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FOR SOME REASON FOR TWWOO YEARS I FEEL THE URGE TO KEEP SCREAMING!1!

a humble nudibranch — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:00:35 GMT

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY!!! EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPSLOCKS ON!11!

HIS IS A SPECIAL DAY IN MY FAMILY!!1 MY MOTHER WHO WAS A TYPIST IN WWII ALWAYS TYPED WITH CAPLSLOCK ON AND CONTINUED ALL HER LIFE!1 ME TOO!!1 >^..^<

Yes, online poker has been compromised too

anoldfriend6 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 02:56:08 GMT

There's a dirty "secret" about online poker. Serious collusion issues. These collusions are done by bots. Many of these bot farms are in Russia. And in the beginning of this video is a 30 second clip of dozens of synced laptops cheating real players out of their money.

"There is nothing easy about writing those words."

doctornemo — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 01:17:45 GMT

BioWare, 1995-2026. Electronic Arts shut down the game developer behind major titles and series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

From the Ars Technica writeup: EA doesn't have public stockholders anymore after a $55 billion deal led by Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners took the company private last year. At the time of that move, analysts told Ars to expect "layoffs, studio closures, and [selling] of IP" as the newly private and now heavily debt-ridden company put "a bigger focus on live services, more focus on annual sports franchises, [and] microtransactions" to help increase profits.

Colors in each year's LEGO sets, 1986-2025

soylent00FF00 — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:40:42 GMT

Unlabeled Puzzle Four XY graphs, 10 axis labels. Eight of the labels belong and two do not. A daily puzzle game for graphical data nerds.

This post was at least partially inspired by Are Lego fans about to "Get Lucky"?

(Mild spoiler for today's puzzle)

Are Lego fans about to "Get Lucky"?

Snacks237 — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:10:47 GMT

Lego fansite announces possible Daft Punk set. Lego fan site The Brickfan is reporting that a new Lego collaboration with Daft Punk will be announced tomorrow (October 22, 2026). Here's the teaser trailer. This "Daft Punk Concert" set might be the one. From the Lego Ideas site: "4 years ago, this set won the Grand Prize in the global LEGO competition Music To Our Ears!, though it wasn't selected to become an official set."

Household waste could make for sweeter tomatoes

chariot pulled by cassowaries — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:31:00 GMT

Household waste could make for sweeter tomatoes. Research has found that the flavour and aroma of tomatoes improve when compost made from food and garden organics is added to the soil.

Major PHP Vulnerability Discovered

signsofrain — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 18:02:24 GMT

Writeup at wiz.io A critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language has been recently discovered which can grant remote code execution on affected hosts. Almost all current versions of PHP (from 5.4 all the way up to current 8.x releases) are affected - just about all PHP-backed web apps can offer gateways to exploitation - Wordpress, Roundcube, Joomla, phpBB, etc Patches to mitigate the vulnerability have been released as of this morning.

Frankly, questing is exploitative

Lorc — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:00:21 GMT

Spell X Sword is an ongoing webcomic by Robin Books about modern city life with magic and monsters, where seers busk on street corners and quests are the foundation of a shitty gig economy. Two adventurers meet cute and surely neither of them have any dark secrets lurking in their pasts. Updates Fridays.

She's written various autobiographical comics, as well as a completed fantasy webcomic Experience Boost, although by her own admission it's something of a journeyman work.

sauve qui peut

mittens — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:51:56 GMT

Politico: The Trump administration's disaster chief told state officials Tuesday they must increase their financial reserves and emergency capabilities to handle most disasters on their own, without federal help.

Previously, from Samantha Montano's Disasterology blog: State, territorial, tribal, and local governments would face a staggering increase in financial responsibility for emergency management. In cases where federal disaster funding will still be made available, decisions about who receives help, when, and how much would fall to state officials, including those with little disaster experience and minimal resources and capacity. The Council's recommendations would disproportionately harm smaller, poorer, and rural states and deepen discriminatory outcomes along class and racial lines. The FEMA Review Council provides no evidence that their recommendations would create a more effective, efficient, and equitable emergency management system.

Big Mess in TLS

postcommunism — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:27:02 GMT

Security personnel around the world are on high alert Tuesday following the discovery of eight TLS certificates with private keys so weak they could allow anyone to mint trusted browser and app credentials for any site on the Internet.

The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that's challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2384, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.

"Not every author is a narcissist, but they all want to be recognized."

Kattullus — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:46:04 GMT

This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don't ask for money from authors. But who was behind it? Had these individuals actually read my work, they would have wanted to stay away from me. I have spent the last 10 years reporting on transnational fraud.

–The Lucrative World of Literary Scams by Snigdha Poonam. The story also links to I Got Scammed by a Fake Book Club ON PURPOSE! by Marsh Rose. Poonam interviewed M. L. Stark, who wrote her own account of being scammed.

But what were the old formulas, exactly?

chavenet — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:01:11 GMT

I would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for. I entered a terrifying fun house of American enshittification. I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what's going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow. [Grub Street; ungated]

Aberfan 60

paduasoy — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:52:53 GMT

Sixty years ago, on 21 October 1966, 116 children and 28 adults died in the Welsh village of Aberfan when pit waste destroyed their school. Amgueddfa Cymru (the National Museum of Wales) has an exhibition and archive remembering the tragedy, and the National Library of Wales has an archive. Nuffield College has an online research project. The BBC: 60 years on: The Aberfan disaster through the eyes of those who survived. The Guardian writes about the legacy of the disaster, and links to its 1966 coverage. ITV has a video, The trauma and tragedy of Aberfan (28min).

SS Richard Montgomery

BigCalm — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:51:21 GMT

The masts of the SS Richard Montgomery have been removed in an effort to decrease the risk of catastrophic explosion. In 1944, the SS Richard Montgomery ran aground on a sandbank in the Thames Estuary carrying large volumes of munitions. If the ship exploded it would be one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts of all time and would hurl a huge volume of water, mud, metal and munitions 10000 feet in the air, devastate the nearby port of Sheerness, and sink any nearby craft in the Thames Estuary. When the similar SS Kielce exploded near Folkestone, it had a tenth of the explosives aboard and was in deeper water, yet still caused an explosion the size of a minor earthquake. The wreck's position has endangered plans to build an airport, has a no-fly zone above it and an exclusion zone around it to prevent anyone approaching, but despite this a paddle boarder still managed to get to the wreck last year. There currently appears to be no long term plan to deal with the wreck other than to try to keep people away from it and hope that it doesn't explode.