Andrew Lindsey

there's a moment in PARADISE LOST where Satan arrives in Eden and realizes Hell isn't a place; it's a thing he carries within him and it'll follow him wherever he goes. and i think about that when i see these awful rich men whose monstrous wealth has enriched them not at all

I keep hearing one of those at a pond nearby, but I've never gotten close enough to see it.

A comic called halloween costume ideas for birders. In panel 1, labeled easy, there's a person labeled northern cardinal wearing a party hat, a beak, and red clothes, and a person labeled roseate spoonbill wearing pink clothes and a wooden spoon on their nose. In panel 2, labeled harder, there's a person labeled merlin sound ID wearing a big green circle with a microphone modeled after the button on the merlin sound ID app, and a person labeled hybrid green x blue jay wearing a complex costume with a mask and robe and hat modeled after a recently discovered hybrid bird. In panel 3, labeled challenging, there's a person labeled baltimore oriole nest wearing an enormous accurate woven oriole nest suspended from their arms and shoulders, and a person labeled african jacana carrying chicks with a hideous costume of long-toed bird feet hanging from their armpits. In panel 4, labeled hot, there's a person labeled high quality spotting scope who is shirtless and is wearing a spotting scope mask on their head, and a person labeled sexy owl pellet wearing an owl pellet top and bottom with a mouse skull on their head.

Halloween costume ideas for birders.

A gaming board with multiple player figurines, facing off against a 3D printed plant monster with a yellow eye inside a large maw. Multiple 3D printed root-tentacles surround the figurines.

The fun things you can unleash on your players when you are a DM with a 3D printer.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that something like this must exist already. If not I might have to create it, although I know that's a lot of work.

On waking up, it occurs to me that this would be really useful for planning campaigns for GMs, and also for worldbuilding for authors, although that's not what I was using it for in the dream.

The basic concept involved being able to place notes/links/files/drawings/etc on a canvas, organize them in groups, make links and arrows between them, and create hierarchically nested floating subwindows to group them together. There's more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.

Last night I dreamed that I was working on some complex project, using a really nifty project organizing program on my computer. On waking up, I had to wonder if this kind of software actually existed, and if not, could I create it?

Today's neighborhood #birds: A flock of wild turkeys encountered in the woods on my daily walk.

Have I mentioned how much I love Trilobites? Let me know which of these cutie crawlers are your favorite!

Art from my new book: DINOSAURS exploring prehistoric life and geological time

buy book here: a.co/d/0BJZbR4

#prehistoric #evolution #dinosaurs #fossiladdict #sciart #paleoart #fossil

Very disappointed that Dana Terrance is getting flak from toxic fans for the crime of not confirming someone's headcanon.

You're entitled to have whatever headcanons you want. You aren't entitled to express public hate for the creator when it turns out your headcanon isn't actual canon.

A piece of spam musubi with a bit out of it

Happy Saturday! Your timeline has been blessed by spam musubi!

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

I don't believe in karma as a metaphysical force, but I do believe if you spend your life making the world a worse place for everyone else, it will eventually circle around and make it worse for you as well.

While also appreciating the irony that someone who worked to make the world a more dangerous place got killed by someone apparently following his own advice, but also that we all now have to live in the more dangerous world that this has become as a result.

It is possibly to simultaneously think that shooting someone because you disagree with what they say is bad precedent that only makes the world more dangerous for everyone, and also that the world is a better place without Charlie Kirk in it and it's good that he's not spreading hate anymore.

I have now seen wild turkeys on two days in a row while walking around the neighborhood. Pretty sure they were two different groups of them too. Lots of deer too. Fall wildlife seems to be on the move now.

I just don't have the reflexes for this kind of precision platformer. I couldn't even get past the first boss in Hollow Knight, and from what I hear Silksong is even more difficult.

Silksong is one of the weird cases of a game where I am really glad that it exists and happy to see it out, but that I have no interest in playing myself. It's a great game, just not for me.

An assortment of red, orange, yellow, and white peppers on a white plate.

The orange ghost peppers and white habaneros, cut in half and dried in a dehydrator.

A small spice container filled with an ominous orange powder.

This weekend's pepper harvest. The Aji amarillos and Aji lemon peppers can be used fresh, but the ghost peppers and white habaneros get dried and then ground to make a truly weapon-grade hot pepper powder. A tiny pinch of this stuff goes a long way.

Things I have to figure out for my Pathfinder game this week: Was does it sound like when a Xorn sings, and more importantly, when a Xorn sings badly?

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): towards a promising LLM architecture for legal work? The above image is sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Generative artificial intelligence (AI)’s first encounter with the legal world was a catastrophe. After OpenAI released ChatGPT in Fall 2022 and the....

i'm not even sure LLMs are fit for that purpose.

jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/retri...

the framing of this article ("RAGs are good!") is frontloaded by a ton of writing about how specifically awful LLMs are.

tldr LLMs are awful at this kind of work.

amusingly i got this from an LLM proponent!

Americans Astronomers
watching watching
US politics Betelgeuse
🤝

“It could happen at any time”

Trans rights are, in fact, human rights. Pass it on. 🏳️‍⚧️🫂

Dragon con remains undefeated.

So now we've got a vulture-headed blue jay that shows up at our door and follows my wife and I around, making a horrific sound that no blue jay should make whenever it thinks it might get a peanut as a reward.

This same blue jay is distinctly vulture-headed, being in the middle of a bad molt. It's also the same jay that has figured out that my wife is the one who gives peanuts, and that it can follow her when she goes for a walk to get those peanuts.

One of our local blue jays has been inspired and has started mimicking the osprey calls. Confused the hell out of the bird app on my phone, as the mimicry isn't good enough to register as an osprey but is far enough from any sound a normal blue jay makes to be unrecognizable by the app.

A very blurry photo of what I assure you is an osprey in front of foliage, though you're going to have to take my word for that due to how blurry the photo is.

A still somewhat blurry shot of an osprey in flight, with foliage in the background and a branch in the foreground as well.

A local osprey has been hanging around a drainage pond in the nearby woods. I've been trying to get a photo of it, but it's very skittish and takes off before I can get close enough for a non-blurry shot.

Mainly I know it's nearby from its calls, which are very loud and distinctive. #bird

Screenshot from Star Trek DS9. Leeta, Rom, and the rest of the workers at Quark's Bar are all huddled together. Caption: "(all chanting): Union! Union!"

Happy Labor Day, comrades 🫡