`fogus

I wrote a post “The Centenary of 'Flower Phantoms' by Ronald Fraser” celebrating a beautiful whimsical fantasy. —> wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-...

If you liked… Then you might like… 

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! From missing characters to damaged reams, this is the tale of recreating Ada Lovelace's Notes. It's equally an investigation of old books and the work of making new ones. Link in reply.

joke = aha + ahh

I remember a time when it took months or years to create a crappy hobby programming language, now it takes a matter of days!

hugging face

Can someone tell me the name of that Woody Guthrie song with the lyrics “… from Lake America to the Gulf of America to the American Ocean to the other American Ocean…”?

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll vibe code it." Now they don't know how many problems they have.

RIP John Crowley

The reworded article on Boing Boing about my “Born Against…” post might be longer than my post. boingboing.net/2026/08/12/h...

Why can't modern language designers stop shoving curly braces and semicolons into their new programming languages? They're Algolholics. 🥁

Happy Birthday (Aug 7, 1946) to L. Peter Deutsch, computing luminary and inventor of the REPL. obsolescence.dev/interactive-...

A Reddit community for the Read-Eval-Print-λove lifestyle at www.reddit.com/r/ReadEvalPr...

… is the best kind of synth-rock.

Emblogginated "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage" --> blog.fogus.me/llm/born-aga...

Raise your hand if you're going to Clojure/conj this year? ✋

From about 7th grade to the time that I graduated college was peak TV to me. In that span I found the three big shows of my life: STNG -> Twin Peaks -> X-Files. I will still stop whatever I'm doing if I happen upon an episode from one of these shows.

I want to read the rest of Edwin Drood.

We revisit one of the new horror classics of the 2010s, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. Tangents include (but are not limited to): good cinematography, twisted coming-of-age stories, suburban horror, and. of course, where is our damn clamshell e-reader already?

Saw the Doomsday trailer... yawn... still no Alpha Flight.

Hey what better way to celebrate not being able to breathe air because of wildfire smoke than to go to a movie about animals finally getting sick of our shit and attacking us. Tomorrow is DAY OF THE ANIMALS at @musicboxtheatre.bsky.social! I will be there as part of a panel discussion! Go animals!

RIP

What a gift it was to have Sam Neill. Beyond all his other work, fearless performances in two of my top tier horror films. I will miss his Instagram dispatches from the Aotearoa countryside and his herd of animals named after other actors.

Does anyone else find it particularly insidious that a bulk of LLM tokens in the workplace are burned to help make tools that make LLMs more useable in the workplace?

William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC] (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc #programminglanguages #metacircularinterpreter #lisp

Libraries of dead literary figures has always been a topic of study and interest. Sadly, no one gives a hoot about the libraries of computerists. "Dijkstra's library" is the first attempt to even inventory such a thing since Erik Naggum's books were listed years ago. www.dijkstrascry.com/inventory

Has anyone found out if 1-trillion dollars is enough to buy happiness?

Ha! My Lithp project from 2008 made a brief blip on the HN front page earlier today. fogus.me/fun/lithp/

Saw "Backrooms" and really liked it. It fits nicely into exactly the kinds of films that I love; those that show how the mundane world is punctured by something weird and eerie.

The weirdest experiences in my life have involved light switches.

Received my copy of Arthur Machen’s book of essays The Guide, published by Darkly Bright Press in the mailbox today. This little lovely contains a humble appendix by yours truly!

The problem with listening to music with bleeps and bloops in it is that I constantly think that I'm getting Discord notifications.

I'm going to save my company some money today by using my human brain!

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 thank you @batsov.net

Was there anything more beautiful than a 1980s video-store horror section?

See you there DC!

AI must be IA, or not at all.

Emblogginated about LLMs -- "Mind the van Emden Gap" --> blog.fogus.me/llm/van-emde...

The legendary game designer, distributor, and publisher Louis Zocchi has left us at the age of 91. He founded Zocchi Distribution (the first distributor dedicated exclusively to hobby games) and Gamescience (which made games and polyhedral dice).

An ocean of mouthwash can’t wash the bad taste in my mouth brought on by learning what shadow pages are. 🤢

The phrase "Icelandic doom metal" popped into my head this morning and now my day has been made so much better.

We need a cutesy name for the dialect LLMglish used in the States. Something like “gherkin” maybe…

Made a little video about the metaverse, adapted from the part of my dissertation I had to write twice last week because the cat deleted it youtu.be/aWRzvOiqc-s?...

Long drive to SC this weekend and I need a 10+ hour audio feed of Werner Herzog talking about… really anything at all.

I'm very happy to announce that Programming Clojure, 4th edition on @pragprog.com is now available for both ebook and print orders! pragprog.com/titles/shclo...

The Clojure Documentary trailer has dropped! www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJEy...

We found the ideal “quiet little horror as giallo”—1976’s The House with Laughing Windows. We discuss weird Italian towns, brightly-lit attics, and this film’s overlap with folk horror. Also: what’s in that bag?

Emblogginated "As Presaged in March 1993" whereby I read an old computing magazine and write about it with the benefit of hindsight. --> blog.fogus.me/as-presaged/...

I received Ghosts & Scholars #50, containing my first non-computing-related published article! On top of that, I got a nice mention by the amazing Rosemary Pardoe in the editorial. (swoon) That said, this is the final issue of a publication that I've read for decades, so my feelings are bittersweet.