Odd Obsession

Blu-ray player Apple TV/Television Record player Cassette player VCR Subwoofer Computer Another year, more tech stuff breaking down. My receiver was only 11 years old, but I guess it was its time. Back when I got my first receiver in high school, it was assumed that it would basically last forever, but nowadays the technical changes come fast and furious, so at least it came with some updates. My parents decided to go with bluetooth speakers and forgo the receiver when they moved to a smaller space, but I have a lot of analog media still.  At least the new speaker plugs are just kind of annoying, instead of utterly maddening like the old ones you had to hold down while simultaneously trying to push in the speaker wire.  The main new feature is receiving Bluetooth signals. I can send music from my phone or iPad (or even my iMac, but there's Airplay for that) to the receiver. It even knows the names of the songs somehow. This works for iTunes or apps lik...

Thread by @ash966: "@SecretGamerGrrl What kind of terrifying plot summaries do these guys have in their heads? @SecretGamerGrrl Alt-right Star Trek: WHITE GUY D […]" I unrolled this thread for you, because it's hard to find old Twitter threads, especially replies.

Guys, I am really sad and mad right now about Universal FanCon.  I hadn't heard of it before it was postposed/cancelled one week before it was to occur, but seeing tweets from so many people who were planning to go was heartbreaking. So many artists and vendors losing their first shot at sales/networking and cosplayers and other attendees who never felt accepted at other cons losing a safe space for geeking out.  I'm proud to be an exhibitor and co-creator of the Manga Reading Lounge at Anime Detour and my July staycation at Convergence is a highlight of my year. I can't imagine having an experience like that taken away so suddenly.  The other sad thing is, it might not have failed if the founders hadn't 1) tried to make their first con some huge, money-making endeavor when most cons barely break even , 2) failed to vet one co-founder who had been involved in failed cons before, and 3) they had asked for help from experienced con people. The Twitter conve...

Jfro's 2017 from ash966 on 8tracks Radio . Sorry this is so late, guys.  Format once again ripped off shamelessly from the  Librarian in Black :    Books --  Who Fears Death?, Universal Harvester, Fingersmith, The Collapsing Empire, City of LIght, City of Poison Comics  -- Ooku, Over Easy, Genshiken Second Season, Order of the Stick Movies --  The Shape of Water, Free Fire, Thor: Ragnarok, The Big Sick, Willow Creek, The Boy & the Beast, Atomic Blonde, Mifune: The Last Samurai, Get Out, The Nice Guys, Okja, My Cousin Rachel, The Love Witch, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Gimme Danger, Logan, Moonlight TV Shows --  Stranger Things, Taboo, Black Sails, Orphan Black, Halt & Catch Fire, The Walking Dead, Insecure, GLOW, Billions, The Expanse, Bojack Horseman, Orange Is the New Black, The Path, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, Veep, Train to Busan, Travelers, Silicon Valley, Sense8, RuPaul's Drag Race, Transparent, Powers, The Unb...

Everyone who knows me, knows I love me some breakfast. Even if I wake up at 4 PM, I like to start with some breakfast-type food. Unfortunately, this conflicts with my desire to stay in bed as long as possible on workdays. My solution is to bring portable breakfast items that I can eat between the time the bus drops me at work until the time I have to be on a desk. My go-tos are Quaker Real-Medley oatmeal cups and Jimmy Dean Delites breakfast sandwiches. The only problems with them are that they are 1) full of preservatives and stuff, 2) OK, but make you dream of better food, and 3) kind of rubbery from the microwave in the case of the sandwiches. I'd been trying to find a breakfast sandwich recipe for a long time, but trying to make good eggs for a bunch of sandwiches just seemed really intimidating. I've just mastered making scrambled eggs a few years ago, and they require careful watching to come out right. Then, this article appeared in Lifehacker. The sheer g...

Steampunk Gear Earrings So, since my work got a makerspace a year and a half ago, I've been making more things than ever. One of my favorite sites for making ideas is Instructables . I've made LED bracelets , laser-engraved rubber stamps , and drawstring pouches . My felt cameos are a little different, but this  is where the idea came from. I even became a Pro member to support the site and because I like being able to download .pdfs to consult while making stuff. Youtube videos can be great for showing techniques, but nothing can compare to a step-by-step guide (although Instructables can have video, so best of both worlds, really). As a librarian, I make a lot of those, so I know of what I speak. Since I now have the fancy camera for taking good macro pictures, I wanted to try my hand at making an Instructable. The editing interface is pretty intuitive for anyone who's blogged or added content to a web site. If you make stuff, definitely give it a try. If you w...

