For potential speakers, a handy FAQ full of useful information is available here.

NOTOCON XIV is fast approaching! The cutoff date to receive our group rate at the hotel is Friday, July 21st. Please reserve now. The speaker schedule has been published on the NOTOCON website. Event registration is still open! We can’t wait to see all of you in August, and wish you all safe travels!

The U.S. Grand Lodge O.T.O. annual report for fiscal year 2022 has been published. This and all previous annual reports can be found here.

SAVE THE DATE for NOTOCON XV: The Crowned and Conquering Child to be hosted in Portland, Oregon from July 25 through the 27th, 2025 EV. The call for speaker proposals is now open and we are accepting Volunteer and Vending sign-ups. Registration and hotel reservations will be available in August 2024.

Hello and howdy. I usually describe myself as turning the "ripe old age of so-and-so" on my birthday posts, but I may need a new adjective as I'm solidly in my mid-40s, now (44). Perhaps "fermented." The birthday's come and gone without incident, although there were minor contemporaneous incidents:

Still in the math hole. It might be an infinite hole. Trying to get out. But I have improved my console fonts and ANSI color libraries and GPU programming skills, at least. I was very pleased that a recent release of NVIDIA drivers came with a brand new updated OpenCL, which I previously assumed had been abandoned like so many computer things that I become fond of. Kudos to whoever at NVIDIA pushed on this. I am making myself laugh privately to myself (well, no longer private now) by imagining someone who spells it out like an acronym, N-V-I D-I-A.

Also, like usual, I ran the Pittsburgh Great Race, a mostly-downhill 10k. No encumbrances this time. I've been in good shape this summer, but I got sick last month and it set me back a bit, so this wasn't a star performance. Still 43m22s is not too bad and I didn't push myself all that hard. Fewer minutes than years old.

The new GPU is mostly for math, but I wanted to try it out for its Intended Purpose, (N)Video Games. So I played through Far Cry 6, which was okay. I liked it better than 5, which among other things had a bunch of technical problems (this one was much smoother and more stable), but I probably should have read my review of that game before downloading, as I say something like "I should probably stop playing this series." Still slowly savoring Tears of The Kingdom, which remains great. I also started Return To Monkey Island. I loved the first two in this series, but couldn't get into the later sequels; of course I'm interested in giving this one a shot since it's made by the original designers (and I did like Thimbleweed Park). Too early to render a verdict, but I did like how they deftly handled the canonicity of the end of 2.

Then there's this: I think this is Taylor Swift wearing a homemade t-shirt of her "Pegicorn" (sometimes "Pegacorn"), a Unicorn-Pegasus hybrid. The text is in my font Action Jackson:

Taylor Swift Pegicorn (Action Jackson font)

You can also see this drawing/font at the beginning of the "Making of" video for You Belong With Me". I think she posted this to twitter in May 2009, but somehow I'm unable to find an archive of her tweets from this time (inconceivable??).

Wow, this month sure went by fast. I'm sure I say that every October, as this is the busiest time of year at work, and stuff like football and Maybe The Last Nice Day This Year keep me busy.

I've been plugging away at this math/programming project, currently porting some numerical code that I don't fully understand and finding bugs in it and improving its performance. It's relaxing, at least, but there's nothing good to share here yet and I'm not sure it'll ever make an interesting story. I did make some version-2 circuit boards for a project I've been working on in parallel, too, but the next step in that one is going to be annoying ("Why won't it boot?") so I've been putting it off.

They brought the small neighborhood race called "Run Shadyside" back this year. This is a 5k course that I can easily walk to the start of, and Shadyside is about as flat as it gets in Pittsburgh, so it's a nice race to try to PR in. I've been keeping in pretty good shape (despite the setback due to illness mentioned previously), but that morning I was having some burning lungs so I didn't push myself too hard. (Could have been mold? Bad air quality? Slightly sick?) I finished in 20m19s, which is probably my third best official 5K time, although a bit disappointing since I ran several unofficial treadmill 5Ks under 19 minutes this summer. I finished 3rd in my age group. The results feature a new capitalization of my name, the elusive Stegosaurus CasE: "Tom Murphy ViI"

Craving a game that would make proper use of the GeForce 4090, I installed Call Of Duty: Cold War. Actually this game is a couple years old, and graphically it's not anything particularly special. I am liking the single-player campaign more than usual for these kinds of games, and avoiding getting sucked into multiplayer. I gave the "zombies" mode a shot and I think I finally understand it, like playing a roguelike on a single seed. I think I'm at the point where I need to set myself some kind of challenge and complete it and retire to more artful things, though.

