a favor by giving me business … but they’re not
Oct. 28th, 2025 05:59 pmaskamanager_feedA reader writes:
I ran a catering business on the side for a while, in addition to my regular job. I don’t do it much anymore, but on occasion I do still take paid jobs, usually for past clients. It’s a way to make some extra money and I enjoy the work.
Since my friends know I still do this, it’s not uncommon for them to ask me to do catering work for their own events (parties, kids’ birthdays, etc.). This would be fine except that I can tell they think they’re doing me a favor by giving me their business, and they aren’t! I have enough of the work coming in through regular channels that I’m not really looking for more work.
It’s thoughtful of them to want to pay me (at least I don’t have the problem of them expecting I’ll do it for free) but most of the time I would much rather have my weekend free than spend it making appetizers for someone else’s party.
When a regular client approaches me about a job I’d rather not do, it’s easy to just say that I’m booked for that time period. And I guess technically I could say that to a friend, too, but often these are people I’m close enough to that they know I’m not filling up my time with catering jobs that way (and I wouldn’t want to have to keep track of the lie to make sure that I don’t mention something else I did that weekend when I had said I’d be “catering”).
Also, jobs for friends are usually the ones that end up being a lot more customized so it’s more work for me, on top of the fact that I usually give them a discount because they’re friends (which is fully my choice; I know they’d pay full price if I asked for it).
How do I tell people, “I appreciate you thinking it’s a favor to throw business my way, but I’d actually rather you didn’t”?
I know one option is that I could just say I’m not catering for friends at all anymore, but I’m still up for doing it if they really actively want my food. If I’m the caterer they’d most want for this particular event, even if we didn’t know each other, great. I just want them to stop thinking they “should” give me the business because we’re friends.
Can you tell your friends that you’re actively trying to take on fewer catering jobs? That sounds like it’s the truth, and it’s information they don’t have.
You can mention that in casual conversation as you’re catching up on each other’s lives, but you can also mention it when someone approaches you about catering for them. For the latter, you could say, “I’m actually trying to take on fewer catering jobs, so unless there’s something specific I prepare that you really want, please don’t feel you need to offer me the business — I’m trying to cut back on jobs, rather than adding more.” That opens the door for them to say, “I was really hoping you’d make your famous stuffed zucchini because I love it so much” and for you then to decide if you’re up for taking the job or not (since you mentioned you might want to do it under those circumstances), while moving things out of the “favor” framing.
Or, if you’d really prefer not to do it at all, that’s okay too! You can say, “Thank you so much for thinking of me, but I’m cutting back on catering so I have more weekends free.”
It also might help to have other caterers you can refer them to — “I’m cutting back on how much catering I’m doing, but Caterer X and Y are really great at that kind of party if you want to try them.”
It sounds like everyone has great intentions here; you just need to give them more information so they’re not working off of the wrong set of assumptions and assuming you’d be grateful for the business.
The post my friends think they’re doing me a favor by giving me business … but they’re not appeared first on Ask a Manager.
Other wavy paths
Oct. 28th, 2025 05:25 pmdr_drang_feed[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.]
I got some good replies on Mastodon after Saturday’s post. Longtime friend of the blog Nathan Grigg said he’s always assumed that GPS-measured lengths would be long because no matter how straight your path, the GPS error would make it zigzagged. Then wherami and thvedt pointed out that the official rules of these events say that the race’s distance is supposed to be measured along the shortest path. If the road is curving left, it should be measured along the left edge; if the road is curving right, it should be measured along the right edge. This makes sense, as you don’t want runners to be able to run less than the official distance.
As you can see from this Fitness app screenshot of my route, the 5k at the Morton Arboretum has both right and left curves, so the route measurement must be done carefully if it’s to be by the rules.
I began thinking about calculating the length of a zigzag path along a road that went in a circuit. The simplest circuit is a circle, and I thought it would be easier to define my path as a sinusoid within the roadway. Like this:
Following the principle that you should walk before you run, I started with a simpler problem: a sinusoidal path along a straight road.
Taking the length of the road as and the width as , I defined the wavy path as
where the axis runs along the bottom edge of the road, and the axis runs across the road.
A differential length of arc is
Integrating this from to gives us the length of the wavy path. This can be done through elliptic integrals, but I’ve never felt comfortable with them, so I just did it numerically, using , , and plugging in different values of until I got a result of , which is, as you might recall, the distance my watch gave as I finished the race.
