• My Home Cocktail Bar
  I’ve decided that over the next year, I’m going to work my way through all of the International Bartender’s Associations cocktail list, making all of them at home. So I’ve taken a someone else’s very kind open source project, and deployed and tweaked it to meet my needs, giving me a useful tracker of cocktails, ingredients, and general progress. Of the stuff marked as my favourites, I would particularly recommend a Vieux Carre and a La Louisiane, if you’ve not had them before.
  Tags: cocktails

• The people holding up the internet | Data Drop
  In case you’re not worried about how precarious the internet, and modern life in general is.
  Tags: software, internet, opensource, culture

• A medieval manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time? | Culture | The Guardian
  It looks like the reason that the Voynich manuscript may have defied understanding is that when it was bound into a book, it was done such that the pages were not bound in the intended order. Now, all we have to do is hope that if we do crack it, it's not some hideous mathematical proof that when understood, summons the many-angled ones from the dark dimension below spacetime in which they are imprisoned. (It's possible my use of it for that sort of thing in gaming has coloured my view of it.)
  Tags: interesting, cryptography, voynich_manuscript

• Daring Fireball: I’ll Wait
  John Gruber nails how I feel about Muse and OpenClaw, even as someone who works with LLMs day-in day-out.

  "The way I think about running an agentic AI on my Mac is simple. I would never let an unknown person use my Mac. Not even for a minute, not even with me watching them. Let alone letting them use it nonstop, without my watching them. I’d be uncomfortable letting even a trusted friend use my Mac, logged into my user account. So why would I let an AI robot, no matter the source?"

On the HBO Harry Potter, and y’know, transphobia aside (which to be clear, is my top reason for not planning on watching), but:

In the context of the way culture these days is a series a reboots and reboots, and what should be done about it.

Radically reduce copyright down to 10 years or something. More than that: invent a new super-anti-copyright which actively imposes costs on any content which is too close to any existing content in an AI-calculated vibes database or something.

i.e. tax unoriginality.

The past is a foreign country that we should impose tariffs on.

• Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion
  A properly marvellous little tool that, without being preachy, manages to illustrate the odds that any of got here at all, and how, for all the world is on fire, how much better the early 21st century is than any other time in human history. My first two tries at a random life have them dying of dysentery as a newborn in what is now South China in 37CE, and dying in an an accident aged 4 in the Nile valley in 861BCE. Only on attempt 3 do I get a life that lives to 62, before dying of the Black Death in the Bengal Delta in 1285.
  Tags: history, interesting

• Lafcadio Hearn – Wikipedia
  And the wikipedia about him, too, for reference.
• Books by Lafcadio Hearn – Project Gutenberg
  This chap had a remarkable life, and there's a few books in here I want to spend a bit of time with.
  Tags: history, writer, lousiana, japan

• Kentucky Superstitions | by Daniel Lindsey Thomas, Lucy Blayney Thomas
  A load of fascinating old superstitions. Some wildly racist ones, be warned.
  Tags: superstitions

• Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States – Wikipedia
  Marvel successfully argued in court that their action figures for some of their range were for "nonhuman creatures" and avoided paying a higher rate of tax on X-men figures. Magneto was right, that's all I'm saying.
  Tags: comics, toys, law

• HOLY REAL ESTATE! The BATMAN ’66 WAYNE MANOR Is Up For Sale
  I cannot improve on that headline. Also, if you click through to the listing and look at the pics, as American megamansions with (let's be kind and call it) a "strong aesthetic" go, this one is surprisingly bearable, and actually feels like it'd be quite liveable. Anyone got 32 million lying around that I can have?
  Tags: batman, housing