Here is the new content:

I've mentioned that I have been working on running a five-minute mile on the treadmill this year, a goal that at one point seemed in reach. I think I also complained that I got sick and that when I got back to it, they had swapped out all the treadmills for fancy treadmills with built-in Netflix and air conditioning and stuff like that, which I now refer to as "Bob's Tred Mill." There's some good things about these, and some things that make me crazy, but one thing that especially made me crazy is they felt significantly faster than the old Precor ones I was used to. It's definitely a real thing that treadmills are sometimes not calibrated correctly (or the tread stretches out or slips, etc.) but it was also possible that being sick set me back more than I thought. The important thing is to get The Data instead of just The Upset Feelings so I was shopping for things like those hand-held unicycles that you can wheel around to measure how long things (like streets) are, as it does seem like the kind of device that I would own, looking at like the world's most accurate hand-held unicycle thing, and then I noticed at the last thing that most of them have a MAX SPEED of something like 10mph, which would not do. I finally had the brain-stroke that I could use a laser tachometer to do it, since these have a max speed more like 99999 RPM. So I measured the tread length with some chalk marks and put reflective tape on there. The treadmill will go at different speeds when loaded (running on it) vs unloaded, which also depends on your weight and stride and stuff a little, so you also gotta engage in the dexterity-testing act of measuring while running on it, which looked like this:

POV: You are me

Pointing the laser at the reflective tape dot (visible right next to the laser dot here) as it flies by while running kinda fast is definitely tricky, although I must say that it was one of those times when I thought, "I've been training my whole life for this!" and you can see that I'm showing off a little bit here by also photographing it at the same time. But you are not impressed since it reports 0 RPM. The nice thing about the tachometer is that it only needs a pair of observations to give you a frequency, and you can easily tell if you missed the tape, which you do often on account of the shaking, because you get some integer multiple that's way off from the right answer. Anyway I dutifully took multiple readings unloaded and loaded at (nominally) 6mph, 7mph, ... 12mph and made a spreadsheet with all the results converted, and... found that the treadmill is just about 1% too fast loaded, all across the board. This would be just 3 seconds for a five-minute mile, which is not nothing, but it definitely does not vindicate my Upset Feelings (I was thinking it felt more like 10%). My best guess is that the old treadmills were (all?) actually too slow, which is annoying because now I doubt some of the unofficial 5k records I painfully set for myself during the summer. But, well, the thing about endeavoring to do challenging things is: No Cheating!

In project news, I feel I have a foothold now to get myself out of this math hole, as I've finally migrated this algorithm to work only with 64-bit integer arithmetic and so I can port it to GPU soon and then be out of ideas about how to make it faster. I have no idea if there's a good story to be told for this project, but I'll try (and also, it is okay if sometimes the hobby programming doesn't lead to a video or Sigbovik paper, you know?). And speaking of Sigbovik: Heroes have emerged quite on time this year, so it's certainly looking like there will be a proceedings and conference (perhaps with livestream), so start writing those papers now.

Aside from the math hole, I've been making some progress on two other concurrent projects. It's getting normal again (even quiet) at work and winter break is coming up, and I'm looking forward to having some several-day stretches to work on them.

I played through Golf Peaks (well, I haven't beat all the bonus levels yet but I've been working back to front so it's just a matter of a little time at this point), which was a very nice little puzzle game that does almost everything right. Other than the very irritating music in one world, I think my only disappointment was that it doesn't elegantly handle infinite-length puts. I'm also still working on Return to Monkey Island, which I do like, although it doesn't hold up to my memory of the first two. I think one of the problems with modern point-and-click adventure games is the voices, actually: Not because the voice acting bothers me, but because it goes so slow compared to reading. It's like when you just want to figure out the maximum speed of the hand-held unicycle and they're trying to get you to watch a video instead of just reading. Tears of the Kingdom (which I'm still savoring, but getting close to the end now) does a good job with this; you do hear snippets of voices, which helps with the characterization, but you can blow through the dialog at a pretty fast pace. Probably a lot cheaper, too!

Hello again,

This month I've been plugging away on the project I mentioned in the previous post which involves among other things a PDF generator and now an implementation of ML (as in Standard ML, but also the other one). This is probably the 10th "compiler" I've written in my life, and it's kind of fun to revisit these problems that you've done many times and try out different approaches, although this time one of the approaches is "Use C++" (for reasons of making good on a joke, but also for reasons of mlton doesn't work on my computer any more). And although C++ is a fine tool for many applications, it does have some deficiencies for the task of writing a compiler (one of the most irritating: a very modest limit on the stack depth? Like my computer has 256 Gigabytes of RAM and 2^64 virtual addresses and somehow it can only manage 1 megabyte for the stack and there's no standard way to increase it? Get off my lawn). But then you can also experience new ways of struggling with C++, like: A middle of the night power failure wrecked my computer's GPT (as in GUID Partition Table, but also the other one) and I was deep in the depths of taking the computer apart to reset its parts, its BIOS (its Basic In/Out System, which is where it stores its biography) and its hard drives were everywhere on the floor, and it could not be saved, and this after I already broke my computer this year by trying to put the world's biggest video card in it, too hard. And I could not merely perform recovery because of Unknown Error, so I had to begin anew again and restore from backups. But when you restore from backup and you're in the mood of "why is this so complicated and I don't understand how computers work any more?" it occurs to you (me) to also change your underlying development environment instead of reinstalling the devil you know. So I ended my friendship with Cygwin64 and switched to new best friend MSYS2. Both of these things are different ways of wishing that you were using Linux while you're using Windows. The main reason I tried this new way of struggling is that Cygwin is very behind on its version of x86_64 clang (C++ compiler), which I wanted to try because it supports AddressSanitizer and clangd on Windows, and I wanted to give LSP in emacs a shot (it's finally good!). There were a few growing pains, but I think MSYS2 is what I would recommend now. One of the nice things they did was create multiple different environments depending on what you want to do (e.g. "I want to use clang to compile x86_64 code" or "I want to do 32-bit cross compilation for ARM") and in that environment, you just say "g++" and it invokes the compiler you want, instead of the weird contortions I've been doing for years with manually invoking x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++. I was also able to get clblast working before being too filled with rage to continue, so that is nice for the ML inference on the world's biggest graphics card. I made these graphics to help me tune the correct settings of GPU layers (y axis) and number of threads (x axis):

tune-single
tune-batch

In some sense the results are obvious (more threads and more layers is faster) but it was interesting to me how the cliff of performance drops off at a different number of layers for single and batch mode (I guess because the batch needs some memory itself?) and how it's clearly better to use fewer threads than cores for batch as well. I was not surprised to see performance drop off for >32 threads (everybody knows that hyper-threads kinda suck) but I was very surprised to see performance pick up again when it gets back up to 64? And only for single mode? I wish I understood that better. But mostly I'm a sucker for the custom visualizations.

