For Tolkien’s work, there is the twelve volume “The Complete History of Middle Earth” which is about as inside baseball as you can get for Tolkien.

I’d replace HoME with Parma Eldalamberon, Vinyar Tengwar and other journals publishing his early materials here.

Recommending Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the lectures he has been preparing shortly before his death.

Not an assembly guide for a work of literature, but it’ll help your own process if it’s already ongoing and you want to improve.

The lectures also have some comments on what Calvino himself was doing here and there and why.

The Phoebus cartel strikes again!

Because we have tons of ground-level sensors, but not a lot in the upper layers of the atmosphere, I think?

Why is this important? Weather processes are usually modelled as a set of differential equations, and you want to know the border conditions in order to solve them and obtain the state of the entire atmosphere. The atmosphere has two boundaries: the lower, which is the planet’s surface, and the upper, which is where the atmosphere ends. And since we don’t seem to have a lot of data from the upper layers, it reduces the quality of all predictions.

I know Google likes to localise their websites based on IP addresses. Perhaps the preview was requested from a Russian IP? (not necessarily yours, could be a VPN if you use one or one of LW’s servers)

CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that’s why security updates are important. If not these, it’d have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can’t exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.

You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.

You should enjoy Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar then.

Being an honest observer of the world outside, Mr Palomar seeks patterns in everything and is always torn between constantly emerging contradicting perspectives. He strives to attain transcendent understanding and fails; he also strives to connect with mundane everyday things and fails. He can’t even decide which of the two is a nobler goal, and that indecision is also something he analyses.

It’s a short beautiful book, give it a try.