The answer I got was . Here’s the Mathematica code that got me there:
This is slightly less than the I got in Saturday’s analysis, where I took the path to be a series of straight-line segments. The lower number for a sinusoid makes sense. The path distance from one edge of the road to another is longer when following a sinusoid than when going in a straight line.
Now let’s tackle the problem of a wavy path along a circular road. Polar coordinates seem like our best bet for this. We’ll define the radius of the wavy path as
where
is the radius of the inside edge of the circle, the circumference of which is the 5000 m length of the race. We’ll use as before.
In polar coordinates, differential arc length has a more complicated definition:
Numerical integration of this over from to with different values of led to a solution of to get a path length of . Here’s a screenshot of the Mathematica code:
I used t for because it’s easier to type.
That this value of is smaller than for the straight road makes sense because all of the path is beyond the inner edge of the roadway. The waviness is centered on a path that’s already longer than the course.
I suppose I could have set up iterative solutions in Mathematica to get the values of n that led to path lengths of 5070. But NIntegrate worked so quickly that it was faster to just work my way to n via trial-and-error.
I should also mention that Mathematica has an ArcLength function, which seemed at first like the right way to go. But it was extremely slow, possibly because it was trying to get an analytical solution. By doing a little thinking to get the equations for the differential arc length, I saved myself a lot of time.
The Big Idea: Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oct. 28th, 2025 05:08 pmscalziwhatever_feed
As if solving crimes wasn’t a hard enough job, you throw mystic and magical mayhem into the mix and you’ve got a whole new world of trouble. Enter the Supernatural Crimes Unit: NYPD, author Keith R. A. DeCandido’s newest novel, where he presents just the team for the job. Follow along in his Big Idea to see why this, of all his novels, was his favorite to write.
KEITH R. A. DeCANDIDO:
I do not have a sole answer to the question, “what are your favorite things to write?”
My favorite things to write are police procedurals. Growing up watching Barney Miller and Hill Street Blues instilled in me the love of a good cop story. Part of it is the fun of solving a crime, which is a process that fiction has made fantastic use of ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a guy named Dupin who figured out that a brutal murder was carried out by an orangutan. Part of it is the struggle detectives have when the ability to solve those crimes is reliant upon the vicissitudes of politics and budget. And a big part of it is the verbal dance that goes on in an interview, as the detective uses the interrogative process and no small amount of rhetorical trickery to glean the truth from a person who is reluctant to provide it.
Plus, investigators are often fun characters to write, from the hyper-observant genius of a Sherlock Holmes to the eccentricities of Nero Wolfe or Miss Marple or Adrian Monk or Charlie Cale to the hardened cynicism of the veteran city cop trying to close a homicide case.
My favorite things to write are fantasy stories involving creatures from myth. Years ago, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on the air, I saw a panel at San Diego Comic-Con that included several of the cast-members as well as creator/show-runner Joss Whedon. Someone asked Whedon about his research process for the demons and such on the show, and he grinned and said he just made stuff up, describing his creative process thusly: “Put a horn on it and give it a history.”
I am abject in my love for Buffy (if not for Whedon as a human being), but this always struck me as a missed opportunity. It would have been so much fun to see Buffy and the Scooby gang go up against monsters from European, Japanese, Zoroastrian, or African mythology.
Indeed, one of the Buffy novels I wrote (The Deathless in 2007) made use of Russian mythology, with Baba Yaga, Bulat the Brave, and Koschei the Deathless all involved in a story set in 1990s Sunnydale, California.
So much folklore and mythology is out there to play with and do new takes on—which is what storytellers have been doing with these bits of cultural zeitgeist for as long as there have been humans.
My favorite things to write are stories that take place in my hometown of New York City. There are other cities on this Earth that can claim to be the greatest city on Earth, but they’re all wrong, and while I admit that this is a biased statement, it’s one that comes from more than five decades of living here.
This city has everything: crowds and empty spaces, overpriced entertainments and free enjoyments, the finest gourmet meals and the cheapest fast food, shopping for every tax bracket, museums, zoos, theatres, concert venues, and every other damn thing. If it’s obtainable, chances are you can obtain it here.
Plus the people. Every type of human imaginable—and some unimaginable—are here, and we all live together in this densely packed metropolis.
