Discover
Wander the web like a shoreline.
Something new washes up every time: pages from all kinds of people, made with all kinds of tools. Beachcomb shows you what it found, then gets out of the way.
Pick a few topics
“You Think Me a Bold Cheat”: Mary Carleton, Counterfeit Princess
Accused of posing as foreign royalty to lure her young suitor into a bigamous marriage, Mary Carleton was the subject of dozens of pamphlets and broadsides published in the mid-17th century, including by Carleton herself. Investigating the fraudster’s life, Laura Kolb finds a self-fashioning figure…
Something different
Cannibal Modernity: Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928)
A modernist manifesto inspired (controversially) by the Tupi people of Brazil.
From The Public Domain Review
takeout
i have tried a few ways to draw lately and this is my favourite. memory-based and (almost) no-undo. also, i have been thinking about writing this blog. it started for perfect days but so far all i see is perfect meals lol. my mind is so familiar with being occupied it questions itself when it's not.…
Something different
Weird Sun Twitter
Claude Fable 5 simulates Weird Sun Twitter with Gwern Branwen's "brainstorming" and Verbalized Sampling (Zhang et al.).
From Kagi Small Web
First Novel vs Second Album Syndrome
I have a bit of a theory about why people talk about first novel, but second album, syndrome. As I’m no longer an academic, I can just have a theory and don’t need to back it up with evidence or citations, so here goes. First novel syndrome is usually characterised by over-writing, too much plot and…
From Kagi Small Web
Danse Macabre
My recent detour into Japanese detective fiction and the captivating mysteries of locked-room whodunits reminded me of popular BBC series Jonathan Creek. The show ran for three seasons between 1997–99. It returned with season 4 and 5 in 2003 and 2014 respectively. […]
Something different
Writing
# Writing A note on my writing style. I write as I speak. Newest first. 2025-01-26 Efficient API Design: Avoiding Costly External Requests 2024-08-30 Exploring Goja: A Golang JavaScript Runtime 2024-07-02 Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite 2023-11-15 Deploying a Rails Application…
Something different
Another literary scam
This keeps happening to me and, I suspect, to anyone who’s written a book that’s gotten some notice. This email that I received last week is about the fifth one of its type I got, all touting a “book club” that authors are invited to participate in. The author is first flattered by a description ……
From Kagi Small Web
Don’t save the good stuff
My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “A Creative State of Mind Starts with Curiosity and Pronoia.” I’ve been wanting to explore these topics in a new book, but the way I was going about it wasn’t very useful. In the spirit of publishing before making it perfect the second time, I…
From Kagi Small Web
Bliki: LLM Voice
Sometimes when I read a post, I get the growing feeling that I'm reading the output of an LLM. I can't necessarily define why, although there are the common tells (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries). As I do this my desire to read on atrophies, sometimes to the point of…
Something different
Biblical Authorship vs. Historical Composition Dates
A research catalogue of traditional attributions, anonymous writers, and later compositions Yes. This is an important companion to the biblical […]
From Kagi Small Web
Author Journey: Four Years After Twitter
Wow – another milestone in my author journey – four years without Twitter. I’ve been thinking about this for about A week: what do I want to say about my author journey, about Twitter., about you? When it comes to simple decisions like ‘What platform talk to people on,’ little things mean a lot.…
Something different
Building a MyST authoring environment to identify things that MyST core could improve
Something that has bugged me for a long time is that [MyST](https://mystmd.org) doesn't have a lot of support for *authors* to write MyST documents more effectively. MyST documents have a ton of rich metadata inside them, but it has mostly been used for making the *reader* experience more…
From Kagi Small Web
Amalgaverse Second Mission: The Delivery, Part 1.5 – Dunsel
Over Robespierre’s protests, Jack orders everyone to fall back to the bay. You’re abandoning ship. Once there, you’re about to board the puddle jumper, when you hear something from out in the corridor. You throw a look to the open airlock. The ship’s battered utility robot peeks in, ducks out, then…
From Kagi Small Web
I have a lot of project stuff on my plate. My wife and I are writing a book. I’m rigging a dragon so…
I have a lot of project stuff on my plate. My wife and I are writing a book. I’m rigging a dragon so I can add to my portfolio, I’m making Wizards and Wagons. But last night my brain was like: You should write that one rom com. I was like, “uh, aren’t we already a little tied up? Also we already…
Something different
That's this stretch.
Walk on