So, I decided it was finally time to get me one of those fancy cameras. My point & shoot had finally died from being dropped one too many times, and I went to see Chris Isaak only to have him appear as nothing but a big white blob on my phone. Since I take a lot of pictures already, it seemed a good use of my annual fun spending. We have a DSLR camera at work, and I liked the pictures it took, plus it has that good old-fashioned "clickity-click" sound when you shoot. My main worry was actually the size of the camera. I went to a photowalk once and people seemed to be competing in a who-can-lug-around-the-biggest-Cyclops-beast-around contest. My tiny hands and achy shoulders can't handle that sort of thing. When I did a Google search on "small DSLR cameras" I learned about mirrorless cameras . My photography class teacher said that the lens is actually more important than the body of the camera for taking good pictures, so why not get a small camera th...

It's Reunion time again, and I was back on the wheels of steel. The theme for my radio show this year was Cyberpunk, a musical soundtrack from the 80s to today for movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell , or books like Neuromancer and Synners .  Here's my archived radio show: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fl9era6cgmnpg56/Andrea%20Herman%20-%20Nicecast%20Archived%20Audio%2020170602%201304.mp3?dl=0 T racklist: "Making Of Cyborg" - Kenji Kawai "Ghosts" - Japan "Vienna" - Ultravox "Morningstar In A Black Car" - Ashbury Heights "Crash" - Mesh " Kingdom" - VNV Nation "Neon Lights" -Kraftwerk "Big Electric Cat" - Adrian Belew "I Want You" - Cabaret Voltaire "Driving The Dynamite Truck" - Breaking Circus "Burning Inside" - Ministry "Headhunter" - Front 242 "Self Control" -Raf "Guardian Angel" - Juno Reactor ...

Some of my old mixes from back in the day. Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR . I've been making mix tapes since high school in the early 80s when my best friend spent a year in New Zealand. It kept going in college for high school friends, then it kept up when college buddies went their separate ways. As friends got older and had families, it became my go-to New Year present, as it is a way to show you value your friends while spending minimal cash & not obligating them to buy you anything after spending all their money on presents for family members. I've gone from tape to CD to online playlists, although I still do CDs for presents so people have something tangible. In the old days, when my only computer was a TRS-80 model 100 , I went to Kinko's with some art to copy and cut up and the song list hand-written in large type to reduce to fit a cassette case. Now I have DiscLabel software for that, or I can just upload songs and screenshots to 8tracks ....

I meant to do this before the 4th season started, but oh well... Post-apocalyptic media has had a field day lately, which I couldn't be happier about. Where else can you depict issues such as resource allocation, the nature of leadership, environmental devastation, the consequences of war, etc, AND have people in face paint fighting each other with kung fu and bizarre weapons? When I found out we finally would have a straight, non-zombie post-apoc show (I tried The Tribe , but it was just too low-budget for me), I was was a little excited, but my expectations were low, since it was on the CW, the network to watch white teens get mopey about their crushes on (even their superheroes spend way to much time mooning).  Parenthetical rant time: When will TV creators of action/detective/fantasy/science fiction shows realize that less is more with romance? Especially when stakes are high - it just makes the characters seem to have really bad priorities. There's a reason wh...

Jfro's 2016 from ash966 on 8tracks Radio . Although a lot of sucky things happened in 2016, I'm going to focus on the good stuff. Format once again ripped off shamelessly from the  Librarian in Black :   Books --  Swing Time, You, The Secret History of Wonder Woman,  Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s, Frog Music Comics  -- Patience, The Flowers of Evil, Ooku Movies -- Arrival, Dr. Strange, Green Room,  The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened,  Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia, The Big Short, Crimson Peak, Deadpool, Amy, The Man From Nowhere TV Shows -- Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Better Call Saul, Bojack Horseman, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Archer, The Americans, The 100, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Brooklyn 9-9, Broad City, The Expanse, RuPaul's Drag Race, Powers, Orange Is the New Black, unREAL, Billions, Penny Dreadful, The Walking Dead, Person of Interest, Orphan Black, The Path, The Knick, Vee...

Whenever someone says about a person, "at least he's honest", that's very handy, because then you know right away that they're talking about a terrible person. Terrible people love to use "honesty" as an excuse to say horrible, nasty things right to your face. They imply thereby that everyone else would say it, but they're all just pretending not to be terrible (they don't explain why, if everyone is so terrible, why we all pretend not to be). Abusers love to make you feel that everyone is really horrible, when actually it's just them. This is the mirror of the whole "hypocrisy is worse than anything else, even genocide" thing I discussed in a previous post .  It's all so adolescent. You catch your parents doing something less than great, and all of a sudden they are EVIL INCARNATE. It's time to grow up and differentiate between failing to live up to your ideals and outright evil actions. Let's try to do that in 20...