And there are millions of them, and they all have stories to tell. I’m proud to say that I’ve told dozens, if not hundreds, of stories set in my city, with no end in sight.
My favorite things to write combine at least two of the above three things. My very first short story (“An Evening in the Bronx with Venom,” written with John Gregory Betancourt, in The Ultimate Spider-Man in 1994) and my very first novel (1998’s Spider-Man: Venom’s Wrath, written with José R. Nieto) each combined the first and third—and the second, if we decide that superheroes count as American mythology (and they really kinda do). So did my solo novel Spider-Man: Down These Mean Streets in 2005.
I’ve combined two or three of the above so many other times, in tie-in novels (Supernatural: Nevermore, CSI: NY: Four Walls), in short stories (“Prezzo” in Weird Tales:100 Years of Weird, “Streets of Fire” in V-Wars: Night Terrors), and in many of my original novel series (the Dragon Precinct books and stories, the Super City Police Department novel and short fiction, and the Adventures of Bram Gold novels and short pieces).
I particularly like blending the quotidian, almost mundane details of the life of a criminal investigator with the crazy-ass elements of the fantastical, whether it’s magic-users, superheroes, or mythological creatures.
My favorite thing to write is Supernatural Crimes Unit: NYPD. My latest series, which debuts today from the Weird Tales Presents imprint of Blackstone Publishing, combines all three of the elements above, and it is my favorite of the sixty novels I’ve written to date.
First of all, we’ve got New York City, and a cast of characters who embody the diversity, the seen-it-all cynicism, and just the general complexity of the people here. This is primarily represented in the members of the NYPD’s newest special squadron, the titular Supernatural Crimes Unit, which handles misdemeanors and felonies that involve magic and/or monsters.
There’s Detective Domenica Kiernan, an Italian-American woman of diminutive height and unlimited attitude; Detective Luis Ortega, who has seen everything in four decades on the job; Detective Liam Grullon, who has a secret he’s keeping even from his fellow detectives; Detective Vinny Fiore, who has “a guy” for all situations, usually a relative or in-law; Detective Sofia Umali, whose comparative religion classes in college didn’t prepare her for this job nearly as much as she thinks it does; civilian archivist/occult expert Basia Pietri, whose hair is a different color each week, and who knows quite a bit about the SCU’s mandate (of course she has a podcast); Sergeant Simeon Hawkins, who has very little street experience, but whose knowledge of the weird rivals Basia’s; and Lieutenant Stan “the Major” Majorowicz, the ex-Marine who rides herd on the squad. Not to mention the various informants and consultants and such, from the Gitaus, a married couple who are paranormal private investigators, to Pasquier Valapart, a three-hundred-year-old vampire who owns a BDSM club in SoHo.
Secondly, there’s the different mythical creatures who aren’t so mythical. Like the city itself, we’ve got lore from all the folks, so to speak: a kappa (from Japanese myth) on City Island in the Bronx who has murdered one of his housemates; a Taotie (from Chinese legend) committing robberies in Chinatown; a shape-changing domovoy (from Russian folklore) who has committed assault in Queens, and who has resisted arrest and escaped imprisonment; and a contingent of Zoroastrian demons whose arrival on 125th Street may spell doom for the city…
And thirdly, we’ve got the aforementioned mix of the drudgery of a police investigation mixed with the fantastical: Kiernan having to requisition a new set of silver bullets after firing her last one at the domovoy. The medical examiner having to deal with the corpse of a likely murder victim being magically liquefied before the autopsy can be performed. A precinct trying to pretend that a homeless stabbing victim was killed by a vampire (two of the stab wounds are to the neck, and they could be bites…), so SCU will take it and the nigh-unsolvable murder won’t be counted as part of their precinct’s crime statistics.
Being able to combine (forgive me) a few of my favorite things has been an absolute joy for me as a writer, and it is my fond hope that it will bring a similar joy to you as a reader. So if you like reading about the Big Apple, or about cryptids and creatures from all around the world, or about a snarky, cynical bunch of co-workers trying to do a job that’s difficult enough without factoring the supernatural into it, and especially if you like all three, Supernatural Crimes Unit: NYPD may very well be the book for you!
Supernatural Crimes Unit: NYPD: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Audible|Kobo
Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Bluesky|TikTok
Read an excerpt.