Right but when writing this compiler I realized that I wanted to use some Greek letters, and I can't handle it when some characters are in a different font in my source code, so I finally made some space for those in my programming font FixederSys. These certainly still need some tweaks, but it's already better than just being in some other weird font:


{{{caption}}}

You can also see that I have been adding some "useful" emoji at the top. It is an interesting puzzle to try to make these things recognizable (especially for the 1x version, whose charboxes are 8x16 pixels). I am pretty sure I will not try to do all of the emoji (like, the flags are totally hopeless at 8x16), but it is tempting to round out the Unicode support somewhat. Like I was trying to make a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ today and had to settle for ~\_( :) )_/~ which is pretty much (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻.

Also: Adam revived our old game jam game Headcat, which I described in post 927, now over 16 years ago. You can play it online at Headcat.org. It is harder than I remember, perhaps explaining why it did not reach #1 on the One Appstore Per Child charts.

Also: I started and finished (true ending, but just with one character) Slay the Spire. Good game, but you don't need me to tell you that. Same for Alwa's Legacy, which is the sequel to Alwa's Awakening. Both of these are very true-to-form "8-bit" and "16-bit" platformers that I enjoyed and would recommend for genre fans, though I did not try to 100% them. The graphics are the highlight and I thought it was very cute how these could easily have been a pair of games from the NES and SNES. The good old days. And speaking of good-old days, I am now playing Katamari Damacy, which I had played at a friend's house many years ago, and always wanted to spend more time with. It totally holds up (aside from stuff like: You have to play through the tutorial and first level before you can access the menus at all, like to make the game fullscreen?) and it's honestly inspiring how unhinged the game design and writing are, and how fun it manages to be. What an accomplishment!

Oof, so busy! I finished up my paper(s) for SIGBOVIK and submitted them. Phew. I'll post 'em here after the embargo ends. I think the papers may be the canonical form of this particular project, but I'm starting on a visual version, which will probably become a video some time this month. (First up: I need to prep a live version for Unnecessary Detail, as mentioned in the previous post.) But right now I'm also on the West coast (in a car traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego) for a short family trip which was cut even shorter by the Spirit of Bad Aircraft Management of Spirit Airlines. Immediately upon arriving at the hotel I looked out our window and saw a little park and thought, "it would be fun to skateboard in that park," (I am not a skateboarder) and then, "did I already skateboard in that park 20 years ago in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater?" and I looked it up and yes, the Los Angeles level in THPS3 is based on that very park.

I thought I wasn't going to be able to make the SIGBOVIK live event at all because of this trip, but it looks like I will be back and might try to make it, depending partly on whether I can get any material together for a talk in time.

I spent most of my free time in March on hacking and writing for this silly paper, but sometimes the brain needs a break, and I continued with Teardown. I think this game is great. It is impressive technically and graphically. The sandbox is fun; I had a great time painstakingly disassembling an enormous blast furnace until the framerate became intolerable. (The way the physics works, the entire blast furnace can be held up by the connection of a single voxel. This is obviously totally unrealistic but it is pretty fun to try to blowtorch around an entire building and then try to hunt down why it is still standing.) But I was also impressed with how they managed to make the missions compelling too. There are a couple of ergonomic annoyances (like: There are limitations on what keys can be rebound to what, so I had to play with a controller. And the quick-save is great, but given that you might spend an hour setting up a heist in a level, it would be nice if you could make an in-level save that was a little less quick, just in case you accidentally stayed up to 2am). Getting close to the end of that one. I also played through Gunlocked, which was a good small Roguelike shoot-em-up. The powerups were really well done; it just could've used a bit more variety in the bad guys.

OK, getting a bit carsick here so I'm going to put the laptop away. See you soon.

Oops! Usually when I fail to post on time and then illegally backdate the post, yielding a penalty of -1,000 points, it's shortly after midnight. Like, as I'm trying to fall asleep (which of course involves and involuntary inventory of everything I may have failed to do), I'm struck with a panic and then get back out of bed to write some dumb pro-forma apology post. This time I just went to bed and actually fell asleep and now here I am noticing that it is May 1. Still, the whole point of doing this every month is to make the grid of months line up nicely, so the post is backdated by 9 hours and nets -1,000 points.

Speaking of lining up nicely: I did get my SIGBOVIK papers in on time and gave a lightning talk at the conference. SIGBOVIK was very popular this year, with our longest-ever proceedings (see SIGBOVIK 2024 PDF or bound volume). This year my project is a paper about a new typesetting system that I wrote to produce the paper (and the talk's slides). That system is called BoVeX and the paper is called Badness 0, which you can read as Badness 0 (Knuth's version) and/or Badness 0 (Epsom's version). You can also maybe find a recorded livestream of the breakneck 5 min presentation, but I would wait for the proper video (in progress now!), which is the same content with much better pacing and details.

