Mark Twomey

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:56:53 +0100

I’m reading Other Worlds Than These: A Talisman Novel (The Talisman Trilogy) after taking a Stephen King break. Wow, we did screw up back in 1990 when he restored ~400 pages of flabby writing his editors cut from The Stand & people bought it. This book is half the size with a strong editor.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:21:19 +0100

Finished reading: Roll the Calls by Ari Emanuel 📚 Ari is the least consequential of the Emmanuel brothers but the richest. Never settle for what you have; be upset someone else has something different and take it from them. Go back to being unsatisfied. He’s unhappy, and it comes off the page.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:25:02 +0100

Finished reading: Strata by Terry Pratchett 📚 I don’t advise reading Strata if you’ve read and enjoyed Pratchett’s later works. This is a writer lacking a comfortable comedy style, with thin, one-dimensional characters in an unfunny satire of the “we can create planets” genre. Skip it.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:51:50 +0100

The latest Resident Evil is a good horror comedy and worth the trip to the movies. Austin Abram’s hapless organ transport delivery person, Bryan, carries the movie for 90 minutes. Don’t be put off by past franchise entries, this is body horror with laughs.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:06:35 +0100

Sitting in an early afternoon showing of Resident Evil and the theatre is filled with teenage girls. The screaming has already started, we’re only on trailers.

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:46:03 +0100

I got 18 minutes into this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds before turning it off. I’m guessing the story ideas for the numerous gimmick episodes this season were AI generated.

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:19:07 +0100

Watching the annual ‘running of the nerds’ on the BlizzCon Twitch livestreams. Take a shower, fellas. Take a shower.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:51:00 +0100

Currently reading: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson 📚 Did cyberpunk fiction peak in the 90s? Does it matter that it did, or has genre fiction absorbed it and it’s just everywhere now?

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:15:12 +0100

Mistral provides hosted GLM 5.2 via their vibe client. I’ve been using it to do system administration on my Linux, Mac, and Windows systems at home, and it works great! It rooted out and solved a dozen problems that would have taken me hours of research.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 23:55:11 +0100

I restarted World of Warcraft after a 20-year break. It was an effort to play it solo then. Reaching level 60, I stopped, yet Mists of Pandaria Classic offers an enjoyable story introduction. 15 levels in it’s still a kill and fetch quest game. 75 levels left to go, I’ll see if it changes.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:14:28 +0100

Nvidia’s purchase of Hugging Face is a defensive move. They want to ensure they have as much influence in open model development as possible, so no one gets wild ideas of going with non-Nvidia silicon for their open models. I see no customer upside here.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:44:18 +0100

It’s kind of amazing to me that there was a time you could write a utility to restore some computer files and build a profitable business around that. Norton Unerase was the foundation stone for a massive software utilities business in the 80s and 90s. Now it would be vibe coded, and free on Github.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:18:09 +0100

Forever and a Day is the spy fiction/thriller you’d expect from a James Bond novel but in the second chapter I had an “Oh. He’s a psychopath” moment. People overuse “psychopath,” diminishing it. Bond’s callousness here, however, demonstrated a dangerous nature he’s blind to.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:38:48 +0100

There’s something humbling about being in a bookstore, picking up a cheapo paperback and realising the font looks so small that you know why they also sell magnifiers.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:53:12 +0100

If Fable 5 usage is underperforming in the US it’s probably cratering in Europe. Anecdotally, I’m seeing more and more companies deploy Qwen because it’s an open source play and there’s no kill switch at the whim of a government.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:57:41 +0100

I’ve been reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, and there’s, what, seven or eight novels so far? The question strikes me: how much of a repetitive slog are the rest of the books? “Carl punches something until it dies, gets a joke reward as a prize” won’t hold my attention for hundreds of more pages.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:35:12 +0100

As a two-minute visual gag in an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the crew as puppets would be quite funny. Carrying an entire episode, they are a waste of the audience’s time.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:01:08 +0100

It took 15 seconds to withdraw €450 from ATMs that used DOS or OS/2. With the machines now running legacy .NET code on Windows 10, it seems to cost me one second of standing there per euro. And they’ve lowered withdrawal limits to skimp on restocking. Banks use new tech just to make things worse.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:06:26 +0100

It’s been years since WebAssembly support was suggested in the EPUB 4 draft. Allowing eBooks to run scientific calculations and interactive code offline. While I prefer my pages free of distractions, I can see the advantages of this. But no one has made progress. Too harsh on the eReader battery?

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:33 +0100

I didn’t enjoy Waking Life, pseudo-intellectual despite the praise. A demo reel for A Scanner Darkly, masquerading as art. Without rotoscope, it’s a student film: characters vomiting paperback philosophy. In dreams, the dreamer speaks to themselves, this one’s a dull conversationalist.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:55:25 +0100

I like to remind first time employees that professional jealousy fades. Eventually, you realise it’s not a competition. Just you, a golf ball, and a career-length crazy golf course. You keep swinging until retirement or death.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:14:07 +0100

Today someone who isn’t a reader spotted my copy of The King in Yellow. ‘How do you know about that?’ I asked. ‘Minecraft,’ they replied.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:28:27 +0100

I do wonder if the audiobook industry’s ongoing growth will lead to favourite AI narrators, complete with names and “Read by” credits?

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:59:55 +0100

Replace Beverly Hills, 90210’s banality with Red Dragon’s menace, add a lot of sex and drugs, and you’ve got The Shards. A writer as the point of view character in a series? We’re not getting a satisfying ending.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:59:22 +0100

Optical may not be back for everyone, but with the drives and spindles of blank discs I have, it’s back for me. SSDs at 7–8× HDD prices mean a reversion to how I used to buy in 2006: SSD for OS, HDD for media, optical for backup. I didn’t miss the hour it takes to burn a disc. Wow.