I was a sloppy drunk at the company party
Oct. 28th, 2025 04:29 pmaskamanager_feedA reader writes:
I recently made it through to the final interview round for a job I was very excited about. I’ve been in my current position without a clear path to promotion long enough to have been eyeing the exits for a while, and finally I found myself in a hiring process that felt like it was going really well. I was meshing with all the people who I would be working with at this company. The conversations we had about the vision I would bring to their team also energized me in a way that my current work hasn’t in quite some time.
The final interview ended up being scheduled on the same day as a company party at my current job. I thought that was great, because it gave me an excuse to come to the office looking more put together than usual without raising any suspicions. I was well-prepared going into the interview that morning, got great feedback from the panel of executives I spoke with, and left feeling confident that I had the position in the bag. In fact, I was so sure that I nailed this interview that I celebrated that evening by enjoying the unlimited white wine at the open bar a little (a lot) too much. I even rallied some coworkers to go to another bar once the office party ended, and I insisted on expensing their whiskey shots there. I am pretty sure, from what I remember, that I was a sloppy drunk. At one point someone told me that I was slurring my words, and I have a mortifying memory of excitedly sharing some salacious gossip that I normally never would have spread around.
The next day, I was barely alive at work. Every time someone walked by my desk, I assume they could clock how bad of shape I was in.
To add insult to hangover, the following week I was informed that I did not get that other position I had interviewed for. I had been so fixated on the prospect of being free from this job that I allowed myself to get over-sauced in front of a room full of people who I am now stuck interacting with for a lot longer than I’d anticipated.
How do I move past the double embarrassment of getting drunker than I should have in front of my coworkers and not landing this other job when I was so convinced I had it all locked up?
You can read my answer to this letter at New York Magazine today. Head over there to read it.
The post I was a sloppy drunk at the company party appeared first on Ask a Manager.
Nisus Writer: Schrödinger’s Word Processor
Oct. 28th, 2025 03:30 pmdaringfireball_feedJoe Kissell, writing at TidBITS:
For more than a year, we’ve heard scattered complaints: problems with Nisus Software’s website, particularly the user discussion forum; slow or absent responses to support requests; assorted bugs; and other issues. But earlier this week, on 22 October 2025, the reports changed to: “Did you know the Nisus website is completely down, and that Nisus Writer is no longer in the Mac App Store? Does this mean Nisus is out of business?”
On the one hand: The site is back online as I write this. The app still works. I’m writing the first draft of this article in Nisus Writer Pro on a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe, and it’s fine. You can still download it and buy a license. At least one person is actively involved in the company, to some extent. It’s (mostly) alive!
On the other hand: All available evidence suggests that development and support for Nisus Writer have ceased, and barring some new information, its future is doubtful. It’s (mostly) dead!
I’m going to tell you what I know. (Well, most of what I know.) I’m also going to speculate a bit, because despite my best efforts, I have been unable to obtain verifiable information about certain topics, though I have a pretty good idea of what’s likely the case.
Seems like an ignominious demise for a once-great app. Nisus Writer has been an acclaimed Mac-only (and Mac-assed) word processor since 1989. I never got into it, but I could always see the appeal. Nisus had a macro language for automation and regex-style advanced search and replace. But when I wanted features like those, I wanted them in a plain text editor, not a word processor, so I got into BBEdit.
ISS in Real Time
Oct. 28th, 2025 03:01 pm512pixels_feedNext week will mark 25 years of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. Robert Pearlman at Ars Technica has linked to a website that celebrates the monumental achievement:
Fortunately, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station have devoted some of their work time and a lot of their free time to taking photos, filming videos, and calling down to Earth. Much of that data has been made available to the public, but in separate repositories, with no real way to correlate or connect it with the timeline on which it was all created.
That is, not until now. Two NASA contractors, working only during their off hours, have built a portal into all of those resources to uniquely represent the 25-year history of ISS occupancy.
ISS in Real Time, by Ben Feist and David Charney, went live on Monday (October 27), ahead of the November 2 anniversary. In its own way, the new website may be as impressive a software engineering accomplishment as the station is an aerospace engineering marvel.
This video provides an overview of this incredible project:
The work that went into this is breaktaking.
my parents called my abusive boss to complain
Oct. 28th, 2025 02:59 pmaskamanager_feedA reader writes:
I wonder if you could offer your perspective on something I’ve been wondering about for a long time now.