Speaking of details: I also presented at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail, which is one of Matt Parker ("Standup Maths")'s live shows. Other than the part where I tried to pack a dense months-long technical project about details into 12 minutes, this was a blast! Lots of cool, interesting people. This took place in a proper comedy club in Brooklyn, like with posters of people that I watch on TV (e.g. Taskmaster legend Fern Brady is performing there in a few weeks, so it seems I'm a mere 5 or 6 steps away from my dream of being a contestant on Taskmaster now), and was sold out (due exclusively to the eminence of others, since it was sold out before I even joined the bill). I finally hung out with Grant Sanderson ("3blue1brown") and told him about math. The audience was amazingly attentive and wholesome, and quite a few of them recognized me and wanted to talk after the show, which is fun. (I do not envy the queue that Matt and Grant endured, though!) Enjoy my technically deficient vacation photography:

I'm photobombing, but Matt is so used to this act that he is reflexively crouching down so as not to appear twice my height

Speaking of technically deficient photography: An additional reason why my video is not done yet (or indeed, why it currently has status Filming 0) is that I finally pulled the shutter release on a new video camera. After much deliberation (and visiting the B&H showroom while in NY, etc.), including on far more ridiculous options, I settled on the Canon R5C. After a complex week-long courtship ritual with the FedEx guy, that finally arrived last night, at which point I immediately realized that I need further accessories. But I'm excited to shoot on this thing and to make my computer suffer with 8k video. It seems to have gotten too complacent with "Full HD."

Finally, I think the main reason I failed to post on time last night was that I was up late playing Balatro. This game is all over the place so you probably don't need me to tell you about it, but it is indeed a good (and addictive) deck-building game that I am enjoying instead of sleep. I am not interested in 100%ing this one, but there are still lots of appealing challenges left for me to do. I'd recommend it if you have the self control to avoid firing it up "for a quick game" when you should be working on your projects or sleeping.

I’m traveling for the long weekend. Either I’m having bad luck with the epic heat waves or there have been a lot of epic heat waves, because again the short road trip threatens to be tyrannized by the hot air. It did at least touch 100°F this time, so at least it is a proper respectable heat wave. We are in a place called Hocking Hills, whose AirBnB has these OBX-style stickers that say “HHO”, which could either be confusingly “Hills, HOcking,” or perhaps “Hocking Hills, Ohio”, but not “Hocking hills OHio” as one might expect. I plan to stick the sticker upside-down for “OHH”, as in “Ohh yeah, I need to write a post on Tom 7 Radar for the month of August, and I need to do it on this mediocre wi-fi which Google Internet Speed Test describes as ‘fine’ while everyone else drinks beers outside.” Fair enough: This is a self-imposed curse and one that’s easily tended to at any time during the month.

During the month: I worked again on making my own video codec, which is a very bad way to spend one’s time, but I don’t think there are any modern lossless codecs that would be suitable for my use case. And I do like a data compression project because of the inherent benchmarkability. The use case is for the increasingly common situation where I have a program generating a series of video frames (e.g. BoVeX is making an animation), which I usually do by writing a sequence of PNG files to disk. I’m way ahead of PNG files so far even without doing any inter-frame stuff, which is not impressive, but does make me feel like it’s at least not totally pointless. (Still, it’s quite pointless: Sure I can make these files smaller at significant cost of complexity and encoding times, but these animations typically use space similar to like one second of 4K 60fps XF-AVC footage.)

Sometimes programming your own lossless video codec is a bit too fast-paced so you need to write a Wikipedia article from scratch about Clairton Coke Works by digging through newspaper archives. I haven't even gotten to the last 30 years of its history yet! I also rounded out the Cyrillic in FixederSys though I don't think I've uploaded a new version of that yet. As usual I did some hacking on secret projects.

UHH, elsewise, I did finish off Animal Well which I liked very much. My spoilerless advice to you is: Don't try to 100% this game without at least looking at a spoiler-controlled guide! But I did have fun once I felt like I was stuck-ish finishing the remaining postgame puzzles. I have also been playing Chippy, a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter that is quite hard (I usually feel good at this genre) and has several new good ideas in it. It's essentially all boss fights, and the chief innovation is that you fight the giant bosses by disconnecting pieces of them. I'm on the last boss so I will probably finish that one soon. As I have confessed many times, I like dumb first-person shooter games, and I played through Trepang 2 this month as well. It does have a few moments, but it was mostly pretty dumb, like I wanted. And then I started Touhou Luna Nights, which is a "Metroidvania" fan-game with great pixel art and music.

OK, I should get back to this vacation!

Hello team!

I turned 45! It happens every year (not the same age, but the same feeling, of time marching forward, with me along with it) so no big surprise. This weekend was the Great Race, also every year, but I unsubscribed from their e-mail list at some point months ago because they seem to operate this list under the misconception that subscribers want to think about Great Race 24/7 all year round. I thought: It should be easy to just remember when the Great Race is, as it always falls on the weekend near my birthday, and I do not need a list constantly mailing me reminders. Easy. But then I forgot about the Great Race, so I didn't run it.

I did take the day off for my birthday despite this being the busy time of year at work, which was worth it: I made some good progress on some projects that had been backed up in my anxiety-brain for some time. Of course they are confidential, but here is a graphic of some significant progress:

Minusweeper

I forgot to mention this one when I did it, but did you know that you can "buy" a Unicode codepoint, by making a donation to the Unicode consortium? So of course I bought ASCII 0x37, which is the digit 7.

True story: I did a lot of film photography when I was younger, and although I do miss film, I'll admit that the saddest thing I feel about its obsolescence is actually that those little black plastic film canisters are no longer all over the place to be repurposed to hold little objects. I found them very satisfying and useful! Fortunately now that I'm old I found another similar ubiquitous shape, which is these orange prescription medicine bottles. I've been using those for a while to "organize" small parts like screws (e.g. when I take something apart that I might want to put back together, I put the screws in the medicine bottle and label it) but then they just roll around in the drawer of crap. So this:


RxBox, Unpopulated
RxBox, Populated

A very simple part, of course, but what could be more satisfying than 3d printing your own holder for canisters for fasteners that goes in a drawer in a cabinet?

And speaking of satisfying, I finally finished Chippy (regular difficulty) which was really quite hard. Several of the last bosses I had to practice over several evenings before I beat them! It was a good and creative game, though. I'm mid-way through Solar Ash, which is good (but it's no Hyper Light Drifter IMO!) and just started playing Satisfactory, since they finally put out a 1.0 version of that. It's quite well done, but I'm not sure if I actually like it (seems a bit heavy on the cookie crafting; in fact I'm letting it craft in the background as I write this). I am getting a kick out of allowing thinking about my messy design as the "saddest factory," a joke which I'm sure occurs to everyone, but that's Game Design!

OMG. I can't believe October is over already. I blame Satisfactory which, okay, I do get it now, and it did destroy my body and mind. I am inches from being done now; I just want to make sure that I finish it with enough force that I do actually put it away, as I could imagine tinkering with my saddest factory forever.

The game isn't without flaw, but I think most of those flaws are not interesting to talk about. I do have one petty but important criticism, which is mildly spoilerful and anyway will only be interesting if you played the game. There is an object called the Somersloop ("cool S") which allows you to double the output of a machine. Canonically this item is some kind of "loop" and the flavor text talks about how it is able to create more energy than you put into it. So when I'm out hunting for Korok seeds I have this thought that maybe I could create a loop of factories whereby it would create infinite resources by repeatedly doubling. And I'm thinking about it but the crafting tree doesn't have any notable loops in it, but I remember the "packager" which allows you to put a fluid in a container or the converse, and I'm like: Yes, that's great! So I get back to base and I am doing this, just for fun to create an infinite fuel factory or whatever, and I realize that the packager just doesn't have a slot for a Somersloop. They must just hate fun, elegant twists. It would not break the game to allow this (you can always get infinite resources lots of other ways) or cause any other problem I can think of. Hmph!

The thing about constructing a factory and watching it churn is that it's basically the same thing as a programming project that you invented for yourself, and it's probably better to do the programming project. Here's progress on my mysterious rectangle:

Minusweeper 2

It's good progress if I do say so myself! Anything but black here is a Satisfactory result, which is 90.55% of them at this point. I may need heavy machinery for the remaining 9.45%, but that is part of the fun.

I think that's really it for this month! Please vote in the US Elections if you can (but I guess also vote in any important elections. And obviously, vote for the good guys???). And happy Halloween!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Tarot: Headless Horseman edition Nick Lawyer REDFeather (October 28, 2023) Reviewed by N. Richards What a wonderful way to honour the Irving Washington classic gothic story of 1822, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and the season of autumn as well as the art of Tarot all in one hit of […]

The post Card Deck Review: THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW TAROT first appeared on Hellnotes.

The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn Sheldon Higdon Scary Dairy Press LLC (September 4, 2023) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy The Eerie Brothers and the Witches of Autumn finds Horace and Edgar, the twin Eerie brothers, battling monsters to stop Hex from collecting one of the four globes to absorb the abilities of […]

The post Book Review: THE EERIE BROTHERS AND THE WITCHES OF AUTUMN first appeared on Hellnotes.

Of Teeth and Pine Desiree Horton Independently published (October 31, 2024) Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy Desiree Horton’s second novel is filled with blood, a taste of the beautiful outdoors, and a lot of snark. I fell in love with her main character, Vick, the female forest ranger who will not put up with any […]

The post Book Review: OF TEETH AND PINE first appeared on Hellnotes.

Some of the most common trials to face JPs nowadays are the Section 172 cases that arise from the ubiquitous speed cameras. Some people (such as Christopher Huhne) simply lie about who was driving the speeding vehicle, and others claim not to know the ID of the driver, but the consequences of being caught can be nasty. These cases tend to be listed in just a few courts, which can be pretty tiresome for the bench members. As it happens these cases are a rarity in my court, so this week the S172 that appeared on my list was the first that I have ever done, in about 30 years on the bench. The evidence was pretty thin, and we acquitted. The clerk told us later that these cases often fail to stick.

They are a tidy source of revenue for the various loophole specialists in the legal profession, as many people will cough up a hefty sum to keep their driving licence.

In the aftermath of the appalling murder of an MP some commentators are looking at the occasionally poisonous comments made about politicians. The received wisdom of the public is that politicians are dishonest, but that is almost invariably a misreading. If MPs and others had to answer every question frankly, life would be impossible. Most of the usual questions would have to be answered with "I don't know" or "well, I hope that A happens but it might well be B for all I know." The Paxman figure would then rip the interviewee to shreds. So let's give them a break shall we?

A judge who was verbally abused by a defendant reciprocated at a court hearing where he was being sentenced for breaching an antisocial behaviour order.

John Hennigan, 50, who had breached the order by using racist language towards a black woman and her two children told Chelmsford crown court judge Patricia Lynch QC that she was “a bit of a cunt”. And Judge Lynch replied: “You are a bit of a cunt yourself.”

When Hennigan screamed back “Go fuck yourself”, the judge replied: “You too.” He reportedly also shouted “Sieg Heil” – a pro-Hitler chant used in Nazi Germany – and banged the glass panel of the dock as he was jailed for 18 months.

Hennigan, from Harlow, Essex, has dozens of previous convictions for offences including drug and firearm possession and common assault.

An asbo was previously imposed on him in 2005 when a swastika was discovered daubed on the front door of his council house.

I can understand the Judge's  reaction, but I have never used that word in court, other than in direct quotation from the evidence.


Perhaps a quiet word from the circuit presider might be in order here.

As some have noticed, I haven't put on too many posts of late, due mostly to my slightly dodgy health and to family commitments.. In addition I am weeks away from my enforced retirement as a JP when I hit 70 at the end of October.

I shall keep the blog going as long as people click on to it, and I shall take the chance to say a few things that might have got me into hot water as a magistrate. 

Stay tuned, and it might be worth your while. If not, at least it's free!

My bench recently arranged its AGM at a nearby Crown Court, in accordance with the sensible policy of using HMCTS property assets whenever possible.

Unfortunately the IT that we use to display documents and suchlike proved to be incompatible with the Crown Court kit. Surprised? Me neither.

I sat today in a bench of two with a liked and respected colleague who is to retire in a couple of months when she reaches seventy (although you would never guess it)..Before the off, we fantasised about how bulletproof we felt, as disregarding the guidelines could at worst result in ejection from the bench that would take longer than we have left to sit.

We dealt mostly with breaches of community orders: the miscreants were mostly addled by drugs, and immune to letters or calls from probation. I was obliged, several times, to explain in plain language that it was the defendant's reponsibility to stay in touch with probation, rather than the other way round.

Our powers are limited in these cases, so I went home doubting that we had achieved very much.

The House of Commons has just refused to allow pardons to men convicted decades ago of sex offences that are no longer illegal. The issue has stirred up the inevitable hornets' nest of Twitter and Press comments, and we are left with the illogical situation that those men (yes, all men) who have died will be pardoned but the living remain with a stain on their character.

I suspect that the furore is largely a matter of semantics; a 'pardon' has a defined legal meaning, but in common parlance it has different implications. If I offend someone, or tread on their toe in error, they my well pardon me for the wrong that I have done them, and that is that. However, a pardon for  a crime looks to the layman as if the offence was indeed committed , but the Queen will overlook it. That is not at all what the convicted men are looking for, but rather an apologetic wiping clean of the slate. Only the archaic concept of a  royal pardon looks to be possible in law, unless legislation can be changed.

Common compassion suggests that the huge shift in public attitudes to same-sex relationships should be reflected in the law. It is a small  matter in the great scheme of things, but means a great deal to the men affected. Parliament is rammed to the doors with lawyers: surely a couple of them could draft a swift form of words to clear up this relatively minor injustice? 

When the current third-runway project was in its first flush of 'yes we can, no we can't' I said something rather tactless to my then Bench Chairman. I grew up near Heathrow (although I knew it as London Airport, but we shall let that pass).

To a Hayes boy, who went to school in Uxbridge, the way to the airport on spotting days went through the unprepossessing suburbs of Sipson and West Drayton. The airport brought great prosperity to the area, but its hinterland remained grim.

My then Chairman lived in Sipson, in a house that had been purchased on generous terms by the airport people, but which stands (as it still does, but for how much longer I cannot say) and is at pretty much the exact point where the airliners' wheels will meet the tarmac, with that puff of blue smoke from the tyres. So in my rather thoughtless way I ventured the opinion that most of West Drayton and Sipson would be improved by a thick layer of ferro-concrete. He sniffed and walked away.

The TV news tonight interviewed various locals who oppose the proposed new runway at Heathrow, some of them in an emotional state. One lady said that she had lived in Harmondsworth for over twenty years - but the airport opened in 1946, since when anyone who cared to elevate their gaze might have deduced that there was an airport across the Bath Road.

I sat in my crumbling courthouse a couple of months ago, having edged past the permanently-stuck gate on the justices' car park, and made my way up the nearly-new lift to the assembly room. It is a handsome room, built in 1907 but has sadly not seen a lick of paint in the last decade-and-a-half and more.

Everywhere are signs of decay and neglect - but no matter. I understand the desperate need for the government to bring expenditure under control, even if that means denying resources to the public service that I have served unpaid these thirty years. There are still biscuits (amazingly) and most of the lights come on when you press a switch. There is some mysterious  kit that we think might be for use in the new all-electronic courthouse. It still bears the protective film that we see on expensive audio visual stuff to protect it on its long journey from a Chinese sweatshop.

I have recently received an email from  www.gov.uk/annual-tax-summary setting out the tax that I paid in the last fiscal year setting out the tax that I paid (direct tax only, so forget the taxes on consumption such as liquor duties and Council Tax (fifty quid a week on my modest Thames Valley bungalow).

Much more interesting is the breakdown of where it went, revealing how little our fellow citizens know of what is done with the country's collective cash.

Not that much goes on the justice system.

A colleague, who has sometimes posted here as Bystander N, has sent me the following, asking me to put it on the blog. It is gratifying, and I hope that it is true.

• Tomorrow is a particularly sad day for my bench. I know Bystander and he had no idea I was going to

  write this short piece. Tomorrow he will be officially “past it”, though of course in reality nothing like

  past it and he is as sharp as they come.

  Both here on this blog and in our retiring rooms we will miss his kindness, warmth, immense

  knowledge, sense of fair play, sense of humour and seemingly endless stream of amusing court

  anecdotes.

  I have not always agreed with him on bail and sentence decisions but that’s the way the system

  works. I have learned a great deal from him and I am really sorry he will not be amongst us any

  longer. I have heard him say that he thinks he saw the best of the bench many years ago. He may

  be right but I’m still sure, even if he will not miss all of it, he will miss most of it.

I have just had a letter on lovely thick straw-coloured letterhead from the Royal Courts of Justice in which a Rt.Hon.Lord Justice thanks me for my 31 years' service on the bench. 

That's nice, and I shall pass it on to my granddaughters in due course. Both of their parents are solicitors. My impending third grandchild will have two journalists as parents, so that's nice too.

I am afraid that my mind has slipped off matters legal today, since my new granddaughter Martina was born at 1am GMT  today, in Bogota, Colombia. Congratulations to parents Matthew and Tata.

The right-wing fanatic who is accused of the murder of Jo Cox MP has opted not to give evidence nor to call any witnesses in his defence. The jury will be directed by the judge as to how to deal with this.

He is of course perfectly entitled to remain silent, just as the jury is perfectly entitled to draw the inferences that it finds proper from his decision. In times past courts sometimes had to decide whether the accused was 'mute of Malice' or 'mute by Visitation of God'.

This is a situation that I have only faced a few times in court. We gravely retired to consider, and I took the bench carefully through the decision making process as if we were assessing a real defence. We then took great care to prepare our reasons for our blindingly obvious decision, reading them out slowly and carefully before handing them down to the Clerk for the file. It all felt a bit unreal, but it is in odd cases such as these that everything has to be done just so.

Guilty it was then, to no one's great surprise.

Prisons are in the news again, following recent outbreaks of disorder. This is an excellent piece from the Telegraph

I have been to Hollesley Bay a couple of times; it had a completely different culture from closed prisons such as the Scrubs, with a target of getting inmates ready for work on release.

A friend recently asked me to cast an eye over a summons she has received for a speeding offence. She was going too fast for a speed awareness course or a fixed penalty, and was duly reported. She is going through the Single Justice Procedure, which is a new one on me, but I expect that it consists of one JP sitting alone with a clerk, dealing with the simpler cases. In days gone by I used to sit alone on Saturdays when I could usually expect about ten or fifteen cases, mostly remands or discharges. My maximum power was a penalty of one pound or one day's imprisonment, which could fill the bill for he usual overnight drunks and nuisances. The real work was deciding on bail, and that is a serious matter when you are on your own.
I shall be interested to see how the new procedure works in practice; no doubt my one-time colleagues will be able to fill me in.

In the six months since my retirement from the bench I have not had cause to visit the courthouse. This week, however, I volunteered to show some local people around the building, and I was agreeably surprised to find that I still remembered the pass code for the car park. Our visitors were very interested and full of questions, which reminded me of my very early days as a JP when I found out just how little people knew about the court and its workings. That was a prime reason for my starting a blog a decade ago.

Great Britain's bobsleigh team call for all sliding tracks to be covered after heavy snowfall at the Winter Youth Olympics in Austria.

Ski Sunday will be back for the 2011/12 season

Ski Sunday presenter Ed Leigh is wowed by Sochi two years ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics

Great Britain's Elizabeth Yarnold wins a bronze medal at the women's skeleton World Championship.

Sevenoaks slider Lizzy Yarnold says the fact Britain has no real purpose built tracks is the main reason behind British success in the sport

UK Sport announces a large investment in British Ski and Snowboarding to be spent in the run-up to the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

British number one Zoe Gillings finishes sixth at the penultimate round of the boarder-cross World Cup in Valmalenco.

Canadian skier Nick Zoricic dies from head injuries after crashing heavily in a World Cup skicross race in Switzerland.

Scotland beat Italy and Canada but fall short of reaching the World Women's Curling Championship play-offs.

Britain's number one snowboarder Zoe Gillings will receive podium funding towards the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia.

Great Britain's men's ice hockey team receives a grant from the IOC to help in its bid to qualify for the 2014 Winter Olympics

Last weekend I had the pleasure of being a panelist at the first annual Mississippi Book Festival at the State Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi!


For me, the weekend started with the plane flight out on Friday and a lovely reception that evening at the Eudora Welty House. Representatives of the Eudora Welty Foundation were on hand to provide tours and answer any and all questions about Jackson's favorite daughter.  It was a great chance to talk to the organizers and volunteers, as well as other authors.

