‘fogus

So like, 2 hoagies?

A lovely tube of purple icehouse pieces

It’s been at least a decade since I last found Icehouse pieces in the wild. @looneylabs.bsky.social

Because everyone around them tells them how galaxy-brain brilliant they are 24/7.

A field flashes by in rural Japan and Mount Fuji ducks behind a building in the distance.

Whenever I visit Japan, I tend to prefer the vast varied and lovely tracks of country where tourist seldom go, and no language but Japanese is spoken save for perhaps the thick dialects of the older generation, which sounds to me like an inscrutably different language altogether.

My favorite occult ritual/artifacts in films, no particular order: Prince of Darkness, The Ninth Gate, A Dark Song, Hereditary

As my first act of not reading I’m gonna go ahead and not read this

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a science fiction book about the dangers of LLMs.

That said, I have a reason to believe that it’s either an original trick taking game or a variant of an existing one. The players who mentioned it in their memoirs were avid players of Bridge and Piquet and played Jacobi when they only had three players available.

I’ve recently become obsessed with finding out the origin of a 3 player card game played at Magdalene College, Cambridge circa 1900 to WWI. In memoirs, Stephen Gaselee called it “Jacoby” and Arthur Benson called it “Jacobi” but neither of them gave any details save its player count. I will not rest!

A few new additions to 200 and Change this week…

• Bit-sliced signatures by Ian Henderson
• A JSON parser in Haskell by @abnv.me

pdubroy.github.io/200andchange/

Emblogginated a new Clojure post: "Arities as pseudo-protocol" --> blog.fogus.me/clojure/arit...

My favorite reads in April 2025: Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker, and Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse.

How I imagine Patricia Warrick looked whenever she received a letter from PKD circa 1980.

I started exploring the history of the mystery plot device where ice is used for murder & melting eliminates evidence. An early use was in Green’s novel Initials Only (1911). Baron Corvo also used the icicle to explain a mystery a story in his book In His Own Image (1901). Anyone know any earlier?

You can just throw out the last two because they are not going to work anyway

Women’s ghost literature in 19th century Britain

Stoked to dig into my latest ILL from @melissae.bsky.social

Ringstones and Other Curious Tales by Sarban

26 years ago today Sarban crossed into Faerie.

Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell & The Bollweevils EP "Talk to Me"

Reading / Listening...

Try as I might, I can’t help but make an eisegesis out of PLD’s Exegesis. 🤷‍♂️

The most distressing part of the decline of reading is that reading's core purpose is to not only present facts, perspectives, and information, but to expose us to the mechanisms of thought itself.

Just one, the blood in the top is type B and on the bottom type AB.

How many times do I need to watch the complete Star Wars saga so that I don’t have to read Plato’s Republic once?

3/28 is a day of great loss for fans of weird, supernatural, and surreal fiction: Virginia Woolf (1941), Francis Brett Young (1954), Clemence Dane (1965), and Eugène Ionesco (1994), and adding to this dark day both Modest Mussorgsky (1881) and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1943) passed on this date.

Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers by Grogono

We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ

My two favorite books read in March 2025:

Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers by Peter Grogono

We Who Are About To by Joanna Russ

Meeting Corvo and Weeks in Georgetown: A Guest Post by Fogus Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, better known as Frederick Rolfe, or better yet still Baron Corvo, was a British wr...

In an attempt to branch out with my writing I wrote about a little bit of private "Corvine" research that I did last year at Georgetown University. It was posted as a guest-post this morning on one of my favorite literary blogs Wormwoodania!
wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/03/meet...

Another in the same vein as last retrocomputing question.... what was the premier programming environment for Prolog circa 1985?

Edwin!

I used MacScheme which came with the most amazing gui app framework, decades ahead of its time. If anyone had a copy of the Toolsmith docs please let me know!

What was the premiere Scheme programming environment for Scheme circa 1989?

My ears still buzz from the last time that I saw Helmet circa Betty… It was worth it