When I was 16 years old, I got my first job. The culture was one that I now recognize as abusive, and teen employees were regularly taken advantage of in some awful ways. At the time, though, it was my only experience with the professional world, and I assumed that much of it was normal.
I had excellent attendance and was always on time, but on one particular day, I was extremely sick — could-not-get-out-of-bed sick. (I would later find out I had scarlet fever, so extremely contagious and potentially dangerous.)
I was scheduled to work that day, so I called in sick for the first time. When I told my boss I was unwell and asked to stay home sick, he loudly mocked me on the phone to other employees and customers. “Joelle says she wants to stay home today. Wouldn’t you have liked to do that? But you came in anyway, didn’t you?” to anyone who would listen. He told me he expected me to come in. Although I definitely shouldn’t have, I felt powerless and intimidated and somehow dragged myself out of bed. On my way out the door, I explained what had just happened to my parents, who were shocked that I was going to work.
Later on during my shift, I was called into my boss’s office. He was furious with me. Apparently, my parents had called corporate to complain about his behavior (and it sounded like his boss had just laid into him). He chastised me for getting my parents to fight my battles for me. I apologized profusely and assured him that I hadn’t asked them to do that and had no idea that they had. I was mortified.
Now, I’m torn. On the one hand, parents should not interfere with their child’s work. On the other hand, his behavior was truly abusive and potentially put others in danger by intimidating sick me into going to work, and I was far too timid as a minor to have pushed back in any meaningful way on my own.
How should my parents have responded?
I can’t take issue with what your parents did!
I wouldn’t encourage parents to call their teenage kids’ employers on their behalf, let alone to lay into their teenager’s boss’s boss, but I have to applaud them in this case.
To be clear, ideally your parents would have stopped you when you were walking out the door and told you not to go into work when you were that sick and then, once you were feeling better, coached you on how to deal with a boss like this — including what is and isn’t okay for an employer to expect and how to handle it when you’re treated the way your boss treated you. That’s the most helpful way to do it, because that teaches the teenager how to handle this stuff themselves.
But it’s also true that an adult in a position of power had just shamed their teenager into going to work with scarlet fever and they were rightly pissed off. I can’t blame them for switching away from “parent of employee” mode and into just “parent” mode.
Parents shouldn’t get involved with the minutiae of their kid’s job, like calling to ask for a schedule change or complaining about an assignment. But sometimes a situation is egregious enough that it’s not unreasonable for a minor’s parent to get involved. And you were still a minor. I’m okay with it.
The post my parents called my abusive boss to complain appeared first on Ask a Manager.
Five SF Stories Featuring the Sudden Formation of New and Exciting Bodies of Water
Oct. 28th, 2025 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll
Sorry if you're a fan of boring old dry land...
Five SF Stories Featuring the Sudden Formation of New and Exciting Bodies of Water
The Empusium
Oct. 28th, 2025 08:12 amaworkinglibrary_feedThe Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 2022)
In 1913, a young Pole arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountains, a place known to be free of consumption due to the still, cold, dry air. Each evening, the residents gather after dinner and drink a mildly hallucinogenic liquor while they debate the issues of the day: do women have souls? does a woman’s body belong to her or to the public? could a matriarchy exist? Meanwhile, rumors swirl about strange murders, bodies left scattered in pieces in the woods, and the abrupt suicide of a woman chills the new arrival. As they come to understand this place, and come to understand themselves, they find that both have changed, and someone—or something—is watching.
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Apple Review #28: Rhode Island Greening
Oct. 28th, 2025 12:26 pmterribleminds_feed
Rhode Island! A nice state with a perfectly pedestrian, run-of-the-mill, mediocre state fruit: the Rhode Island Greening apple. I’d much rather they choose as their state fruit a truly gonzo choice, like their (in)famous New York System Wieners, a greasy hot dog in a steamed bun topped with a mysterious meat sauce, chopped onions, and I dunno, probably ground up sailor’s teeth or something. A gastronomical delight, and also may cause anal leakage. Have one of these with a nice cold coffee milk and kick the apple to the curb.
Or better yet, save it for a pie. See, not every apple is for eating out of hand. Many aren’t! Nor should they be! Arguably, I’m contributing to the ruination of our agricultural output because I’m over here reviewing every apple for how desserty it is, how good of a snack it ends up being, but some apples are snacks, some are pies, some are saucey, some are for cider, and some are for DOING EVIL. And that’s okay! Make the pie! Do the evil! But sadly, I’ve dedicated myself to the act of eating apples and telling you how good they are when rawdogged. And yes, I’m also part of the problem in watering down the meaning of the word “rawdogging.”