The next morning was breakfast at the Winter Archives Building, where the staff gave us a tour and showed us the forthcoming Museum of Civil Rights and Mississippi History Museum.

Then we were off to opening ceremonies, where the Jackson State University Marching Band performed on the Capitol steps, and then the panels!  The Harper Lee Reconsidered panel, held in the old Supreme Court chamber, was lively and fascinating (and also covered by C-SPAN).  I wasn't able to make it to the picture books panel due to the long line, but hear it went well, and I'd had the chance to talk with the presenters the night before :-).

My panel was the Young Readers panel, and featured moderator Margaret McMullan, and panelists Kimberly Willis Holt, Taylor Kitchings, Deborah Wiles, Carolyn Brown, and Cassie Beasley.  Margaret did a great job as moderator and kept the conversation going and on track. :-).

Many thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees for making the event such a success!

Altogether, it was a fantastic event, with standing-room-only crowds and a terrific venue!  Here's a report on the festival from the Clarion-Ledger: Book Festival Attendance Outpaces Projections.

And here are some pics from out and about festival weekend:

My duffel bag leaves the jetway in Houston

Art deco Greyhound Station, downtown Jackson

Kerry Madden, Susan Eaddy, Hester Bass, Chris Barton in the Eudora Welty House Garden

Deborah Wiles, Kerry Madden on the Eudora Welty House lawn

In front of the Eudora Welty House

MS State Capitol

Kerry Madden, Kimberly Willis Holt

W. Ralph Eubanks, Margaret McMullan

Jackson State University Marching Band

View from the Capitol steps

Capitol interior and dome

Dome in House of Representative Chamber

Dome of Senate Chamber

Mayflower Cafe

Kimberly, Taylor, Deborah, Margaret, Me, Cassie, Carolyn

As of November 10, 2015, BORROWED TIME (the sequel to CHRONAL ENGINE) is now available in bookstores everywhere as well as online (in hardcover and ebook)!  Signed copies are available from BookPeople.

In an article titled, 'Borrowed Time' mixes paleontology and fantasy, Saturday's Austin American-Statesman had a great review of BORROWED TIME, stating it's "a slam-dunk for dinosaur aficionados and will appeal as well to those who are fans of literary time travel and outdoorsy adventure."

Sunday was the launch party at BookPeople! I had great fun doing a presentation discussing the connections between the book, Charles Umlauf, dinosaurs, Johnny Weissmuller, and me (really).

The dinosaur standees for the photo booth were a hit, as were the refreshments including water, soft drinks, wine and cheese, and crackers. (The wine, from the Languedoc region of France, is made from grapes grown in Cretaceous clays where dinosaur fossils have have been found).

But the real eye-opener was the mosasaur cake by author/cakelustrator Akiko White. About two feet high, it featured a mosasaur sculpted from modeler's chocolate on a chocolate cake base with buttercream frosting! She'll be doing a youtube video on the making of it soon (and I'll link when it's available).  Suffice to say that still pictures don't do it justice -- it was mounted on a motorized turntable and illuminated with a blue strobe that made it look like it was underwater!

Here are the pics:

Me and cake

Carmen Oliver and T.rex

Akiko assembles! (photo courtesy Akiko White)

Presenting (photo courtesy Akiko White)

Cake!

Refreshments

Signing

Frances Hill and Lindsey Lane (photo courtesy of Shelley Ann Jackson)

Shelley Ann Jackson and Lindsey Lane (photo courtesy Shelley Ann Jackson)

 Many thanks to BookPeople for hosting the event, to everyone who came for the event, and to everyone who helped out: Akiko, for making the awesome cake; Cynthia Leitich Smith; Carmen Oliver; Lindsey Lane; Shelley Ann Jackson; and Cory Putnam Oakes!

Cake topper in its natural habitat

A few years back, when Cynthia Leitich Smith was off to Vermont for the VCFA residency, I undertook an exploration of Austin pizza joints and pizza blogging: the rules were these: aside from a dinner salad prior to the pizza, my meals were pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  For ten days.  For the record, the first time I did it, I lost five pounds; the second time, two and a half.

Here's the inaugural post from 2009:  A Pizza a Day and Other Weird Activities.

I tried this again January 2015, but posted only to my Facebook account (I'll be reproducing the posts here along with this edition, with the term "archive" in the header).  I also did it in July 2015.

To view the entire line-ups, just click the "pizza a day" label.

This time, I decided to do something a little different, since I'm on the verge of exhausting Austin's specialty pizza places:  I'm going to see how many pizzas I can make using various techniques.  I'll also take a look at some of the places I've missed or have recently opened.

And, for Christmas, I received this nifty little item:

Yes, it is a starship Enterprise pizza cutter.  So of course I had to make a couple Star Trek-inspired pizzas:
(You can see the Enterprise if you squint real hard).  The saucer section was Canadian bacon with an olive for the bridge.  The nacelles were scallions and the engineering section Belgian endive.  The pizza didn't turn out so great but the cutter worked fantastically.

I also made a pizza in honor of our Klingon allies:

This one sort of drifted apart due to migration of the mozzarella, but it is a Klingon D7 class battlecruiser.  The main hull was a green pepper, while the nacelle supports were red onion.  The nacelles themselves, and the neck section, were scallions, and the bridge was a mushroom slice.

Q'apla!