October 15

Problems With Polls - The Polls Are Broken
The polls in the headlines are alarming ... but polls have been way off in the past few years. This website documents some of the huge discrepancies between polling predictions and the actual results; notes some reasons for those errors; and suggests some other indicators that may offer a better sense of how the candidates are doing. The site's main message: don't panic - take action instead. [more inside]


October 14

spaceships on strike
North Continent Ribbon is a collection of linked short stories including an assassin with a crystal sword, a judge whose best friend is a book, and spaceships on strike. I wrote about the way the worldbuilding intertwines with eighteenth-century crime records for Mary Robinette Kowal's column My Favorite Bit, and the first story, Closer Than Your Kidneys, is available for free at Frivolous Comma. [more inside]


October 12

My third book is loosed on the world
Stark Raving Mab, the third book in my urban fantasy trilogy Gravity's Daughter is out as of yesterday. If you're intrigued by any of the following: action-heavy urban fantasy, less-traditional faeries, gravity-defying antics on public transit, Canadian settings or in-over-their-heads characters who will not give up sarcasm 'til you pry it from their cold, dead hands, then give the books a look or request them from your local library. [more inside]


October 7

My newsletter, The Eighth Sea, forever free of charge.
In which I write about Islam, spirituality, my Hajj pilgrimage in the summer of 2024, living as a USian in southern Spain, and change both voluntary and unwilled. [more inside]


October 4

Rate My Existential Dread
It's a GPT that rates your existential dread


October 1

The Redemption of Andy Capp
Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp was the greatest British newspaper strip of the 20th Century, but few people realise how much of his own troubled childhood Smythe poured into Andy and Flo’s lives. Andy was essentially a portrait of Smythe’s wastrel father, Flo a version of his formidable mother, and their neighbourhood a portrait of the pre-war Hartlepool where Smythe grew up. My new book traces Smythe’s own biography, explores its parallels in Andy’s world, and tackles the strip’s early wife-beating jokes. There’s also a look at how the balance of power has shifted between Andy and Flo down the years and my own analysis of just what made Smythe such an accomplished and stylish cartoonist. [more inside]


September 26

Radio Static
Radio Static is a small and ultimately pointless internet radio that plays nothing but various forms of static and occasionally some industrial noises that also kind of sound like static (can also be downloaded here for offline play).


September 24

Celebrate Disco Fanzine (Star Trek Discovery zine)
A Free 42-page PDF you can read on your phone, tablet, or laptop and enjoy! [more inside]


September 20

Downticket Democrats
Downticket Democrats highlights candidates for the House of Representatives and state legislatures in competitive districts, making it easy to donate for maximum impact. [more inside]


A support group for people who are creating graphic memoirs
I'm starting a (remote/Zoom) free support group for people who are involved in creating graphic memoirs. [more inside]


September 17

My new thriller, Floor 24, is now available.
Floor 24, a Hitchcockian thriller, is available from Oliver-Heber Books. [more inside]


September 9

Running for Carrboro Town Council
I've been canvassing and making phone calls for Democratic campaigns since 2004, and I've been a precinct secretary. I've also been on the board of two different local nonprofit organizations, the Triangle Linux Users Group (TriLUG), and the Carrboro Bicycle Coalition. Running for elected office is a big step, and I'm new at this, but I think I have a clear picture of both the logistics and the financial reality of what it will take to run and then do the work of a Town Council member. [more inside]


September 2

Fifteen years ago I made a Flash game called Starcom...
Six years ago I released my first PC game called "Starcom: Nexus" (previously). For the past four years I've been working on a follow-up title called "Starcom: Unknown Space". Today it graduates from Early Access on Steam. [more inside]


August 26

A Castle Built From Random Rooms
A Castle Built From Random Rooms is a Fighting Fantasy-style text adventure (which should be playable in any browser) set in a castle built from random rooms. Can you find your way through the labyrinth and escape... with your LIFE! (and also some treasure). [more inside]


August 19

Diptychs From America
A short project featuing diptychs from a month long trip starting in Las Vegas, to Seattle, then down to Los Angeles. [more inside]


August 17

Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts at Bridge City Sessions
Live in studio recordings of original junkyard jazz, jangly jive, and ragtime residue. Featuring four brand-new tunes: "Hold on Tight" (a screwloose comedy heist), "Minneola" (a loving tribute to any city or town that happens to be named Min[n]eola), "Paradeiolia" (the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern), and "Mrs Johnson" (a western klezmer veterinary odyssey). Recorded spring 2024 at Bridge City Sessions. [more inside]


August 14

My photos from Sidmouth Folk Festival 2024.
I spent all last week at the excellent Sidmouth Folk Festival in the English county of Devon. I didn't manage to attend all of the 624 events on offer there, but I did manage to see three gigs a day and photograph many of the performers involved. You can find 88 of my better pictures in this Bluesky thread. [more inside]


August 9

Bob and Ray in Westchester Furioso!
From 1973 to 1976, comedians Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990) hosted the drivetime hours on New York's WOR. A major feature of the show was a spoof of soap operas called “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.” Collected here are the surviving recordings of this feature, organized into something resembling chronology. It's almost 20 hours long so you don't have to listen to anything else today!


August 7

I published a novel: The Ballad of the Grey Swan
My first novel. And I’m excited. [more inside]


August 1

Tulip Creative Computer
Tulip is a cheap (US$59, basically the cost for parts/assembly), simple and overall FUN portable computer for making things. music, animations, writing. It boots right into a Python prompt, no other OS. No AI, no ads, not even Wi-Fi unless you type in some stuff. Tulip comes with a really good synthesizer and a lot of music stuff (MIDI, CV, sequencer, sampler, drum machine, DX7, Juno-6). Purely open source, the point is to gather a community of like-minded people that love this sort of thing to make it even better.


Little Riddle
My mom loves word games. Inspired by this comment on the game "Road Toad", I built a super simple browser app that provides a 'Little Riddle' to a two-word answer that always rhymes. If you are stuck, you can receive a hint or a letter. I built in 'making and sharing' so my mom can send me and the family riddles she likes. I hope someone on Mefi enjoys Little Riddle as much as my mom does. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. [more inside]


July 29

Reading Project 2025 online
I started an open, online reading of Project 2025, that major conservative manifesto and playbook aimed at a second Trump administration. [more inside]


Spirited
iOS app for WFDF Rules of Ultimate (frisbee). [more inside]


Over 100 local non-chain restaurants with a website
This is not a work of genius, but more just the result of straight effort, and sharing not to seek praise for any kind of brilliance, but just to show it can be done and maybe nudge people toward doing the same: a local resource (Kingston, Ontario in this case) to make and share a list of non-chain restaurants that you don't have to go to Facebook to learn about. [more inside]


July 27

I made a comic about my cancer diagnosis and treatment
Over the years I’ve done a number of comics, mostly autobiographical, and most of them about weird medical things that have happened to me. These included a detached retina, a thyroid cancer scare, and a terrible fall I had. Unfortunately, last December I was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. [more inside]


Hang a tiny bell / from a hungry, agile cat, / and alter all things.
I've launched a new blog called A Tiny Bell. It mixes both the "links to cool things" aspect of a traditional blog and the "personal essay" aspect of more modern blogs. I hope you like it enough to spread the word.


July 24

How British Are Your Teeth?
I took UK government dental survey data and created a fun way to compare your own teeth with the average for your age by inputting number of teeth, fillings, etc. [more inside]


July 16

Procreate Thicknthin Brush Set
In my spare time as an illustrator, I'm always on the hunt to bring more unique marks and variable lines into my work. I've made a set of 16 brushes made from traditional marks and textures that can give you richly expressive, fluid brushstrokes. Each is designed to be able to push pressure sensitivity as far as I can--and can give different effects with erasing, smudging, and playing with opacity.


July 13

The Daily Sutra
It's Michael Barbaro (from The Daily podcast) reading off names forever. [more inside]


July 12

As old as Biden
Barely a Project - just a single post to my blog - this highlights some of the other folks who were born in 1942, the same year as Joe Biden, including Paul McCartney, Barbara Streisand, and Harrison Ford.


July 1

catfishing - the Wikipedia category guessing game
Guess the Wikipedia article from the categories it’s in. Every day there are 10 articles to guess, from a pool of about 2,500 notable, diverse and interesting people, places and things. It's free and there are no ads. [more inside]


June 28

What Democracy Looks Like In... ITALY! (podcast episode)
Feeling depressed after the US presidential debate? Take comfort from a country that survived not only the original fascist dictatorship, but an even sleazier corrupt billionaire president, Silvio Berlusconi! The What Democracy Looks Like In... Podcast visits Italy to talk corruption, the public good, and doing democracy at the local scale. [more inside]


June 26

True Stories
Was a live series of conversations from June 6th to 8th– in person and online – which aimed to address an increasingly urgent issue: tackling misinformation, disinformation and fake news in an online environment. Now streaming on YouTube, links below. [more inside]


June 20

StopOrMy.Mom
The internet’s no.1 “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” fansite, with a blog, GIFs, fanart, an imminent podcast, and more. Basically, I noticed the .mom TLD, couldn't resist buying the daft domain, then had to do something with it.


June 14

The Queer Medieval with Nicola Griffith - In Conversation with María Bullón-Fernández
Video of a talk at Seattle Town Hall, includes live musical performance. For Pride month, join celebrated historical fiction author Nicola Griffith for a conversation about queer representation in medieval history and fiction. The acclaimed author of Hild, Spear, and Menewood will explore how fiction can create belonging and challenge narratives about who belongs in history. In a conversation with Professor of English at Seattle University, María Bullón-Fernández, Griffith will tackle questions like: How are current ideas of queer identity similar or different to those in the Middle Ages, and those represented in historical fiction? How can fiction help us re-see the past, and thus re-envision our future? [more inside]


June 9

A Servalan playlist
This is a playlist that I made about Servalan from the British TV show Blake's 7. The artwork of Servalan is by the very talented OxideBlack.


May 22

MetaFilter activity stats
Tracking monthly active users, posts, and comments on MetaFilter and subsites. Automatically updated whenever the Infodump updates. [more inside]


May 19

Blog/Column: Humans and Technology  
I started writing technology column (as if we need another one of those) for one of my region's local newspapers, and I've been archiving it on a blog. The focus is on the human side of technology use. [more inside]


May 15

Kirby Klose-Ups
One close-up comics panel by Jack Kirby from his 7 decade-spanning career posted once a day, every day on Bluesky.


May 14

Small Wonders Magazine Year 2
An online magazine of speculative flash fiction and poetry. [more inside]


May 9

Jiu Jitsu Training Camp 2024
A Brazilian black belt friend of mine is organizing a BJJ camp for a week in Rio de Janeiro this fall and I've been helping him build a website for it. (I'm a brown belt and will be part of the camp, but not an instructor. Unless it's a how to make spaghetti carbonara lesson.) Would love to get feedback on what's there so far, as we're doing it in November and still have time to adjust things a bit. (Looking for feedback both on the website as well as the proposed experience.


May 7

OEDILF, The, n.
The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, or OEDILF (oh-DILF), is a magnificent, ambitious, and slightly insane attempt to write a limerick for every word in the English language, one letter group at a time. Twenty years after it was first posted to Mefi, it's still going strong—which means that it's now celebrating its twentieth birthday. [more inside]


May 2

"Here We Are" Close Read Blog-o-thing
I took myself to see the premier Sondheim's posthumously released final play "Here We Are" on my birthday in January and came home with a head full of thoughts. Through the magic of dark internet (Reddit) I was able to get a cruddy recording when I got home and have been listening to it since. I'm trying to get these thoughts out of my head in single-file line ahead of the release of the cast recording on May 18th. [more inside]


May 1

Power Button - Episode 384: Super Shopping Spree
My friend Blake and I have produced a weekly video game podcast for over a decade now. We live on opposite ends of the country and rarely see each other. Last week he came to visit and I took him around on a shopping spree of retro video games and toys. On this podcast recorded in the same room together for the first time since 2011, we let you follow along on our road trip and tell you about the awesome stuff we bought. [more inside]


April 26

Dungeon, an RPG system for Commodore 64
I've gone ahead and pushed #Dungeon out the door for people to buy and play for $5. It's an RPG game system, for old-school RPG adventures, for the C64 from 1990. You use the Dungeon Guild to create a character, then put it through adventure modules other people have created. Five of them are included with the game, to play and to use their monsters and items in your own scenarios. It was published on Issue #74 of the C64 disk magazine LOADSTAR. It's presented by permission of the rights holder, Fender Tucker and configured to play in VICE.


April 24

Anything can be a sandwich
I taught myself to make baguettes and decided I would try to make them everyday, but I also love sandwiches so I was typically taking whatever was for dinner and turning it into a sandwich. Then I started imagining how I could turn a dish into a sandwich and started creating them. I don't do it everyday, but I do on most. I've started documenting the results on a feed on Bluesky. [more inside]


April 23

Lost Notes: Season 4
KCRW’s acclaimed music documentary podcast, Lost Notes, is back for its fourth season! Co-hosts Novena Carmel (KCRW) and Michael Barnes (KCRW / KPFK / Artform Radio) guide you through eight wildly different and deeply human stories, each set against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of LA’s soul and R&B scene of the 1950s-1970s. (The fifth of eight episodes releases this week on Wednesday.) [more inside]


April 18

Snail Facts! -- 15 Minute Incremental
I was on my way to work a couple weeks ago and I got the weirdest idea for an incremental game. Here it is, Snail Facts! This is my first incremental, so I decided to make it pretty simple. Some details inside: [more inside]


April 15

Unsettled Tarot
This is an online tarot reading. You page through ten randomly loaded cards, each card combined with randomly loaded text. I drew the cards, they are my personal tarot deck. They iconography has very little to do with a traditional tarot deck, each drawing is something I could not express in words. It's not intended to be mystical, more to trigger unexpected associations. [more inside]


April 3

British Placename Mapper
A web app that lets you search for British place names that match certain queries (eg. starts with 'great', ends with 'burgh', contains 'sea') and show them on an interactive map. Fascinating patterns start to emerge, and you can even share links to your favourite configurations.


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