(Last night, while carving pumpkins, my son asked me if I was doing a specific design or what, and I just said, “Nah, I’m gonna rawdog it.” To which my son said, “Ah yes, unprotected pumpkin sex.” Children are a true joy, and I say that with zero irony.)
Anyway, let’s do this.
My review of a Rhode Island Greening apple, Scott Farm (VT), late-Oct:
I already spoiled this a little by saying, “Hey, some apples just aren’t for eating out of hand,” aaaaaand yeah, that means this apple.
Listen, I had one a little earlier in the season, and it was pretty unpleasant — tart, dry, a light lemon-elderflower taste, ultimately just a huge chore to get through. I didn’t review it at the time, and should have, but just as life finds a way in Jurassic Park, I live in Real People Park, where life gets in the way.
So, this was my second sample of the apple, and it was better.
Not like, crazy better, but better.
It was not a total chore to get through, and that lemon-elderflower taste become more overall effervescent and refreshing. It was finely-grained, and fairly crisp. The second example was juicier than the first. I’ve heard these keep for a while, and when they do, they develop better flavor, though still remain pretty mild.
I didn’t hate it. But it gets some cred, I guess — it’s one of the oldest apples in America, though for the oldest apple, I’ll be reviewing that tomorrow. (Spoiler: it’s the Roxbury Russet.) This one, though, dates back to the 1600s, grown by a fella named John Green of Green’s End, and I am 100% sure that this is referring to the author John Green, who is surely a time-traveler. I mean, he kind of has a time-traveler vibe, that guy. There is a wisdom to his eyes, and he’s clearly very smart, so I totally believe he’s capable of not only building a time machine but also using it to travel back through the centuries to give us a weird cool apple. The Rhode Island Johngreening.
Hank Green, also a time traveler, probably? (Also, Hank did a very good video about an older, now-largely-inaccessible banana, the Gros Michel, and whether it did or did not contribute to the banana flavor you find in candy. It mostly doesn’t, that’s a myth, but he did then help identify what the flavor is that goes into those candies from bananas: isoamyl acetate. And sometimes I’ve noted that there are bananas that taste not like banana, per se, but banana runts, and so then I looked up isoamyl acetate and apples, and sure enough, apples got it, too. And some have more of it, especially as they ripen! Which explains a bunch of stuff. Though you’re also free to believe in the INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY OF GOD PUTTING BANANA RUNTS FLAVOR INTO THINGS BECAUSE GOD REALLY LOVES BANANA RUNTS.)
Anyway. Still not an amazing apple eating raw. Or raw-dogging. Whatever.
Call it a 2.7 and head on home.
I eat it here, and also my dog makes an appearance if that’s your thing.
Rhode Island Greening: If pie, yes, if not pie, no
Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin
Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams
Oct. 28th, 2025 08:55 amjames_davis_nicoll
How could a man die in front of Atocha Chief of Police Loren Hawn when that man died twenty years before?
Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams
Simon’s Short Sunday report (really a Kavango mini review)
Oct. 28th, 2025 11:53 amopinionatedgamers_feedBoston
Oct. 28th, 2025 08:18 amsartoriasYesterday I went with Nine to the Mapparium on the other side of the river. (The bus ride down Massachusetts Ave is great for scenery!) If you've never heard of it--I hadn't until one of the Viable Paradise workshop writers clued me in--it's an enormous glass globe that you can walk into, to see the entire world, worked in jewel-toned glass, as it was in 1935. It was constructed to be a reminder that we are all in this world together; a needed warning then, as now. (Naturally those who need it most won't see or hear.)
We had a great time looking, then testing the amazing sounds created by voices enclosed in glass.
Afterward we met up with Rushthatspeaks for tea and chocolate at L.A. Burdicks. Oh, they know how to do chocolate so, so right. Delish. We chatted and reminisced and cackled like maniacs. Today we'll visit the Fogg to see a Botticelli that is usually hidden in a private collection. I can hardly wait!
I'm coming down from the high of a very successful workshop, and a month of splendid visiting and seeing and fast-lane busy. The workshop writers are so talented and so focused, and all this in beautiful Martha's Vineyard.
Tomorrow homeward bound!