Photograph by Dimitar Denev .  I've been trying to write an essay about Generation X and popular culture since I saw School of Rock in 2003, but it always eluded me. Then in a fit of insomnia, it came to me as a poem for some strange reason (I'm an English major, but I'm very picky about poetry and don't like most of it). So here it is, enjoy.  Song of the Aging Gen X-er I'm old and I'm tired Of defending what I like. Once it was too odd Now it's too popular, Yet still weird somehow. But why wouldn't I like it? We put weird on the map. We gave you the "graphic novel", I'm not gonna see the movie version? Once it was "Psychotronic" -- King Fu, Horror, Post-Apocalyptic. Now they get awards. And why ever not? Some of us are mad. 1 We had to work so hard to find it. Scour second-hand stores, send away by mail. Self-addressed envelopes. Ask for a ride to the city. "Is the new L & R in yet?...

Once again, I had a great Convergence with J, as well as friends T, L, M, & B, even though I had to wear my unfashionable cam boot for tendinitis (J was great about bringing me food, and I commiserated with other Booted-Americans). It actually went pretty well with my Post-Apoc look (I added black mask makeup in tribute to both Furiosa and Lexa from The 100 ). This year, J and I swore to avoid eating out too much, especially the overdone, overpriced horror that is TGIFriday's. We ate all our meals in the Con Suite , except for one trip to Burger King. I also avoided all news except for that trip, a lovely break from the agony of 2016 current events (RIP Prince).  Thursday: 3:30 Crafty Geek Meetup . We hung out a bit and worked on geeky coloring pages.  7:00 Sci Fi TV Year in Review. I'm always wanting to learn about good shows to watch. This was OK, they mostly talked about shows I already knew about, except one guy was weirdly obsessed with Galavant .   I ...

So my place of work has a Makerspace now, which means I get to make stuff at work, which is pretty cool. To get ready for Con , I thought I'd make some stuff to add to my steampunk costume. The watch is a pattern I downloaded from Thingiverse . The hands didn't come out, but it still looks cool. The hardest part was scraping out the "raft" - the temporary support part - out of everything. I found I'm not good at scraping the inside of a circle with a utility knife without getting my fingers cut, but luckily I didn't lose any. The cameo was based on a project I saw on Instructables , but unfortunately it wasn't complete, because they were waiting on a Kickstarter or something which never happened. So, I just found a clip art of a Victorian-looking cameo and imported it into CorelDraw, which is what we use with our laser engraver (you can create the designs in other programs and import it as a JPG or PDF into Corel, but I needed the practice). Corel ...

So, I just got my tax refund, which means it's time for a big-ticket-item purchase. Usually, it's either technology or home improvement. Last year was both, as I bought a new bigger TV, wire shelving and CD storage. This year, I'm finally replacing Big Iron, my 2007 MacPro tower, with a new iMac. Big Iron was starting not to play nice with current software, not to mention he blows his fan at me sometimes for no good goddamn reason.  Of course, one purchase often leads to others, so I might also try to update my "home office" set-up, maybe a new little table for peripherals, since I won't have a hard drive tower to keep them on, possibly the kind that the Google calls "C" . I have this fantasy of getting selected for Lifehacker's Workspace Show & Tell even though I don't have 6 monitors and a desk made out of a plank from Blackbeard's pirate ship. In honor of tax refund time, here are some of my best (beyond the obvious one...

PIZZA RAT/ CIGARETTE CRAB 2016: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN https://twitter.com/peter_fries/status/646062337833627648 Format once again ripped off shamelessly from the Librarian in Black :  Books -- Station Eleven, The Incident Report , The Haunting of Hill House, Tipping the Velvet, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Wolf in White Van, Dread Journey. Comics -- Museum of Mistakes, New Lone Wolf and Cub, Order of the Stick: Blood Runs in the Family, The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality & the Financial Crisis. Movies -- Snowpiercer, Chappie, Mad Max: Fury Road, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, Ant-Man, Ex Machina, Tangerine, What We Do in the Shadows  TV Shows -- The Americans, Archer, The Killing (US), Black Sails, The Bridge (US), Danger 5, Silicon Valley, Ray Donovan, Broad City, Sons of Anarchy, Veep, The Blacklist, Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, Brooklyn 9-9, Agents of SHIELD, The Code, Halt & Catch Fire, RuPaul's Drag Race, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmi...