17. Top 5 children's books? Why, all 5 of the "Dark Is Rising" novels by Susan Cooper. I routinely recommend these to parents who have kids that like fantasy but want to steer them away from Harold Potter and his wizard cop shenanigans.

Robin McKinley's "Blue Sword" and "The Hero and the Crown" are superb fantasies written for younger readers. I believe readers of any age can appreciate and love Ursula K. LeGuin's "Earthsea" novels. Lloyd Alexander writes phenomenal young person novels, not just his Prydain Chronicles.

I recommend Alexander's Welsh-mythology-inspired Prydain Chronicles to anyone who finds Narnia too smarmy and heavy-handed. His other novels like Westmark are also great, though verging on more mature. Alan Garner's "Weirdstone of Brisingamen" and E. Nesbitt's "Five Children and It" deserve mention

We have higher rates of kidney and bladder problems compared to the general population, and historically rather than address this, medicine has chosen to either ignore it or blame our healthcare. Nope, turns out marginalization just destroys bodies. Quelle surprise.

Sandy Ernest Allen@sandyernestallen.bsky.social · 1h ago

Here's my Cosmo piece about how segregated bathrooms have impacted my own health www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a6...

Introducing Boron — A WYSIWYG editor for designing beautiful CLI screenshots It's Carbon or ray[dot]so for terminals instead of code blocks 👾 ✅ ANSI colors & styles ✅ richtext copy/paste from terminals ✅ export to png/svg/jpg/webp/text boron.sh

Boron — beautiful images of your terminal

Compose a terminal session, keep its ANSI colors, and export it as an image.

boron.sh

The inability of journalists to notice right wing outrage as a business model is a defining attribute of this decade.

5 (but it's not weak, it's a double latte - or if it's tea 1 but lightly brewed) 4 1 alt text numbered (1-6) photos of lines of coffee (black to milky), toast (untoasted to burnt) and steak (rare to very well done) headed settle this debate

B_Rye989@brye989.bsky.social · 2d ago

3 5 4

elaborate flirtations with people who WORK FOR YOU are never cute

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social · 17h ago

A congressman sent his staffer a box with a puzzle inside. Once she put the puzzle together it revealed a hand-written note inviting her on a date to an Adam Sandler show.

did Musk ask Grok for those figures? SpaceX running its own phone network is another of those 'coming real soon' promises we've heard before

Tom Rebbeck@tomrebbeck.bsky.social · 18h ago

They said that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mo have revenues of $600bn, which will be news to them ($300bn is probably closer). SpaceX said that it intends to win "quite a few of their customers"

Andrew describes the relationship between the version conflict resolution strategies chosen by different package ecosystems and how that determines where costs are incurred.

Andrew Nesbitt@andrewnez.bsky.social · last wk.

Why npm Dependency Trees Are So Big nesbitt.io/2026/07/28/w...

Ice is spending millions on outside agencies to sweep up Americans who criticize it on social media in a far-reaching dragnet that infringes free speech. “As far as I can tell, all of this is about people saying naughty things about ICE and immigration enforcement." www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics

The agency says its surveillance program searches for threats to agents, but critics see free-speech infringements.

wsj.com

I'd love to see more folks fill out the interest form for testing monetization features on Leaflet! I'm particularly excited to hear what y'all think about this part — ideas for going *beyond* the typical paid subs model

Piloting paid memberships for the open social web!

Lab Notes 035: building monetization features for Leaflet creators, starting with paid memberships — tell us if you'd like to be the first to try, and what else you need!

lab.leaflet.pub

Leaflet@leaflet.pub · yesterday

Leaflet is the new† Substack‡, you heard it here first folks! ✍️ 🍃 💸 †not just new — better — b/c no platform lock-in, great Bluesky integration…and now, monetization too! ‡actually even bigger than that; not just us but a whole open ecosystem replacing Substack! here if you have any q's!

X Spots The Mark.

I can't believe the carnival barker decieved me.

The Associated Press@apnews.com · yesterday

SpaceX shares are down by half from their June peak as investors worry Musk may have oversold them on its future prospects.

I think Poison Ivy and Magneto are in basically the same boat there. they've been around so long, and written by so many people in so many contexts, their respective motives have occupied basically every point on the spectrum of reasonableness. they've gone quantum

It’s failures over the lifespan, but actually I’ve heard that “doesn’t work out of the box” is not as rare as you’d think. My position on this is that you must treat GPUs as a fallible resource and react accordingly, expecting memory errors, GPU faults, driver faults, or badly behaved kernels

Comment sections are so underrated. I recently learned in one that a small group of men is called a podcast

Shopify managed to get Ruby Central to trash most of an ecosystem in a way that ended up with it reporting a maintainer to the FBI!

André Arko@indirect.io · 5d ago

I wrote an update on the dispute with Ruby Central over Bundler and RubyGems. I'm sad it's reached this point, especially since Ruby Central's conferences are a big part of what convinced me to join the Ruby community back in the day. andre.arko.net/2026/07/30/rub…

the probably with treating AI as freakishly different from every other technology ever is that you fall into the same hyperbole as the AI labs when you could just be saying 'hey, this stuff is still baking' rather than 'end of the world in 12-124 months from my mark MARK!'

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 21h ago

amusing pull from July 2024 www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-alt... xcancel.com/brianryhuang...

Update: group chats can now host up to 100 members.

Bluesky@bsky.app · 2mo ago

What's up, chat! Group chats are rolling out today in the new v1.124 update. This is our first feature built for communities, and there's more to come.

If not an intelligence operation, why intelligence operation shaped?

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 23h ago

automatically running signal messages through a stranger's AI is, I think, the worst pitch and idea I've ever been cold pitched in my life and that is saying a lot

Thanks. Yes, that's what I was trying to say, but took too long to get there. Our politics community is strong, and I'd love for us to expand into new communities. Science and sports have already taken off. Birding, gardening, K-pop, we're open to all (except nazis and jerks).

Remember back in March when I did hourly comic day but for my colonoscopy prep? Well, the fine folks at @ohjoysextoy.bsky.social asked me to reprise it for their site and it's up today! Go check it out! Now in color and with more info! www.ohjoysextoy.com/adventures-i...

Adventures In Colonoscopy by Cat Farris

Text: Oh Joy Sex Toy presents: Adventures in Colonoscopy by Cat Farris Image: Cat Farris draws in a simple, energetic, cartoon-y style with a color palette of yellows and greens. A person in a cowboy ...

ohjoysextoy.com

honestly, I struggle to find one thing that W is doing that matches what it says it is doing

Emelia@thisismissem.social · 21h ago

W Social doesn't actually ensure that the account username / display name actually matches, from what I can tell given they had a "tiktok" account setup that definitely was not TikTok as in the organisation.

Even if you don't use it to generate any code, it's sooo cool that you can generate something like this in 2 minutes to show a whole codebase on one graph, if you look at some legacy* code and don't even know where to start 🎨 * every code you write is legacy code when you look at it 3 months later

Should people really have to install adblock in cars

BMW is putting Spider-Man ads on your dashboard, after promising it never would

The promotion began on July 27, 2026, and is scheduled to run through August 10 across more than 70 markets. On supported vehicles, starting the car brings...

techspot.com

voluntary and not even slightly transparent

Techmeme@techmeme.com · 21h ago

Sources: the White House doesn't plan to publicly release its voluntary AI framework; details will be available to the companies that are part of the process (Maria Curi/Axios) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Wizard of Earthsea Security Posture

Hannah Posts@hannahposts.bsky.social · 2d ago

Safety tip: don't put your child's name on their backpack so that a potential predator can't use their name to get close to them. Also, don't say their name out loud in public. Use a fake name. Get all your friends and family to use that name. Then get the fake name embroidered on the backpack

also, imagine that Adams delivers his final line sounding like, ooh, an extra in Shada

The Midnight Society@midnightpals.bsky.social · 23h ago

Douglas Adams: life seems harsh and cruel. i feel all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain Barker: i got great news for you! Barker: the treatment is simple Barker: the great humorist douglas adams is doing a reading tonight. go see him. Adams: but doctor

the leader of the group accused of some dodgy sex offenses having the home addresses of people doing their job and taking down emblems of nationalism is creepy

Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · yesterday

Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.